Tesla is facing issues with the bare metal construction of the Cybertruck, which Elon Musk warned was as tricky to do as making Lego bricks
It’s almost like he hears about how bad the build quality of Tesla cars have become, so he thinks the solution is more accurrate, more expensive parts. Kind of like he has absolutely no clue what he’s doing, and doesn’t want to listen to smarter people telling him what they need.
Elon is a masterclass in the Dunning-Kruger effect.
I think we should rename that effect after the man who invented it: the Musk-Dunning-Kruger effect
Two to invent, one to perfect.
On the kneecaps of giants.
Family emerald mines not withstanding.
Seriously. He can’t NOT publicly repeat every technical term that he hears, usually with next to no actual understanding.
Microns
I think it’s more likely that he is looking for excuses for the years of delays on the cyber truck.
Now he can blame it on his “desire for perfection” instead of admitting that his timeline was never viable
The design isn’t viable. They could have developed a new car in less time if it wasn’t going to be an absolute nightmare to produce reliably.
Let’s not forget about the new Roadster that was due to enter production 3 years ago.
Everyone that bought one gave Tesla a $250k interest-free loan.This is all starting to seem intentional.
At some point, once consumer rights are eroded enough , the straightest path to profits is just downright theft. Take money now, worry about product later. It’s literally inevitable and the video game industry is really fuckin good at it.
Tesla should mill the car from one solid block of steel.
As a pedestrian and cyclist (aka Dutchman): fuck that noise
TIL I’m a dutchman
Make me some stroopwafel.
Only if you also grab a Heineken for on the road on your bike ride home from the bar
Just cause I’m a dutchman doesn’t mean I drink shit beer.
You’re one step closer to bringing back the glory of the Dutch East Indies Company
Pedestrian vaporizer 9000 coming up!
10 microns is .4 thou, about the width of a cotton fiber. Its possible to machine those tolerances, but very time consuming as machine maintainance steps up. Its also small enough that the thermal expansion of the sheets will be larger than that
So basically elon would rather dump money into expensive equipment to improve build quality than do the thing that’s actually needed to improve build quality and pay his workers what their work is worth and make their factory environment safer?
This is the kind of petty angry bullshit you have to do to be a billionaire. Its not about being smart, it’s about on some level hating everyone that isn’t you
Making a lot of assumptions about what he’s willing to put into this.
He’s not going to get fancy expensive new equipment, he’s not going to hire the best machinists, he’s not going to slow the work down to allow that kind of accuracy. He’s going to bluster and shout and make demands without providing any way of actually achieving those demands. That’s what Elon does. He’s not an Engineer, he doesn’t design things, he doesn’t build things, he tells people who actually know what they’re doing to build something. Here, he’s just saying “Do better” without anything more, and expecting that to be enough because he doesn’t actually know shit about dick.
Frankly the closest I’ve seen to evidence that Elon has ever actually designed anything is the eyesore that is the Cybertruck, because it absolutely looks like something that cretin would draw in crayon and demand be made a reality.
This is the very first thing I thought of when I saw cybertruck
It’s design demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what trucks are for. I know people give the CEO of Ford shit for saying hes not worried about the Cybertruck because people who want to do real work wouldn’t take any interest in it, but its true. Trucks all have the shape of bed they do for a reason. Convergent product evolution landed on that as the best shape for a bed for trailer hitches
Actually, anyone else notice how comically small most truck beds are nowadays? So embarrassing.
Very true, and very annoying. Anytime I see thst all I can think is that its a family sedan for someone not confident enouf in their manhood
Also for shitty drivers. Many people buy large trucks so they don’t have to drive decently.
And then they don’t know where the front end of their vehicle is, making the roads more dangerous for everyone
I mean… I literally bought a Ford Maverick because it was like a four door family car with the added bonus of a truck bed for many of the purposes I would have wanted a truck for.
Maverick gets a pass for being a small hybrid rather than a gas guzzling 1500 with no torque
Oh you mean those SUVs with the open-air trunks?
Reminds me of Bill Burr https://youtu.be/E3s-qZsjK8I?si=YKykzYsFt7lnPC6g
I love the uncomfortable silence. He makes really good use of it too. I’ve seen him do that several times and it’s always hilarious to me.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/E3s-qZsjK8I?si=YKykzYsFt7lnPC6g
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Lol, never saw that bit before. Bill Burr is an absolute treasure.
Harsh, but fair 😂
You aren’t going to hit that tolerance consistently on an assembly line no matter how much you pay. Can be done by a skilled machinist, but there are too many dynamical variables in an assembly line environment, like the previously mentioned thermal expansion.
I guess they could do like Nissan did with the GTR’s engine: climate controlled assembly bay, temperature check on the parts etc…
But I mean, they did it only for the engine which is relatively small
It’s not even about that. You absolutely don’t need those tolerances for a cup holder. An assembly line will fuck it up regardless. You use tolerances like that when needed - in jet engines or turbines. Insisting on those numbers on a car is plain stupid - it isn’t better (other than the ego boosting “my car has high tolerances where nobody cares”) than just doing it like every other manufacturer does it. It’s a waste of money plain and simple.
For reference, in working with parts that interface directly with optical components about the tightest I’m ever comfortable specifying at production volumes is 0.05mm and that is for very specific dimensions and not entire parts yet he is demanding 5 times lower tolerances here.
What I meant is that Elon has set a fairly un-achievable standard, as the sheet metal parts he is talking about will grow and shrink by more than that depending on weather. Additionaly, the small parts can be machined to that tolerance, but only by a skilled machinist and not at assembly line levels.
Besides just thermal expansion, which will totally happen by driving on the road, the rotation of the motors and the use of brakes.
It will also flex as it hits bumps and takes turns.
And these will be different metals. With different thicknesses which will expand and contract at different rates.
Which just shows he has no idea how tolerances work. Small machined parts have different tolerances than large stamped parts. The key is setting the right tolerances for each part, designing the vehicle for desired gaps with those tolerances, and continuous improvement to fix and design out issues.
None at all. He also doesn’t understend that the issues tesla has faced are largely due to poor process design rather than automotive design. The plans may call for small gaps ore big gaps, but they certainly don’t call for iconsistent gaps
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Isn’t that 10 microns? 0.01mm?
Which is 0.4 thou
Oh haha, yeah, I understand my error now. Thanks for bearing with me
0.4 thou = 0.4 mil
(TIL about thous, all my engineering textbooks referencing US units must be old or something)
decimal inches is basically only used in machining. The only time ive ever seen it is in schematics and an indicators.
Thanks, I understand my error now. Corrected
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Imagine measuring door panels on a granite block in a climate controlled room, and sending it off to the surface grinder for rework. 🤣 Or sending the frame off to get scraped. Truly, this is the most idiotic idea on the planet and it’s all because he didn’t care about tolerances early on. His self own has turned into whatever the hell this crap was.
I can confirm this
Machinist here.
.004 ? That is exagerated but .0004 this is insane
This is not a airplane engine !!!
If LEGO and soda cans, which are very low cost, can do this, so can we.
This man is a certifiable idiot, and I feel bad for anyone working for him.
I mean, to be fair, he’s not entirely wrong, you can get that accuracy on larger parts given sufficient time, materials, tools, expertise, etc.
But a car has more parts than a Lego brick
Yeah anything is possible with enough time and money, it’s just that is about the most textbook example of comparing apples to oranges I’ve seen IRL.
Also, I suppose Lego bricks might be considered low cost if you’re a billionaire, but in the grand scheme of molded plastics they are very much a premium product.
Yeah compared to car plastics they’re crazy expensive
Which will balloon the cost exponentially.
Maybe he can build the truck out of LEGOs - it would cost about a bajillion dollars to make something that size, but maybe less than the parts he’s demanding would be.
What happens when you put that large metal part in the sun? He is entirely wrong.
Well, of course. It doesn’t change my statement though.
And the guys down the lab could go “well, we don’t have to make it out of metal.” And then it starts a rabbit hole of further insane requests that are technically possible, but to people unfamiliar with engineering (Elon) say “damn the cost” betting (incorrectly) that the time or financial cost to fulfill the requests is still profitable.
Happens to a lot of products, unfortunately. People making demands are better off knowing what the demand entails. When they do not, this is what we get.
He’s also probably confusing his experience with Space-X too. He can’t think critically, and it’s going to be his undoing. I hope at least.
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He’s probably hyper self conscious about people ripping into Teslas over their clearances (with inconsistencies measured in millimetres). But, no, instead of saying “VW can produce stuff that doesn’t look like it fell from a truck and you will figure it out, too” he’s going overboard.
If we’re going overboard, why bother with cars at all? Just use this cheesy blueprint, make it work and solve all of humanity’s problems! This is what California should invest in instead of trains.
Micron, as in 0.00004"? Yes you COULD hold it, with second ops and temp control.
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The total tolerance is .0004". In equally disposed bilateral tolerancing it will be ±.0002".
Eh, if someone tells me to reduce a tolerance from 5 to 10 thou at work, it’s understood that it’s +/-5 and 10. I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone use the full range of a tolerance in conversation. If the tolerance isn’t bilateral, it would be said like plus 5, minus zero. Anyways, +/- .0005" is our standard tolerance on the span of all dowel hole pairs.
Bilateral tolerancing is a Machinist’s first introduction to tolerancing so it’s no surprise to run that as default. And I suppose GD&T is not heavily used where you are.
If you’re given a parallelism tolerance of 10 micron are you assuming that to be ±10 micron? True position? Angularity of 5 thou? Etc… The only feature control that could be interpreted as bilateral by default is profile and it’s still communicated by its total tolerance.
Simple ± tolerancing isn’t the industry standard anymore. And if Tesla prints are anything like spaceX ones… It’s basically all GD&T and minimal title block tolerances.
I use GD&T on all my drawings, including 100% of my hole callouts. However I’m one of the more enthusiastic adopters of ASME Y14.5 at the place I work. Therefore, I get what your saying regarding the tolerance range, but since most of my coworkers are still relying on block tolerances, I’ll refer to a .010" positional tolerance as a “+/- .005” equivalent" in conversation so there is no miscommunication. I can see how this is not the norm.
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Just curious… what does Starrett have that Tesla will need?
Starrett isn’t known for quality precision metrology.
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Elon: “Stacking” tolerances? No, we will not tolerate anything less than micron precision on every aspect of the design.
“All parts for this vehicle, whether internal or from suppliers, need to be designed and built to sub 10 micron accuracy.”
LOL
Yeah ok.
Tell me you know nothing about manufacturing, without telling me you know nothing about manufacturing.
That one quote - assuming it is accurate - explains that Musk is even more of an idiot than everyone already knew he was. You don’t make things at those tight tolerances. A couple of dimensions on a part might be (for instance the bore on a press fit sleeve), but you’d almost never, ever hold an entire part to that tight of a tolerance.
In imperial units, 10 microns is .00039". A human hair is roughly .001 to .005" thick. So he is asking for a tolerance that is 3 to 10x smaller than the thickness of a human hair. To put the absurdity of Musk’s demand into perspective, most parts that go into a car are roughly an order of magnitude looser in tolerance with some dimensions being 2 orders of magnitude looser.
That difference might not sound like a lot, but holding something to +/-.0039 versus +/-.00039" could easily triple the price of an item or more. Easy. You use a tight tolerance only when you need to - that’s engineering 101. Some parts could easily be +/- .039" and not affect their performance on bit. Close tolerance engine parts might be held at what Musk is demanding, but never “ALL PARTS” would be held to that.
Not to mention the fact all the tolerances should have been determined before mass production began. You determine the dimensional requirements and develop the manufacturing process to deliver that.
There is absolutely no way they have the systems and tools in place to properly measure every part with sub 10-micron accuracy and precision either. To control those dimensions you need to go a whole additional order of magnitude out. I pity the fool that has to manage that control plan.
develop the manufacturing process to deliver that.
Exactly. I’m sure his engineers did the right thing and know what they are doing, and now the top executive steps his foot into the mix and will muck everything up.
I know exactly how the people that I have worked with in the past would have dealt with this - surrly engineers and quality managers who knew how to handle tough bosses. They would let the whole situation cool off for a day or two first. Then go tell him how much more expensive the truck would be if they tried to hold every dimension of every part to +/-.0004". Any sane CEO would quickly know he fucked up and issue some retract. If that still didn’t sway him because of his ego, we probably would stop even listening to him altogether. He has shown that he is utterly clues, so would he even know a part held to 10 microns versus one held to 100 or even 1000?? I’m guessing no. If he asked if these new parts were held to the tighter tolerance, we’d say yes and just go on about our day.
The whole Twitter fiasco suggests Tesla and SpaceX know exactly how to do this. Managing their idiot CEO is part of the training. Existing Twitter management didn’t know how to do that, and we haven’t seen the last of the consequences yet.
Except this is Musk, and anyone that embarrasses him by showing him how stupid he is, will get fired and publicly shamed on twitter.
In many ways, it is their own fault for wanting to work for that clown. It’s not like it isn’t known that he is a terrible person and incompetent boss. We would get lots of fresh grads post up on the engineering subs on Reddit asking about jobs at Tesla. WTF? Why would you WANT to work there? We would try to talk sense into these people but few would ever listen.
twitter
*shitter
As someone who knows almost nothing about the topic, wouldn’t some (most?) of these parts be big enough that a small change in temperature or air pressure alone would cause these parts to expand/shrink enough to go over the tolerance limit?
Yes, and different materials will have different rates of thermal expansion. That’s probably why the pixel 7 camera glass was cracking for no apparent reason when winter hit. Imagine coming out in the morning and finding all the glass in your car shattered because it got cold overnight. Or even worse you take it out of a heated garage on a cold day and the glass shatters while you’re driving.
Thermal expansion of steel is .0000072" per degree F. All you would need is a 100 degree F temp change to blow that tolerance out of the water. And 100 degrees is not that much when it comes to cars. A freezing cold day versus a boiling hot day in the summer is a temperature swing more than 100 degrees. A ICE engine runs at roughly 250 degrees F so that right there would easily expand parts way more than the tolerance he is calling for. On an EV, I don’t think anything gets that hot, but the motors still get warm.
Is that per inch or per foot?
That’s inches per degree F.
But one unch of material doesn’t dilate as much as one foot of the same material. I guess that’s what they mean when asking “per inch per foot?”
We compensate for thermal expansion. The standard temperature things are measured at is 68F/20C. So if it’s 72 degrees we’ll compensate it back to 68 in software for the material we’re measuring. We use scale bars of known length and similar material type to verify scale. (I run laser trackers and laser radars.)
For measurement equipment that’s stationary, like CMMs, you just control the environment.
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I work in semiconductor industry where machines need to have sub-micron positioning accuracy and even we don’t generally design parts with 10 micron tolerances, unless it really needs to.
engineering 101
Mechanical engineering 101, us sparkies don’t get to learn that stuff until we get into the real world. Not bitter just disappointed in my uni.
Really? I’d have thought EEs would learn it in the context of something like circuit breakers using bimetallic strips or the effect of heat-cycling on soldered joints.
Seems like EEs are not taught a lot of practical things in school.
Yes. The field is way too broad and has been for decades. I have all this knowledge in my head that I never get to use (integration of 1 over the square root of arctan squared of x cubed), knowledge that would have bern useful in the 1970s (this is how to build a class C amplifier without soldering), and knowledge that would have been useful but wasnt taught (this is what FLA is).
The ideal would be to break it up into a few different degrees. Guys and gals working in Software Defined Radio shouldn’t have the same training as those planning powerlines.
I lost it on an intern a while back who wanted to drop out because “we aren’t learning anything practical”. Yeah I know kid, get your piece of paper and get to work.
I’ve heard almost the exact same thing from MEs as well. Both are sooo broad. I mead I get WHY they try to teach you anything and everything, but it does seem overwhelming and at the same time seems like you haven’t learned anything useful even when you really have. You simply don’t know if you’ll be working at a nuclear power plant dealing with thermodynamics or a car maker mostly dealing with design or as a project manager at some other company dealing with vibrations. There’s just no way to know. The path your work life leads is impossible to predict so they sort of have to teach you a little about everything.
Damn, I’m an EE and my university wasn’t too bad for having a good mix of theory vs practical. But I’m aware a lot of EE courses don’t do that.
BTW, are you Australian too?
Nope. I might have been to harsh a bit. My sub-field (controls and automation) is notorious for being poorly documented and most of the tech being very vendor specific. So you learn on the job.
I am sure plenty of the semiconductor EEs will disagree with me.
Ah yeh, fair enough. I didn’t do any controls and am. Now having to learn a bit for my job, but I like learning at work. It’s more fun than university.
No customer would ever pay for that accuracy on all parts.
No customer would NEED that accuracy on all parts. Just shows what kind of clown Elon is.
When I was young I got a job at a manufacturing place that made all sorts of parts for sensitive equipment. Younger people, or people with steady hands would debur and smooth. We would have these huge magnifiers and friggin microscopes and be working with what looked like a really long tiny exacto knives that needed to be replaced every 5 minutes or a couple dozen uses to get that stuff to spec. You can spend 20 minutes on a piece, think it’s perfect and then QC would send it right back because they somehow found some tiny inconsistency or groove you didn’t or couldn’t notice.
There is no way you can expect that level of accuracy, unless your willing to pay for clean room level stuff. Even we weren’t always quite that accurate depending on the end use and they charged like almost $50 for something that looked quite like something you get a hardware store for 50 cents.
huge magnifiers
Probably an optical comparator.
Using a comparator for deburring breaks my QA addled mind.
hah historically Teslas body panels are closer to +/- .39"
I’ve told many (usually new) design engineers that they’re stupid for asking for 0.001" tolerance on parts when they only need 0.005 “or 0.010”. The difference between 0.010" and sub-10 micron is easily a factor of 100 in most parts, ESPECIALLY when you’re talking larger steel components like panels on a freaking car.
ESPECIALLY when you’re talking larger steel components like panels on a freaking car.
not just that, he said “all parts”. The stitching on the seats, the floor carpets, USB ports, cupholders and the A/C vents have to be more accurate than the width of a human hair too
Unless you are talking about a press fit location or some kind of high precision alignment issue, almost nothing needs anything tighter than .001" and .005 or .010" is perfectly fine for most things. I work with a lot of weldments so if we’re within .030" we consider that good enough.
+/- .030 good enough for most skin panels on airplanes.
Gear teeth I believe need to be precision ground to less than a thou for best efficiency and life. But that’s not for most things.
I don’t see anywhere in the article where Musk says “tolerance”. He specifically says “accuracy” and goes on the talk about listing more decimal places instead of rounding. Any mention of tolerance is done by the author of the article. If certain dimensions are not naturally rounded to one, or even two decimals, there is no reason not to list it to three or more on modern drawings. GD&T can specify whatever tolerance is necessary without relying on a decimal-based block tolerance. I’d be interested in seeing the original email but it seems like there is a misunderstanding by the author given the context being discussed.
I default to three decimal places for all my basic dimensions on both in and mm drawings. One of the benefits of GD&T is that you can give provide additional dimensional accuracy, completely independent of the tolerance being specified.
That’s a really good point. If this is actually for the intervening calculations, that’d make a lot more sense.
The linguistics of metrology is not exactly a topic I’m particularly passionate about, but if yiu look at the technical definition of accuracy, it essentially is the same as a tolerance.
Accuracy: the degree to which the result of a measurement, calculation, or specification conforms to the correct value or a standard.
And when it comes to decimal places, you’d never display more than you really need. If a dimension is +/- .010" there is absolutely no reason to display it to 4 decimal places. That doesn’t win you anything. More importantly, I’m sure a company like Tesla doesn’t even use drawings at all. I’m sure they are paperless and send out their models for machining.
I think there is a very important distinction between accuracy and tolerance in engineering. +/- .010" is not a dimension, but a tolerance that can be applied to a dimension. However if your example was changed to a .010" dimension, I would agree with you as I stated in my last comment. There is no need to give any further accuracy to that dimension if you are just adding zeros to the end (unless you are using block tolerances that rely on a specific number of digits to correspond with a standard tolerance). Unfortunately, not everything is designed using the same units and you will inevitably end up with a part designed in mm that uses a bolt-on component using a hole span in inches (for example, a nice round 1-in span). If you want a +/-1 mm tolerance on that part, you wouldn’t want to round every dimension to the nearest mm because you may end up with a tolerance of 24-26 mm when you really wanted 24.4 to 26.4 mm. I like to provide true dimensional accuracy (to microns or .0001" if I’m not just adding zeros) and then apply a suitable tolerance independently, using GD&T.
Regarding paperless manufacturing, I agree that many components are made straight from the models these days and imported directly into a CNC machine. However, there should always be a drawing or a digital equivalent a drawing. This is the contract that specifies acceptable tolerances to the manufacturer, and it will be used during QA inspection to determine if an acceptable part has been delivered.
I think there is an important distinction between accuracy and precision in engineering. I’m having flashbacks of sitting in class when the professor was going over this stuff. I honestly always found it some of the most boring topics in the curriculum.
One of my physics profs had a story about this. He needed two resistors to be very similar in performance for a circuit he was making, so he asked for a couple of the super-high-quality ones.
His advisor said “fuck that, get the 1% bin, they’ll be bimodal at 1% above and below rating, sort em and find two that match to the degree you need”
That’s kind of analogous; do you need to try to hit a particular value (accuracy) or do you need things in a consistent relation to one another (precision)?
Just coming in to say you are completely and absolutely correct. 🍻
Engine parts? Tesla’s don’t have engines, they have electric motors which shouldn’t need this level of precision. Electric motors they have today work pretty well already.
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Due to the nature of Cybertruck, which is made of bright metal with mostly straight edges, any dimensional variation shows up like a sore thumb.
It sounds to me like the reasonable conclusion to draw from this would be to modify the design of the car. I’d also assume you don’t need tolerances to be the same for literally all parts inside and out. I’d also think that, if the car looks that bad if things are 10 or more microns out of place, these cars are going to age terribly after regular use.
But what do I know? If I were smart, I’d be rich, right? And Elon is so rich, he must be a genius!
Tesla is know for shoddy panel alignment correct? This is gonna look horrific.
They are, and that undoubtedly gets under his sub micron thick skin, which is why he’s going overboard about it with this.
Yeah heat that mf up on a sunny day vs a cold day lol what an idiot.
It’s not like “accuracies” doesn’t add up either ha ha what a genius.
Usually car makers solve the expansion and contraction using glue, curves, and trim to deal with expansion and contraction.
The cybertruck has no curves and not much trim, the glue would have to be very flexible, which would lead to separation.
I am going to bet that we will see cybertruck with panels flying off or flapping at highway speeds not long after release.
Oh yes, I’m all with you here, either make a frame and stick the “panels” to it individually (probably good if you make a cheap tank vehicle or something IDK) or make a chassis that take the deformation forces and distribute them as evenly as possible.
My bet is they have him as a stupid publicity monkey drawing attention to Tesla, cybortryck etc (I mean all publicity is good right?) and away from bad things like Tesla didnt self drive end 2019(?) and still doesn’t, child labour, … etc
The awkward moment where you sit on the car watching the sunset with your sweetheart and the next day your stainless steel car is bent.
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That tells you of Elon’s brain surface roughness
Variations below 10 microns, like the car parts?
Like a bowling ball
Hahhaahhahaah
It’s just marketing. Elon wants dumb tesla bros to think their truck is built to that accuracy. No need for it to be reality.
Cybertruck, Cybertruck,
Engineers say “what the fuck”
Micron fits for auto steel?
Those are not a thing that’s real
So deal! Deal with it, Cybertruck.I read that in the Spiderman themesong’s rhythm lmao
This is what the refrance
A pretty good refrance… Macron should take notes
In the full email he goes on to tell the engineer what a micron is.
I guess, he just read that word somewhere and now feels cool that he knows it.
It would be cute if he was a junior manager, but this way it’s just sad.
You really think he wrote it? He has an army of engineers working for him, many of which would kill their mothers to get on Elon’s good side, corporate culture is same shit different smell no matter the corporation.
The leaked email has his name on it and the leak claims it was an email from Elon to employees. Can’t really tell if the leak is real or fake, but if it’s real then Elon is definitely the one who wrote it.
Based on his proclivity to say dumb shit and his inability to keep his mouth shut, I’m inclined to believe it’s a real leak.
This 100% sounds like him. I don’t see any reason to doubt it given that if someone was going to make something up it wouldn’t sound like this.
Why does Space Karen still have all his fanbois? Do they really think he’s some kind of software/technology/business genius, even after all that has come out about him?
I wouldn’t say I was a fanboy, but I liked him before … I don’t know, he was always crazy. These days he’s even more crazy and I’m not touching anything he does.
I can’t stand him but Starlink is so fucking awesome. Having high speed internet fucking everywhere is a game changer.
Eh, not saying starlink isn’t good, but it’s not exactly novel. It didn’t take a genius to come up with the idea, which I very much doubt musk did, but the work that needed to be done and the service provided is impressive.
Musk did very little in that effort beyond paying the bill. I don’t really think that’s something to be commended for. Bill Gates could’ve paid for it and the result would have been identical.
I’m definitely not praising Musk, I’m just saying that I’ve been really happy with my Starlink dish. I don’t like that I’m supporting him financially in this small way but it fits my needs too well.
Bill Gates still doesn’t get the internet thingamajig
Nah, he caught on late but he got it. He’s been out of the game for a long time, so people don’t remember when he was running MSFT. Guy was the real deal.
It’s not gonna be high bandwidth though, just low latency over long distances. It’s primarily for stock exchange information.
Mate, it’s the opposite that’s true. Satellite communications are high latency, low (ish, Starlink is actually not that bad in this respect) throughput.
I did more digging and:
- Starlink bandwidth is better than I was expecting.
- I can’t find the video that did all the math, but basically by using a low Earth orbit network you can get information long distances faster than you can with cell towers and fiber because you’re significantly reducing the number of repeaters you need without significantly increasing the distance the information has to travel.
“Traditional” satellite internet uses satellites that are much higher up, which is where the high latency comes from. The LEO means comparatively lower latency, though the advantage over ground-based networks only works over significant distances. It also means you need more satellites to make a functional network and you need to replace them more often.
The higher cost to orbit made the old model the correct way to do satellite internet, and now a bunch of billionaires are betting they can replace satellites cheaply enough to make money off a LEO network. Rural customers might be a happy accidental revenue stream, but the most enthusiastic customers will be people sending market information between servers on opposite sides of the globe. To them, billions of dollars can be made by getting information a millisecond before everyone else, so they’re the ones who have the biggest interest in using the network.
I also think signals travel faster through a vacuum (speed of light) than through a medium like copper or even fiber optic cables.
But I’m not a physics dude, so I don’t know how much that impacts latency. But from I know about it, seems plausible.
I think there’s a bit of a bandwagon kind of thing where everyone wants to say anything that Musk is associated with is a dumb idea. Starlink isn’t a new idea, I remember reading about the idea of a LEO satellite constellation concept in Popular Mechanics back in the 90s. I think it was Microsoft that was considering getting in on that back then, but it never happened.
The “genius” of Elon Musk is that he simply has the resources to implement ideas found in old Popular Mechanics magazines. Just didn’t really look into Hyperloop enough (not feasible) before going on about how great an idea it is. Starlink does make sense though.
LEO orbits have been practical for decades, but things like GPS use MEO.
MEO was the standard, until now, for reasons. First of all, there is higher drag in LEO orbits as you are passing through the thermo- or else exosphere. This means more energy (and therefore mass) is required to maintain the orbit. And the more mass, the more gravity is pulling on you (LEO gravity is nearly the same as on the surface - you’re falling, but you’re missing the planet… until you’re not).
SpaceX’s “revolutionary” idea was to let/make them deorbit, and to use the space freight program to replace them. Of course, this was possible before, and planned obsolescence is already an important part of designing satellites. However this is insanely expensive and is only practical long-term because SpaceX is already being paid to launch their rockets. And more importantly, the volume of the LEO surface is the lowest of all orbits… there is minimal space available, and anything traveling to a higher orbit must pass through it. So there is a real risk of Kessler syndrome, where debris makes it impossible to continue using the orbit. And the debris of concern is usually small so they stay in orbit longer. This debris comes from launches, collisions, and potentially deorbits.
SpaceX is the only group that has chosen to utilize LEO as a consumable that is inherently limited in nature. They externalized the cost of pollution to society due to operating in an under-regulated domain. Now regulators are scrambling to find solutions for orbital pollution - enacting rules requiring deorbiting, supporting efforts toward satellites that cleanup debris, and so on.
Whether these efforts will be enough and whether they will come to fruition quickly enough, I do not know. But I do know that the rocketry industry involves a lot of pollution, is growing into a significant GHG contributor, and depletes ozone in the atmosphere (the hole in the Antarctic is still estimated to be 50+ years from healing, and one 8 times larger was just discovered in the tropics).
Umm, high latency means slow reactions. I think you and OP meant the same thing, but you have the terms mixed up
Same. I think it happens with any billionaire the longer the media focuses on them the more of their crazy comes out.
No you guys just got fooled by his very good PR team
I honestly think that is anybody. Anyone can appear crazy once you get to know them.
I’m pretty confident not everyone goes on crazy drug fueled racist, homophobic rants. No matter how well you get to know them.
You’ve obviously not met my grandma, the difference is she isn’t in the public eye.
I think everyone just has a tiny bit of crazy in them, but they meet enough people to realise they need to temper their worst instincts.
The more rich/powerful you get, the more yes men you meet, and the more you think “hey i’m actually right all the time after all”, and the more you start justifying your own craziness.
Crazy and racist are two different words. Wonder if they have two different meanings?
No clue what this reply is supposed to mean. Yes, crazy and racist are two different words. Yes, Elmo has gone on crazy and racist rants. Sometimes independently, sometimes together.
Well I was responding to crazy. Not racist. And saying most people are crazy is poignant. Saying most racist is not the same.
I think they do , two of my school friends are his fanbois and even after his open goofup at twitter they be like , Elon musk , rocket boi , innovator and genius , first to invent sattelite internet ,he has enginnering degrees in making cars and rockets and should stick to it ! ( i was like no he does not have the degrees) 😏
He is talented, just not at engineering or science particularly.
His talents lie in obtaining government subsidies and trolling.
Him and his companies have achieved some very impressive things, most notably Tesla being so far ahead of the pack with EV technology, and Space X with their reusable rockets.
Regardless of your opinion of him as a person, he has achieved some impressive things.
If Elon would have looked back, he would have seen that Delorean has already tried bare metal, and it’s nearly impossible to fix. Dent your truck? May as well paint it.
I mean, Elon obviously doesn’t care about repairability, but the first few fender benders will result in a pile of articles about how unfixable the body panels actually are.
But at least John DeLorean didn’t demand that the parts be accurate to within a few microns. Maybe he was too busy making cocaine deals to do it, but still…
I just realized how accurate the comparison probably is…
Although Musk is famously on Ketamine instead.
Elon gonna engineer the shit outta this thing. Nevermind coil steel itself varies by more than that before it goes into a die and stretches. It’s almost like he doesn’t have any background in automotive manufacturing. This statement makes me think Elon may not know what a micron even is. The fit and finish of Tesla’s current offerings seems to evidence it anyway.
