If 300kg of those 1130kg is the battery pack, it should have over 40 kWh. It also looks like they really tried to make that brick-shape about as aerodynamic as they could get it - still won't be great at high speeds. Good range will crucially depend on taking it slow with this one.

Electrek@electrek.co · 8h ago

Details of new Smart car leaked in regulatory filing… but you can’t have it

Properly applying the rocket equation to an out-of-whack thing like Starship is just glorious. I just realized that Starship would have over 50% more payload if it was half the size, on the same Super Heavy, even when flying back to the tower itself. This thing more ridiculous than I imagined.

Stop spreading these lies. They don't escape, they are used for hacking.

TechCrunch@techcrunch.com · 10h ago

Chinese AI model Kimi escaped its cybersecurity testing environment, researchers say

Curiosity may have killed the cat but it saved the human

🔋The third largest battery manufacturer in China is facing complaints over swelling, leakage, and other faults. Curiously, this is happening as cars cross the 150,000 km warranty threshold, indicating corner cutting and lax quality control. #batteries #battchat #greensky #energysky

CALB in spotlight as GAC Aion S vehicles hit by widespread battery cell defects

Aion S vehicles equipped with CALB's 177-Ah LFP battery cells have seen a surge of complaints over swelling, leakage, and other faults.

cnevpost.com

Venezuela conquered the USA. Yes, I know, people will tell you it was the other way around.

Andrew Gelston@agelston.bsky.social · yesterday

Article link in alt text This is how the American economy works now, and thus it is important to understand 'ally' assets since everything can be exempted from tariffs if you know the right guy (Howard something)

Nobody at NASA talked about Starliner like that and they didn't allow anyone to tell the real story. This is how NASA works with every current project, until the reality cannot be denied. And that's why I don't respect space agencies. Because they are all similar. youtu.be/5I_2rTw0HHc?...

Starliner Commander: "I Knew We Weren't Coming Home"

YouTube video by Jeremy Boreing

youtu.be

Why is so little attention being paid to North Korea supplying ballistic missiles to Russia?

Car sales in China are crashing. Totally normal behavior for a 5%-annual-growth-society.

Ben Barclay@benbarclay.bsky.social · 2d ago

”EV sales fell 2% in China in July and…” “See? EV sales are crashing!” “…and ICE sales fell 37%.” ”I told you no one wants an EV.”

Just woke up and realized that Starship (rather: Super Heavy) is under-powered. Comparison to Falcon 9 makes it pretty clear. Why is it under-powered, you ask, doesn't it have the same thrust at lift-off? Yes I say. But the engines use less fuel, so the rocket stays heavier for longer.

I hope that one day, we'll see that same graph, but with Lyme disease.

Our World in Data@ourworldindata.org · 2d ago

How close is the world to eradicating guinea worm disease? Guinea worm disease, also known as “dracunculiasis”, is a painful and debilitating parasitic infection. The guinea worm’s larvae can invade a person’s stomach and intestines when they drink contaminated water, such as from a stagnant pond.

I think, in the most circuitous way possible, I may have found out that you can get a damn-near-optimal Starship with about 10x the launch mass of Falcon 9 by .... ...taking the numbers for the fuel capacity of Falcon 9 and adding a zero.

Ok. I will admit it. This is a low speed vehicle and sodium-ion batteries are perfectly suited for them.

Jasmin Smajic@jasminsmajic.com · 2d ago

🔋 World’s first sodium-ion electric mining truck delivered in China with 676 kWh battery capacity. The truck supports 0% to 100% fast charging in 20 to 25 minutes. The battery maintains a cycle life of over 8,000 times. #battchat #batteries #greensky #energysky

It's really satisfying to just keep staring at Starship performance numbers, compare them to Falcon 9, keep correcting for ever new contradictions showing up, confirming that Starship is well-constructed and performing better than Falcon 9 in every metric... ... except stage mass ratios and payload.

For illustration: If Falcon 9 had an upper stage with the same performance as Starship - just appropriately smaller - it would have had ~12.5t of payload to a real and useful orbit. (Instead of 17.5t currently.) That's 33% of the pretend-payload of Starship with a Falcon 9 having 9% launch mass!

Frank Wunderlich-Pfeiffer@frankwunderli13.bsky.social · 3d ago

Anybody serious about reuse of rockets would spend their time and money on the first stage, as SpaceX once did, until it is fully, rapidly and cheaply reusable - after maximizing speed of re-entry with minimal mass for additional structure and fuel for flight from separation to landing.

SpaceX literally has nothing but government revenue on paper for actual starlink growth They subsidies the consumer side so freaking much

So, I might consider listening to this with limited chances to give myself further brain damage.

Andrew Gelston@agelston.bsky.social · 3d ago

Elon musk provides less then 10 minutes of commentary on Q2 earnings call Ends thanking employees for their work BREAKING: Employees immediately sell their unlocked shares and go enjoy their lives.

"I expect maybe 10% of our compute to be used for grok training" SpaceX Q2 Ok well now it's clear what he means by an Ai company, and it's not what he meant 6 months ago

This is also the guy who thinks that rocket stages must fly back to the launch pad in order to make launch cheap - because it is to expensive to have a boat ship them back and operate a crane to bring them back to the pad. But mass accelerators on the moon? Sure thing.

George Pearkes@peark.es · 3d ago

Elon is talking about using robots to build a mass accelerator on the moon in support of an economy 1000x to 1 million times the current earth economy. It's a bad sci fi novel not an earnings call.

Ability to hit targets anywhere on earth with X tons absolutely is a KPI!

Rude Law Dog@esghound.com · 3d ago

*SPACEX 2Q MASS TO ORBIT 485 MT, EST. 580.93 mass to orbit as an operating/earnings metric is actual lmao

Starship - excluding costs of construction, amortization of R&D expenses, maintenance and other operations - will be very cheap.

eggnog slut@deus01.bsky.social · 3d ago

earnings excluding the cost of launching satellites are very strong

Hallo, ich versuche es mal auf diesem Weg, denn die Hoffnung stirbt zuletzt: Am kommenden Freitag, 7. August, 10–16 Uhr, wird wegen eines Trauerfalls noch eine Aufsicht für unsere Ausstellung im Jenaer Rathaus gesucht. Hinweise bitte per Direktnachricht.

If you ever wonder why the clean burning flame of Starship seems to leave a dark-ish trail of something soot-like behind ... this is nitrogen(di)oxide, forming a brown gas. This happens when the nitrogen gets burned with oxygen in the air. That's why nuclear mushroom clouds tend to be brown as well.

It will also mean that people could suddenly wake up with or realize having tattoos they didn't want, gotten as a prank. This *will* happen.

The Verge@theverge.com · 4d ago

CipherX, a London-based biotech company, developed disposable “Microdot” patches that provide an alternative form of permanent tattooing. The process is designed to be “quiet, fast, and pain-free,” all of which I found to be true, opening the door for even more people to rock some permanent ink.

Excessive complexity of rocket engines in companies who basically haven't flown anything worth talking very much about. The exact opposite of what is needed, namely: Simple, reliable, well-known, quickly developed technology. Who the hell cares if a small rocket engine is 5-10% more efficient?

ESA Space Transport@transport.esa.int · 4d ago

Storm incoming 🌪️ The Exploration Company is developing Storm, a full-flow staged combustion engine. This video shows elements of the pre-burner hot-fire test campaign at the @dlr-spaceagency.bsky.social P8 test bench in Lampholdshausen, Germany.

Occasionally, you get to hear where misinformation in the mining industry is coming from. Here is one - new discoveries in old mines (where most new copper is found) are not counted as "new discoveries". Creating the impression of shortages and long delays to start up mines youtu.be/rIPRaRQTdNg?...

Is the copper shortage a myth?

YouTube video by Mining Intelligence

youtu.be

Today I finally noticed that the Super Heavy is actually *a lot* more fragile than Falcon 9 during re-entry. Falcon 9 slows down from ~7900 kph to ~5200 kph at 40-50km altitude and then just falls and slows down. Super Heavy never gets above ~4300 kph in free fall, but does so further down.

Just ignore what Trump says. Why even listen? Nothing he is worth anything. Just look at what he does and act accordingly.

WarTranslated (Dmitri)@wartranslated.bsky.social · 5d ago

US Congressman Turner says transferring Patriot tech to Ukraine is still being discussed but would be "very, very difficult" to implement. He cited technical complexity, security requirements and restrictions on sharing classified defense tech as main obstacles.

"Microsoft warns that consumers aren't buying enough of the thing they don't want."

The Irish Times@irishtimes.com · 7mo ago

AI boom could falter without wider adoption, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella warns

I just learned that there is such a thing as "Pure Calcium Cored Wire". It's 98.5% calcium, used in metallurgy with a steel cladding to prevent the (obvious) corrosion issues and generally temperamental nature of the metal. alfalloy.com/cored-wires/... But you know what this means? There is hope!