CASEY HANDMER'S BLOG has a hugely important piece on Starship. If a space firm misunderstands this passage:

"A dollar spent on mass optimization no longer buys a dollar saved on launch cost. It buys nothing."

It's doomed

caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/sta…
His blog's comparison of NASA's SLS based Artemis architecture versus a Lunar program based on Starship makes the point.

This is a phase change difference in access to space akin from the X-Atlantic air travel jump from Charles Lindberg to the wide body jet in 5-years.
2/
For the logistical types, these are your current price points:

$100,000/kg for LEO bulk cargo
$1,000,000/kg(+) for deep space exploration.

Starship will do 100 ton (+) chunks for <$10m per launch.

It will be launching several hundred times a year w/in 5-years.
3/
Starship will be doing 1,000(+) flights a year in about seven to 10 years.

And no one in the NASA or the incumbent space industries world wide are doing jack to prepare for that reality.
4/
Casey Handmer's point is how will...

"NASA and industry will have to find a way to produce 100x as much stuff for 1/10th the price. Rovers will have to be $1000/kg and we will need 100 tons of them every year."

5/
That isn't where NASA is
Nor Boeing,
Nor Lockheed Martin,
Nor Aerojet etc. etc.

They are all pretending the SpaceX's Falcon & Falcon Heavy rockets don't exist
6/
Another of Handmer's point's --

"History is littered with the wreckage of former industrial titans that underestimated the impact of new technology and overestimated their ability to adapt. Blockbuster, Motorola, Kodak, Nokia, RIM, Xerox, Yahoo, IBM, Atari, Sears, Hitachi,
7/
...Polaroid, Toshiba, HP, Palm, Sony, PanAm, Sega, Netscape, Compaq, Enron, GM, DeLorean, Nortel.

What we are seeing here is an industrial/institutional version of Thomas Kuhn's Theory of Scientific Revolutions. People invested in the old ways
8/
amazon.com/Structure-Scie…
...will be displaced by those who believe in the new, relevant, scientific & technological paradigms.

And politics will follow this shift.

9/
Starship's success, and it is looking increasingly successful, will be akin to a seed crystal dropped into a supersaturated solution.

The first fully successful Starship orbital launch & return will kill stock values of every other space launcher firm overnight.
10/
And the NASA SLS architecture - long nicknamed the "Senatorial Launch System" for its major supporters - will not survive past the 3rd launch.

What there will be left of NASA after Starship enters regular daily service is conjecture. I too, like Handmer, hope it can adapt.
11/
But whatever comes after...it won't include the Senatorial Launch System.

/End

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More from @TrentTelenko

30 Oct
@man_integrated >>Measured by American manufacturing output (given the constraints) during a crisis, I'd say FDR wins in a walk.

Just...no.

FDR did hugely destructive things to the US mobilization with hugely unrealistic production goals in aircraft & tanks that took until 1943 to unsnarl.
1/
@man_integrated In creating this logistical dysfunction he was hugely aided by the US Army war mobilization plan.

Jim Lacey's "Keep From All Thoughtful Men - How U.S. Economists Won World War II" deals with a lot of this FDR Administration dysfunction.
2/
@man_integrated There is a more granular feel is how the FDR's unrealistic goals whipsawed A/C procurement in this Green book:

UNITED STATES ARMY IN WORLD WAR II
Special Studies
BUYING AIRCRAFT: MATERIEL
PROCUREMENT FOR THE
ARMY AIR FORCES
by
Irving Brinton Holley, ir.
history.army.mil/html/books/011… Image
Read 5 tweets
27 Oct
@adachi_austin_ Wikipedia has a useful article on the Jan 28th incident.

It certainly seems to explain the acceleration of IJN aviation technical development by then Rear Admiral Yamamoto. Who served as chief of the Technological Division of the Naval Air Corps
1929-1934
@adachi_austin_ The IJN adapted a US Fairchild radio compass in its A5M Claude, H6K Mavis and "Rikko" Type 96 land-based attack aircraft the Mitsubishi G3M designs.

Radio beacons associated with the Fairchild radio compass were deployed through out the Empire no later than 1937.
@adachi_austin_ The radio beacons were associated with a map grid system applied around Japanese home islands and possessions.

The Western Allies were unaware of the extent of this grid mapping until the Marianas were over run in the Summer of 1944. This grid network was ~decade old by then.
Read 6 tweets
17 Oct
This is a thread addressing Chinese military technology innovation today, it's parallels with Imperial Japan in the Mid-1930's to early 1940's period, & the "Great Supply Chain Collapse."

They are related.
1/
thedrive.com/the-war-zone/4…
The Chinese took two existing technologies, the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) and the Hypersonic Glide Vehicle (HGV) & kit bashed them together into a 1st strike nuclear weapon that evades US ICBM trajectory early warning radar coverage.
2/
One can argue about the usefulness of this kit bash.

The one thing you cannot ignore is that it's a highly innovative weapon system design aimed like a laser at a decades old weakness.

A weakness the Chinese have been aware of for its entire existence, via @TheDEWLine
3/
Read 24 tweets
14 Oct
@man_integrated As far as truck drivers go, the graduate degree & Silicon Valley tech head crowds have less than zero understanding of the work load.

It isn't just getting a commercial license for driving & driving.

Loads require different trailers & load plans the driver has to execute
1/
@man_integrated ...per thick federal, state, and company rule books.

Often the driver also has to be an all terrain fork lift operator as well in support of delivering to construction sites.

2/
@man_integrated Truckers carrying HAZMAT loads require additional training for signage, documentation, reporting and routing.

This is all long attention span theater through eye wateringly small text.

3/
Read 9 tweets
13 Oct
@mercoglianos @ltgrusselhonore The origin of just-in-time was with the Japanese. They sourced every down level vendor for an auto factory in the same city and worked to get stable relationships to eliminate as much as possible transaction costs.

When the ISO box came plus massive computer ordering systems
1/
@mercoglianos @ltgrusselhonore ...first retail and then increasingly manufacturing companies tried to make the ISO boxes their warehouses both to save costs and to avoid property taxes on warehouse stock.

The issue is this wasn't cost reduction as much as cost shifting.

2/
@mercoglianos @ltgrusselhonore Continental or intercontinental sized supply chains are about avoiding measurable costs.

There are always disruptions in large supply chains that result in mistimed deliveries of parts that result in the production of Mfg goods w/o those parts.

The extra time required to
3/
Read 7 tweets
12 Oct
This thread is on the unexamined local political issues affecting the supply chain blockage at California's Ports of LA & Long Beach.
1/
portoflosangeles.org
Salvadore Merclianos' Youtube channel "What's Going on With Shipping?" is 'must watch' streaming on the subject of world supply chain meltdown & the ports of LA/LB. This is one of his latest streams:
2/
The Youtube stream @mercoglianos runs is also a "must read" for its comments from truckers, railwaymen, warehousemen and others involved in the on-going world wide supply chain collapse.

Case in point this comment on how CARB pollution rules throttle SoCal port clearance.
3/
Read 19 tweets

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