Is Elon Musk Nuts?
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Thursday, September 3, 2026 02:05
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Why Elon Musk will be remembered as an automotive pioneer
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/11/why-elon-musk-wi
ll-be-remembered-as-an-automotive-pioneer
Elon Musk sells his home for £23million to live in a £37k box: 'It's special'
https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1533995/elon-musk-sells-home-ca
lifornia-boca-chica-starbase-texas-boxabl
Sulla, was a Roman general and statesman. He won the first large-scale civil war in Roman history.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1469762144786919427
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Elon Musk sold 934,091 shares of Tesla, which are worth around $906.49 million late Monday.
But at the end of the day he owned more shares than he had at the beginning because he also purchased 2.13 million shares at the strike price of $6.24 per share granted to him via a 2012 compensation package. Those shares of Tesla that only cost him $6.24 per share are each worth $966.41 on Monday.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/14/elon-musk-sells-another-906point5-mill
ion-worth-of-tesla-shares.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Elon Musk tweets that SpaceX will start program to pull carbon dioxide in atmosphere and use it as rocket fuel
https://news.yahoo.com/elon-musk-tweets-spacex-start-013744313.html
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Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Elon Musk tweets that SpaceX will start program to pull carbon dioxide in atmosphere and use it as rocket fuel
https://news.yahoo.com/elon-musk-tweets-spacex-start-013744313.html
I won't go as far as to say that this is impossible.
But if you were going to to this, you would burn more energy pulling it from the air and turning it into fuel than you'd get out of the deal.
It's pure bullshit. Like the Hyperloop.
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Quote:SpaceX rocket fuel is kerosene. There are 6 million results for convert carbon dioxide to kerosene. https://www.google.com/search?q=convert+carbon+dioxide+to+kerosene
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Elon Musk tweets that SpaceX will start program to pull carbon dioxide in atmosphere and use it as rocket fuel
For an example of what Musk might have been reading to get him thinking about CO2 to kerosene: New, cheaper catalyst turns carbon dioxide into jet fuel
An inexpensive and efficient new catalyst for turning carbon dioxide into jet fuel has been developed by a team led by University of Oxford chemists. The researchers say the process could lead to an industrial-scale method of extracting the gas from the air and reusing it in jet engines, thereby mitigating the warming effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
The Oxford team want to help move the aviation sector from a linear fossil fuel based one to a circular one based on renewable energy and recycling of carbon dioxide.
‘Because CO2 is extracted out of the air and is emitted again when you fly, the overall effect is a net-zero CO2 emission flight,’ the authors said. ‘Instead of consuming fossil crude oil, aviation fuel can be produced from CO2 and renewable energy.’
Study co-author Peter Edwards, head of inorganic chemistry at Oxford, says the researchers plan to use the process to make fuel for existing jet engines within ‘two to three years’. They are also looking for an industrial partner to develop it, he said. This is where Musk has a role, assuming he read the article.
The study details a catalyst that can simultaneously perform two critical stages of a hydrogenation process for carbon dioxide that form the long-chain hydrocarbon fuels used in jet engines – usually kerosene refined from fossil fuels, with a typical chain length of between eight and 16 carbons. Synthetic jet fuels have been made by reacting syngas – a mixture of mostly carbon monoxide and gaseous hydrogen – over an expensive cobalt-based catalyst in a hydrogenation process called Fischer–Tropsch synthesis. But most Fischer–Tropsch methods require a further step to first reduce carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide, and they have poor selectivity – a measure of how targeted the process is for producing hydrocarbon chains of the desired length.
In contrast, the new catalyst is based on iron – an abundant and inexpensive element – with manganese and potassium, and can produce long-chain hydrocarbons in a single step from carbon dioxide with relatively high selectivity. ‘[The] catalyst shows a CO2 conversion of 38.2% and selectivity to C8–C16 hydrocarbons of 47.8%,’ the researchers write, with correspondingly low selectivity for methane and carbon monoxide. That’s comparable or better performance than alternative Fischer–Tropsch catalysts, many of which are made from expensive materials or need large amounts of water to prepare.
Tests with the catalyst using a laboratory source of carbon dioxide and hydrogen in a reactor at 350°C, produced several grams of long-chain hydrocarbon fuel. At the same time, the process generated useful amounts of petrochemicals, such as light olefins, that are usually obtained by refining crude oil.
Edwards says the next stages will be to extract the carbon dioxide directly from the air, and to scale it up so usable amounts of jet fuel can be made from ‘green hydrogen’ in plants powered by renewable energy.
Ultimately, about 4.7kg of atmospheric carbon dioxide – that’s roughly the carbon dioxide generated by a car driving 20km – could be turned into one litre of jet fuel with the new catalyst, Edwards said. He called the development arguably the most important advance in his four-decade career. ‘[Co-author] Tiancun Xiao and I started thinking on this a decade ago,’ but they needed innovations in catalyst design from lead author Benzhen Yao to finally make it happen, he says.
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/new-cheaper-catalyst-turns-carbon-
dioxide-into-jet-fuel/4012981.article
The Joss Whedon script fo
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
But if you were going to to this, you would burn more energy pulling it from the air and turning it into fuel than you'd get out of the deal.
It's pure bullshit. Like the Hyperloop.
This guy Musk while he does seem to troll or have some level of autism we need to give his intelligence credit and maybe Look past the headline. You're missing his almost child like dream, the long term goal and vision. NASA or the USA wants to stay ahead in space, there will be other players, Japan, India, Europe, Russia, the Private sector, some might help the USA and some might not. China now has robots almost as good as NASA on the Moon and exploring Mars. Musk wanst to put Nuclear power into space and so does China, NASA has a current rover with nuclear power called Perseverance investigating the production of oxygen on Mars. Unlike Earth Mars has a very thin atompshere but it is there, Mars is not a total vacuum, atmosphere of Mars is the layer of gases of mostly carbon dioxide (95%), then some molecular nitrogen (2.8%) and argon (2%). It also contains trace levels of water vapor, carbon monoxide.
Maybe he's thinking ahead, has a vision for a village or town out there in space and already planning for the return trip.
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
SpaceX rocket fuel is kerosene.
Now why on Earth or why on Mars would they chose ideas like kerosene...and it seems the new engine, the Raptor, which uses methane instead of hydrogen.
Propellant production? http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3479/1
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Quote:Musk uses 3 different fuels on missiles:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Now why on Earth or why on Mars would they chose ideas like kerosene...and it seems the new engine, the Raptor, which uses methane instead of hydrogen.
Propellant production? http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3479/1
2 Kerosene-based engines
2.1 Merlin 1
2.2 Kestrel
3 Methane-based engines
3.1 Raptor
3.2 Methox thruster
4 Hypergolic engines
4.1 Draco
4.2 SuperDraco
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_rocket_engines
What is next for Musk? Di-lithium crystals from Star Trek? Who knows?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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A lot of ideas seem good at first glance: for example hydrogen fuel from water. What's not to like? Water is abundant, hydrogen doesn't generate CO2.
But 'good ideas' don't work in the abstract, they work in the specific, the nuts and bolts. Hydrogen has low energy density, so it needs to be handled at ultra-high pressures. Hydrogen leaks through metal and in addition embrittles it. Hydrogen at high pressure explodes. Hydrogen fuel 'tanks' release bits and pieces of metal and plastic, poisoning the fuel cells they're supposed to feed. And entire multi-quadrillion dollar hydrogen infrastructure needs to be built to use it. High energy-usage facilities - steel mills, aluminum refineries, electricity generation, cement kilns - outstrip hydrogen's ability to be generated and transported.
What seems like a great gosh-whiz brilliant idea falls apart in the specifics.
Kerosene on Mars? Well, CO2 is abundant in the Martian atmosphere. But how much hydrogen and how much energy do you need to turn CO2 back into kerosene (or other hydrocarbon fuel?) This needs to be penciled out specifically. But considering how far Mars is from the sun - the only natively available source of energy on Mars - it doesn't seem like it would work out. And if you're going to bring an energy source to Mars to make kerosene, why not just use that energy source directly?
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Not to mention the amount of energy necessary to split H2O up for usable hydrogen will ALWAYS require more energy than what you get out of it.
Unless somebody magically finds a way to change the laws of thermodynamics, this will always be the case.
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SpaceX’s towering Starship aims to get humans to Mars
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/20/spacex-starship-hum
ans-moon-next-year
Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
But considering how far Mars is from the sun - the only natively available source of energy on Mars - it doesn't seem like it would work out.
Everyone today also seems to be looking at Nuclear, that is the Russians, the USA that is NASA plus the Private Sector like Musk, the Chinese, the Europeans are look at Nuclear power in a spacecraft maybe a 'Space-Tug' called Zeus or some kind of reactor on the Moon or Mars... Sunlight is there always, its not as strong as the Solar light on Earth but it is there, think of a kind of Cold looking dull day in Alaska, Russia or Antarctica, Solar power has come a long, long way. Land at the equator you don't have those long night at the poles on Earth you can stay near the Mars equator for yourt long day, its cold but you have a 24 and half hour day, thin toxic air that no person can breathe but the Sun is there maybe less than 44 % the Sun you have on Earth, its enough to power a Rover for many many years on the surface, its not really known what long term exposure to Cosmic Rays or Martain Dust or Solar Storms will do to things and people on the surface, there should be sunlight unless something really unlucky happens and an arrival during months long dust storms.
As a source of power wind is probably out although NASA now has a mini robo helicopter flying in its thin atmosphere
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Not to mention the amount of energy necessary to split H2O up for usable hydrogen will ALWAYS require more energy than what you get out of it.
You forgot your school lesson or you did not pay attention in class that day. With Water the Splitting is easy enough done with electro reaction, Split the hydrogen and oxygen in water is accomplished using a process called “water electrolysis” then of course you can get your free power from our Sun, a simple AA battery does it or a potential difference of 1.25 volts maybe 1.5 V are required for practical use . The electricity drives a very natural reaction, The water chemical reaction where some molecule gains electrons is known as a reduction reaction while reaction where some molecule loses electrons is an oxidation reaction, elecricity is the catalyst of sorts that accelerates used to drive the natural reaction. The hydrogen gas can be collected by example by simply inverting a water-filled tube or jar over the wire producing the hydrogen gas. Chinese are thinking about stuff, they have already tried growing stuff inside a Rover's mini biosphere on the Moon and the guys at NASA, MIT JPL already proved the' on April 20, 2021, MOXIE produced oxygen from carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere by using solid oxide electrolysis.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Oxygen_ISRU_Experiment
Process of creating air from water is a little more complex than I described, you need some filter membrane, they can do it on subs but it is a longer process as you need to do reverse osmosis and purify any chemical or salts from water otherwise you can create a toxin or gas that can kill you...but it can be done with 'pure water'.
It might be easy enough to set up some solar farm generating many hundreds of MJ of energy or tens of kWh of power. The more difficult part will perhaps be the unknowns how to get past this cold month long dust storm, how to clean machines from all the Moondust or Mars dirt or like how to fix the generator after it got it by a micor-meteorite or why are our plants all dying inside our wonderful Greenhouse on Mars?
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