The acceleration of a rocket is slower than a normal car at lift off. It's pulling about 1.2G, but 1G of that is fighting gravity, so effective acceleration is only 0.2G. Almost any car can do that at low speeds.
But a car's acceleration slows almost instantly. The rocket just keeps accelerating faster as the tank empties and it gets lighter. By main engine cut off it might be pulling 5G.
They didn't have to increase speeds, they already achieved orbital velocity. To circularize all they need to do is relight. Relighting an engine is very difficult for an engine like Raptor, but they've already demonstrated relight.
> They didn't have to increase speeds, they already achieved orbital velocity
My undertstanding is Starship didn't hit 17,000 mph [1]. LEO orbits tend to be 17,500 mph and up.
Like, I'm not arguing that SpaceX couldn't have circularised on previous tests. But it would have added material risk without any reward. And taking a ship, particularly a re-usable one, particularly a novel one, into its first orbital flight is always exhausting and novel.
The flaw is the limited float. Indexes will be forced to buy a huge number of shares which don't exist, driving up the price.
For general investors if this is going to eventually happen, the earlier the indexes buy in the better. Otherwise more sophisticated investors will buy ahead of the indexes and grab the profit.
if they weighted (fully) by float (perhaps the average float from the trailing 90 days to the re-balance) it would not be as easy to game. The Nasdaq is accounting for float, but not completely.
They are, but SpaceX is trying to get rules changed. They want the index to buy at a multiple of the float, so they release say 5% but get bought as if they had released 15% float. They also normally wouldn't be eligible for index inclusion for ~1 year, after showing multiple quarters of good stewardship, etc. They're trying to bypass all that
I don't know about the funds, but it's really about the index. Both for the index funds that use the index, and the active mutual funds and index funds benchmark to that index.
The biggest thing protecting Taiwan right now is that the US keeps getting worse and worse. Why invade today when it'll be even easier next year? The current leadership of China has essentially committed to invading Taiwan but can stall by postponing. That's a tactic that won't work forever. The hope was it could last long enough for a leadership changeover in China, but at the rate the US is degrading, that seems like faint hope.
It's definitely possible to put 3 car seats across in the back seat of pretty much any car available in the American market. The appropriate narrow seats just aren't very popular or well known...
Heck, you don't even need a plot that hangs together. When I was a kid I had trouble figuring out why i loved the original Dune movie while everybody else hated it.
It was a bad movie because the plot didn't hold together. But the visuals and the characters were awesome. As an adjunct to the book it was great. It just didn't stand alone.
Hail Mary as someone who has read the book is a different experience than someone who hasn't. It brings the book to life.
Just an aside, but China is the 5th largest oil producer. They have a lot of oil. The problem is that they're the 2nd largest oil consumer, so are still importing. Their current course is sufficient to achieve energy independence.
It's kind of unfortunate they don't need to further decarbonize to achieve that independence. There are some other fields that aren't yet economically valid to decarbonize. If China had a non-economic reason to decarbonize jet fuel, steel, plastic etc they might drive enough volume to make them economic.
It's a strategy as old as time, but it's a strategy that usually fails. Spending a lot of money on customer capture only works when customers are actually solidly captured. Most markets have fairly heavy competition and customers will only stay captured as long as there is no substantial cost to staying captive.
Take Uber as an example: yes they've raised prices to become profitable, but not to the insanely profitable levels they could if they had a true monopoly. People will stay on Uber when the competition is still at a roughly equivalent price, but will switch if Uber raises its prices enough.
Uber Eats is different, since its a 3 sided market where the cost is paid by the restaurant rather than the user.
AI appears it's going to be more like Uber the car service. Claude can charge $200/month, but charging $2000/month seems unlikely to work. I'm sure many would be willing to pay $2000/month if they had no alternative, but there are alternatives.
Donald Trump obviously doesn't care either, because every action he has taken during his two terms has increased the risk of Iran developing nuclear weapons.
JCPOA was highly flawed, but it was a lot better than nothing, which is what Trump traded it for.
If Trump was serious about stopping Iran's nuclear program, he would have made taking Isfahan a top priority of the initial strikes.
People repeat themselves saying "JCPOA was highly flawed, but it was better than nothing", as if JCPOA would have prevented Iran from getting nuclear weapons. It would not - it only delayed Iran getting nuclear weapons, and so by that line of thinking, it only delayed the onset of war.
Delaying the onset of war is not worthless, but it is not the same as arguing that war could have been avoided, which is what people who roll out that claim are really trying to argue. It's only true in a universe where Iran would have collapsed from within before the expiration of the sunset clause, and that clearly was not going to happen.
That depends on what Iran does in the meantime, does it not? If Iran effectively turned their missile program into a true deterrent then negotiated delay is worse, because it would remove the ability to stunt the development through military means. Which is very much the argument being made for the “why now” of this war.
> It's only true in a universe where Iran would have collapsed from within before the expiration of the sunset clause, and that clearly was not going to happen.
No one can know this hypothetical, but some def bet their entire futures/careers on this: that an Iran with a more prosperous middle class (as a result of JCPOA) might have had a better chance for social/internal reform, i.e. regime change.
That doesn't change in the least the argument the OP made. The UN's IAEA has declared that Iran deceived them, didn't follow the agreements, and even accused them of violating the agreements with the intent to build a bomb.
As to Trump's motivations, they don't change this calculus. Iran intended to nuke their neighbors, and Israel, not just before Trump came to power but literally before the first Bush became president. And the full situation is even worse: right after the mullah's came to power in a leftist revolution in 1979, they begged for US and Israel's help to stop Saddam Hussein from nuking them. They got that help ... and then figured that nukes are a great idea.
Here's what the mullahs are most afraid of btw. The biggest threat to their power, the biggest problem for their central-London villas:
This local opposition to them has systematically worsened over time, btw. So I wouldn't put it past the mullahs to nuke Iran itself, eventually. It also means that Iran's islamic regime is threatening everyone, for the simple reason that if they make a single concession loosening their grip on Iran, they'll be lynched, one by one, in the streets, by people they went to school with. That is how much Iran's regime is "winning".
JCPOA was followed with minor discrepancies like having less than 1 ton too much heavy water. US intelligence agencies agreed that Iran was not working on a bomb as US left JCPOA, as they testified to in congress.
(they preliminarily reported the same stance even in 2024, before any attacks)
TLDR: Iran, despite having signed a treaty allowing access, is hiding highly enriched uranium, enough to build 9, maybe 10 nuclear devices. It is also not complying with its other obligations under the NPT treaty.
And then Iran responded to this ... by boasting of making nuclear weapons grade uranium to make bombs, to American diplomats:
Now I get that American diplomacy is a shitshow since ... a certain event. However, I fail to come up with a worse attitude that Iran could have had at the time. They are openly boasting of having "the divine right" to enriched uranium that can only be used for bombs in negotiations ...
I also get that Americans (and everyone else, for that matter) feel that it's entirely unfair that they have to care about nuclear weapons in Iran. But if nobody does ... Iran's leaders have made it clear that as soon as they have the weapons, nuclear war starts. What I find baffling is that nobody cares ...
Of course, now it turns out that UAE and Saudi Arabia have since been SCREAMING at the US to do something. But the people it will affect the most are of course in Europe and Asia (everyone except Russia, Norway and Ukraine), who are effectively going to see yet another 3-4% tariff, except this one applies even on goods they produce themselves, for themselves. The EU is burning massive amounts of political goodwill trying to get a few percent savings, and now they'll have to do tell their people they're saving at least double that, in a few months time, with no real warning.
They started again in 2021, years after Trump left the JCPOA and imposed heavy sanctions. You see how one thing might lead to another? Its almost like someone wants this to happen.
I don't really care what you say, this is the IRGC, who massacred 50 people at Brussels airport for example. If they feel they are unfairly treated in any way, they can always report to the Belgian authorities, who I'm sure will provide a small windowless room with free meals.
And until they do that, and until they're let out again, no amount of arguments will ever make me agree that it's just not fair. In fact, if everyone even remotely involved with them gets shot THAT I will call fairness.
Yeah they should. Netanyahu and Israels leaders should report to the ICJ.
You don't really care because you don't have a valid argument. Fact is Iran was complying with JCPOA, as all US intelligence agencies agreed on. It was working. But it had one flaw, Obama signed it and the orange baby couldn't deal with that, and likely Israel/Netanyahu influencing Trump back then as well as they were opposing the deal from the start.
Now I don't think Iran should have nuclear weapons, but lets be fair here, they followed the deal, but still got sanctions put on them as if they were building a bomb, why not do it then? If we're to judge them by what politicians, generals or religious zealots has said in the past, then look no further than the US and what they thought about using nukes post ww2, I would argue they were much much worse no matter what Iran has said.
Like I said you cannot make a reasonable argument that Iran respected international treaties and is now being treated unfairly. That's utterly and completely ridiculous, regardless of the specific treaty.
Iran's government organizes massacres, inside and outside of Iran. Could you illuminate further to me which treaties that little practice follows and how unfair it is it causes bad things to happen to them?
You, me, solatic and acoup probably all agree that a nuclear weapon in Iranian hands is a huge danger.
But it's only Donald Trump that has used that as an excuse to make that danger greater.
And acoup has a great counter-point to your tweet in the article.
The Soviet Union dealt with massive internal protest quite successfully for pretty much every single one of its 70 years of existence. The Soviet Union only fell when insiders took it down.
Iran appears to be in absolutely no danger of that happening.
But a car's acceleration slows almost instantly. The rocket just keeps accelerating faster as the tank empties and it gets lighter. By main engine cut off it might be pulling 5G.
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