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Could you do me a favor and locate a traffic accident where a driver had to choose between the lesser of two lethal evils? Surely that would be a pretty significant story. "Man Swerves To Avoid Baby, Kills Elderly Couple". I'd do it, but it sounds like a tedious chore because I've never heard...

One of the tower sections that was barged from Cape Canaveral has arrived at Starbase. They've still got lots of work to do before raising the tower, so the section has been parked at the Sanchez site. That's adjacent to the build site, where they store hardware, including the "Rocket Garden".

Something that hasn't been mentioned is that Ship 29 was moved away from the launch tower after Ship 31 had its electrical problem. There was some work done at the bottom of the ship - it was either very bright work lights and/or welding - and then it was moved back to the launch site. As I...

I put together a video showing how I interact with the wheel to eliminate nags. I just keep some torque on the steering wheel at all times. None of Tesla's driver assists are hands-free yet, so don't try to use them that way.

As ever, it boils down to training. Show the system a bunch of simulated scenarios of the trolley problem and it'll do its best to match those scenarios as trained when they happen in real life. Assuming that it is trained "ethically", it will respond "ethically". Give it military training...

Their Huntsville plant is supposed to be capable of 42 engines a year with 300 employees. But Blue Origin shortly afterwards staffed to double that number of employees. That means either that they want to double the output to 84 a year, or they were only getting perhaps half production on the...

It may yet, but there's no way to know what will happen. ULA and Blue Origin may be completely on top of this and Vulcan may be flying at a reputable rate by the end of 2025. Not Falcon 9 rates, nor with reusable boosters, but at least they'd be on their way to satisfying their contract...

I wonder if this is related to the loss of Ship 25 during IFT-2 when they had a fire and explosion during LOX venting. Perhaps Starship has a basic problem with shorting of electrical connections in the raceway, and when enough oxygen reaches the site of a short, you get this. Perhaps we...

They're thanking you for being courteous. It doesn't matter if you chose to do it manually or use an automatic system, it was still courtesy. A discourteous person would push the car through, which remains an option to you. A discourteous person would also not even engage the automatic...

Ship 31 is at Massey's and was going through a cryo test when there was an electrical short of some sort. Lots of arcing and flashes from about halfway down the vehicle. The vehicle had a full load of LOX at the time. They did an immediate and lengthy depress. No explosion. No fire...

Collect the data as the potholes are hit, phone home, and share that with other cars. Same for when the potholes are filled. Tesla could do so much with vehcle data collection, and I know lots of us are confused as to why they don't do it. Perhaps too much LTE data would become prohibitively...

All it takes is traffic circles.

Watch those dash cam compilation videos. After years of watching them, I'd claim that the majority of accidents are a result of one person doing something really dumb, leaving the other person little to no chance to avoid. It may be just that the majority of video-worthy accidents are like...

It has the delta-V to do a lot more than drop off the retrieval lander. The lander is only 25 tons. Starship can do that to Mars as a rideshare as part of a 100 ton payload. So Starship could try its first entry, descent and landing. That would require some kind of appropriate landing...

Boeing is proposing use of the SLS to launch a huge sample return vehicle to Mars which would use aerobraking followed by a propulsive landing. It would have the ability to collect the samples and then perform a direct return to Earth, eliminating the orbital capture with a separate vehicle...

This is different. SpaceX is using a Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane helicopter to lift equipment. I guess something has to go on top of a high bay that a crane can no longer reach. This image also covers the arrival of Booster 11 for IFT-4, and the demolition of Suborbital Pad B.

I was curious to see the rest of that document. Here's the link (it doesn't preview well in the forum as a document). The expanded scope of operations that SpaceX is after will require an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).

It's a good match for the information. A 12 hour window is standard when they fire up the tank farm for any testing, and booster 11 has its hot staging ring. The road and beach closure schedule is a bit off, though. They list the primary closure date as the 14th, with the 15th and 16th as...

At a guess, the voice feedback was more useful when drivers were prone to disengage before anything actually happened. A kind of anticipatory disengagement. "I don't know what it's doing, and I don't want to find out. Disengaged." Telemetry wasn't going to tell Tesla what was going on. With...

Hot fire of the Aeon R methalox engine. There will be 13 of these 117 ton engines on the Terran R rocket.

"There's a Wikipedia page for that" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Earth It says a lot less in humans than it does in animals in general. It's that whole frontal lobe thing.

Here's another long-term one; the sun is increasing in brightness by about 10 percent every billion years. Another 10 percent means that the oceans will evaporate and the surface will be too hot for water to form. By then, however, we may have the ability to move the planet around, so it stays...

Sadly, the launch isn't imminent. The booster and ship have been sitting in the bays, and the only activity I've heard about is that the hot staging ring has been installed on the booster. We haven't heard about the IFT-3 mishap investigation, and certainly there are no air and sea...

These are the landing thrusters for Blue Origin's Blue Moon MK1 lunar lander. They've passed acceptance testing and are ready to be installed.

Suborbital Pad B has seen its final static fire. Ship 30 is off the pad, and now the pad is being demolished. So all future static fires should be at the Massey site, using the fancy-shmancy flame trench. I believe Ship 26 is over there now as the initial test vehicle. Coverage of Massey's...

Emphasis on "instinctive", not "desire" or "motive". Whatever the reason, it is instinctive. Curiosity is instinctive. Instincts are simply what evolution has given us, and they aren't necessarily the best tools to have in our kit. The whole "fixing" thing is to review the toolkit and...

Part of the "fix" would be the elimination of the instinctive desire to explore the universe. If there are good reasons to explore the universe, then the "fixed" humans would ensure that it happens. The most obvious one to me is ensuring that a big rock doesn't drop on our heads. Whether...

There are apparently other Pulsed Plasma Rocket designs out there. There is a Slashdot post of a Gizmodo article, and one of the comments on Slashdot talks about firing uranium out the back of the thing. The commenter provided a link and, sure enough, there's a paper describing how that would...

I think they wanted the new aircraft because it was going to make numerous flights more cost effective, not that the current aircraft couldn't complete the cycles safely. They'll have to do more inspections, replace more parts, and that will drive down their profit margin per flight. It's not...

Clearly I disagree, and I'll leave it at that.

Sorry, dachshund, I didn't see this question. The torque lock is the thing that prevents the driver from turning the steering wheel while FSD or Autopilot is active. If the driver wants to take over control, there is a certain amount of force that the driver has to apply to steering to "break"...

Exactly. That's the stuff that causes us to behave like animals. The more advanced our technology, the more dangerous it is for humanity because animals excel at irrational uses of such things. Resources are always finite. It's a question of whether we have enough resources to keep from...

Suppose we had instant and free teleportation that provided access to dozens of Earth clones. Ready to go tomorrow. I'd turn off the teleporters. Having more doesn't change the human experience. We'd just keep breeding and fill all available room. Along the way, we'd bicker and fight...

I assume it's an equestrian reference, suggesting that he was all-in. If not, he's an extreme geek, and it's a computer reference. I think he was using a phrase that was intended to convey his confidence in the team, not to suggest how difficult the problem is. After all, he did say "set the...

I've been hoping that this is a result of going to neural networks, and that it's such a new medium for them that they haven't gotten around to implementing people's preferences. The preferences are needed because their attempts at making driving decisions for the driver are pretty awful. Lane...

I wanted to make a joke about using a different planet as our standard day, but we only seem to know the day length of a single exoplanet, and it isn't the needed 53 hour day to make the math work out. @Cosmacelf said five days, so I ran with five days. I may have given you a thumbs-up for...

Yup. And if the car detects torque on the steering wheel, it can respond to that torque as if it was the system's idea in the first place. Apply too much torque or for too long (e.g. leaving the lane) and the system disables. Lucid has a lane bias system that works like this. I'm thinking of...

The goal is to be able to move the wheel to bias within the lane. I recall that there are systems that allow that. The torque lock prevents Tesla drivers from inputting any steering motion at all; the wheel is locked to FSD. If the torque lock is disabled while the system is active, then it...

Okay. I'll bite. Why? Other systems operate without a torque lock, so are you suggesting that it is hardware restriction?

So you expect the torque lock to remain, but just no torque nags? Yeah, I can see that as a natural progression of disappointments from Tesla.

Okay, so if they eliminate the steering wheel nag, then that literally frees up the steering wheel for in-lane steering adjustments (e.g. pothole avoidance) without disabling FSD. In fact, I wonder if that was the inspiration for eliminating it. And, of course, elimination of the torque lock...

Not a chance. If they eliminate nags, then drivers don't have to pay attention, and that's a Level 3 feature.

I don't believe that the capability of the software is the gating factor here. NHTSA wants drivers paying attention when a Level 2 system is active. They're insistent that the driver be nagged if they're not paying attention. If there's any fix coming, I hope that it's the elimination of the...

Given NHTSA jumping all over Tesla for driver attention with Autopilot, I wonder what Elon considers the correct behavior for FSD.

I'm gonna wait for 2.5 before deciding if Tesla has a handle on this. "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is a pattern."

They completed the Ship 30 static fire today just before noon, central time. We're a week into May and there's no word on the IFT-3 mishap investigation. I wonder what's going on. SpaceX may be hung up on a regulatory hurdle. Then there's the continuing work on Ship 29's heat tiles, so they...

Right. And I'd say that there are explorers among us, not that humans are explorers. It's an important distinction, and it is not maintained when people talk about humanity reaching out into space. It won't be humanity, but rather some people who are obsessed with that sort of thing. In...

Being a little more expansive, the idea is that they put a Starship on a stand like that, run the SPMTs under it, drive it over to Massey's, then right over the flame trench. They set the whole thing down, Starship and stand, on mount points, then back the SPMTs away. To allow the SPMTs to...

Two days really. Wednesday and Thursday. I assume they're replacing the valve in question, and may be inspecting other valves of the same type. They need Friday for preparations of both crew and vehicle. Remember that this is a manned launch with an instantaneous launch window. It's not...

That's the way I'm looking at it. This is where I disagree. We have explorers, but humanity is not an exploring people. We have many different motivations across humanity, and many in larger numbers than explorers and adventurers, yet we don't characterize humanity along those lines. We only...