- 3011 - ELON MUSK - launch at sea? Launches and landing at sea has been a part of Musk long-term vision for SpaceX . Elon Musk is not just defining space launches he is redefining the auto industry. He is redefining the battery?
----------------------------- 3011 - ELON MUSK - launch at sea?
- Elon Musk has been open about how he and the company he founded plan to make space more accessible and allow humanity to become an “interplanetary species.”
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- A key element to this plan is the Starship and Super-Heavy launch system, which will allow for regular trips to the Moon as well as the eventual creation of the first human colony on Mars.
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- Musk’s plan is the creation of spaceports at sea that will allow for greater flexibility with launches and landings. SpaceX recently acquired two former oil drilling rigs off the coast of Texas. These spaceports have been dubbed “Phobos” and “Deimos” (after Mars’ two satellites) and are currently undergoing modifications to conduct Starship launches in the near future.
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- Elon Musk has been up front about his plans to use floating spaceports for future Starship launches. But the first hints that they were close to realizing this goal came last summer when SpaceX indicated on their website that it was looking for experienced offshore crane operators, electricians, and engineers. The postings also indicated that the jobs were related to the development of the Starship.
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- The posting specified that the positions were located in Brownsville, Texas, the closest town to SpaceX’s Boca Chica Launch Facility. SpaceX is building floating, superheavy-class spaceports for Mars, moon & hypersonic travel around Earth. Lusk said he needs to be far enough away so as not to bother heavily populated areas. The launch & landing are not subtle. But you could get within a few miles of the spaceport in a boat.
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- SpaceX is not alone in seeking offshore launch facilities. China has also been working on its own floating spaceport, which is located off the coast of Haiyang city in the eastern province of Shandong. Once it is fully operational, the “Eastern Aerospace Port” will be China’s fourth spaceport and the only one that is not located inland.
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- Spaceports at sea offer a number of advantages over inland launch facilities. For starters, launches for inland facilities often result in spent stages falling back to Earth, which can pose significant damage to populated areas and result in hazardous chemicals and unspent propellant leaking into the ground. Inland facilities require extensive safety procedures and cleanup operations.
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- While SpaceX circumvents much of this danger by launching from Boca Chica and Cape Canaveral, SpaceX hopes to conduct regular launches with the Starship and Super Heavy.
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- This launch system poses a significant noise problem. Once complete, each Super Heavy will have no less than 20 Raptor engines. With regular launches taking place, this will mean that the blast areas around the launch pads will need to be wide, and noise concerns will also need to be taken into account.
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- Musk’s long-term plan for making regular trips to Mars call for orbital refueling, where a tanker version of the Starship modified to carry propellant will meet with and refuel a passenger and payload version of the Starship after they have reach orbit.
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- Musk has also hinted in the past that SpaceX could be conducting intercontinental flights with the Starship someday. According to an animation released by the company in 2017 , this would involve having spaceports off the coast of major cities that would be serviced by passenger boats.
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- Launches and landing at sea has been a part of Musk long-term vision for SpaceX . Elon Musk is not just defining space launches he is redefining the auto industry. He is redefining the battery?
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- During Tesla's long-awaited "Battery Day" on September 22, 2020, Elon announced several innovations that could transform the battery industry. He is focused on an in-house redesign of the lithium ion battery, which he says will use nickel cathodes, rather than cobalt.
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- Elon sees future economies of scale in battery production, making a $25,000 Tesla possible in the next three years.
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- During the Tesla CEO's highly anticipated "Battery Day" event. Musk announced an ambitious slate of innovations, and even an all-new manufacturing plant, that Tesla will pursue over the next 10 years in order to start producing its own batteries.
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- He says it is incredibly important that we accelerate the advent of sustainable energy. Musk sees Tesla taking on a more significant role in sustainable energy generation and storage, in addition to creating more affordable electric vehicles.
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- Musk plans to phase out cobalt in its battery cathodes in favor of nickel, a silvery lustrous metal found in mines across the globe, with high concentrations of nickel ore in Indonesia, Russia, Canada, and the Philippines.
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- This, plus other redesigns of the lithium-ion battery, will enable Tesla to make more energy-dense, in-house batteries that not only increase the range for the company's luxury electric vehicles, but also enable cost benefits that will lead to a $25,000 fully autonomous electric vehicle in the next three years, by 2023.
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- Tesla's ultimate plan is to halve the cost of a kilowatt hour in the factory, leading to greater economies of scale in the electric vehicle, lithium-ion battery, and sustainable energy generation industries. To do that, Tesla is redesigning the fundamentals of the battery cell.
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- Each cylindrical battery has a "cap" (+) and a "can," (-) which are the negative and positive portions of the cell. Inside the can, there is a tab connected to the cell, plus a "jellyroll" that contains the positive and negative electrodes.
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- In a Tesla cell, there's about one meter's length of jellyroll, which looks like a rolled-up Swiss cake. From there, the lithium ions move between the anode and cathode to recharge or give off energy.
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- Tesla sees the ideal cell design having a 46-millimeter diameter. The company has introduced a new "tabless" architecture that it's calling the 4680 cell.
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- The resulting battery is simpler to manufacture, requires fewer parts, and looks a bit like a mandala of metallic shingles. It enables six times more power than Tesla's previous battery, and gives Tesla vehicles about 16 percent more range before taking into account other battery improvements.
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- The distance that the electron has to travel is much less. Even though the cell is bigger, it has more power, the power to weight ratio is much smaller than with tabs.
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- To transition all vehicles with an internal combustion engine to electric ones, it will take a great deal of battery production, about 150 terawatt hours per year. Tesla has generated about 17 terawatt hours of solar energy to date.
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- A terawatt is 1,000 times more than a gigawatt. One terawatt is equivalent to one trillion watts. That represents a huge leap in sustainable energy growth. Tesla will need to generate 100 times more battery power than current levels to reach its ambitious new goal of 10 terawatt hours of battery production per year.
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- Tesla's existing Gigafactories in Sparks, Nevada; Buffalo, New York; Shanghai, China; and a fourth under construction in Berlin, Germany, aren't satisfactory for these lofty energy production goals just yet.
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- In fact, it would take 135 Nevada Gigafactories to produce 20 terawatt hours of battery power each year. Tesla is ramping up production of its new tabless cells at its pilot battery manufacturing firm at an undisclosed location near Fremont, California. A full-fledged manufacturing plant could produce energy on the order of 200 gigawatt hours per year.
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- The cathode is a structure that holds ions while retaining its structure and shape. Without it, battery capacity quickly drops. In a sense, cathodes are like bookshelves, where the metal is like the shelf, and the lithium is the book. Depending on the metal used in the cathode, there are different amounts of "books," or lithium, that can fit.
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- Nickel is the cheapest and most energy-dense material that companies could use in cathodes. However, cobalt is currently the most popular option, due to its stability. Instead, Tesla wants to move toward a reliance on nickel, bringing its batteries down to zero percent cobalt.
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- All of this adds up to a 76 percent reduction in process costs and a move toward sustainability, with zero percent wastewater as a byproduct. Musk says the goal is to move beyond the need for new battery-grade nickel, and instead focus on using recycled nickel from existing batteries. That way, there's less reliance on mining.
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- Last December, 2019, International Rights Advocates filed a lawsuit against Tesla, along with Apple, Google, and Dell, representing 14 parents and children who allegedly died or were injured while working in the cobalt mines that supplied the metal to those tech companies.
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- In the future car shells will be made of batteries. In the early days of aircraft planes actually carried their fuel tanks like cargo. Today, though, manufacturers have realized a better design, wherein the fuel tanks are fitted inside the wings, becoming part of its structure.
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- Tesla will use its new batteries as a structural component in its cars. Because the non-cell portion of the battery has negative mass, it allows Tesla to pack the cells more densely.
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- This will lead to 370 fewer parts in the cars, representing a 10 percent reduction in mass that should make the vehicles feel more agile.
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- It's no secret that Teslas are a luxury vehicle, and, that's detrimental to the company's green missions. Although there are other mass model electric vehicles, from the Nissan Leaf to the Chevy Bolt, the price tag on each of Tesla's cars lead to lost customers that may instead purchase a car with an internal combustion engine.
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- So the goal is to create a more affordable Tesla. With the expected economies of scale that will result from Tesla's in-house battery operation, Musk said the budget car could be here sooner rather than later.
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January 31, 2021 ELON MUSK - launch at sea? 3011
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