frezik
SLS was bogged down for years waiting for congressional approval that was repeatedly blocked or maliciously modified last minute by congressional and senate republicans, a form of efficiency knee-capping that the agency never faced in the Apollo or Space Shuttle days.
You can complain about that, but it's not a factor that's going away any time soon. It's built into how NASA works and our system of government.
The problem with NASA isn't money. It's having to play pork barrel politics where every state gets to do a little something in order for it all to work. In theory, deriving SLS from old shuttle hardware should have been quick and easy. In practice, its budget is ridiculous compared to what's been put into Starship.
The real problem is that SpaceX is quickly becoming the only game in town. The ULA can't match the Falcon 9 on cost, and they have the stench of Boeing around them. Blue Origin is standing in a corner and appears to be wanking itself. Virgin Galactic is only interested in space tourisim. There are some smaller up and coming companies, but few that are beyond basic R&D. NASA is giving ULA money just so SpaceX doesn't become a de facto monopoly, but it's not looking good.
You're not really wrong, but I think you are missing a few things. If you can get your rocket on a ballistic trajectory with a height above the Kármán line (~100km), then going into LEO from there is just a matter of having enough fuel. Nobody doubts that Starship could carry enough fuel to do that.
They haven't bothered doing that in testing yet, because they wouldn't learn anything. Knowing how the heat shield survives reentry is far more important. The upper stage still hasn't been able to come down in a safe, controlled manner yet. Test 4 managed to splash down, but the heat shield took a lot more damage than anybody is comfortable with (if you watch the videos of it, you'll see why it was amazing it survived at all). This one was Test 5, and while the heat shield survived better, the upper stage blew up when it hit the water.
It's not just saving a little money. If this works, it will drop costs by another order of magnitude. Falcon 9 already dropped a zero, Starship will likely drop it by another zero even without this, and consistently being able to do this catch would mean another zero. That's getting to $20/kg to LEO, vs $150/kg without it on Starship.
That kind of cost will enable things that were completely infeasible before.
Didn't help that Elon announced the Robotaxi just before. That thing sucked away all his headlines, and none of them were positive about that stupid thing.
SpaceX seems to be the Musk company that's most able to manage its idiot CEO, but they still can't rid themselves completely of his antics.
How do you hire people who can implement it right? There are three companies that can make x86. One is failing, one gave up years ago, and the third is kicking ass but seems uninterested in this part of the market. All the people who know how to do x86 well already work for one of them. That third company that nobody talks about gave up because by 2010, they lacked the ability to make a worthwhile product.
It's an incredibly difficult ISA to work with, and all the talent is already busy. Due to its closed nature, there is little hope of significantly growing that talent base. Not unless you want the early 2000s version of x86-64, which is patent free.
It's hardly just Intel. There are two other x86 licenses out there. One gave up. The other is kicking ass, but Apple didn't go with them, either.
Meanwhile, Intel themselves kept the 80486 alive until 2007 as an embedded processor. It outlasted the Pentium III by a few months. It was never as popular as PIC or ARM or z80 devices, but it found some kind of niche.
I'll grant that in theory, it could be done. But why? There are millions of smartphones running fine with ARM, and they don't have any backwards compatibility needs to x86. Why pick an ISA that can only legally be designed by three companies? Why pick an ISA that hasn't been as well tested on mobile device OSes? ARM will hand a license to anyone who shows up with some cash, and if you want to take a plunge into a different ISA, then RISC-V is sitting right there. There doesn't seem to be a single real benefit to x86 over what mobile device creators have now, and plenty of reasons not to.
You're not going to see phones with x86. The architecture just isn't going to scale down like that. Not if you want something faster than a Pentium III.
It'd be nice if it, you know, linked to the actual paper. The article reads like it was written by someone who knows cryptography words but had no clue what they mean.
The article says they hit AES, which doesn't make much sense. Block ciphers aren't vulnerable to QC in the same way as public key crypto. Even so far as Grover's Algorithm would help at all, it's far from being practical.
Technically correct. You would buy time well past the end of the universe. Advances in either quantum or conventional computers would not change this. There are theoretical limits at play.
Now, maybe you can find a way to substantially reduce the difficulty of breaking it over brute force. Cryptographers have been trying to break AES for 30 years now and haven't found one that does more than marginal improvement. But it's possible.