Isegoria

Why do people work for Musk?, Scott Alexander asks:

The book paints a pretty grim picture of working at a Musk company. Employees get handed near-impossible problems, chewed out or fired if they fail, and barely thanked at all if they succeed. Work weeks are 90+ hours. Vance says Elon sent an angry email to a marketing guy who missed an event because his wife was giving birth, telling him to “figure out where your priorities are” (Elon denies this). So why do thousands of people, including the very best and brightest who could get jobs anywhere, work for him?

The cliche answer — that they believe in the mission — is mostly true. But many employees also talked about their past jobs at Boeing or GM or wherever. They would have some cool idea, and tell it to their boss, and their boss would say they weren’t in the cool idea business and were already getting plenty of government contracts. If they pushed, they would get told to file it with the Vice President of Employee Feedback, who might hold a meeting to determine a process to summon an exploratory committee to add it to the queue of things to consider for the 2030 version of the product.

Meanwhile, if someone told Elon about a cool idea, he would think about it for fifteen seconds, give them a million dollars, and tell them to have it ready within a month — no, two weeks! — no, three days! For some people, the increased freedom and the feeling of getting to reach their full potential was worth the cost.

Michael Barnard has been looking at ways to make wind energy a thing for cargo ships again for at least a decade:

Few of the them appear to make much sense in context of the shipping industry. Many appear to be motivated by romanticism rather than pragmatism.

That’s why sails are in the sexy but foolish quadrant of my sexy vs meh decarbonization assessment of maritime shipping, along with hydrofoils (which I love on tiny pleasure water craft like wing foils) and hydrogen (which is just as nonsensical as a shipping fuel as it is a trucking fuel).

The only solution I’d seen which managed to cross over at least partially into the practical quadrant was bow-mounted parafoil power assist. The reasons are pretty straightforward.

Ships are high-tech simplicity. They have big engines, they love to run in straight lines at the same speed for days or weeks at a time, small crews can run huge ships and they are optimized to fit through canals and into ports globally. They exist in a complex business model where one organization builds them, another owns them, another operates them, another registers them, another insures them, another fuels them, and yet another owns the cargo that they carry.

The firm that pays for the ship is usually different than the firm which pays for the expenses of operating the ship. That’s one of the things that gets in the way of efficiency measures that require capital expenditures. The ship’s owner has to spend that money, but typically can’t get that money back from the operators who gain the benefits from it. This is the same problem with efficiency retrofits in commercial real estate, by the way, where tenants pay for utilities but landlords pay for insulation and heat pumps.

So there are business model headwinds for wind energy on ships. But those aren’t the only challenges.

Cargo ships don’t sail majestically across the briny deeps and then lower their cargo into rowboats. They berth at complex, highly automated, highly standardized ports, with most traffic flowing through the biggest 800 ports globally. They exist within a technical ecosystem that includes a lot of technology in ports to rapidly pluck cargo out of them and put it back into them. Smaller ships sometimes have winches of their own for loading and offloading at tiny ports, but this is the exception rather than the rule.

And specific bulk cargos have specific load and offload technologies, often at separate docks. Grain can’t be taken out of ships with coal loading equipment. Ammonia can’t be pumped out by equipment that deals with gasoline. Containers aren’t lifted out with the same cranes that haul out palleted cargo typically. Ships usually moor under a complex, gigantic mechanical spider’s worth of arms and gantries.

How exactly do masts and sails fit into that world? Well, they don’t. That’s a big problem for wind-powered cargo ships. Most wind energy solutions require very big things sticking up from the ship along its length. How exactly do you berth a ship like that so containers can be plucked from it?

[…]

The next problem for wind energy and cargo ships is keels. Sailing ships need them. A sailing ship moves forward because wind is trying to push it sideways and forward, and the keel prevents it from going sideways. That enables sailing ships to go upwind, or at least not be pushed downwind. And keels are longer the bigger the sailing ship. Wind surfers get by with little dagger boards. Kite surfers get by with little fins and some creative edging. Sailing ships need really deep keels. And cargo ships have really shallow keels by comparison.

Cargo ships are designed to be pushed from the back and to have the keel and the lee side of the ship push against the water sufficiently to overcome most wind loading from upwind. They burn fuel to go upwind. They point a bit more into the wind as necessary to achieve a straight course.

Put a big set of sails on a cargo ship and a lot more force is pushing the cargo ship sideways and downwind. This has to be adjusted for, mostly with a deeper keel.

And loaded cargo ships are already problematic for a lot of ports without deep keels because they have deep drafts, the distance between waterline and lowest point of the keel. Make the keel a lot bigger, and the draft by necessity gets deeper. Retractable keels exist for sail boats, but that’s not really an option for a cargo ship.

[…]

Next up, masts for sails wouldn’t just sit on the deck, they’d pierce the deck and be mounted on the hull. And the hull needs to be structurally sound enough for this. The masts would not be small, and on normal ships, they’d be along the center line, so would take up cargo space in addition to the problem of getting in the way of loading and unloading. Retrofitting sails that actually do anything to most existing bulk cargo ships would take a lot of extra metal below decks, and a really good engineering assessment to ensure that they could even survive the strain.

Finally, at least for this piece, there’s the problem of crews. They cost money. Ships are optimized and automated to reduce the crews as much as is reasonable given various port and sailing duties. A typical bulk coal or iron ore carrier of 150,000 to 175,000 tons would have 20 to 30 crew members. Smaller ships might have eight to ten.

Sailing ships that used to carry 200 tons of cargo had 20 to 30 crew members. We are moving 750 times as much cargo a lot faster with the same number of personnel. Cargo shipping is cheap unless you add a lot of crew. And most sailing technologies are going to require at least a few more people to manage them.

I’ve assessed several sailing technologies and setups for cargo ships. Magnus effect rotors are very interesting, as the same spin that makes a baseball curve in mid-air can be used to generate forward movement in a ship with vertical cylinders, but they really get in the way of pretty much everything noted above. Fabric sails on masts are just manual effort nightmares which pleasure and competitive sailors curse as much as they delight in when they are trimmed and working beautifully. Modern rigid wing sails that grew out of battened, almost rigid windsurfer sails, built in the same manner as wind turbine blades, and used on the massive, absurdly complex, foiling America’s Cup sailboats that crash spectacularly these days, just get in the way of everything too.

Only the bow-mounted parafoil passed my sniff test. Autolaunching and furling? Check (most of the time at least). Single attachment point? Check. Out of the way of cargo loading and unloading? Check. Relatively inexpensive? Check. Most power aligned with pulling the hull in the direction it wants to go through the water? Check. Even then, they’ve been having trouble finding buyers due to the business model challenge.

But this week, the Pyxis Ocean launched in China. The big shipping firm Cargill paid to have the Mitsubishi-owned ship retrofitted by Yara Marine with a couple of first-of-a-kind 123ft (37.5m) tall, rigid, complex sails designed by Bar Technologies, which is a spinoff company of an America’s Cup team. Did I mention the complexity of the business model challenge?

I started reading (and enjoying) Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk biography yesterday, so I was surprised to see that Scott Alexander already had a book review of Elon Musk up — but its subtitle clarified:

Not the new one, sorry

This isn’t the new Musk biography everyone’s talking about. This is the 2015 Musk biography by Ashlee Vance. I started reading it in July, before I knew there was a new one. It’s fine: Musk never changes. He’s always been exactly the same person he is now.

[…]

Musk has always been exactly the same person he is now, and exactly what he looks like. He is without deception, without subtlety, without unexpected depths.

The main answer to the paradox of “how does he succeed while making so many bad decisions?” is that he’s the most focused person in the world. When he decides to do something, he comes up with an absurdly optimistic timeline for how quickly it can happen if everything goes as well as the laws of physics allow. He — I think the book provides ample evidence for this — genuinely believes this timeline, or at least half-believingly wills for it to be true. Then, when things go less quickly than that, it’s like red-hot knives stabbing his brain. He gets obsessed, screams at everyone involved, puts in twenty hour days for months on end trying to try to get the project “back on track”. He comes up with absurd shortcuts nobody else would ever consider, trying to win back a few days or weeks. If a specific person stands in his way, he fires that person (if they are an employee), unleashes nonstop verbal abuse on them (if they will listen) or sues them (if they’re anyone else). The end result never quite reaches the original goal, but still happens faster than anyone except Elon thought possible. A Tesla employee described his style as demanding a car go from LA to NYC on a single charge, which is impossible, but he puts in such a strong effort that the car makes it to New Mexico.

This is the Musk Strategy For Business Success; the rest is just commentary.

Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft Design may seem niche, Byrne Hobart notes, but they are really general-purpose rules for managing teams:

Or at least teams that are working on problems where some parts can be quantified, some parts are unknown, and mistakes are costly; rockets are obviously an extreme case of this, but that just means there are certain things their designers learn faster and more painfully. Some of them, when generalized, can be quite fun. For example: “If you want to have a maximum effect on the design of a new engineering system, learn to draw. Engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist’s concept.” This is a more concrete version of what someone might call “vision,” and since it’s more specific, it’s also easier to see why this is hard to pull off.

David Akin originally wrote his laws up to hand out to his senior design class at MIT:

1. Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion.

2. To design a spacecraft right takes an infinite amount of effort. This is why it’s a good idea to design them to operate when some things are wrong .

3. Design is an iterative process. The necessary number of iterations is one more than the number you have currently done. This is true at any point in time.

4. Your best design efforts will inevitably wind up being useless in the final design. Learn to live with the disappointment.

5. (Miller’s Law) Three points determine a curve.

6. (Mar’s Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.

7. At the start of any design effort, the person who most wants to be team leader is least likely to be capable of it.

8. In nature, the optimum is almost always in the middle somewhere. Distrust assertions that the optimum is at an extreme point.

9. Not having all the information you need is never a satisfactory excuse for not starting the analysis.

10. When in doubt, estimate. In an emergency, guess. But be sure to go back and clean up the mess when the real numbers come along.

11. Sometimes, the fastest way to get to the end is to throw everything out and start over.

12. There is never a single right solution. There are always multiple wrong ones, though.

13. Design is based on requirements. There’s no justification for designing something one bit “better” than the requirements dictate.

14. (Edison’s Law) “Better” is the enemy of “good”.

15. (Shea’s Law) The ability to improve a design occurs primarily at the interfaces. This is also the prime location for screwing it up.

16. The previous people who did a similar analysis did not have a direct pipeline to the wisdom of the ages. There is therefore no reason to believe their analysis over yours. There is especially no reason to present their analysis as yours.

17. The fact that an analysis appears in print has no relationship to the likelihood of its being correct.

18. Past experience is excellent for providing a reality check. Too much reality can doom an otherwise worthwhile design, though.

19. The odds are greatly against you being immensely smarter than everyone else in the field. If your analysis says your terminal velocity is twice the speed of light, you may have invented warp drive, but the chances are a lot better that you’ve screwed up.

20. A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately.

21. (Larrabee’s Law) Half of everything you hear in a classroom is crap. Education is figuring out which half is which.

22. When in doubt, document. (Documentation requirements will reach a maximum shortly after the termination of a program.)

23. The schedule you develop will seem like a complete work of fiction up until the time your customer fires you for not meeting it.

24. It’s called a “Work Breakdown Structure” because the Work remaining will grow until you have a Breakdown, unless you enforce some Structure on it.

25. (Bowden’s Law) Following a testing failure, it’s always possible to refine the analysis to show that you really had negative margins all along.

26. (Montemerlo’s Law) Don’t do nuthin’ dumb.

27. (Varsi’s Law) Schedules only move in one direction.

28. (Ranger’s Law) There ain’t no such thing as a free launch.

29. (von Tiesenhausen’s Law of Program Management) To get an accurate estimate of final program requirements, multiply the initial time estimates by pi, and slide the decimal point on the cost estimates one place to the right.

30. (von Tiesenhausen’s Law of Engineering Design) If you want to have a maximum effect on the design of a new engineering system, learn to draw. Engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist’s concept.

31. (Mo’s Law of Evolutionary Development) You can’t get to the moon by climbing successively taller trees.

32. (Atkin’s Law of Demonstrations) When the hardware is working perfectly, the really important visitors don’t show up.

33. (Patton’s Law of Program Planning) A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.

34. (Roosevelt’s Law of Task Planning) Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.

35. (de Saint-Exupery’s Law of Design) A designer knows that they have achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

36. Any run-of-the-mill engineer can design something which is elegant. A good engineer designs systems to be efficient. A great engineer designs them to be effective.

37. (Henshaw’s Law) One key to success in a mission is establishing clear lines of blame.

38. Capabilities drive requirements, regardless of what the systems engineering textbooks say.

39. Any exploration program which “just happens” to include a new launch vehicle is, de facto, a launch vehicle program.

39. (alternate formulation) The three keys to keeping a new human space program affordable and on schedule:
1) No new launch vehicles.
2) No new launch vehicles.
3) Whatever you do, don’t develop any new launch vehicles.

40. (McBryan’s Law) You can’t make it better until you make it work.

41. There’s never enough time to do it right, but somehow, there’s always enough time to do it over.

42. If there’s not a flight program, there’s no money.
If there is a flight program, there’s no time.

43. You really understand something the third time you see it (or the first time you teach it.)

44. (Lachance’s Law) “Plenty of time” becomes “not enough time” in a very short time.

45. Space is a completely unforgiving environment. If you screw up the engineering, somebody dies (and there’s no partial credit because most of the analysis was right…)

Eviation, a Washington State-based startup aiming to be one of the first companies to produce electric planes for commercial use, says its electric planes due in 2027 will make air travel less costly and cleaner:

The Alice is a nine-seater aircraft with a length of around 57 feet and a wingspan of 62 feet. These dimensions put it in the ballpark of a Cessna Citation Excel or a Piaggio P.180 Avanti. “I like to say that we found the sweet spot for electric aviation with this aircraft: we have a nine-passenger plane,” Aviation CEO Gregory Davis told InsideEVs. “You can fly with a single pilot in North America, so it means that it is more cost-effective to operate than a ten-passenger plane where you need two pilots.”

Keeping this plane flying in the air requires significant research and development — and that starts with the battery. Namely, the Alice stores a 900kWh battery pack in its underbelly. “In terms of the size of the battery, it is an 8,000-pound battery,” says Davis. “That 8,000-pound battery is fairly similar to what a full fuel load on a plane that size might weigh,” Davis told InsideEVs. “It actually works out well inside the existing rules for aircraft sizing.”

The 900kWh battery pack gives the Alice a range of around 250 nautical miles (with an additional 30 minutes for reserves), meaning it’s geared strictly for short-distance travels.

[…]

We need to have a good battery life, but it doesn’t need to be a 20-year battery. What we’re actually doing is designing our battery to be a 3,000-cycle or 3,000-hour battery, and they’ll get replaced during routine maintenance. We make sure that you’re also operating in the top 10% of battery utilization.”

Interestingly, aircraft turbine engines need to be rebuilt around every 3,000 cycles, and after several rebuilds, they’ll need to be replaced entirely.

[…]

“For the aircraft, electricity that is derived from the grid is between 30 and 70% cheaper than aviation fuel, and that’s in today’s environment,” Davis told InsideEVs. Besides the fuel cost savings, electric motors providing thrust will be less maintenance intensive than a turbine engine. “The electric motors are so much less costly to maintain than a traditional turbine engine,” Davis said.

But ditching the turbines comes with an unexpected benefit. Namely, the plane won’t have to reach 30,000+ feet to achieve maximum efficiency.

[…]

The ability to fly lower also means that Alice won’t have to spend more time climbing, which is a highly energy-intensive task. Along with cutting down carbon emissions, the Alice will also reduce noise pollution, an adversary of residential communities located near airports. “One of the advantages of an electric aircraft is that it’s very quiet. It’s incredibly quiet, especially compared to a turbine aircraft,” Davis said. With the quieter flight, these planes might be allowed to fly into airports with curfews during off-hours, like John Wayne Airport (SNA) in Irvine, California.

“The idea is that with an {electric} aircraft, you can access the airport infrastructure at 2:00 in the morning to do an overnight package delivery,” Davis told InsideEVs. “That rapid point-to-point package delivery for the freight provider is {highly beneficial}. Being able to knock twelve hours off your delivery time is very valuable to freight companies.”

In 2025, United Airlines will fly an air taxi service between the downtown Vertiport Chicago and O’Hare International Airport, using electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft it is purchasing from Archer Aviation:

The Archer Midnight eVTOL aircraft will complete the route in about 10 minutes; according to local resident and Ars Managing Editor Eric Bangeman, that journey by car can take over an hour due to road construction.

[…]

United placed an order for 200 eVTOL aircraft from Archer back in 2021 at a cost of $1 billion.

[…]

The Archer Midnight has a range of 100 miles (160 km) and a top speed of 150 mph (241 km/h).

[…]

Asked about the cost, an Archer spokesperson told the Chicago Sun-Times that the company hopes to make the service competitive with Uber Black, so it will be roughly $100 for the trip.