SpaceX plans to become a mobile carrier(www.theverge.com)
7 pointsby BlueBerry20018 hours ago4 comments
  • ai_critic7 hours ago
    The incredibly obvious play here is teleoperation and low-latency robotics, and then selling that capacity to whoever handles the bot hardware. It remains to be seen if public investors are as ambitious as the engineers.
  • mapping3657 hours ago
    Surely this justifies the trillion dollar valuation.
  • jaggs7 hours ago
    I hear they're also planning on opening an artisan Italian food truck on the dark side of the moon to capture an early slice of all that anticipated Mars traffic. Should be rad.
  • rvz8 hours ago
    You may not want to hear this but SpaceX is the next Google.
    • ben_w7 hours ago
      Between the financials on one side, vs. graveyard, innovation by buying startups, dropping "don't be evil", and ads everywhere on the other, I don't know if you're suggesting this is good or bad.
      • rvz4 hours ago
        Both Google and SpaceX have a near monopoly in the services that they operate that have high demand.
        • ben_w3 hours ago
          > services that they operate that have high demand.

          "high" doing heavy lifting there, I think.

          SpaceX has a lot of demand for rocketry… from itself, in the form of Starlink. Starlink has segments where it's a near monopoly but those segments are low-demand, and segments where it's high demand but those segments aren't a monopoly.

          Outside Starlink, there's not a particularly vast mass of stuff people want to launch right now.

    • Zigurd5 hours ago
      You mean Theranos, right?
      • rvz4 hours ago
        Care to explain what investment fraud SpaceX just committed?
        • Zigurd4 hours ago
          Starship has as much chance of working to spec as the Theranos machine. Except the scam is three orders of magnitude or more larger. But if you take a step back and ignore the hype, the rocket is way too big for orbital delivery of payloads, and there is a very real likelihood that it will never get beyond low Earth orbit. It will work any day now was exactly Elizabeth Holmes's pitch.
          • ben_w3 hours ago
            > Starship has as much chance of working to spec as the Theranos machine.

            Don't get me wrong, I'm skeptical about SpaceX's business model (I really must make more time to work on that blog post about orbital compute…), but no, that's just plain wrong.

            And I agree with you there's a real risk about going past LEO: between the booster still not landing reliably, and the team being still so lacking in confidence that after all this time the orbits still have not been circularised, there's a decent risk LEO is all it is good for.

            But even in expendable mode, where it's not going to be any good at all for the Moon or Mars, this is still a cheap LEO solution.

            And so far, Starship has actually been to space and back. It's taken so many test flights and cost so much during development (so far) that I think it compares mediocrely to the Soviet N1, and the US Saturn V and Space Shuttle, but that's a huge improvement over Theranos.

            Now, it may fail for unrelated reasons (spoiler from blog draft: data centres should not be in space), but the going-to-space part of SpaceX seems reasonably sound.

            • Zigurd2 hours ago
              Using capillary blood that's been sitting on your fingertip, that has some amount of interstitial fluid in it will make your blood tests fail, even if you collect enough blood that way to use a conventional blood testing machine. If you look deeper Theranos is not that different from thinking "OK we can recover boosters, upper stages are an incremental development."

              Having dealt with incompetent phlebotomists on a couple occasions, I can see where investors would get enthusiasm for a blood machine that makes everything is simple as a finger-stick test. But it's very analogous to extrapolating from falcon 9.

          • jfengel4 hours ago
            That seems an odd comparison. Theranos was complete vaporware. You've seen Starship; it goes into space and comes down in a controlled fashion.

            Maybe it won't work out; they've certainly had a lot of problems. But why compare it to something that didn't exist at all?

            • Zigurd3 hours ago
              The Theranos machine actually did run blood tests. But only a very limited number of blood tests can be run on a finger prick sample due to limitations on the volume collected, contamination, etc.

              In other words it was a wild ass idea from an entrepreneur who lacked knowledge of how blood tests actually work. That's not too dissimilar.