As for Spacex, Falcon 9 is undeniably the product to beat worldwide. (And there is room. New Glenn has more weight to orbit and a methalox first stage. The next big thing will be recovering the orbital stage.) However its chosen successor Shartsip bears many marks of creative involvement by top management. I am very curious to see how it will perform.
As long as it doesn't look like a giant white penis, and able to re-enter in a way that it is able to be retrieved (not more space junk), I'm in.
Good news on both fronts. New Glenn looks delightfully conventional. It was supposed to fly last year, and the most recent (and surely obsolete) news I can find says this month.
i'm waiting on a piece of chinese space craft to hit something important...i've been expecting it since they allowed Tiangong to just decay and fall where it wanted
They’ve been doing the same with LM6 stages.
wups, wrong. It’s the LM5 core stage. 22 tons empty.
aerospace.org
I read the article about the cheaper tesla...It could work, but as more and more bugs pop up in the standard issue tesla, it's going to drive down interest in any Tesla, no matter the price.
I'd be more interested in the competition's reactions in terms of pricing. EVs can be made cheap, batteries are expensive, but prices should drop like a rock if sodium batteries are used. A hundred miles range is plenty for a commuter car and plugging in at home would be attractive to many, a beats the bus option.
i wouldn't buy an ev that didn't have at least a 250 mile range...a trip to Knoxville is 75 miles round trip, it's a spread out town, i may go somewhere else on the way home...100 miles just doesn't give me enough wiggle room.
it would seem like a good idea to me to make the voltages and the connectors universal, if the government is going to be subsidizing the charging stations all over the country. you don't want to see shit like this when you pull up to charge your car
More of a second car option for commuters and I doubt anything will be offered that doesn't have a 200 mile range minimum for the N American market. Sodium batteries appear to be rapidly approaching the energy density of current lithium ones, work better in the cold and could have very long lifetimes, there is no shortage of sodium either.
Yep, standardizing charging for fast and at home would help a lot, have the industry association come up with some standards like USB C for devices. The EU will or has already and a global standard would be nice too.
It does seem like a national standard is needed, nobody wants to be stuck with the betamax of electric car chargers.
Those sold in N America probably will have more range than in the EU for instance. There will be more charging stations and fewer gas stations, mixing the two would be a bad idea. The EV fast charging stations will need some shelter from the rain since you would be dealing with hundreds of volts and amps and doing it a rain or snow storm would not be a good idea! There might be just burnt shoes with cooked meat inside them left at the charging station.
Perhaps one step further would be a standard sized battery pack that a robot could change out - thus eliminating charge wait times and all range anxiety.