12.31.12

2012 Highlights

Posted in books, personal at 11:54 am by danvk

A few personal highlights from 2012:

I traveled all over the place this year. Some highlights:

I took a three-month sabbatical from work during May, June and July. Some highlights from that:

I also spent a lot of time working on personal projects this year. A few highlights:

Books I read in 2012:

And a few other miscellaneous things:

Elon Musk on Rockets

Posted in space at 9:08 am by danvk

I watched this interview with Elon Musk of SpaceX a few weeks ago and have found myself thinking about it now and again:

(Fast forward to 24’30″)

His claim is that, by creating a truly reusable spacecraft, they’ll be able to reduce the cost of getting to space dramatically (by 90+%, or perhaps 99%). The space shuttle was an attempt to do this, but it fell well short.

He makes an analogy that’s been sticking with me: imagine that planes were disposable. To fly from San Francisco to London, you’d buy a new jet, fuel it up, fly it, and then throw it away. Repeat for the return trip. Total cost: at least $500 million. Nobody flies this way. It would be insane. But to a large extent, this is what we do for space travel. I’m not sure what the marginal cost of one flight in a jet is, but Musk says that the cost of fuel for a rocket is typically around 0.3% of the cost of the rocket. So there are huge potential savings here.