/sci/ - Science & Math

>>9616576
my jarvik 5 is pretty good. i heard yamahas are decent.

>>9547459
yeah this guy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAYY-MmonYU

>>9154909
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a16681/elon-musk-interview-1212/

>The problem with the Americans is that they were like Russians. No, they weren't gangsters, and they didn't make a business model of drinking you into a stupor. But the guys in American aerospace acted like they had you, and when you showed up with the money, they asked for more. Musk didn't like that. He didn't like getting screwed. He particularly didn't like getting screwed by people who also laughed at him. One time, for instance, he needed a valve—"The one we had was too small, and we needed a bigger one," Tom Mueller says. "We called a vendor and they said it would cost a quarter million dollars and it would take a year to make. We said, 'We need it this summer.' They laughed and told us to go away. So we decided to make it ourselves. They called us back in the summer. They were like, 'Hey, how is it going with that valve?' We said, 'We made it, we finished it, we qualified it, and we're going to fly it.'"

>Another time, Musk had an issue with a vendor that makes the big aluminum domes that top off the fuel tanks. The issue was that they were going Russian on him. "We got a big increase from the vendor after the first units were delivered," says Mark Juncosa, SpaceX's lead structural engineer.

>SpaceX now makes its own domes — as Juncosa puts it, "We have our own dome-manufacturing facility in the back of the factory." This is a big deal: Elon Musk is not just assembling rockets in Hawthorne, California; he's manufacturing 70 percent of them, piece by piece. It doesn't mean that vendors have stopped trying to screw him, though, and on the evening that Musk sits eating his medieval turkey leg at his desk, Juncosa walks in to tell him that Alcoa is going Russian on him.