Amazon has led a $700 million investment in electric truck and electric SUV company, Rivian. Amazon and Rivian will develop Amazon delivery vehicles and build out its logistics network. General Motors might also invest in Rivian.
Rivian’s CEO R.J. Scaringe told Greentechmedia that they will have a 400-mile range truck with 185 kwh of cattery capacity that is priced below $90,000.
Rivian like Tesla has a skateboard base for all of their vehicles. The skateboard has the batteries, wheels and other electronics. All Rivian vehicles are built on this common architecture. The R1S and R1T each are built on common skateboard base. There will be other vehicles which have not been revealed which will also use the same skateboard.
SOURCES- Greentechmedia
Written By Brian Wang
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
Because this site is using a sh*tty commenting system.
Why can’t they just use Disqus? Because, you know, it actually works, and isn’t slow as h*ll(Vuukle, or whatever we use here, is so bad that this site slows down my computer so badly).
Why are the comments on the Rivian electric truck article seemingly to be from a Tesla rocketry article?
That sled looks like something I saw at Disney World Epcot 25+ years ago.
Glad to see they’re finally getting into production.
How are you going to beam solar energy to rectenna farms through clouds of radioactive fallout?
‘It would make starting a nuclear war a no win situation.’
Starting a nuclear war has been a no win situation ever since more than one country could do it.
At least SLS supporters aren’t trying to destroy aviation as a whole, like a certain Cortez
And it must be said, NASA has done some very good work that a group like SpaceX is not setup to do and NASA has done the heavy check writing. But now that they have the new tech worked out it is time to put it in production. The fears of it not working on location when they can’t service it, at least not yet, like they could with the Hubble, is very real and legitimate, but the risk can be mitigated by having a plan to build and launch multiple copies, the first few having more mods and then start pumping them out.
This may increases the short term costs but not much with the massive reductions that SpaceX has brought about and the efficiencies of mass production. The added cost would both give the new paradigm a major boost and provide much more redundancy to this new level of astronomy.
That Hubble needed five service missions shows how much this redundancy is needed for these deep space telescopes where servicing is out of the question in the near future. This way at least one of the multiple telescopes would be operational after twenty years and in the meantime we would be able to get far more astronomy done with so many scopes. How many more billions are they going to spend on testing between now and launch? And still no guarantee that it will work.
With reduced launch cost and bigger rockets we don’t need to spend so much on engineering every last ounce off the weight of the payload which only increases fragility. Shift R&D $$s to production & launch.
After the monumental error with the Hubble telescope the project leaders know that a mistake with the Webb scope would be career ending. So yes they will test it to a ridiculous degree.
Starship (and Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy) need more payloads. Starlink is a good fit and is what needs to be done in other sectors of space, rethink payload economics, production techniques and scale. Instead of lab production with PhDs turning the bolts, start building assembly lines. We need Model Ts not hand-crafted Rolls Royces.
Key to Starlink (and OneWeb) is they are mass producing satellites, making production volumes that were once way too expensive much more affordable. This in turn increases cadence of launches and brings cost per launch down, especially with reusable rockets that need a higher cadence to leverage their advantage. A mutually beneficial feedback loop between launching and payload production is the real potential. Do this with space telescopes, martian and lunar landers and rovers, space station modules, planetary explorers, asteroid probes, etc, etc.
It drives me nuts that they are testing that stupid James Webb telescope till it turns to powder from old age. Just contract SpaceX to make twenty of them. Launch one to see if it works, make some mods on the next as needed, and when one works, start launching. The final cost will be far less than what they have spent so far and they would get far more astronomy going and sooner.
The payload builders have not readjusted to a whole new paradigm. This readjustment is what is very much needed.
Slow down there! We’ve had ICBM’s since the 60’s. There’s a reason – besides cost – that we don’t use them to regularly deliver ordnance. Like having Russia or China mistake the target and determine they’re in a use it or lose it situation and have them launch against us. You can’t tell the payload from a radar return, so the risk vs return on using ICBMs for conventional ordnance is pretty lopsided.
As a number of commentators have pointed out, the military has been known to scre up by the numbers from time to time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls#25_January_1995 Also look at the one from the other side in 1979.
It’s probably returning to “higher, faster, farther” just on a much grander scale.
Ya see your point, pretty much every major defense contractor (Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop, Raytheon) would lose their shit. However, they are funding the SABRE to some extent, so maybe DARPA/USAF will get involved since they really do want this type of capability. If they can secure 3-4 of them for a billion or two, that is a drop in the bucket for DARPA and they could probably fit it in with what they have to spend, no congress involved. I mean they already technically operate a drone capable of taking out satellites. The X-37. Trump want’s a space force. The Starship can be that.
Only the first testing prototype will have less than 31 raptors. The height of the rocket and the number of raptors on both stages will be the same as Musk indicated.
Musk has already said that the first version of Super Heavy Booster will likely have less than the 31 engines planned for, he also recently said that his first goal was the Moon first, before Mars. So reading the tea leaves it looks like Musk has come to the conclusion that there really isn’t an immediate need for a 100 ton Mars capable rocket as there currently isn’t a market for it. However, with China making a major lunar effort with a manned landing in about 2030, Musk seems to have come to the conclusion that a 70+ MT lunar capable Starship/Super Heavy will get all the push it needs from the Chinese moon effort, in addition to being able to cover every other commercial and military mission in the 2020s. I would expect that the Starship/Super Heavy will trade off ultimate performance for lower development cost and an accelerated timeline. It will likely originally be a bit shorter than current 118 meters and may have fewer than the 7 Raptors for the upper stage. Really, 3 raptors at more than 1.35 MMlb thrust is more than enough for a 70MT+ upper stage. So for now its looking like Mars can wait until maybe the second half of the next decade at the earliest.
Look up ‘Rods from God…’
Developing wealth generating exoindustry would be the next industrial revolution, and would give the US the ability to be the last government standing after a nuclear exchange.
Solar energy beamed to huge rectenna farms, point to point surface communications, momentum, and energy transfers between orbiting structures, a cheat way to land refined orbital materials to ground,…..
Militarily, a huge presence in orbit, and deep space would play the same role as strategic missile submarines that could respond to a successful first attack on the US mainland. It would make starting a nuclear war a no win situation.
No nukes in space? Who needs fissionables? Hundred meter asteroids make a mess, and are hard to intercept at orbital velocities.
raptor looks like a super powerful bunsen burner from chemistry class….
Provided that it’s affordable, I might, too. Same basis.
If you build it, they will come.
I hear you on inefficiency but the U.S. rarely passes up transformational technologies (see stealth… up until then is was just higher, faster, farther).
I guess it also depends of what they can show the rocket is capable to do.
If it can be relaunched once or twice a year, it would be almost business as usual.
If they can a launch a same rocket once a quarter or faster, things start getting quite more interesting.
Once a month or more and we won’t be in Kansas anymore.
And the rockets being so big means they could absorb all the existing launch market for SpaceX and the rest of the world, specially at the faster launch rates of once a quarter, which require more reuse, and where the price tag starts to seriously go down.
This means SpaceX will be the first ones pushing to replace all of its commercial launchers with Starship Superheavy, but first they need to prove they can.
I have every intention of signing up for Starlink as soon as it is available, and plan on taking my whole family with me. Part of it is because I want to encourage and enable Elon Musk in his space endeavors, part of it is sheer contempt for our current providers.
I agree with everything you say, but I believe you might be underestimating the bumbling inefficiency (possibly corruption) of the military procurement process. As a famous man once said “Just Saying…”
Well, SpaceX does have a plan to create their own demand for launches – Starlink. The Starlink network will need a ton of launches, and once up and running, should provide plenty of revenue for SpaceX to continue future development. Hopefully they are able to get the funding needed to get the network at least started, and things go reasonably smoothly. I kinda wish SpaceX had some publicly available stock to purchase; I am pretty optimistic about their plans. As you mentioned, more external demand would be a good thing, to bring in the dollars needed for getting Starlink up; rather than having to rely on investors.
You have to think that there is gonna be some major USAF support if SpaceX succeeds with the Starship Heavy prototype. A B-2 carries 20 tons of ordinance, a flight from a base on the east coast of the US to somewhere in the Middle East for a strike would cost about 3-4 million in flight hours and ordinance, an 18 hour round trip at around $100k per hour. If they can launch 3.5 times that into orbit for 5-10 million and do more damage with strike times of 30-40 minutes at an altitude that takes them out of range of any known defenses. When you can go 1000 km up and hit anything on earth in 45 min or less, who needs stealth? That’s a huge advantage. At some point the USAF will get on-board in a big way.
“…the US military to pass up a massive global dominance in space launch technology.”
They just need the ability to launch their satellites into orbit, they have that. Rockets can launch stuff into orbit with or without “massive global dominance in space launch technology”. The rocket equation simply works.
I hope they stick to the 100 ton to LEO payload. For the sake of our fast space settlement dreams.
But yeah, even at 70 tons to LEO it would be revolutionary, if it’s fully reusable and can do more than 10 launch cycles.
Nevertheless, I expect the new rockets to not have much external demand at first, similar to what happened with Falcon Heavy. Struggling to launch another one after 1 full year passed since the first one, because there are not many customers with payloads for it.
It also seems related to the unstated expectation of government, to use only believably tested rockets (having done 10 successful launches or so).
“It would be difficult for NASA and the US military to pass up a massive global dominance in space launch technology.”
Never underestimate our governments ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.