The contracts are fixed price, with each company eligible to be paid “up to” a fixed amount, and each guaranteed a minimum number of flights, but they aren’t given the same number of flights.

I obviously meant their traditional contractors, you twit.

As for cost, you make a complete false assumption on the number of flights each company will make.

NONE of those maneuvers you describe for the Falcon 9 to exaggerate its difficulty are actually that hard.

No - the grasshopper tests weren’t at all the same thing. The Grasshopper never exceeded 744 m in altitude, and its vertical speeds never where anywhere close to what BlueOrigins achieved. The grasshopper simply took off, went to low altitude, and then descended slowly, with the rocket firing the entire time. That…

Yeah - and that’s a completely different vehicle than an Ecoboost.

You’re talking about a plugin hybrid. And EVERY single electric vehicle or plugin hybrid loses range when you’re using the heat. That has NOTHING to do with Ecoboost mpg ratings.

You’re missing the point - SpaceX hasn’t tried to return to the launch site - they’ve tried (and failed) at landing on an actual launch. Yes, they reach higher speeds - and then drag slows them down just as it does for BlueOrigins - who cares if they reach Mach 7 instead of Mach 3, when both simply fall (with…

I’ve hit as high as 48 mpg over a 50 mile flat stretch in a Fusion with a 1.5L. Just stay off heavy throttle use and avoid the brakes. :)

“Driving fast” isn’t exactly what gets you bad mpg. You’ll get bad mpg in an Ecoboost if you accelerate hard. So that fool that jumps out at the green light to get up to 35 mph is killing their mpg compared to someone who accelerates more slowly but still drives at the same 35 mph.

And being chronically late doesn’t…

The grasshopper doesn’t even compare to the BlueOrigins feat - the grasshopper (and the Falcon 9R both) made short, low altitude test hops where the vehicle never was unpowered or came down with the fast approaches that are used in an actual flight by the Falcon 9 or the BlueOrigins rocket.

Ignore the hate that will be spewed your way. Your question is more than fair.

NASA (and their contractors) have achieved everything SpaceX has so far except for the cost threshold - and that achievement for SpaceX is highly overrated. Why? Because their competition is actually achieving the same marginal cost per…

Max speed is irrelevant. Both use drag to bring their landing speed down to about the same speed.

Musk’s ego and his fan boys are annoying me once again.

Is it significantly harder to get to orbit (SpaceX Falcon9) than just to space (BlueOrigins)? Yes. But that’s different altogether than the complexity of landing -

The Falcon 9 first stage isn’t achieving orbital velocity - not low earth and nowhere near…

Having driven several ecoboosts over hundreds of miles as rentals, the only reason people aren’t getting the EPA mileage is their own driving habits. Keep it easy on the throttle and you can easily beat those marks.

On the other hand, what right does any public official, elected or appointed, have in directing the university when the state provides virtually no financial support for the university anymore and is years behind in paying the few bills it actually has agreed to pay?

UIUC is essentially a private school now in all but…

“The breakthrough is the business-case: there are now enough people wealthy enough to afford and stupid enough to buy a $100+ million private jet.”

There - fixed it for you. I mean, think about it. Even assuming you’re chartering the planes and not buying them, you’ll be spending about twice as much per flight all to…

Is it, really?

A 1999 Toyota Camry LE had an MSRP, including destination, of $20,278.

A 2016 Toyota Camry LE has an MSRP, including destination, of $23,905

That’s only a 0.973% annual increase in price. Inflation has averaged 2.25% since then, even though you’re getting a lot more features on the car.

Cars aren’t going up…

Yep - and while fuel cells have come down in price, so have batteries.

The cost for a battery for a Volt when it first came out? Generally it was stated at around $10-12k. Just a few short years later and the price is about $2,400 from GM.

Hydrogen Fuel Cells have been in a race with batteries - and while they have been…

Finally experimenting with it?

They’ve been actively working on it for MANY years.

Ford and Daimler-Benz went in together with Ballard systems in 1997 to invest ~$1 billion into fuel cell development. That JV is actually where Honda and Toyota got their first fuel cells from. Ford and Daimler bought out the auto side of…

Not exactly.

Hydrogen is produced by using electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. This process is generally only around 80-90% efficient at best. Fuel cells are generally only about 40-60% efficient.

So lets take the best two cases there, shall we? That gives you 90%*60% = 54% total efficiency.

I’m sure some would lean towards the size of the Explorer. But the sales figures don’t lie - the demand has completely inverted from where it was - the market share is heavily controlled by Escape/Rav4/CR-V sized vehicles, not Explorer/Blazer/Grand Cherokee sized vehicles.