Building a Future for Space 🇺🇸
Pensacola, FL
Joined September 2022
- Tweets21.6K
- Following490
- Followers1K
- Likes21.1K
JETLAB-X retweeted
Elon Musk on how far Raptor 4 could go:
“It is so tempting to make a 500 ton thrust Raptor 4 in place of the 250 ton Raptor 3 for the outer ring of the Starship booster”
Just look at the progression:
Raptor 1 → 185 t
Raptor 2 → ~230 t
Raptor 3 → 250 t (230t reliably)
Raptor 4 → Elon is already thinking about 500 t
That’s double the thrust of Raptor 3 from the outer booster engines
SpaceX keeps pushing rocket propulsion into completely absurd territory
JETLAB-X retweeted
SpaceX will attempt to catch both the Super Heavy booster and Starship on the upcoming flight.
If both are successful, it will mark the first time that all parts of an orbital rocket return to Earth intact.
This is the critical breakthrough needed to make life multiplanetary.
More than a dozen flight tests and years of development, with countless hours worked by SpaceX engineers and technicians, all come down to this: the first orbital Starship launch carrying advanced Starlink satellites bound for space.
Watch “Go For Orbit” and experience the moments behind flying the most ambitious Starship mission yet
JETLAB-X retweeted
Standing by Elon Musk was never about agreeing with every decision or expecting an easy road.
It’s about recognizing someone willing to take extraordinary risks to build a future most people can barely imagine.
Through the criticism, the setbacks, the victories, and everything in between, my support doesn’t disappear when the narrative changes.
I believed in the mission when it was difficult. I believe in it now.
Through thick and thin. 🚀
JETLAB-X retweeted
Astrobase website animation explicitly breaks down the key architectural flow paths that define a true full-flow staged combustion cycle:
Dual Preburners
It highlights the separate fuel-rich and oxidizer-rich preburners working simultaneously.
Independent Turbines
The graphic traces how these separate preburners feed into distinct, dual turbine drives to optimally power the propellant pumps.
100% Exhaust Routing
It shows how all of the gasified preburner exhaust is funneled directly into the main combustion chamber, eliminating propellant waste and maximizing thermal and propulsive efficiency.
JETLAB-X retweeted
If your plan to protect Americans from AI is to ban American development while China keeps building, you should be nowhere near policy.
You cannot legislate away the technology. You can only decide how much of it gets built here and whose rules the rest of the world follows.
Calling a ban a safety plan, without saying who loses their job, their savings, their edge when American companies fall behind, is not protection. It is surrender on a delay.
If China builds the future anyway, who exactly did you protect?
JETLAB-X retweeted
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
This planet has-or rather had-a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.
This is not her story. But it is the story of that terrible, stupid catastrophe and some of its consequences. It is also the story of a book, a book called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy-not an Earth book, never published on Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or even heard of by any Earthman.
Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 👍
JETLAB-X retweeted
Let's go Flight 15! teapawt.net/SpaceNotices/status/21…
Starship Flight 15 has been delayed by 1 day to NET November 13 per a new CADENA presentation
compass.atfm.aero/public_svc…
JETLAB-X retweeted
SpaceX is currently targeting Friday, November 13th for Starship's 15th flight, according to SpaceX's VP of launch, @TurkeyBeaver.
This flight is expected to include the first-ever Starship catch 🚀
JETLAB-X retweeted
The loudest voices calling for AI safety are terrified of becoming irrelevant, and they need you to believe it is about something bigger than that.
Their degree was a costume. Their job was a bottleneck. Their expertise was gatekeeping dressed up as wisdom. For twenty years they got paid to be the only person in the room who knew the answer, and now the answer is free.
So they invented a moral panic. They call it existential risk. They call for pauses, bans, permits, and committees. Anything that puts a lock back on the door they used to guard.
Career protection with a philosophy degree.
The machine does not care about their status. It does not negotiate. It does not need their permission. It just keeps getting better while they write op-eds warning that anyone can now do what they spent a decade learning.
There are people doing real work to make this technology safe. They are easy to spot. They build things.
The ones writing letters and demanding pauses have not built anything in years. They just need you to believe the door should stay locked, with them holding the only key.
History will remember them as the last generation that tried to make intelligence a private club.
JETLAB-X retweeted
Humanity’s greatest achievement isn't any single invention. It's our refusal to accept the limits we inherited.
From fire and language to artificial intelligence and interplanetary travel, every breakthrough began with someone questioning what was possible.
We are a species that looks at the impossible and starts engineering a way through it.
And we're nowhere near finished.
JETLAB-X retweeted
One of the most elegant engineering decisions behind Starship is autogenous pressurization.
Instead of carrying a separate pressurizing gas, Starship uses its own propellants to maintain tank pressure.
Less complexity. Less dead weight. More capability.
Sometimes the smartest engineering is eliminating what you never needed.