My mother was an acquaintance of Warren Zevon's and she introduced me to him when I was a teenager in early August 2002, in a sort of casual "Hey Warren I'd like you to meet my son."
After the introduction I stood there and listened to the adults speak as a child often does in that kind of situation and he was lamenting that he hadn't been feeling well for awhile and he wasn't looking it either.
So my mother did what one does in that kind of situation which was insist that he go to the doctor and he kind of hummed and hawed at it because he didn't like doctors but finally said that he should do that.
That was a few weeks before he was diagnosed with cancer and about a year before he passed away. It's just one of those little experiences that kismet gifted me and I think of it often. More so now that I've gotten into his music over the past few years.
Like the author of this blog post I sometimes come across that final Letterman interview with Zevon and reflect on it and that powerful but simple line "Enjoy Every Sandwich" that Zevon offhandedly made.
It makes me reflect on how I want to continue to live a long and healthy life so that I can continue to have those kind of neat fleeting experiences of meeting people and just... witnessing life.
That reflection also made me realize that I should aspire to enable others to have those sorts of experiences so I have started to volunteer more at organizations which I feel can make that happen. It's rewarding and encouraging. It makes me feel like the world is a little bit less of a terrible place. If only for a moment.
Warren Zevon was recently inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and The Killers performed at that event. This video of their rehearsal for the Warren Zevon song "Lawyers Guns and Money" is fabulous: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4q_K52TYsE&list=RDK4q_K52TY...
That’s about 2X as expensive as the cash pay MRIs near me in the United States, which is interesting. You don’t have to wait a week here, but that’s to be expected with how many MRI machines are all over the place. For specialty imaging like contrast or doing time resolved MRI you do have to wait a little longer to get someone qualified to do it properly. Some of those take a little more expertise that the cash walk-in places aren’t good for.
Hmm, that's good information to have, I had no idea. I just had an MRI appointment that I had completely forgotten about or what it was for I was waiting so long (and obviously not having the issue for anymore). I'll know this for next time and consider it.
Yeah is it legal to finance MRI machines as a business then and sell fast imaging? If it’s that bad near a big city could have a batch running constantly. Of course until the government healthcare system finds a bunch of money in a suitcase somewhere and decides to finally buy more machines, which would kill this business.
I'm happy to confess I don't understand US medical care but OP was saying that $800 was the price they paid but you're saying that if one had "US insurance" it would be "less than half of that" ?
I mean if you have insurance I don't know why it's costing you anything but regardless it's hardly surprising that you're cost is less than the person paying cash ?
Most people with insurance in the US have something called a “copay” although not all. And yes I’m surprised that it’s quicker or cheaper here than Canada.
We’re all on this world for a little while and then we die and leave behind the detritus of our lives.
For some people that’s a house full of crap that their kids need to clean out after the funeral and for others that’s a dilapidated apartment building that’s soon to be condemned and will require asbestos abatement and demolition.
They’re going to lose out to a choose your own adventure-esque experience that locally generated AI content will produce. Why pay a subscription for terrible content when you can make your own personal terrible content?
I use the Orion browser on my iPhone and it doesn’t have ads.
I also don’t install the YouTube app so I use the browser to visit the YouTube site and have an ad free experience and can even have audio playing on it while the screen is off or I’m in another app so it’s an objectively better experience than using an android device with the YouTube app that is automatically installed on it.
it’s an objectively better experience than using an android device with the YouTube app that is automatically installed on it
It's not better than YouTube after Morphe. Morphe is an app that can patch other apps. It makes the official YouTube app nice by removing ads, skipping over sponsored segments, remove tracking from links, improves the player, etc.
Would be extremely hard to do something similar on iOS.
As an outsider who is very interested in space exploration I'm very flummoxed by the state of space exploration.
With the price of launches so low compared to only 20 years ago due to advancements in launch technology and the increased cadence of launches it seems like it should be easier to do these kinds of missions and that there should be more, cheaper missions that are willing to take risks because the per mission cost is so much lower.
Can you comment on why that doesn't seem to be happening? Why aren't we covering Mars in cheap rovers and satellites?
For both operating mars rovers, the launch vehicle cost was about 10% of the total. So even if the providers paid you to launch, you'll still be picking up 80% of the remainder. Cut the development cost by 10x? Still in the hundred million dollar range. So still only large goverments can afford. And none of them would approve a bunch of rovers, they'd just see a discount on the one rover they already don't want to give you - "you have one, isn't that enough? Why do you need two?"
Not just mass optimization either. Intense effort and cost are expended through verification because a single payload simply must work. But using commodity hardware with reduced verification effort, launching many, and tolerating some amount of attrition has resulted in reduced costs for Starlink.
I think if they had a big f-ing rocket at their disposal and could bundle a couple dozen of them MIRV style there would be no political downside if a bunch went splat so long as a bunch didn't
"look guys 9/24 of the rovers are transmitting back, great success"
Testing of using commodity parts was part of the Mars helicopter and it worked well enough that making many of them seems plausible. I'd love to see multiple drones flying faster/further than rovers. Just not really sure what instruments would make them useful.
That's another great example. And ridesharing on the mission allowed them to prove it very inexpensively and with much lower risk than a dedicated mission.
I think the question of technical possibility answers differently from the question of organizational feasibility. Starlink is optimizing costs because they have a financial incentive to do so. The less each satellite costs, and costs to maintain, the more income they make. I fear incentives are not so direct in governmental orgs. Outside contractors performing most of the work have outsized influence, and incentive to inflate costs. Budgetary decision makers all want to see investment in their own districts.
I think Starlink and cubesats have definitely proven the approach can reduce costs.
The engineering does not seem as challenging to me as figuring out how to get such a policy approved and pushed through all the administrative and decision making layers without watering down and budgetary inflation.
Maybe if we launched 30 Starships carrying 30 rovers each. With only 30 units, the prices would likely be similar to current commercial satellites, which are already built on standardized platforms.
I'd go even more radically low cost, and kit the first lander out with wifi, and a half dozen each of every commercially available robot dog, humanoid, and wheeled or tracked robot of any interest. Rumble in the Mars Robodome. Bit of publicity for the existing manufacturers who may be willing to pay for the privilege, and who will undoubtedly learn valuable things about how their designs fail and can be improved. And you figure out in one stroke if there's a COTS platform you can buy for $30k that gets you 80% of what you need. If any of them function for any period of time, you use them to prepare the space for future landings. Rinse, repeat. After a few iterations, you have a half dozen manufacturers with commercially produced platforms with a few strategic modifications to which you can bolt your science instruments.
All I can think about now is a bunch of e-waste littering Mars. At some point, other visitors will show up to investigate Mars and come to the conclusion that the Earthlings are just so trashy their trash even started filling another planet.
The surface of mars is roughly the size of Earth's dry landmass. They'd have to spend quite a lot of effort looking for it to find it. And at that point it'd probably look more like a treasure trove of useful thermoplastics, refined metals, magnets, and other useful things otherwise difficult or expensive to source on Mars directly.
0 to 1 is part of why the first Curiosity cost so much. If they kept the technology alive in practice, launching a new one every year doesn’t sound unreasonable.
In fact, that kind of standing order for a new Curiosity every year is exactly how you would keep the technology alive in practice.
They issued statements like that... aaand then built a copy of the rover for the same cost as the original one. And it only took them 10 years to do this :)
Yeah, build-to-print at the small scale of space missions never really works in practice because requirements always change and small changes in requirements tend to have big design impacts.
We've had 8 launches in the past 3 years, with only 10 in the combined 17 years before [1].
Seems that the reduced cost is being taken advantage of. And, make sure to exclude the drastic reduction in non-lunar launches in your cost comparison for lunar launches.
I won't find it now, but I distinctly remember watching a video about some big NASA event a few years back but when Starship Booster (first stage) had been flying already. Basically none one at the event even considered switching paradigm from ultra custom probes and landers built from unobtainium and unicorn blood in favor of the way cheaper and way less robust, almost mass market hardware, to be launched once every 10 months instead of every 10 years on a regular basis. (PS: I know all the laundry list of arguments against this approach, and they are not that convincing at NASA scale). And I won't even talk about Space Disgrace System for manned flight.
NASA is stuck in the past and does it consciously and voluntarily.
To my understanding people at NASA and people approving budgets like novel stuff. What’s the point of 100 identical rovers on mars? For politician - good publicity only for first 5 rovers, then it is only routine. For engineers, challenge of designing and constructing new cutting edge stuff is interesting and fulfilling, constructing 50th clone is boring. (If now you give money to top talent to do cutting edge, then after 5years you will have pool of talented people; might benefit next mission or some other company)
The point is that, while the first of them has 2 MPx cameras with crappy optics, the fifth one has 50 MPx cameras with automagic everything, and the tenths one has damn light stacking array of top tier cameras and on board AI to colour correct on the fly or some other magic stuff. And at the same time battery increases x10 times while losing half of the wight and thermal deficiencies, CPUs get better and more redundant, better memory, wheels are getting fixed in 1 year instead of 10 and the list goes on.
Or you don't need to craft a JWST with nail files anymore, but instead just lauch a swarm of mirrors to free float and emulate the whole thing. And if one mirror goes bad - just launch a new one for pennies (NASA pennies). Or if the whole project is nonviable somehow - no big deal, just launch next year a different architecture. Ok, not next year, but in like a few years. And not in three decades (LUVOIR anyone? hello? Is there anyone at NASA?), if on schedule, and forty years if not.
The list goes on. I get hedging risks and preserving institutional knowledge, sure. But not even discussing a different approach, which could be conducted in parallel, is very very bad.
... checks math ... Starship should have enough cargo capacity for this. One launch. We could put the whole senate up there. The house might take a couple launches unless we really pack 'em in. /s
We just need to setup a fake corporate sponsor meet and greet. We camouflage Ship to look like a hotel ball room, with a door for "private meetings" that leads to the cargo bay.
The nature of science and exploration is that every mission is harder than the last, which is a reasonable first order proxy for expense. For NASA specifically, there has also been a large focus placed on making delivery to orbit and the moon a commercial service rather than something that NASA has to do in-house which has held us back.
And as others have said, there is really no such thing as a cheap rover. As a recent example, there was recently a push by NASA HQ to refurbish a Mars rover engineering unit (basically a one-to-one copy of the one sent to Mars, kept at JPL for use in ops planning and issue debugging) into an operational lunar rover. The estimated cost to take this existing piece of hardware and make it fully flight ready and suitable for the new mission was hundreds of millions of dollars.
A practical issue with government spending is that it's self motivated. Politicians' only job is to get elected. And one big way to do that is by ensuring that money goes to your district, creating jobs and opportunities. This is how you get things like the SLS, nicknamed the Senate Launch System. It was a tremendous waste of money, spending on the order of decades to build a launch system that was arguably obsoleted years before it completed, and will in any case be far too expensive to ever regularly use.
But the reason we kept throwing good money after bad is because the goal was never really about making a good launch system. It was all about sending money and creating stable long-term jobs in various states and districts, actively supported by the politicians representing those areas. So you had parts being built all over the place, in a way that just sends costs skyrocketing, but that's okay - because the rocket isn't the goal.
Of course the government itself is aware of this problem, much like fishermen are aware that overfishing is self destructive in the long-run, even if they are nonetheless individually motivated to do exactly that. So I think this was why the big push for commercializing space. And I think we'll ultimately see the exact same thing with deeper space missions and technologies. SpaceX's goal is Mars and I see no reason to think they will fail there. At that point, costs for various Martian missions - be they sample return, rovers, or whatever else - should be relatively negligible relative to today. Exactly as happened when we went from ferrying people to the ISS using the Space Shuttle, to when we started launching them on Falcon rockets.
Cynicism is a variety of compliance in advance. It creates the conditions it decries.
Obviously there are corrupt politicians. But also obviously there are politicians who actually want to advance the public interest. It is the job of voters to tell them apart and ensure only the latter become the custodians of state power.
Politics, especially in its modern form, does not incentivize nor reward those who would put the public interest ahead of their own political careers. On the contrary it effectively prunes the overwhelming majority of these people out of office long before they get anywhere near the higher levels of office.
There have certainly been a few exceptions, but they're few and far between - and tend to be because of special circumstance. For instance I think Bernie Sanders, before he tried to run for President, was a good guy. But that's because he's from Vermont, a state with a smaller population than El Paso, TX. Democracy works quite well with small populations, but not so well with with larger populations when the 'distance', speaking both metaphorically and literally, between voters and their representatives grows too far. It also tends to fail when societies become too divided.
As for the voter determining who's socially motivated and who's a silver tongued conman? I don't think that's at all realistic.
It is definitely picking up - you if look at the list of planned launches to the Moon for example, there are quite a few things launching in the next 12 months.
Also I think we need to start looking at smaller institutions and even private companies doing beyond LEO research soon - exactly because of the launch costs going down.
Yet at the same time, traditional big exploration players don't seem to be really able to make use of ti quick enough for some reason (politics ? inertia?).
One issue is definitely that there is no tangible (economical) upside to anything other than low earth launches and now maybe the moon, and the scientific exploration, while technically cheaper now, is still expensive - and requires a lot of public funding, which hinges on public interest. I don't think the general public is still as enthusiastic about space exploration anymore, people are far more skeptical about the upside given all the problem we have down here that occupy their minds constantly.
Yep notice that all the space stuff going on is about commerce not science.
Personally I couldn't give a shit about astronauts landing on the moon I want hundreds of drones flying around the solar system doing science but I'm the minority.
At least ESA isn't doing much propaganda.
America is being run by somebody who doesn't understand the value of science, so it is seen as a waste of money and worse, systematically destroyed. The problem is that the result won't become apparent for about ten years at which point Americans will be asking why everyone else is making money from science and technology breakthroughs and they're getting poorer.
Outside of specifics like the space shuttle program, launch costs have never been that big of a factor. Like 5-15% of a program's cost. If your satellite or rover costs billions to build and another billion to run for a decade, saving a hundred million (or even a couple hundred million) isn't that much of a game changer
One reason is that launch is not as cheap as often stated.
Launch is cheap for SpaceX. But they still charge high prices for everyone else. It's often estimated that a Falcon 9 launch costs SpaceX $15-20m, but they charge $60m+ to customers.
Some types of launches to some classes or orbits have gotten cheaper. Not all launches to all orbits. I don't know if any commercial launch services can even do planetary transfer orbits.
In space everything is an orbital change. To change orbits you need to speed up and slow down, all of that requires fuel. Even using what are known as "low energy" trajectories that use a bunch of gravitational slingshots need velocity changes to adjust trajectories to get the right angle of approach to some large body.
Most commercial launch services focus on LEO because the secondary stages don't need to carry much fuel and their engines only need to fire reliably once to get into a stable orbit.
A planetary transfer requires multiple engine firings. That's much harder than a single reliable firing. It's not impossible but the testing and engineering is expensive.
A science mission often needs to beg, borrow, and steal to get built. There's one shot to accomplish the mission objectives. That's more expensive engineering and testing. Some mission profiles require specific planetary alignments with very narrow launch windows to boot. So there's a lot of expensive work made more expensive by a tight deadline.
The actual marginal cost of the rocket, fuel, and launch is a very small part of the mission cost. Halving the launch price doesn't necessarily affect the cost of anything else.
Starlink satellites are effectively disposable. If a Falcon 9 explodes or fails to get the second stage to orbit they're out maybe a few tens of millions of dollars. If a science mission has some mission-killing failure there's no funding for a do-over.
You're right I was forgetting the Falcon Heavy. But it's certainly not cheap when the government is footing the bill. The Nancy Grace Roman launch cost NASA $255m, far above SpaceX's prices for even an expendable GTO launch.
> There are more opportunities and knowledge available now for people who do want to build their own machines and it’s very cheap.
And what happens if China decides that it is no longer in their interest to allow Americans access to cheap aluminum extrusions, hotends, motors, and controllers?
Between the American tariffs and Chinese prioritization of 3d printing in a past five year plan American hobbyists and small scale producers are in a potential bind.
> And what happens if China decides that it is no longer in their interest to allow Americans access to cheap aluminum extrusions, hotends, motors, and controllers?
Then home 3D printing will be the least of our concerns? What kind of question is this?
Decades of prioritizing manufacturing capacity and talent lead to China being able to prioritize the development advanced additive manufacturing for industrial purposes and to being able to dominate international sales of consumer level 3d printers.
Ignoring the development of the sorts of skills and abilities in the general public that come from tinkering with small bench top machines like lathes and 3d printers is detrimental to nation’s ability to be self sufficient and raise the next generation of mechanically inclined people.
China seems to get that while other countries don’t.
> Ignoring the development of the sorts of skills and abilities in the general public that come from tinkering with small bench top machines like lathes and 3d printers is detrimental to nation’s ability to be self sufficient and raise the next generation of mechanically inclined people.
I replied to your topic about China stopping exports of stepper motors and aluminum extrusions, now you're switching to yet another goalpost.
For what it's worth, I've spent a lot of time with 3D printers in the past decade. The amount I've learned doesn't hold a candle to any of the deep dives I've done for real engineering work. A couple months of paid full-time engineering work on in a new area would bring any engineer up to speed.
3D printers are cool, but the self-importance some people attribute to this hobby is a little too much some times.
I think mechanical / electronic intuition are important, and they come from tinkering (especially at younger ages).
Sure, being able to do math and detailed analysis are important. But having a good guess on step 1 is important, too, to narrow the search of huge design spaces.
I think we've all experienced different kinds of engineers. The one you trust to do a month-long trade study with deep mathematical reasoning is usually not the one you trust to just know a plausible path forward. And we need both.
It has never been a better time to be able to make parts at home in USA than right now. A formlabs form 4 is cheaper than a Bridgeport, there is a glut of desktop CNC mills (aluminum routers) under ~5k, in wood the shaper origin and sienci altmill are pretty strong as is the avidcnc router family which happens to use domestically sourced extrusion from 8020…
Frankly, I am confused by much of what in reading here
> And what happens if China decides that it is no longer in their interest to allow Americans access to cheap aluminum extrusions, hotends, motors, and controllers?
We make our own. You seem to be under the common delusion that because only a tiny % of people work in manufacturing compare to 70 years ago, that mean the US doesn't to manufacturing. In fact the US is manufacturing more than ever with just that tiny % of people. Be glad you don't have to work a boring assembly line job.
I mean, on the one hand, manufacturing has grown near-continually for those 70 years, and its demand for labor has reduced. So, it's not like you're wrong.
At the same time, our production of lower value, commodity-ish things has indeed shrunk rather than grown with population of demand. That manufacturing expertise is more concentrated more on higher value (aerospace, information technology, etc) things and less on fasteners, bulk materials, or extrusions.
We are not vertically integrated in the way that China is.
The older I get the more I realize the deep wisdom in the simple words of Forrest Gump, ‘Stupid is as stupid does.’
One of the most corrosive effects that money has on society is that it can shelter people from the consequences of their stupidity.
People can luck into a shitload of shelter for their poor choices whether through inheritance or random chance of their actions and then don’t ever have to face consequences proportional to their stupid actions.
Or someone can start out smart and then suffer cognitive decline that is at first imperceptible until they become kookier and kookier until they’re blathering on about the antichrist and some people still take them seriously because they’re blinded by money.
The end result is a society where stupid people are surrounded by stupid people riding their coattails and everyone becomes confused about what smart and smart action actually is.
That was part of the mission profile, no? If it hadn’t been you’d have a point, but as I understand it that was a reasonable milestone to hit and to determine if an animal can even survive for a time in orbit before they risked a human life.
Animals often die in experimentation and that’s usually the whole point of the experiment.
After the introduction I stood there and listened to the adults speak as a child often does in that kind of situation and he was lamenting that he hadn't been feeling well for awhile and he wasn't looking it either.
So my mother did what one does in that kind of situation which was insist that he go to the doctor and he kind of hummed and hawed at it because he didn't like doctors but finally said that he should do that.
That was a few weeks before he was diagnosed with cancer and about a year before he passed away. It's just one of those little experiences that kismet gifted me and I think of it often. More so now that I've gotten into his music over the past few years.
Like the author of this blog post I sometimes come across that final Letterman interview with Zevon and reflect on it and that powerful but simple line "Enjoy Every Sandwich" that Zevon offhandedly made.
It makes me reflect on how I want to continue to live a long and healthy life so that I can continue to have those kind of neat fleeting experiences of meeting people and just... witnessing life.
That reflection also made me realize that I should aspire to enable others to have those sorts of experiences so I have started to volunteer more at organizations which I feel can make that happen. It's rewarding and encouraging. It makes me feel like the world is a little bit less of a terrible place. If only for a moment.
Warren Zevon was recently inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and The Killers performed at that event. This video of their rehearsal for the Warren Zevon song "Lawyers Guns and Money" is fabulous: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4q_K52TYsE&list=RDK4q_K52TY...
reply