Recent content by benswitala

I don't think SpinLaunch is a good idea. It won't work.

It would be cool

I was thinking this effort might cost between one and two billion dollars. Radian One says theirs will take 15 billion dollars. My intuition says I could maybe make their ship at one tenth the scale. If the cost scales down linearly, then my effort would be 1.5 billion dollars. However...

Gosh, berkeman, haven't you played Kerbal Space Program? SSTO stands for Single Stage to Orbit. I'm not worried about being bad at math. After all, this is a physics problem, not a math problem, right?

Hi, As I was swimming laps at my local swimming pool today, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to start playing the lottery. If I won the lottery, maybe I could fund an effort to make a small SSTO spaceplane. What is your opinion? Is it possible? I would try to make it as small...

That's pretty good. However, the video doesn't show the monkey doing anything that a human routinely needs to handle when driving in the real world. Traffic? Traffic lights/signs? Freeway speeds? Pedestrians? Possibly off-road? Can the monkey demonstrate he is going someplace...

Great. So, what constitutes a 'likely' site? Does that mean a site inhabitable by humans?

He suggested putting wheels on his vacuum train. 'nuff said.

I am inclined to disbelieve anything Musk claims. However, in this case, my belief that AI is not a threat is also supported by my actual experience with AI (and common sense). Never seen SkyNet or anything. I asked ChatGPT for some help doing computer programming the other day and it...

More proof that AI is not a threat: Musk says it is a threat ON TUCKER CARLSON. Sheesh. Wake up people.

I don't fear AI. Take BingChat or ChatGPT. You have to "refresh" it or "clear its slate" every ten queries or so. Hardly threatening. My cat is smarter than that. As for self-driving cars, they won't work for another one hundred or two hundred years. I base my projection on something...

Do the people on this forum support manned (staffed) space exploration? I would like to know? Or would we be better off with simply robots exploring space for us. What is your opinion?

Thanks!

Thanks!

I really don't know, where is it?