Artemis II is not safe, at least by the standards we apply to things. It's the third flight of a capsule, on the second flight of the rocket, and the first flight of things like the life support system.
At the end of the day, one of the reasons astronauts are respected is they understand those risks, and go into space anyway. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to minimize risks - but at some point the risk becomes acceptable, and the cost of reducing it too great.
To paraphrase a quote from Star Trek - risk is their business.
Interest also compensates for the other things that money could be doing. If I didn't loan it to you (or a student), then I would be doing something else with the money, even if just buying a government bond.
I'm not sure that is accurate. You need a borrower to do that. If there were other low risk borrowers they would also lend them money, it's not a zero sum game. I'm no banker, but pretty sure the bank doesn't lend itself fractionally reserved loans and buy t-bonds.
College grads also pay on average 10x the taxes above a HS grad, so there is a huge disconnect on the repayment the lenders get. Once you pay the SL amount in taxes, you should be done.
The point of the Starship program is to drop the cost of a kg going to space significantly - this isn't meant to be launched with rockets that aren't fully reusable.
On the other hand, Tesla vehicles have similar hardware built into them, and don't require such hands-on intervention. (And that's the hardware that will be going up.)
Car-grade inference hardware is fundamentally different from data center-grade inference hardware, let alone the specialized, interconnected hardware used for training (like NVLink or complex optical fabrics). These are different beasts in terms of power density, thermal stress, and signaling sensitivity.
Beyond that, we don't actually know the failure rate of the Tesla fleet. I’ve never had a personal computer fail from use in my life, but that’s just anecdotal and holds no weight against the law of large numbers. When you operate at the scale of a massive cluster, "one-in-a-million" failures become a daily statistical certainty.
Claiming that because you don't personally see cars failing on the side of the road means they require zero intervention actually proves my original point: people who haven't managed data center reliability underestimate the sheer volume of "rare" failures that occur at scale.
Most of the other big news events are ones where people get severely hurt, and political ones where one partly loses.
With this, we can look up at the moon, and say "Humanity did that."
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