Tesla again threatens to sue Cybertruck buyers who try to resell the cars
arstechnica.com
Clause deleted from public version of terms is in the contract sent to buyers.

Tesla again threatens to sue Cybertruck buyers who try to resell the cars | Clause deleted from public version of terms is in the contract sent to buyers.::Clause deleted from public version of terms is in the contract sent to buyers.

  • @[email protected]English
    0•1 year ago

    The DC-X was a self landing rocket long before musk got pissed off that the russians wouldn’t sell him an ICBM

    https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/dc-x-the-nasa-rocket-that-inspired-spacex-and-blue-origin

    Like most things spacex (and blue origin): it is less about “innovation” as it is more about having a filter between government funding and public oversight. When NASA fucks up? We best do a full investigation and slash their budget and blah blah blah. When private space industry fucks up? Oh ha ha, can’t make an omelette without cracking a few eggs and it is great that these heroic billionaires are spending their own money because I have no concept of government research grants or contracts.

    And plenty of those talented engineers were poached from existing infrastructure (NASA, JPL, Boeing, etc). Which, inarguably, slowed down government and government adjacent research and development drastically.

    And just to comment on the three likely repsonses to this

    1. It isn’t a true orbital vehicle. It was specifically meant for suborbital flight! Not really. It was designed from the ground up to support missions involving orbits, but largely was intended to rely on additional boosters to handle most of the flight. Which… makes sense. No need to carry around the extra weight so long as you Check Yo Staging as it were. That said, scope creep is a mother fucker.
    2. It never truly succeeded: Yeah. Politics, safety concerns, and the funding issues I described above
    3. That is only the crewed(-ish) craft, not the boosters. Spacex lands the boosters: Yeah… there are a lot of arguments for why that is not important and they can be summed up as “remember the glorious shitshow that was the space shuttle?”. These, and the heat shields/tiles, are what take the most stress and need to be inspected and evaluated the most. And there are very much diminishing returns where you stop trying to retrofit to reuse and just recycle. And recovering (and re-using) boosters has been a thing since the Apollo program (I think. The various rockets blur a bit in my brain)
    4. It didn’t have a cock and balls painted on it: That is indeed a musk special, you got me there.
    • @[email protected]English
      1•1 year ago

      Huh? The DCX never made it off the drawing board. (They did build a smaller-scale demonstrator but it never made it to space.) Falcon 9 reusability is real and has been for almost a decade. And still, no one has built an orbital class rocket that can do the same.

      If you want to argue that propulsive landing is nothing new, you’re right there. We’ve been doing it since the 60s, but on the Moon and Mars. A reusable, orbital-class rocket is a true innovation.