Which is actually even more impressive as the raptor also produces a greater amount of thrust.
So not only are you getting ~90x as many engines/year you are also getting a similar amount of thrust but at half the weight, likely meaning considerably mission mass / vehicle when configured for like for like thrust.
i originally edited out the "greater thrust" part of my comment because the articles says they're about the same. Maybe the article mixed things up and is applying the vacuum thrust of rs-25 to the sea level thrust of raptor?
It's not clear if that's sea level or vacuum for raptor2 but i would assume sea level since it came from a test stand and raptor2 hasn't flown in a vacuum yet
The coalition supporting SLS in Congress is much broader than just Senator Shelby, though he's definitely one of the biggest proponents - an old school Senator purely motivated bringing home the money to his state. There are plenty of SLS advocates in both the Senate and House - SLS is not going anywhere just yet.
That is disingenuous. The message you pointed to says "4-4.5 years from when we order material" which is comparing the manufacturing of an assembled item with the full length of the supply chain.
At this point, unless a nation-state gets serious (and I have to believe at least China and Russia are), SpaceX is going to win. Their lead is just too great for anyone else to surmount.
This is bad, because a sole supplier of viable orbital rocketry is almost as bad as only nation-states having the capability.
Hopefully, someone steps up to the plate. My guess is that Russia and/or China both have "black" programs to copy and replicate SpaceX's technology...
Russia's high-tech industry is dead in the water for the foreseeable future. They won't recover for decades from the tech embargoes that started in 2014 and are very extensive now.
I don't see them making any kind of comeback any time soon, since they can't get any high-tech equipment from abroad. Which is pretty much impossible with current leadership and current political system.
More than just sanctions, Russia is the sort of a country where if you start a company and its too successful someone with connections might show up one day with documents "proving" you signed it over to them for a fraction of its worth.
Russia has straight up butchered their rocket industry. They are effectively cancelling everything new and just copying things designed in the Soviet Union with ever-decreasing budgets.
Putin never saw the space industry as anything but a profit center he can squeeze to fund other stuff, once SpaceX made it hard to compete they just gave up.
> "This is bad, because a sole supplier of viable orbital rocketry is almost as bad as only nation-states having the capability."
Well, it's still way better than none having the capability IMHO, so kudos for SpaceX to make it possible! One of those cases where being technologically brilliant gives you a big competitive advantage IMHO.
I think you should keep an eye out for Relativity Space, their rocket is soon to launch, and the whole thing is, and I am not exaggerating, fully 3d printed. It's a wonderful design and I hope it works, because it automates a great deal of the process.
They are, they just need a hell of a lot of them to a) finish testing Starship + Super Heavy b) build a giant fleet of both and have replacement engines available for them.
IIRC they're planning to "soft land" at least the first one in the ocean. So it's guaranteed to throw 33 away, to avoid the risk of destroying the pad for the first go.
If it manages to "land" successfully just above the water, then they'll go for landings back at the pad.
Each rocket needs 33 for the booster and 6 for the ship, so thats still about 5 weeks for one, or 10 rockets per year. Will need a lot during development since reusability probably won't work 100% of the time for a while. then their stated goal is having a ton of these things launching for mars, etc.
A starship + booster has almost 40 engines. In a year you could produce enough engines for 9 of them. You can use that many because a mission to the moon might take 10 or so launches including fuel tankers:
(Although I guess you could refly the same tanker a few times)
If you were really going to Mars you would need all the Starships you could get, even operations around the Earth and cislunar space could keep a substantial fleet busy if the cost per pound is low enough to encourage new applications. You will also need to replace engines at some rate.
A full stack Starship right now needs 39 engines (33 for Super Heavy, 6 for Starship). SpaceX will definitely lose some to testing (and indeed last I checked they are 100% going to lose all the initial ones, because they're going to do a mock-landing over the ocean before attempting a real landing, so even if it goes perfectly all those are going into the salt water). Once they have SH being recovered, ideally starting launch 2, that will cut the burn rate big time but they'll still probably take a bit to start successfully recovering SS. That's entirely expected and acceptable for MVP and as a worst case for HLS (because Lunar Starship and such aren't coming back to Earth at all, that's Orion's job). SpaceX runs hardware rich, so they will need hundreds just for testing.
Long term though they want 1000+ Starships for Mars and other efforts. There will still be expended Starship profiles, and reuse doesn't mean that cadence won't require having more raw vehicles. Fueling orbital depots quickly requires lots of vehicles and trips, and boil off particularly early on means just depending on a few isn't ideal (and that's assuming they have reuse working by then, if they have to just eat the refueling as expended to meet their contract obviously they'll need more). With the current design that's tens of thousands of engines, so at current production they'd be hitting the right numbers in about 22 years which seems in the ballpark of when such an effort might actually get going.
At any rate mass production is very important for their plans and how they operate. It's let them iterate very quickly, iron out more kinks, be much more aggressive about testing which in turn feeds back into doing each better, and pushes down the cost per engine dramatically. If you go to the Ars comments first page you'll see pictures comparing Raptor 1 and Raptor 2 and can just visually see the massive simplification (though note it's a little bit unfair because Raptor 1 was much more heavily instrumented, but there is far more stuff removed/improved then just that).
> because they're going to do a mock-landing over the ocean before attempting a real landing, so even if it goes perfectly all those are going into the salt water)
They are. Rockets using Raptor are still in testing and occasionally explode. Starship uses 6 Raptor engines. The Super Heavy booster uses up to 33 Raptor engines. SpaceX is going to need a lot of Raptors to advance Super Heavy testing where some of them will likely be destroyed.
Glad to share--Small Batches podcast is excellent in general (I'm totally unaffiliated) and I found the Deming introduction contextualized in ways I could understand better than straight business texts. I'm going to do some relistening right now.
Musk's goal is that "the factory is the product" [0]. He's always focused on production efficiencies. This was brought up in the Tesla bot presentation also where they're trying to reduce the number of unique parts.
In a way it's a good thing Musk companies are such crappy places to work and are a massive resume boost. People are joining SpaceX & Tesla, learning some good lessons and then leaving and taking those lessons to other companies. If they stayed at SpaceX/Tesla their entire career those lessons would not spread as well.
Reminds me of this: << Recognize the team is the product. In software, the product life cycle is shortening. “In traditional accounting,” says Bjork, “the business asset is the product. But more and more, in practice, the asset is a team that is capable of delivering products. The team has a longer lifetime of generating value than the product itself. That’s a big shift in focus.” >> (The_Age_of_Agile.online.pdf)
Tesla is not more efficient than other carmakers. Tesla has 110,000 employees and makes 366,000 cars/year. Honda has 220,000 employees and makes 5.3 million cars per year. That's 3.3 cars/employee vs. 24.1 cars/employee. Even if 2 out of every 3 Tesla employees do nothing related to making cars (e.g. they are working on that bipedal robot thing), Tesla still uses 2x more labor/car than Honda. Tesla also has 176 failures/year/PP100 for 3 year old cars, making them the 4th least reliable car company, despite the fact that they are mechanically much simpler than gas cars.
Can't argue with SpaceX, though - an engine a day is an insane pace.
Not really apples-to-apples considering how much of the finished car Tesla manufacturers. Other car companies make very few of their parts. Tesla makes almost every part.
Tesla does not make almost every part. I have talked to multiple Tesla part suppliers and can assure you that Tesla purchases both individual parts and entire subsystems the same way every other automaker does. Tesla has inhoused a couple of components that are typically done by specialized companies, such as their seats.
Honda doesn't employ parts makers too, but all of them are needed to produce car and deliver it to the end user. Tesla does all of that, right? So it makes sense to consider outsourced personnel as part of the chain.
Talk to an actual industrial engineer and they can tell you how laughably bad some of Tesla's manufacturing practices. You're never going to catch up to Toyota or Honda in pure speed or quality.
But Tesla has figured out a ton of clever ways to cut corners (mostly by having a customer base that accepts a very tiny static lineup of car models) and have gone all out on economies of scale.
Not sure which engineers you spoke with but Toyota recently decided to reboot their EV strategies to respond to progress made by Tesla - [0]
> "What's driving Mr Terashi's effort is the EV's faster-than-anticipated takeoff and rapid-fire adoptions of cutting-edge innovations by Tesla and others," one of the people said.
Sure, Toyota is lightyears behind on battery tech. But it sounds like this is more about Toyota misestimating the market than actual differences in manufacturing technology.
Sorry this is actually nonsense. Seriously, just nonsense.
Go and actually watch the disassembly and analysis done by Munro engineers. They do detailed analysis and costing. And Tesla is routinely doing things nobody else is doing that is highly effective.
Their use of aluminum casting is industry leading. Their electronics are industry leading by a wide margin. They are great at working with large glass panels. Their battery packs are industry leading. Their heating-cooling loop is fantastic. I could go on.
Just go and look a Tesla looks under the frunk and then look at how a VW ID.4 looks.
That doesn't mean they are the best at everything. Their suspensions are not as good. Their fit and finish is not as good. Again, there is more one could mention.
To just flat say that Tesla it worse at manufacturing the their competition is simply not true. If it were true they could never achieve anywhere close the margin they got. And this margin is achieved with pure EV, something most companies barley make profit on.
Tesla is also amazing at iteration. They are iterating faster then Toyota. In 2017 Model 3 had a lot of issues, if you look at Model 3 in 2021 the internals are very different.
> But Tesla has figured out a ton of clever ways to cut corners (mostly by having a customer base that accepts a very tiny static lineup of car models)
A the old 'all their costumers are idiots' defense that can't be backed up by anything substantial.
> and have gone all out on economies of scale.
They are pretty small car company still in terms of volume. And centralizing and vertically integrating production is a valid and effective industrial practice.
They had better margin then the competition while having 1/2 or less production on a architecture so just saying 'economics of scale' is just nonsense.
I think you misread my tone. I'm commending Tesla for being smart about their manufacturing strategy.
> They are iterating faster then Toyota. In 2017 Model 3 had a lot of issues, if you look at Model 3 in 2021 the internals are very different.
To put it in perspective in these 4 years, Toyota iterated for every single model year across 14 different model. And on top of that released all new platforms for the Yaris, the Camry, the Rav4, the Corolla, the Land Cruiser, the Tundra, and the Avalon.
>Tesla is also amazing at iteration. They are iterating faster then Toyota. In 2017 Model 3 had a lot of issues, if you look at Model 3 in 2021 the internals are very different.
This actually undermines your point to a certain extent. Tesla is great at iterating but that often comes at a cost to quality. It is very hard to manage reliability when parts and suppliers are constantly churning.
"Older models typically fare better in reliability, as companies tend to make tweaks and redesigns to solve known problems, while sticking with the same parts and suppliers.
But Tesla deviates from this approach, Fisher explained. “At almost random times during the year Tesla will switch major components, suppliers or sensors and other units. The more you change, the greater the chances you’re going to have some problems.” [1]
The method of consistently updating was actually advocated by manufacturing guru who saved the US car industry, Edwards Deming. He advocated for this to improve quality. The engineer who pointed out how good Tesla is doing with this iteration worked with Deming at Ford.
"5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs."
- Edwards Deming
This does make version and revision management and service harder, but that you can manage with software and its worth the cost.
However, what you say is partially true, its not all positive. If you endlessly make the same car with very little change you can also hit very high quality and reliability. That is why sometimes cars like Jeep look good in quality rankings.
Overall however, I think there is good reason for iteratively interdicting changes.
This comes from someone who's previously worked as a process and reliability engineer, and one of those was in automotive manufacturing. One of my degrees is in industrial engineering, so I'm very familiar with Deming.
What you're saying is true, with one important distinction we may disagree on:
>"but that you can manage with software"
This is a take that seems accurate on it's surface but belies a lot of additional problems. Leaning on software for improving reliability can be a dangerous path. It's tempting because it's cheap and easy to iterate on. Software doesn't wear out like mechanical components. But software makes reliability pretty tough when you constantly iterate because it tends to fail at interfaces. Not only do the number of these interfaces tend to grow exponentially, they are notoriously difficult to test fully. Nancy Leveson has some good articles that demonstrate this distinction.
A automotive example from my own experience is a comparison with mechanical vs. electrical robots used in the stamping process of body panels. Plant managers like electrical retrofits because they held the promise of being much cheaper to build and modify. But they needed near-constant tweaking of the control system. The number of interfaces causes a lot more failure modes and impacts the reliability. By contrast, a mechanical system is, by it's nature, constrained by mechanical linkages. Once the mechanical system is tuned and working, it works for a long time. Gradually the parts wear, but they tend to be much easier to predict and troubleshoot.
Since this thread is about aerospace, you can see where software failure caused catastrophic failures by lulling engineers into complacency about how software can enhance reliability. From Ariane V, to Falcon, to CST-100 all have examples of how software did not fulfill its promises to increase reliability and often it does the opposite. Don't confuse the ability to move a design change faster with an inherent ability to make things more reliable.
I certainty don't don't have your expertise here. It sound like a case of doomed if you do, doomed if you don't. If you don't keep updating incrementally you have difficult single updates and issues stick around for longer. If you update incrementally you have a lot of issues with tracking all the different versions and potential inconsistency. Its really quite a bit like software in terms of rolling release vs stable upgrades.
What I mean by 'manage with software' is that each car has an exact description of what hardware is in it. Meaning what revision of every part. Tesla has some advantage because they manage the process end to end, knowing exactly what vehicle was sold to what costumer and the control the service center and write the diagnostic software so the service center should know exactly what car they are working on and what potential problems each revision of the software has.
In the 70s when Deming advocated for this such extensive version tracking would likely be much harder.
Ah, ok. Your clarification on software for version tracking makes a lot of sense and I completely agree.
The software management issue I was talking about was a different animal. Take the Ariane V; the idea was the could iterate faster if they leveraged software reuse. Since it was previously verified software, they didn't think it needed much testing. But the new rocket design exceeded the assumptions in the previous iteration and the vehicle was lost. There's a lot of instances where software allows you to iterate faster, but you have to very careful about the baked in assumptions.
I'm very familiar with Demings (I wouldn't say he saved the US car industry. He was ignored here. It wasn't until Japan took his works and almost destroyed the US industry that he was taken seriously).
But that brings ups up a specific example of where Tesla has struggled. They used to keep HUGE backstocks of excess inventory (I believe they have since tamed this) which is a classic manufacturing mistake. So if you have any production mistakes or improvements in the part, you have to scrap or just cycle through the entire inventory until the improvements show up in the car.
This is why Just-In-Time is such an important concept in manufacturing. You can iterate constantly. Meanwhile, Tesla would crank out huge batches of identical fenders and doors and mirrors to maximise efficiency (economies of scale) but then struggle with part fits and panel gaps.
Tesla has since dealt with a lot of this when they went through their production hell period. But a lot of what they had to do was re-learn things like Lean Manufacturing and JIT.
I'm not saying Tesla isn't doing any good work. I'm just saying that it's untrue to say that they're somehow unequivocally better at manufacturing then other car companies. They simply are not - they're improving rapidly but they are far from the industry leader.
Yes, Tesla is orders of magnitude more efficient than industry. They also maintain the highest profit margins in the industry (14.95% vs 4.32%).
For comparison, if Toyota was as efficient as Tesla they would've posted 2022 Q3 profits of ~$24 billion, not $3.1B. Tesla achieved $3.9B from only 344k cars. Operational efficiency is their leverage.
>They also maintain the highest profit margins in the industry (14.95% vs 4.32%).
They have a different business model than OEMs, this is not apples-to-apples. OEMs act as wholesalers.
Besides the fact that you're talking about the efficiency of a company that literally produces 10x the number of cars. Let's see what happens to Tesla if they ever reach that scale.
>Toyota: 2.6M (+5% y/y) Tesla: 344K (+42% y/y)
Base rate fallacy. Why not use absolute numbers of cars, rather than percentage increase? It would tell a different story, wouldn't it?
> Besides the fact that you're talking about the efficiency of a company that literally produces 10x the number of cars. Let's see what happens to Tesla if they ever reach that scale.
10x higher production should in itself bring a lot in terms of economies of scale. Generally, the more you make of something, the cheaper one unit is to make.
So Tesla's position is certainly more impressive in this comparison.
Its not longer 10x the cars. Toyota is targeting only 9.1 million. Tesla is targeting close to 1.5 million. That's more like 6-7 times as much. And next year it will likely be even less.
With the recent increases at the Shanghai and Austin Gigafactories, Tesla is able to sustain a rate that would extrapolate to two million vehicles manufactured per year.
They're better at making profit, that doesn't make them more efficient at building cars. Tesla sells a product which is differentiated based on software and brand, leading to huge margins. Tesla also uses more labor to make it's cars than traditional car companies, despite the fact that their cars are more mechanically simple. There's building a profitable company (Tesla has done this) and then there's doing good manufacturing engineering (Tesla is still working on this).
Yes, it is true that their operational efficiency of OPEX/revenue is excellent. But you can measure operational efficiency for a lot of different variables. Their headcount/unit is awful. Their OPEX/unit is not great either, about 50% higher than the average car. All that OPEX/revenue is telling you is that they charge a lot of money for their cars.
I'm not even saying they don't have great manufacturing practices objectively - if you compare them to a lot of other industries they absolutely do. But auto manufacturing has always been the cutting edge of manufacturing tech and they simply are not at the top of that highly competitive field yet.
Agree to disagree. I'm very (very) familiar with their manufacturing abilities in automotive. Tesla is absolutely bending traditional supplier capabilities. It's a fact. Ask any Tesla supplier and they'll agree.. expectations are next level (compared to traditional) in almost every aspect.
I learned this from an interview with Elon and some additional reading, but here is an example. Tesla makes their own seats. They asked one of the manufacturers to build them a seat that supports higher G forces than the "standard" seats since the instant torque in a Tesla is legitimately different than most other non-hypercar seats. They also wanted to integrate the heaters (and eventually the coolers)[1] for their seats directly into the whole vehicle heating / cooling system to use the lowest amount of energy possible. Expectedly, the manufacturer told Tesla no, that was silly, so they made their seats themselves. They now have seats that are rated for higher G ratings in crashes than virtually any other manufacturer that exists.
In doing something as simple as making their own seats, they were able to also improve the safety. They've put sensors directly in the seats to reprogram airbag deploy sequences, in software, on the fly. They know if there is a child sitting on the very edge of the seat vs an adult laying down across the seat and have the airbags fire differently based on this knowledge. Recently[2], they stepped this up a notch and are in the process of using millimeter wave radars to confirm this. They're industry leading in this regard and previously just used pressure sensors plus the cabin camera above the rearview mirror.
In short, Tesla is not perfect, but they are trying to rethink the problems from first principals. In doing this, they are coming up with very novel approaches that are actually big improvements over the entire industry. In other areas (fit and finish) they're towards the middle of the pack when compared against peer auto manufacturers.
I think your data is suspect here. Tesla[6] made 343,000 vehicles in the third quarter of 2022, so thinking they are only able to make 366,000 per year is incorrect. Year to date, from their quarterly reports, Tesla has manufactured 908,573 vehicles so far in 2022. With the recent updates at the Shanghai Gigafactory and the spin up of the Austin Tx Gigafactory, they're on track to be able to make (if it ran at this speed a full year) two million vehicles per year.
One of the ultimate "business metric" for auto manufacturers is the gross margin aka "how much profit does the company make as a percentage of the cost of the vehicle"
Before Tesla, Toyota[1] generally held the crown as the highest with just under 18% over the past five years. Ford[2] averages around 14%. Tesla[3], is industry leading with an average of 20.61%. GM[4] has always sort of been a laggard with the average at 11.26%. The German manufacturers, known for their efficiency, also do very well with VW[5] at 18.75% (this includes Porsche, which significantly tips the scales upwards for Volkswagen) and Mercedes[6] at 19.66%.
So Tesla makes approximately 6% more profit per vehicle sold at the low end (GM) and almost exactly 1% more than Mercedes on the higher end. Mercedes has ~173,000 employees and (per your own comment) Tesla has ~110,000 employees. So doing "less with more" is a pretty nice way to say they're more efficient, is it not?
Not to mention some of the alloys used in the Raptor2 engine were invented at SpaceX and exist nowhere else. They have to make the metal before even getting started on the part. I would imagine, start to finish, a Raptor2 takes a while.
What's is level of complexity relative to something like V2 rocket engine that was suppose to be scaled for 2000 per month. DOD can absorb a lot of exquisit missile engines even during peacetime procurement, I wonder if SpaceX is going to get into the weapons game. Almost everything Elon touches is dual use anyways, wonder what it would take for him flip.
DOD is already SpaceX's biggest customer. It's probably already in the weapons game, but that's not something you're going to hear about, because it would be classified.
Though their launch payloads are often classified, that they're launching DOD payloads isn't classified and given the contracts that are public as reasonable proxies for the ones that aren't, there's simply no chance the DOD's manifest is SpaceX's biggest in terms of launches or dollars.
NASA, for example, launches on SpaceX way more often than DOD. You can easily count the launches yourself by reviewing SpaceX's historical manifest on Wikipedia. I think there have been 6 or 7 DOD launches in the last three years while there have been 15 or 16 NASA launches in the same time period. Some DOD launches are a bit more lucrative than some NASA launches, but the inverse is also true.
You might go on to assert that SpaceX has other DOD projects like its Starlink/missile tracking and E2E cargo (and potentially troop) delivery (and even money for Raptor dev and other smaller programs like the long ago DARPA investment in Falcon 1) but it's clear from various reporting that those are tiny investments compared to a year or three's worth of orbital launches.
Yes, the USG is SpaceX's biggest customer. No, the DOD is not SpaceX's biggest USG customer. That title, for now, belongs squarely to NASA.
I don't think the weapons people like liquid cryogenic fuels. They want propellent that is easy to store for years in a vehicle that's ready to launch in minutes or less.
> What's is level of complexity relative to something like V2 rocket engine that was suppose to be scaled for 2000 per month.
Historically, von Braun had to use 70% ethanol - i.e., diluted with water - to avoid V2 engines burning through. So, loss of efficiency. It took quite some efforts to e.g. Glushko with Liliput to switch to kerosene (and cylindrical chamber and flat injector head) - the result was R-7 engines. Some decades of improvements - for example, V2 uses hydrogen peroxide to drive turbopumps, modern engines all use main components, which at least simplifies the engine overall, the closed cycles don't have separate exhaust after turbine, turbopumps are much more efficient (geometry in 1940-s wasn't too good from fluid dynamic point of view, turbine vanes didn't use that high temperature gas, losing in efficiency - here some material development work is important), and others. Raptor has an order of magnitude higher thrust.
Just out of curiosity, I look up the chamber pressure of the two engines. The chamber pressure of the V2 engine was 15.45 bar, the chamber pressure of the Raptor engine is 300 bar.
And that's before we get into insane complexities of a full flow combustion cycle vs the open cycle of the V2's engine.
the cryogenic methane fueled full flow staged combustion engine of the raptor 2 is in many ways not a good fit for weapons platforms. It's a very purpose built engine for uplifting mass into orbit.
Soviet Union used to deploy R-9 - a rocket which was "always ready", launching within 20 minutes from the command, while using liquid oxygen and kerosene as propellants.
Kerosene makes a lot more sense than methane. The only reason methane makes sense for SpaceX is they intend on manufacturing fuel on mars for the return trip.
Why do many people (including myself) like what Elon Musk's doing, and why do we disregard all the hit pieces and smears targeting Musk across social media (very prevalent on Reddit, etc.)?
It's because SpaceX and Tesla are the clear leaders in opposing the de-industrialization trend in the hyper-financialized American economy. It's so incredibly stupid and short-sighted to move manufacturing and the associated technological R&D outside the United States, as it results in the loss of critically important technological skills. Follow that route and you end up with financial institutions desperately trying to retain control of technology via intellectual property lawsuits targeting countries with their factories in China, which as history has shown, will alway be a losing battle.
Rolling back the financialization of the American economy, and re-introducing industrial activities at scale, is the only way the country will avoid devolving into a dystopian Third World system of wealthy enclaves with large capital holdings (protected by private security armies) surrounded by miles and miles of festering slums.
This is a huge part of why I was really hoping the Twitter sale wouldn't go through. Elon is great at leading engineering companies building real hard tech. I hope his taking ownership over arguably the biggest cess pool in social media doesn't distract him from what he's better at.
Elon Musk's career was initially in software. He started out on a VIC-20 and BASIC. He sold his first game at 12. More professionally he then was involved with Zip2. After that came X. X merged with PayPal and the product eventually sold to eBay. It was after those endeavors that he started SpaceX, followed by Tesla, Neuralink, and the Boring Company. Twitter is just the latest, and it represents his return to software. I understand not wanting him to get out of physical stuff where he seems to really shine, but I am not too worried.
The biggest threat is really a matter of time management. He is now spreading his time really really thin across some of his companies.
He got his career started in software but my overall impression from Ashlee Vance's book, news reports about Tesla, etc is that Elon just doesn't have the same good judgement in software that he does in engineering. I mean, he's smart and hard working and could iterate features fast but that's different from sustainable software engineering. And Twitter isn't really about software at his level, it's more organization where I also don't think he has an unusual talent. He is a heavy user of the platform, though, unlike the people who had been running it and it's possible that will give him better judgement over which features matter.
I am extremely saddened (but not surprised) that your comment is being downvoted. I think you hit on a lot of good points. You are right. The de-industrialization of America is extremely sad, especially. It's uncouth to say today, but the truth is American culture is exceptional in its production of novel technologies and the entrpreneurial systems that let such technologies be industrialized and scaled for the benefit of humanity. Without a solid industrial base, the harder that becomes.
Yes I'm not on the Elon hate bandwagon. He's entitled to his politics.
Most of the people who are on that bandwagon would place their favorite celebrity on a higher pedestal than EM. Which is to say the way we rank people and go after people seems off. It's easier to stay on people's "good side" when you're not doing anything different.
I just think it's neat that America has a celebrity who's a nerdy engineering type rather than another Kardashian (no hate, I just don't relate to that cuz I'm a nerd). For the most part, the people I've admired in my life like Claude Shannon or Jim Keller are known exclusively within the tech world and even then not universally even in that subculture. Elon everyone knows. I don't care too much one way or another about the guy, but I at least like that the country I live in has more or less embraced a nerd. Feels good somehow.
Well, it doesn't have to be either or. It's possible to think he's built impressive companies while also thinking he's an unsavory character.
As far as I can tell, the people who "smear" Musk don't do so because of his companies, it's because they oppose his ideas and how much influence he has to implement them. Whatever you think of Musk, it's a little scary that someone can just buy the megaphone that is Twitter and disseminate whatever information you wish.
I have somewhat similar feelings, but when I think about it, it's a megaphone some people choose to listen to. You can not use Twitter or not follow him on Twitter or block him on Twitter. I choose the former.
You really need to live under a metaphorical rock in order to not find out what Musk is up to. He's constantly talked about on this forum, and all other internet forums related to technology. Just watching regular news will get you some info on what he's currently doing. His megaphone is too loud even for dedicated people who wear earplugs.
In my opinion, they are "freely choosing to talk about him" the same way people freely choose to buy a product after being exposed to advertisments for it.
This, 100%. He has become very successful by showing up as an outsider to a couple of different industries and successfully challenging entrenched conventional wisdom, in ways other people had failed to do previously. It sort of seems like this has led him to (mistakenly, in my view) decide that all conventional wisdom in all domains is wrong, and that he is uniquely qualified to challenge it, which seems to have then led to him saying lots of demonstrably false things and generally looking like an idiot.
But it doesn't seem like there's any fundamental tension in assessing that in some domains he has done good/useful work and in other domains he's acting like an idiot. It needn't be the case that he's either an all-around genius or an all-around fraud/charlatan/megalomaniac/whatever.
This is great but... what are they goig to do with so many Raptors?
SpaceX is following a "fully reusable" strategy, I am not even sure if the BFR booster has an expendable option, Starship may be expendable but it is clearly not the configuration they are pushing for. And yet, SpaceX is producing these engines as if they were consumables.
We only need so many launches, especially super heavy rocket launches before we run out of payload. And if they build as many rockets as they have engines for, where are they going to store them? What about the launch pads? Etc...
I am not criticizing SpaceX strategy, I know that Musk is a fan of assembly lines, for a lot of good reasons, so maybe they are just making so many engines just because they can, or so that they can blow them up later during testing (another SpaceX hallmark), but I am curious about their medium term strategy (i.e. after Starship is operational but before crazy projects like Mars settlements).
My opinion... they are going to drive down costs through economies of scale. Musk and Shotwell want to continue to drive donw the cost of getting payload to orbit.
The Mars plans are medium-term, though, and they need many thousands of Starships+Boosters for that plan to work. In the short-term, SpaceX is 'behind' on launching Starlink, especially v2 which is needed to fulfill the promises of the network and be profitable (and v2 can only launch on Starship).
In the short term, they need hundreds of full stage rockets, and in the medium term, thousands. That's tens of thousands of engines needed in the next ~10 years. I don't think 1/day is fast enough and I'm sure they will increase that rate as soon as possible.
Also for testing, SpaceX doesn't want to be afraid of blowing up rockets and losing engines, so the first few hundred engines will likely not be reused.
That plan will not work, as there is nothing that could possibly be gained by flying thousands of rockets to Mars: there is nothing worth having on Mars.
This is what baffles me about the current space-travel fetish. We know what's up there - basically nothing at all. Even if you go to another planet and mine for raw materials, bringing material back isn't even remotely economically feasible and is unlikely to become so in any of our lifetimes.
Going to space in the 1960s made sense from the perspective of scientific advancement, and let's be honest, showing off. Now, we realize that the world has serious problems - but the people with influence are decidedly un-serious and so would rather continue to show off instead of fixing the mess they helped to create.
Depends on what exactly are you mining and whether it is possible to make fuel out there. And with launch cost falling drastically I expect to see this in my lifetime.
Why would you want to bring it back? There are literal gigatons of useful material 'up there', perfectly usable in-place (or anywhere that's not down a well) with low effort. Even with Starship, it's easier to use resources at the destination rather than boost them up.
Because we only care about resources to the extent that they are useful to us, and by definition we are down here and not up there.
Now, it's important to note that there are some wonderful research insights that could be gleaned by landing things on Mars, and also perhaps by using martian resources to launch things further away from Earth. None of these require 1000 rockets landing on Mars though.
This kind of thinking is so defeatist - why do anything at all then?
And why is it the pro space people who need to stay on earth and save it, what about everyone else?
Human history is progress and this is progress.
“As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”
Defeatist? Elon is the one wanting to give up on this planet and start from scratch.
> And why is it the pro space people who need to stay on earth and save it, what about everyone else?
If we limit "pro-space people" to the billionaires sucking up all the oxygen in the room with their dick-waving, the "why do they need to save it" is obvious - they have the money to make a positive difference. Failing that though, if Papa Musk wants to blast himself off to Mars and die of radiation sickness, he's welcome to do so.
People were talking about "the world's problems" in the 60s too. Fortunately we still went to the moon and inspired generations of people to quite literally reach for the stars. The idea that we could simply reallocate the relatively small number of resources currently used for spaceflight, and that would make some meaningful impact in the world's problems is silly. There will always be new problems on Earth to solve.
The resources are symbolic, but the messaging is terrible - "We fucked up this planet, but don't worry because Amazon and Tesla are going to ship us "lucky" people off to their interplanetary labour camps, for the survival of the species."
That's tremendously valuable, because it's off planet and out of our gravity well, so we can launch much bigger rockets (measured in interplanetary payload capacity) than we can from earth (though the moon itself may be better, depending on what we can get there).
If you want to do science, then I wager it is better to do more of the work on Earth and head straight for your destination, avoiding the Mars gravity well entirely.
Huh? We do not know what is up there. That’s the whole point of exploration. We don’t even fully know what our planet has.
The world is and will always be a mess. That’s the nature of human being, we have different ideas, priorities, mindset. We can’t stop progress in an area just to fix some other areas. Besides, it is baffling that space is always singled out when it comes to fixing earth’s issues. Why not says, divert all resources of the video gaming industry to fixing climate; stopping all sporting competition, especially professional ones, for the same goal? That’s of course straw man and unrealistic argument, but space skeptics repeat the same argument on every single space discussion.
Elon has said that his motivation is to make humanity a multi planetary species thereby lowering the risk of extinction (asteroid impact, nuclear war, pandemic, biological warfare, catastrophic climate change, what have you).
Personally, I suspect he might just be doing it because he's nerdy and likes the idea.
For all of us who may not agree with his motives, the technological innovation required to make such a project a reality will benefit all of us anyway; so, for my part, I hope that SpaceX/EM succeed in their goals.
> Elon has said that his motivation is to make humanity a multi planetary species thereby lowering the risk of extinction (asteroid impact, nuclear war, pandemic, biological warfare, catastrophic climate change, what have you).
None of those will leave the Earth even a millionth as inhospitable to life as Mars already is - so this motivation makes no logical sense.
Not to mention, with anything resembling current technology, any Mars colony will be highly dependent on Earth for a good few hundred years - there is no way to bootstrap a fully functioning high tech economy any quicker than that, and life on Mars would depend critically on the highest of high-tech (there is no way to live on Mars without computers, for example - so you would need to be able to build, supply and man advanced chip fabs on Mars before you could have a self-sufficient colony).
It also can't be forgotten that there is no proof that a human population can survive on Mars at all, given our current technology. For example, we have no way of knowing yet if humans could successfully reproduce and bear children healthy enough to reproduce themselves in such a low-G environment. We may require genetic engineering to actually be able to live on Mars (or at least human settlements might require huge centrifuges of some kind simulating high-G, which is way beyond our current abilities to do on a planet, or at least increases the costs thousand-fold).
Building 1000 rockets is not going to solve this problem though; and there are far easier experiments that can be done on mammals in low-G settings before "starting a colony" on Mars.
Not to mention, there are good reasons why the ancient Egyptians did not start work on a rocket program, even though they did want to fly.
Modern computer hardware doesn’t bring us the internet, among other technology advance, but for sure if nobody was working on it in the 1950s, 1960s there wouldn’t be the Internet we all so rely on today. Starships, a lot of them, are prerequisite if we want to have any significant presence in another planet.
> there are good reasons why the ancient Egyptians did not start work on a rocket program.
They didn’t have the required knowledge to do so. The rocket equation, after all, was only established a hundred years ago.
The problem of going to Mars is more or less solved. Advancing on the rocket front is not going to bring us one iota closer to knowing if humans can mate in very low gravity.
Also, computers are useful even if we didn't think of the Internet. 1000 space ships on their way to Mars are not very useful if we can't actually live on Mars.
The bigger rockets use many engines, and for NASA applications, may not be coming home. So, deep space / Mars will be littered with raptors in 20 years, I bet.
Hydralox is worst of both worlds. To get out of gravity well thrust/weight is key, and Raptor is king at that. In deep space ISP is key, and ion thrusters are way more efficient than hydrolox at that. People don't realize that SpaceX is perhaps the world's largest manufacturer of ion thrusters since they use them on Starlink.
Storage time is also important, and it's likely easier to store long term (Earth-Mars flight time is months) mid-cryogenic LOX and liquid methane rather than deep-cryogenic LH2.
"To get out of gravity well thrust/weight is key" this isn't really true. TWR matters a lot for the first stage, but by the seccond stage, higher ISP and lower TWR is worth it as long as thrust is reasonable. ion thrusters are great for light unmanned probes but anything heavy needs higher thrust and hydralox is key for that. Ion propulsion is also pretty much worthless past jupiter since you can't get enough electricity.
ISP is like fuel milage, and the economics change drastically when there's infrastructure in place. Having an abundant source of propellant near a celestial body with a much smaller gravity well (Mars) could easily change the economics and practicality of which fuels make sense for different missions.
Put another way, we might one day look at Starship as a big rig semi truck (though the ISP of Raptor is actually really good while a big rig's is very much not). The fuel efficiency isn't really that important.
I think (or hope at least) we're far away from being able to really see how much space access is going to change if Starship actually pulls off what they're trying.
A full Starship will require 39 engines, and they will likely lose some during development. Even with a raptor a day that is less than 10 Starships a year. Of course if it is fully reusable and doesn't explode too often even 10 per year will be too much production (unless large-scale Mars colonization missions actually happen ). But it will take time, and for the meantime SpaceX does need to build up a fleet of Starships, and that takes a lot of engines.
“Fully reusable” is still a little wiggly. Cars are fully reusable and they still get replaced after 150k miles. Are we going to begrudge someone calling it reusable if they have a MTBF of 10 flights? Or at least, as long as partial failure results in a successful mission but a decommissioned engine or unibody?
You’d use your whole manufacturing capacity then to do 90 missions a year.
There's not a huge number of datapoints yet, but there are several Falcon 9 boosters that have flown >10 times (including two that have flown 14 times.) I'm quite confident in Super Heavy at least handily exceeding 10 flights MTBF.
"Fully reusable" in all uses I've seen of with respect to aerospace it seems pretty fixed to me. We don't talk about "fully reusable" cars because there isn't an example of a non-reusable car. The "fully" part doesn't refer to how many times it lasts, just that the vehicle is reusable in whole instead of in part. "Wholly reusable" might have been a more semantically correct term, but "fully reusable" is what has stuck.
> We only need so many launches, especially super heavy rocket launches before we run out of payload.
Why do you believe this is true? It's entirely possible that there's a massive amount of unmet demand that's only economically feasible at lower price points that SpaceX is beginning to unlock with reusability and economies of scale.
Even SpaceX themselves is a huge customer with Starlink. An extremely low cost of launch not only means that you can put drastically more satellites up, but you can put them in lower orbit where they will have a shorter lifespan, because they decay orbit and burn up exponentially faster, mitigating the risk of Kessler Syndrome. You can also iterate the satellites much faster as technology advances and waste less time making sure that the satellite is 'perfect' because you only have one shot at launching a JWST after 20 years of work.
On that note, why is one Hubble or JWST enough? We probably need hundreds if not thousands of them if we want a sufficient observation coverage to be fully away of all extraterrestrial (asteroids and commets) threats that might be coming our way.
Starship will certainly enable some new things we could not do before, or that were simply not economically feasible. But even then there is likely still a severe limit to the demand for launching payloads. All those payloads cost serious money, and while you can save a significant amount by removing the necessity for very lightweight construction due to the enormous capacity of Starship, this might only move stuff from "extremely expensive" to "very expensive".
> But even then there is likely still a severe limit to the demand for launching payloads.
The Starship is about changing the approach, not applying state of the art to a changed parameter. Currently there is a limit. After Starship is offered on the market, that limit may significantly change, as its main reason to exist is the high price of the launch services.
> All those payloads cost serious money
Right, but if you, say, are going to send off-the shelf - or, ok, almost off-the-shelf :) - Caterpillar to the Moon, the payload cost suddenly drops. This is exaggerration, of course, but the idea is that payloads may become much - orders of magnitude - cheaper to produce.
If you can drive the price ($ per ton to orbit) down, more demand will be created.
Historically and right now the payload cost dwarfs the rocket costs.
That will change and be reversed over time.
Some very sophisticated stuff like space telescopes is much more expensive than their launch costs. But indeed, try launching stuff like propellant or shielding and the difference currently is so high its not funny.
> Some very sophisticated stuff like space telescopes is much more expensive than their launch costs.
Today. Space telescopes are much more expensive than their Earth-bound cousins. In a large part because you can't afford failure. With cheap launches you'll send much cheaper telescopes, which will still do the same science - and they are cheaper because they are not made not to fail with very high probability.
Agreed, still even in the future instruments will be likely more expensive than say bunch of liquid H2 for your NERVA engine & which would influence how they are being launched and moved around.
I think the whole long-term point is to be able to "build" fuel in space somehow, either on the moon or in orbit, because then the rocket equation has been effectively solved.
Maybe, maybe not. Historically speaking, every time we make doing some expensive and rare thing dramatically cheaper or faster, somebody will dream up a way to make use of that new capacity. I'd be more than happy to see what people dream up to do if we manage to make access to space 10x cheaper.
Why not? That's exactly what we did when we ventured onto the high seas and across unknown continents. The spirit of adventure and all that. I'm sure you'd have many thousands of volunteers.
Do you have the same attitudes towards helmets whether you're walking on the street or riding a motorcycle? I'm assuming not, because you understand they are different risk profiles.
When risk profiles differ, so do the mitigation strategies. One of the ways spaceflight manages different risk profiles is by implementing a risk-based approach. For example, NASA classifies their software risk based on probability and severity. When risk is high, they leverage more requirements and more oversight as a way of mitigating the risk to an acceptable level.
What you seem to be insinuating is we should be willing to accept more risk. While I agree in principle, the hard part is getting stakeholders (from astronauts to contractors, administrators, politicians, and taxpayers) to agree. They get a say, too.
Agreed, and even if there's not enough actual demand, think of all the extra resources that they can start to stockpile in space for a trip to Mars, etc. by hitching a ride on the same launch as customer payloads.
So Elon Musk is aiming for 1000 starships towards Mars before 2050. 100/year over 10 year period (or something like that).
Each booster uses about 33 Raptors, and each Starship uses 6. I assume the boosters can be reused between launches to some extend. So they might not need 100 boosters.
But you'll need more than 100 ships active; I assume they wouldn't launch 100/year, but rather 200 every 2 years (due to the 26 month launch windows to Mars). Not sure about the return windows and strategy.
That's at least 200 ships (1200 engines) you need active at any given time + boosters + refueling vessels (Each launch will require 6-9 refuels in orbit).
Additionally, there is the whole Earth-to-Earth transport idea (i.e. New York to Tokyo in 50 minutes).
I think NASA's point is that it's looking for reliability in manufacturing and reliability in the field. Being able to produce AND TEST the engines rapidly will drastically improve both of those fronts.
If you're only able to make 4 a year (as does Rocketdyne, as mentioned in the article) then your ability to respond to failures during testing is abysmal at best. Also your ability to optimize and improve, simplify, harden, etc the manufacturing process and drive costs down also sucks.
Slow iteration for testing and enhancing rocket engines has been the bane of the industry since inception.
As a kid, I read about Goddard and the early days of rocketry, which was a bit wild. Does anyone know of a good history that touches on the factors that contributed to the increasingly slow iterations in the field prior to SpaceX? My fuzzy knowledge of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions suggest that they were fairly fast moving. Was the Space Shuttle era when iteration slowed down?
A lot of things happened. Apollo 1 disaster, end of space race, space shuttle not hitting enough launch volume and having unclear requirements, Challenger and Columbia incidents which skyrocketed shuttle between-flight maintenance, continued failure of NLS>Constellation>SLS.
Things move fast until something bad happens; then layers and layers of oversight are added to avoid bad things happening again. Years go by without bad things happening and people begin to wonder why we need so much oversight so they begin to peel them back. Rinse and repeat.
In that context, a major mishap is a very big risk to SpaceX because it can erode their efficiency. One of the advantages of the CCP approach is that there is much less oversight, so things can move quicker. I'm not so sure NASA will be okay with that if they lose an astronaut.
Read "Ignition!" by John Clark. https://archive.org/details/ignition_201612 . Mostly about search for liquid rocket fuels, but talks about the industry as a whole to some extent.
I have a lingering suspicion it was the astronauts. All of those pilots wanting to be in charge of the ship, in an age where is was hard enough to get a computer to do the work without having to cooperate with a human.
A lot of the stuff SpaceX has been able to do is down to automated systems. Maybe we would have had rockets that could land in the late 80’s if that turf war had gone the other way.
IIRC - Shuttle autoland capability was vetoed by the Astronaut Office. There was some capability within the guidance software for it, but it was never demonstrated (some early Shuttle flights got close to demonstrating it though).
In practice, I expect much of the answer will end up being "militarize space a whole bunch more".
I don't think anyone's expecting anyone else to actually abide by all those space-related treaties if there's another Great Powers war. Which, this century, means only one pairing: the US and China.
More surveillance, satellite kill vehicles with perhaps a little plausible deniability, dark, redundant GPS and comm sats, maybe some new, secret constellations at novel orbital heights for when all that debris gets spread around the lower orbits and screws everything up... maybe not actual space-based ground-targeting or anti-ICBM weapons, but then again, countries do cheat on treaties.
I'd encourage anyone bothered by this post (evidently, someone was) to check out the stats on past and upcoming SpaceX contracts. The overwhelming majority are the US military and NASA, and the US military's share isn't far behind NASA. Seems clear to me the smart money is on "same stuff, but more of it" if they bring costs down even farther. And I'd say the US military's got more room in the budget to quickly put together useful payloads than NASA does, if the prices drop, which narrows it down to "mostly more military stuff". And especially if Starship gives them the ability to put large payloads in higher orbits on the cheap. I bet they've got filing cabinets and skunkworks warehouses full of shit they'd love to build/finish and launch as soon as the costs work out.
But maybe I'll be surprised and military launches will remain about the same while StarLink competitors and elementary school students launching cubesats will eat up all that new, cheaper capacity.
Elon keeps hinting about competing with airliners for trans-oceanic flights. My bet is that Starship is going to become the suborbital trans-oceanic machine that shrinks the world in a way not seen since the airliner was invented.
If there is one thing we desperately need to avoid as a society, it's developing new technology that burns massive amounts of hydrocarbons to make rapid travel anywhere (somewhat) cheap and ubiquitous.
So, basically Concorde, but worse and more restricted. Needs a launch site remote enough to not drive everybody crazy with the noise (Shuttle launches could have been heard dozens of miles away), and a secure trajectory to not kill anybody on the ground if things go bad. Not even talking about reliability, g-loads, and many other things.
You can't jump from Mayfair, London to Manhattan with this system, at which point any flight time improvement becomes negligible.
High speed ferry to offshore platform? That should address both noise and safety.
All the check-in gets handled on shore, then a fifteen minute ride out to the platform on a high speed ferry, 20 minutes to onboard, then 30 minutes to any other offshore platform in the world, followed by a 20 minute offboarding, and another fifteen minute ferry ride.
The actual travel time would be less than the time you're expected to wait in the airport prior to boarding an international flight.
Or just a hybrid HTHL vehicle, think SpaceShipTwo with an additional airbreathing engine and some thermal protection instead of a fancy feathered system (not feasible at high velocities). Take off on a quiet engine, get away from cities, make a rocket-powered suborbital jump, vomit in between, re-enter, land quietly across the pond.
(still sounds handwavy and not very realistic, though)
Why not aim for the moon? Honestly wish we'd invest in moving a lot of toxic manufacturing processes over to the moon (I'm sure way smarter people than me can figure out a way to make those processes work in that different environment) and slowly turn Earth back into a green, beautiful planet.
Asteroid mining is another very profitable and useful option. We are talking about many trillions to be made, many things to be built, and people who get up there first could end up controlling lots of things for the foreseeable centuries.
Think of British East India Company, except the scope is way more than anything we can imagine.
If you are a super power, a project like this is something you must absolutely consider.
> We only need so many launches, especially super heavy rocket launches before we run out of payload. And if they build as many rockets as they have engines for, where are they going to store them? What about the launch pads? Etc...
The explicit goal, as has been stated several times by SpaceX leadership in the past, is for Starship to eventually cannabalize Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches. They've said they'll keep launching them as long as there is demand for them, but there will be more and more incentive for companies/governments to stop buying Falcon 9 launches. Already SpaceX sells some launch contracts for "arbitrary vehicle" launches where SpaceX can elect to launch the spacecraft on Starship instead of Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy if SpaceX so wishes.
This aim for monopoly strategy is going to have us in trouble in a few years just like germany is dependent of Russian oil the US government is too dependent now of the paypal mafia.
Is amazing to me that wealth concentration has occurred at a scale where projects like this don’t even need public financing through the equity market. Ha
Alternatively, technology has advanced to the point where this kind of work is doable by the private sector.
Drastically more wealth concentration has existed in humanity's past, but they weren't building reusable rockets because of it.
Also, SpaceX in particular was founded and started advancing this technology well before Musk at least was anywhere close to such extreme wealth. You might be putting the cart before the horse.
I would say that the satellite market has developed sufficiently that such efforts can be supported on a purely commercial basis. Yes SpaceX has major cash cow contracts with NASA and the DoD, but that was always the case with ULA too. What has changed is the huge market for commercial launches which SpaceX can service, and every reduced cost is profit for them.
(Opposed to government contracts which were traditionally cost-plus, meaning the cost reduction would actually decrease profits.)
Market for commercial launches existed since early 1990-s. Cubesats were invented at about the same time as SpaceX was incorporated. SpaceX definitely used a lot of existing opportunities.
In fact, it's hard to imagine how, in American society, a person could build a hugely successful new car company from scratch and revolutionize the launch industry, without becoming extremely rich in the process.
SpaceX is something that Musk created and controlled fully for the entirety the full period of existence of SpaceX. I think it is delusional to think it is successful despite Musk, especially with how many better funded space players such as ULA, Blue Origin and various government initiatives are falling behind.
buildings teams is part of my day job, Musk's ability to get the right people in the right spot at the right time and motivated is his biggest gift IMO. If you're good at that then there's really nothing you can't actually do.
Fortunately there are entire books written on SpaceX's founding years from interviewing employees which support the point that Musk played a pretty big role in SpaceX getting to where it is now.
Sure I have, you disagree with pretty much all of the leader of SpaceX who have said the opposite. Have you not bothered to look? You disagree with the journalist who has spent most time investigating space. You disagree with most experts who have studied the topic.
Ambition, backed by a lot of money. He's certainly not the first person to say "What if we could reuse the rocket?".
Musk's contributions can pretty much be summed up by "already had a lot of money" and "hired smart people". Contrast w/ the founding of Microsoft or Apple, in which the founders were the actual people creating their first products from scratch.
Musk is certainly a big-idea person, but I think he is a prime example of somebody who was in the right place to get lucky at the top of the dotcom boom, which in turn rested on him being from an already wealthy family. His foray into Twitter, "how to solve the Ukraine-Russia war", and the Thai cave rescue suggest he's not quite the genius his fans make him out to be.
> Musk's contributions can pretty much be summed up by "already had a lot of money" and "hired smart people".
He almost went bankrupt getting their first small rocket to space. He wasn't exactly poor at the time thanks to paypal, but he didn't have anything close to unlimited funds. He is a billionaire now because he succeeded, not the other way around.
> [..] which the founders were the actual people creating their first products from scratch.
> which in turn rested on him being from an already wealthy family.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1005593651219582977, "I arrived in North America at 17 w $2000, a backpack & a suitcase full of books. Paid my own way thru college. Dropped out of Stanford Eng/Phys grad school w $110k in college debt."
> He's certainly not the first person to say "What if we could reuse the rocket?"
Of course. But he was the first person to make it work, which was very non-trivial. NASA failed at it for 60 years.
From sratch? I don't think so. DOS was bought from Tim Patterson. Microsoft BASIC ran on a computer created by others. Microsoft didn't invent BASIC. Neither did Apple. Apple didn't invent the 6502. The Apple 1 was built from off-the-shelf parts available to anyone.
Being a genius does not require being a success at everything. In fact, most successful people fail quite a lot. The difference between successful people and unsuccessful ones is the successful ones:
1. are not dissuaded by failure
2. learn from their mistakes and failures
3. try again and again
The unsuccessful ones "learn" from their failure by not trying again. Or they quit before they start.
People love to give her all the credit, just to discredit Musk. She was doing sales for the first 8 years of the company. Surely an important job, and she is of course great, but to claim she is some overwhelming part of the success of SpaceX compared to Musk is to much.
Of course all the early people, Shotwell, Mueller, Königsmann, Bazza were all really important. Shotwell by now being the the most important.
But there really is no question that Musk deserves by far the most credit.
Here's Tom Mueller, the main rocket expert at early SpaceX, describing his experience working with Elon:
>And, uh, I’ve seen that hurt us before, I’ve seen that fail, but I’ve also seen— where nobody thought it would work— it was the right decision. It was the harder way to do it, but in the end, it was the right thing. One of the things that we did with the Merlin 1D was; he kept complaining— I talked earlier about how expensive the engine was. [inaudible] [I said,] “[the] only way is to get rid of all these valves. Because that’s what’s really driving the complexity and cost.” And how can you do that? And I said, “Well, on smaller engines, we’d go face-shutoff, but nobody’s done it on a really large engine. It’ll be really difficult.” And he said, “We need to do face-shutoff. Explain how that works?” So I drew it up, did some, you know, sketches, and said “here’s what we’d do,” and he said “That’s what we need to do.” And I advised him against it; I said it’s going to be too hard to do, and it’s not going to save that much. But he made the decision that we were going to do face-shutoff.
>So we went and developed that engine; and it was hard. We blew up a lot of hardware. And we tried probably tried a hundred different combinations to make it work; but we made it work. I still have the original sketch I did; I think it was— what was it, Christmas 2011, when I did that sketch? And it’s changed quite a bit from that original sketch, but it was pretty scary for me, knowing how that hardware worked, but by going face-shutoff, we got rid of the main valves, we got rid of the sequencing computer; basically, you spin the pumps and pressure comes up, the pressure opens the main injector, lets the oxygen go first, and then the fuel comes in. So all you gotta time is the ignitor fluid. So if you have the ignitor fluid going, it’ll light, and it’s not going to hard start. That got rid of the problem we had where you have two valves; the oxygen valve and the fuel valve. The oxygen valve is very cold and very stiff; it doesn’t want to move. And it’s the one you want open first. If you relieve the fuel, it’s what’s called a hard start. In fact, we have an old saying that says, “[inaudible][When you start a rocket engine, a thousand things could happen, and only one of those is good]“, and by having sequencing correctly, you can get rid of about 900 of those bad things, we made these engine very reliable, got rid of a lot of mass, and got rid of a lot of costs. And it was the right thing to do.
>And now we have the lowest-cost, most reliable engines in the world. And it was basically because of that decision, to go to do that. So that’s one of the examples of Elon just really pushing— he always says we need to push to the limits of physics. Like, an example I’ll give is, on the car factory; you know, a car moves through a typical factory, like a Toyota or a Chevy factory; a car is moving at you know, inches per second. It’s like, much less than walking speed. And his thoughts are that the machinery, the robots that are building the car should move as fast as they can. They should be moving so fast you can’t see them. That’s why you can’t have people in there, because they’d get crushed; people move too slow. That’s the way he thinks. “So, what are the physical limits of how fast you can make a car?” He looks at videos of like, coke cans being made, and things like that, where you can’t even see them; it’s just a blur. And, you know, the puck of aluminum, cut it up, deep-draw, fill it with coke, you put the lid on, you put the lid on it; it’s just like going down the assembly line so fast you can’t even see it. And Elon wants to do that with cars.
People often claim SpaceX was just Musk's show rather than a team effort where Mueller and Shotwell at least were just as important and probably more people besides. And he's had his share of bad ideas. But at the same time the sort of restless perfectioni...
More than that. One key line: "We blew up a lot of hardware."
Any other exec would have pulled the plug. For example, in 2017 Blue Origin blew up an engine and test stand. Bezos freaked out, fired the CEO and brought in an oldspace stooge who has basically killed the company.
It's when things get tough that you find out what leaders are made of. SpaceX and Tesla have gone through some really tough times.
In the eyes of everyone that knows you. Your peers don’t know you, they are just business relationships and cast a blind eye to who you are as a person. I’ve worked with many extraordinarily successful people and it’s hard to point to more than a few that are successful people outside their work.
I do believe he positively influenced these companies. I also believe he seems to be an insufferable megalomaniac; perhaps less malicious than others but still not healthy. I don't think his goals at twitter are long term profitability or a healthier American society/democracy, so I am very skeptical of his character.
The top line is debatable, it gets into the great man theory. And FWIW Tesla literally did exist before he was involved. Credit to him entirely for SpaceX being founded, but IIRC Gwynne Shotwell runs it day to day.
To the last point: Yes, I think he could. When you have $150,000,000,000, even losing $149,000,000,000 would leave you with $1,000,000,000, which is hundreds and hundreds of times the lifetime net worth of most Americans.
Meaning yes, I can completely imagine someone with his money spending a lot of money to have major influence over how the world communicates. Bloomberg spent a billion dollars of his own money trying to be president and he's still quite rich.
> Bloomberg spent a billion dollars of his own money trying to be president
The Clintons made around $100 million for being President. The Clinton Foundation is worth $300m, and is largely used to fund the Clintons. Obama is worth $70 million. Trump initially viewed his run for office as publicity stunt for his businesses. He was obviously surprised that he won.
Being President is very, very lucrative.
> FWIW Tesla literally did exist before he was involved
I know. And without Musk nobody would have ever heard of it.
> The top line is debatable, it gets into the great man theory. And FWIW Tesla literally did exist before he was involved. Credit to him entirely for SpaceX being founded, but IIRC Gwynne Shotwell runs it day to day.
Shotwell runs certain parts of the business day to day. Elon heads up new projects whereas daily operations goes to Shotwell, which makes sense given her position of Chief Operating Officer. For example, by her own words, she has little involvement in the Starship project, or didn't as of early 2021 when asked about it.
> I always wonder how people say Musk is a failure with a straight face. If that's failure, I wonder what would be a success!
Business is about improving the quality of life of the consumer.
Musk never went directly at that, he always involved himself in industries whose main customer is Government, or that would not exist without Government.
Apple, Microsoft, Google, Walmart, JPM...those are real businesses, which would thrive even if Govt. expense were to plummet at 5% of GDP (actually they'd do much better).
If Govt. expense were to plummet at 5% of GDP all the functional companies which Musk has would go belly up, not to mention the scam ones such as the NeuraLink and Boring.
It's also worth mentioning that this effectively outsources much of the risk to the taxpayer. Because the govt is self-insured, there is no insurance needed to limit losses. This is particularly important in risky business ventures, like aerospace.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing. The hybrid contractor/govt model has many upsides. SpaceX deserves a lot of credit for what they've done, but that context is important when gushing about when big gambles pay off. Those risks may never occur in a different paradigm.
Space is a big waste of money. At best it's a zero sum game playing field between countries. Regular people will never benefit from space.
Commentators and pundits were fooled by GPS , Sat-TV and Internet and are extrapolating loads of quality of life which would come from space if only could be cheaper to send stuff up there.
The world is increasingly urbanised. Fiber and 5G for telecomms will always be cheaper in an urban setting compared with sat-internet.
This is not really true. If SpaceX fails to perform, they don't get the money. They developed things like Falcon Heavy totally by themselves on spec. They pushed the government into fixed price contracts.
If SpaceX had failed to do the human launch, the cost would have been on SpaceX. As it is right now on Boeing.
>If SpaceX had failed to do the human launch, the cost would have been on SpaceX.
This is not how govt launches work. The payload (which is sometimes worth more than the rocket) is self-insured, meaning SpaceX is not responsible for eating that cost if it's lost. They are paid for the service (i.e., the ride) but have little to no cost regarding the cargo on govt launches.
This is true but that is the costumers responsibility if they want to insure their cargo or not.
Whatever method or rocket design the govenrment uses this is always an issue. Just flying on a government provided rocket doesn't change that cargo is at risk of being lost because it is not insured. In this case the risk to the tax payer is always at risk, it has nothing to do with SpaceX as such or the method of rocket procurement.
But the way the contracting model has been changed, the fact is, if SpaceX had not performed on their development and test campaign, they would have been stuck with the cost of most of that. Just as Being likely had to eat 600M+ because of their delays.
So in terms of developing capabilities for the government to use, this was an incredibly low risk and cost effective one.
>This is true but that is the costumers responsibility if they want to insure their cargo or not.
Yes, but this is somewhat missing the forest for the trees. The larger point is that relatively untested tech is going to be more expensive to insure because there is greater uncertainty. This makes it less economically viable until it proves itself to be reliable. Can a commercial company forego that and take on greater risk? Of course, but they aren't likely to because they are more risk-adverse for a variety of reasons. But because the govt is self-insured, the economic risk considerations related to that becomes a moot point. Meaning, the govt is in a unique position to take on risk to help an upstart like SpaceX. Note that 100% of Falcon Heavy contracts are govt (military/NASA).
>Just as Being likely had to eat 600M+ because of their delays.
But this is a different point. They are being penalized for contractual delays. This has the potential to increase risk because it incentivizes rushed development. We saw this with CST-100. The only reason it came to light is because the mission did not go as planned, and as a result NASA started to trigger additional oversight (which slows down development).
This is part of why the CCP can move faster than NASA. They don't have to build to the same requirements as an in-house NASA build. To an extent, all NASA cares about is the ride. That works well as long as things go as planned. As soon as they don't, NASA will start doing engaging more oversight. This has already happened with SpaceX, too. When some unfavorable things came to light, NASA wanted more govt in-person inspections/audits.
> Can a commercial company forego that and take on greater risk? Of course, but they aren't likely to because they are more risk-adverse for a variety of reasons.
What we are seeing is actually the commercial company are far more willing to risk these things the governments.
Companies like Astra (not that I think they are good) almost celebrates blowing up rockets.
> Note that 100% of Falcon Heavy contracts are govt (military/NASA).
This is true but Falcon Heavy was developed on spec. DoD didn't pay for its development unlike for almost all other rockets the military uses or used historically.
> This has the potential to increase risk because it incentivizes rushed development. We saw this with CST-100. The only reason it came to light is because the mission did not go as planned, and as a result NASA started to trigger additional oversight (which slows down development).
Yes but it rewards those that do development well and punishes those that don't. Of course oversight and verification is still a function government has to provide for the goods they buy.
> This is part of why the CCP can move faster than NASA. They don't have to build to the same requirements as an in-house NASA build.
CCP is learning the same lessens that NASA has. They have constantly rockets blowing up. They will have to also establish internal requirements that they follow.
And honesty, in terms of rocket development there isn't much evidence that China is better or faster from what I can see. We also don't know how much China is spending on these things.
> As soon as they don't, NASA will start doing engaging more oversight. This has already happened with SpaceX, too. When some unfavorable things came to light, NASA wanted more govt in-person inspections/audits.
Sure they will check everything and want to know about potential problems. The intensive structure however is still aliened better. The functions of the different parts are aligned better. NASA can tell contracts to change some process and have done so before but that doesn't imply automatically that these contracts will then drop in efficiency to the point NASA would have been at.
NASA own efforts like Ares 1 were so catastrophic that basically convinced large parts of NASA to not try that again. And NASA had a huge amount of success with the new model.
I think we pretty much agree on all this, particularly the effectiveness of the hybrid model.
>What we are seeing is actually the commercial company are far more willing to risk these things the governments.
My personal opinion is that that NASA (less so the military) are risk-adverse in terms of political risk. When there's little political risk, they are quite fine blowing stuff up to learn.
One thing that I've noticed is that commercial companies tend to take an engineering perspective and NASA tends to take a more fundamental science perspective. For example, when SpaceX had COPV issues, they were fine to just change the design and move on without understanding the root failure mechanism. NASA funded their own studies to try and understand what was going on. This is the direction I'd like to see the hybrid model continue.
I do think that contract changes can risk efficiency drops, though. Right now, CCP doesn't have to show a lot of their work. This may mean that their "efficiency" is a product of process gaps, rather than better processes. The CST-100 software validation was a prime example. It was a definite process gap that allowed them to get to launch quicker. If they were lucky and didn't run into issues, NASA would be none the wiser.
It's an odd strawman to focus on an arbitrary reduction in government spending, which is inherently part of the GDP calculation (C + G + I + NX, where G = government spending). For G to fall to 5% of the formula, some other variable would have to uptick, either Net Exports, Investments, or Consumption. It's hard to imagine a scenario where upticks in either of those 3 would not be beneficial to Tesla & SpaceX.
Tesla and SpaceX are political organizations basing their revenues off political trends
Tesla: Climate change political trend
SpaceX: Defense/National Pride political trend
Organic exports, investments and consumption would not be benefiting such companies, the big winners would be the real bona fide and non-political companies I already mentioned: Apple, Microsoft, Exxon, JPM, Google, Amazon, Walmart.
Meaning the stuff that people use daily as opposed to only reading about it in the tech and the financial press as aspirational goals after billions of dollars in subsidies and govt. contracts
> You are plainly wrong. Out of 50 Falcon 9 launches this year only 3 had DoD payloads.
If it's not DoD then it's military stuff from allies or Turkey, if it's not that then it's Starlink.
In any event the point still stands. This company only exists in the financial press and the tech press. Regular people aren't using SpaceX nor they ever will considering how the world is increasingly urbanised so sat-tv and sat-internet are dead on arrival matched against fiber and 5G. The only exception is maybe the yacht crowd but they aren't regular people.
Regular people aren't buying ASML equipment either. Aren't customers of Maersk. Wouldn't buy A330. They benefit from their products every day, though. And yeah, regular people are increasingly using Starlink, especially in my country. Turns out even good fiber infrastructure is quite vulnerable.
I pay SpaceX $110 a month for the best satellite internet service I have ever used. Even if the world was 90% urbanized with high speed fiber in 90% of homes, which is nowhere close to being true by the way, that would leave an addressable market of close to 1B people, nevermind the use cases for intercontinental travel and domestic travel (the service is already better than 4G and competitive with 5G average speeds @ 100+ Mbps).
Also, at 100+Mbps, this is the first generation of the technology. Is it feasible that they hit 1Gpbs by end of decade? I wouldn't rule out the possibility.
> by the way, that would leave an addressable market of close to 1B people
Hell would freeze over before Musk would even dream about making a philantropic service for poor people, because that's what you are describing. The poorest of the poorest in the next 50 years will be the last 10-20% who for whatever reason remains stuck in the badlands as opposed to moving to the urbanized world
I'd take the "hell freezing over" side of that bet. He's already providing 10s of millions worth of internet service for free to Ukrainians. Do they count as poor?
Starlink satellites spend a lot of time flying over Africa. And if it's priced at $110/month it will not see a lot of use. So for a very low marginal cost he can provide a very valuable service. Therefore I wouldn't be surprised if somebody talks him into giving it away for the next cause du jour, especially if its structured so he only gives away the service (low marginal cost) and not the terminals (high marginal cost).
No I am not. The "90% urbanized" figure was just thrown out there. Let's not debate urban vs. rural because even in the U.S. nowhere close to 90% of people have gigabit internet speeds or 5G availability. The addressable market for Starlink in US alone is likely 50-80 million people.
DirecTV and Dish Network alone have over 30 million U.S. customers combined. Keep in mind Starlink has been engineered for portability unlike DirecTV and Dish. More than 11 million families own an RV. And 12 million own registered boats. How many own second homes? Starlink takes 2 minutes to setup and 2 minutes to tear down.
Back to residential service though. There are tens of millions of households that are limited by old copper lines that were never filled in or cable extensions that were never dug. Or if the cable does exist, it's still at slower speeds and certainly not gigabit. Relying on mobile isn't a great option as most services today still throttle speeds down to 600 kbps when exceeding 15GB a month (which is nothing these days).
But worldwide, including in all the BRICS countries and the global south that rapidly growing in GDP and global importance is about 2-3 billion people with varying levels of spotty, congested, unreliable internet. These communities are probably lucky if they have 4G in many cases. That market is worth hundreds of billions over the next few decades, even when adjusting for purchasing power. Easily.
And your assumptions about relative competitiveness vs the highest quality residential speeds (which are only largely available to people in dense urban cores) are perhaps one upgrade away from being achieved. They already solved the hardest problem with regards to satellite communication: latency. It will be interesting to see how far they can push the bandwidth at scale over the years.
This is flat out inaccurate. Tesla sells a tiny % to government and if you are still trying to argue credits, you are beyond out of touch. And among all serious rocket companies in the world its the least dependent and direct by government.
Microsoft as made gigantic amount of money selling to government. So do large banks. GM and Ford have much larger better organized departments selling to the government. Amazon has huge contracts with DoD as well.
Tesla would not exist today if it wasn't for Government mandated climate panic. It's a company selling subsidised go-karts to rich people in California and New York due to the out-of-touch worries of neurotic politicians in D.C. , Glasgow, Davos and Paris.
> Microsoft as made gigantic amount of money selling to government
Microsoft , you mean the company almost dissolved by the DOJ? I will retract my statements on Tesla being propped by cronysm when Govt. produces even 1/100th of scrutiny endured by Microsoft. Who am I kidding? It will never happen...for the DOJ to go after a company it needs to have market share of 70% and upwards, whereas despite billions of dollars in subsidies and credits Tesla can't even make it to 1% of yearly global new car sales.
1% in 20 years. Ladies and gentlemen the backbone of the global industrial economy. Not. However that's how the cult leader...ehm I mean the CEO advertises it to the world.
Great dominance in the Financial press, tech press and gossip press though. And surprisingly even on HN and reddit people have fallen for the scam.
So much nonsense and often repeated myths. So many basic mistakes. You should be embraced.
> It's a company selling subsidised go-karts to rich people in California and New York due to the out-of-touch worries of neurotic politicians in D.C. , Glasgow, Davos and Paris.
Wow tell us how you really feel, you must feel so superior. Of course its just unsubstantiated nonsense.
So lets go threw some actual facts.
Most vehicles Tesla sells are pretty close to avg new sale car price. So I guess you can call everybody that buys a new rich if you want but Tesla is not really spacial or unique in terms of selling to rich people.
In terms of your 1%, they actually are more then 1%. 78 million are sold globally, Tesla this year will close to 1.5 million cars. Can you do the math? (And you can also do the numbers 12 month rolling if you don't want to include Q4 of this year). But don't let facts stop your rant.
And if you want to look at it in terms of profit, Tesla is way larger fraction of the automotive market then that.
And of course as far as your comment about how the press, the reality is Tesla profits this Quarter were higher then Ford and GM combined, close in profit to Toyota while having much better debt position and selling far fewer cars and models. And of course while still growing at incredible rates. Maybe just maybe that is why the financial press focuses on them more then many other companies.
Go and search some historically comparable companies in terms of revenue and profit growth and tell me how Tesla is doing badly.
> 1% in 20 years. Ladies and gentlemen the backbone of the global industrial economy. Not. However that's how the cult leader...ehm I mean the CEO advertises it to the world.
Have you actually done literally any research on the topic ever? Tesla is one of the faster growing manufacturing companies in history and doing that while also interdicting a product that had not existed to any series degree in the market before.
And Elon never said that Tesla is the 'backbone of global industrial economy' that just seems like something you made up. Please provide a source.
> whereas despite billions of dollars in subsidies and credits
In terms of subsidies Tesla got the same type of tax abatement's literally every large industrial player gets when making large. So if VW, Toyota or whoever had built a Gigafactory in Nevada they could have gotten the same kind of deal.
This is just a reality of the way the system works. It doesn't give Tesla some magical advantage that they can exploit against other companies. Its just how the economy works, you can like it or hate it, but as a reason why Tesla is successful its absurdly terrible argument. And its also not cash they can just spend, its just a reduced expenditure over the next 20 years.
So the idea that because of those subsidies Tesla got some competitive advantage is nonsense.
Another thing people mention is the tax credits program. This is a program that only applied to 250k cars and again was available 10 years after Tesla was funded. Again this provides no competitive advantage to Tesla, ever car company could take advantage of that. And GM and other companies used these credits too. So again to claim that Tesla success can be explained by this mostly falls flat.
The next and favorite thing people bring up is fuel credits. Fuel credits are system to reward companies that do good in terms of following regulations and punishes companies that are bad. This is not money from the government, this is money from car companies that pollute more then they are should. Again, these are the universal rules of the market. This rule was not designed for Tesla or with any intention of promoting Tesla. These are just the laws the car market operates under.
We can have a discussion if fuel credits are the best policy tools for government to use. But fundamentally are you gone disagree with the concept that governments should have fuel standards give intensives to companies to do the right...
That poster is correct, SolarCity was an utter disaster, with a generous helping of self-dealing.
People aren't pissing on him when he's right, they are pissing on him when he's wildly, wildly wrong, because he can't stay in his lane. Pedo guy submarine cave rescue is a great example of that. Covid will go away by April 2020 was another. Full Self-driving Tesla robotaxi that makes you money while you sleep in 201? is a third...
It’s absolutely true he had used more companies to support others, most recently using Tesla workers to look at Twitter.
However that argument alone doesn’t support the posts conclusion: “he's simply a highly privileged technocrat who has quite successfully failed upwards his entire career”
>He’d be super nice to the diver (who told Elon to stick a submarine up his ass).
Pulling a publicity stunt while people's lives were literally on a deadline was not helpful, and only served to distract the professionals involved in the rescue.
Throwing a tantrum and calling the diver a paedophile when they declined (on the basis that the submarine would not be able to fit into the caves and thus would be unfit for purpose, assuming it could even be built before the trapped group were killed by the monsoon) was a spectacularly awful move. And that's just one of the many fiascos he's been involved in.
Elon may be a successful businessman but he is also a disaster of a human being and has thoroughly earned any "haters" he may possess.
> Pulling a publicity stunt while people's lives were literally on a deadline was not helpful, and only served to distract the professionals involved in the rescue.
So was everyone who offered to help the trapped kids presumed to be a self-serving asshole for doing so, or only Elon?
> Throwing a tantrum and calling the diver a paedophile when they declined (on the basis that the submarine would not be able to fit into the caves and thus would be unfit for purpose, assuming it could even be built before the trapped group were killed by the monsoon) was a spectacularly awful move.
But the diver didn't just decline. He declined and told Elon to stick the submarine up his ass on national television. In that context, Elon's reply is childish, sure, but you'll have to explain what makes it "spectacularly awful" and/or a "fiasco".
> Elon may be a successful businessman but he is also a disaster of a human being
Help me to understand the standard by which I can judge whether someone is a "disaster of a human being". Is one bad tweet sufficient? Or one bad tweet and one bad prediction regarding future tech? How many judgmental internet posts would be required to hit the standard? I'm genuinely curious.
>So was everyone who offered to help the trapped kids presumed to be a self-serving asshole for doing so, or only Elon?
I'm sure the offers of help from experienced cave divers, folk who could help with logistical support, etc. were appreciated. Even the SpaceX engineers and supplies Elon sent were probably appreciated (I could not find anything about them actually being used, although I did not search extensively).
A techbro CEO throwing out half-baked whimsical bullshit ideas for social media attention, not so much. Not to mention personally injecting himself into the situation, touring the rescue site, and otherwise getting in the way of the rescue workers.
>In that context, Elon's reply is childish, sure, but you'll have to explain what makes it "spectacularly awful" and/or a "fiasco".
Falsely accusing someone of being a paedophile is not just childish, if taken seriously it can completely derail a person's life, get them fired from their job, turn them into a social pariah, and even result in them being assaulted or killed by vigilantes. Thankfully no one took Elon seriously.
Even if the diver was impolite when calling Elon out on the submarine thing, it was a completely disproportionate escalation.
>Help me to understand the standard by which I can judge whether someone is a "disaster of a human being".
Making such judgements can be complex. But attempting to socially destroy a person who is literally risking their life [1] to rescue children from certain death because they were mildly rude when rebuking them for being an attention-seeking twit is about as clear a signal as you can get.
[1] and that was not a hypothetical risk, two of the other divers involved died either directly during or later as a result of injuries sustained during the rescue.
> I'm sure the offers of help from experienced cave divers, folk who could help with logistical support, etc. were appreciated. Even the SpaceX engineers and supplies Elon sent were probably appreciated (I could not find anything about them actually being used, although I did not search extensively).
Elon/SpaceX's offer to help _was_ in fact appreciated by the lead diver.
Disingenuous, bad-faith half-truths are the most you will get out of the anti-Musk crowd.
It is simply too fashionable; and any iota of defense will get you labeled a boot-licking puppet.
It is just raw, distillable jealousy, combined with the new social paradigm of "this man is uber-bad and the single point of all problems" that long-Trump-Derangement-Syndrome has left ingrained into the thoughtless, NPC-eqsue masses.
Elon Musk is no worse than any other billionaire, and by many objective counts, the best yet for humanity.
You will be forgotten, he won't - and that pisses most off at a mammalian level.
Your link (to another HN argument you were in?) does not support your argument here.
Your link brings us to a 3-day old comment which argues SolarCity failed (which, yeah, nobody disagrees there) and that Musk "failed upwards" and is not a "tech deity". This is not claiming Musk is overall a "fraud and failure."
Well, no - they’re almost entirely opposed. To “fail upward” inherently requires one to have succeeded - if only on terms the writer thinks are lacking merit!
It’s totally legitimate for you to think that Musk is the target of unfair criticism, particularly around the influence he’s had on his businesses’ obvious successes. But you don’t have to build a straw man to make this argument. Virtually nobody would describe Musk as a failure - but they will argue frequently that he’s an arrogant narcissist, or that his success is unjustified. There’s plenty of criticism like that out there—justified and not—and it’s weird to make stuff up to get all “lol u mad bro” about.
He's not. He's a pretty solid engineer with a lot of resources and a crazy work ethic. He's also done very well recruiting smart people and at least keeping enough of them motivated to get stuff done.
Sometimes I think that the fact that he looks so superhuman sort of proves that wealth is not a meritocracy. If it were, Musk would be an average billionaire at best.
Hard work is necessary, but not sufficient. One also needs the audacity to do things everyone else says are impossible - like making a new car company from scratch, or reusable rockets - something NASA has failed at for 60 years.
(The space shuttle had to be essentially rebuilt after every mission, the boosters were thrown away, the concept was a dead-end from the start.)
This misunderstands the differences in how NASA is managed and constrained. It has inefficiency built in as a feature, not a bug.
E.g., NASA cannot build a major program with an assembly line mentality. The need to spread their work out across multiple constituencies to ensure continued support. Ever wonder why major NASA centers are in key political states like Florida, California, Texas, and Ohio?
Yeah, this is way off. By the forth attempt of Falcon-1 flight Musk was rather low on money and pretty high on risk. And no taxpayer funding yet. Downvote; go learn.
Except Musk himself has said they were hours away from bankruptcy before NASA's contract had come through after that fourth launch. Regardless, their early business model hinged largely on securing federal contracts i.e. taxpayer funds is literally what they used to mitigate their risk.
Also, when they lose govt payloads, the govt (i.e. taxpayers) shoulder most of the risk because they are self-insured. That means SpaceX gets to take bigger risks because they don't have to pay for them through the typical privatized mechanisms of risk mitigation like insurance.
>Downvote; go learn.
You might benefit from learning a bit from the HN Guidelines regarding discourse.
> You might benefit from learning a bit from the HN Guidelines regarding discourse.
Yes, I might :) . Just went with existing practice, not with guidelines. Will try to do better next time :) .
> Except Musk himself has said they were hours away from bankruptcy before NASA's contract had come through after that fourth launch.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. I think you're proving my point - your "Unless you're Musk, who gets the taxpayers to fund his risk. What's the saying? It's socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor?" says that Musk didn't risk his own money developing Falcon-1, and almost lost.
Remember Falcon-5? That was SpaceX approach to relatively slowly conquering the market in case NASA won't give them contracts. But NASA did, and Falcon-5 went to history, and Falcon-9 got full steam ahead.
> Also, when they lose govt payloads, the govt (i.e. taxpayers) shoulder most of the risk because they are self-insured. That means SpaceX gets to take bigger risks because they don't have to pay for them through the typical privatized mechanisms of risk mitigation like insurance.
SpaceX happily serves commercial customers. And commercial customers are happily served by SpaceX. And US government wants its own share of cheap and reliable - comparatively - launches, so SpaceX gets their orders too. Will you say anybody dealing with US government rides on the backs of taxpayers?
Do you understand that you're wrong with your socialism and capitalism?
I think we agree on the points but disagree on what they mean in the larger scope.
I have no qualms with the hybrid govt/contractor approach. I've said elsewhere on this thread that I think both sides can benefit from it. But, to a certain extent, I'm saying that limits Musk's claims to great business acumen, at least outside of relying on large govt contracts. To a certain extent, many on this thread have said that constitutes a type of grift. A grift that requires taxpayer money. I'm playing a little loose with the socialism definition, for sure, but that's what I mean in the larger point.
To that point, there would be no SpaceX without govt funding. One of the reasons they now have commercial customers is because the NASA contracts allowed them to get better to a point where private customers saw them as a viable option. If they didn't have that opportunity with NASA, I don't think they'd have private customers. For one, they likely wouldn't have enough early private customers to be economically viable. And two, those early flights would be much more expensive because they were unproven and that uncertainty makes insuring those flights much more expensive if not impossible. To that extent, a viable SpaceX business model is completely predicated on government contracts and not on private sector capitalism. The govt split the CCP contract to try and spread risk across multiple vendors and essentially fund an upstart in the hope that it pays off.
It's paying off so far, so I'm not saying that's all bad. But it does make their model divorced from a purely capitalistic endeavor. I'm not saying Musk had no skin in the game, but I am saying he had almost nil chance of winning that game without taxpayer support. Other people on this thread have pointed out how that distinction matters when comparing to better examples of business leaders.
>Will you say anybody dealing with US government rides on the backs of taxpayers?
I would say if the business model is only viable with government contracts and is particularly viable because it forces taxpayers to shoulder the early risk, yes. If your business only works by being propped up by the govt, it's a bastardized form of socialism. I'm glad SpaceX is able to move away from that, but let's not revise history to ignore those early facts because they don't fit our preferred narrative of Musk being a clever paragon of capitalism.
The simplest way of framing it is saying, "If they required taxpayer money in order to become/remain viable, it's a form of socialist intervention." I would put a lot of other companies in that list, from automotive to finance, so I'm not just picking on SpaceX.
I'm glad you're moving away from blunt accusations, but let's look into details deeper.
> there would be no SpaceX without govt funding
Strictly speaking, historically things evolved one particular way, and we don't know exactly what would happen if something have changed in the past. Here you state your opinion, and I'd say yes, SpaceX used US govt money, but that doesn't mean they couldn't grow without them. They already had an orbital launch on private money - a significant achievement by itself - and there were plans to grow without NASA, which - in my opinion - were reasonable. So I'm skeptical about their guaranteed death without support from US govt money.
> But it does make their model divorced from a purely capitalistic endeavor.
Maybe you mean some rather theoretical, simple pure market model. In reality US govt supports growing industries - Internet is an example - so this is at least rather traditional.
> I am saying he had almost nil chance of winning that game without taxpayer support
This is an opinion. Here is what I know: there is a community, called alt-space (from a Usenet section), or New Space, which basically talked about what SpaceX was doing about a decade before SpaceX. It was a matter of time who'd get this done successfully first. An example of this New Space approach would be Northrop Grumman Lunal Lander Challenge, where John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace showed a lot of impressive technology, and which was eventually won by Masten Space - all of that with reusable rocket technology, landing under power, years before SpaceX made first stages of Falcon-9 reusable. Because of this I think that Elon's stated approach of developing more modest, but cheaper rockets - like Falcon-5 (while continuing flying Falcon-1) - or partnering with Virgin Galactic on droppable launcher - relying only on private market could actually work.
> but I am saying he had almost nil chance of winning that game without taxpayer support.
Beal Aerospace "folded" a few years before SpaceX; now people have doubt if he did the right thing, given that his technology was perhaps even cheaper than SpaceX. NASA also learned a lesson from Beal closing the doors, and was more careful to the next entrant. The final result, by today, is rather good, by popular opinion, I would say - NASA got a good launch supplier, SpaceX got a good anchor customer, so US govt would likely lose if it didn't support SpaceX, and relying on that support was a good approach. Yet even without that support there is no guarantee SpaceX wouldn't succeed; there are some arguments for that.
> if the business model is only viable with government contracts and is particularly viable because it forces taxpayers to shoulder the early risk, yes.
SpaceX brought significant savings to US govt, so that risk - from US point of view - was rather justified. Remember, US govt can't work with only zero-risk schemes, and in such a complex area as space access it has to tolerate some risk, even with existing providers.
> If your business only works by being propped up by the govt
There is no proof that SpaceX couldn't work without govt help. Also govt help brought taxpayers savings - in exchange for some risk, which is not obviously comparable to existing non-zero risk elsewhere.
> it's a bastardized form of socialism.
I doubt many on HN will agree with you.
> but let's not revise history to ignore those early facts
I want to emphasize - if the history would repeat, those choices made would better be repeated. Even if SpaceX lost, US govt would be better keeping betting on new companies for the launch services, because alternatives are likely worse. In this sense SpaceX is a lucky opportunity for US.
> because they don't fit our preferred narrative of Musk being a clever paragon of capitalism.
For long time rocket startups assumed one of their customers - perhaps biggest, or the only one - would be US govt, bec...
>we don't know exactly what would happen if something have changed
>This is an opinion.
>There is no proof that SpaceX couldn't work without govt help.
These are all refuted by Musk's own words. He literally said NASA bailed him out when they were so close to failure he thought he might have a mental breakdown. The irony is that your push against that seems to be your own opinion, that goes against his. I am also aware of the previous work with similar ideas, including others that you didn't mention. Yes, the ideas existed. However, there wasn't the right climate or the right timing to execute it. Hell, govt essentially subsidizing flight goes back to the Wright brothers competing for military contracts. In a sense, that's what changed the pursuit from hobbyists to professionals. I give all the credit to Musk for capitalizing on that when the timing was right. But that is conflating good business timing that secures govt support with being a good capitalist businessman, irrespective of govt support.
As to whether the govt is better off, I agree. I've already said that much in this discussion and elsewhere on the thread. But the same applies to when the govt bailed out GM to save a major manufacturing supply chain, or bailing out the financial sector during the housing crises. This feels very much like a strawman. I'm simply pointing out they benefit from a form of socialized risk; I'm not saying the effects of socialist policies are inherently bad.
So, to your statement about this is just how things work, I generally agree there as well. What I disagree on is when people pretend it's not so in order to justify a fairy tale of capitalistic virtue. I don't think it's wrong for the govt to support businesses like this; if you recall, my original post was simply refuting the framing of the problem as a false dichotomy between NASA and SpaceX while failing to recognize that the differences are actually part of the intent, not the result of some boondoggle.
I do think you may have had a knee-jerk reaction to my initial comment, which is understandable given the amount of Elon hate. Maybe if you re-read it with a critical eye and some emotional distance, you'll interpret it differently. It seems like the only part we really disagree on is the viability of SpaceX without govt support early. Sure, maybe there's a chance they would have still succeeded, but given Musk's own words on the matter, I highly doubt it. And I'm pretty happy they've done well.
>>we don't know exactly what would happen if something have changed
>>This is an opinion.
>>There is no proof that SpaceX couldn't work without govt help.
>These are all refuted by Musk's own words. He literally said NASA bailed him out when they were so close to failure he thought he might have a mental breakdown.
We disagree in interpretation of Musk's words - indeed, I never heard him saying that he would certainly close SpaceX if NASA funding wouldn't materialize.
"“That would have been it for SpaceX,” Musk said. “But fate liked us that day.”
That’s because the fourth launch succeeded, reportedly due to engineers changing a single line of code to fix a problem from the third attempt. The success helped SpaceX land a commercial contract with NASA valued at roughly $1.6 billion, extending the young company a lifeline."[1]
“NASA called and told us we won a $1.5 billion contract,” Musk can be heard saying in the clip. “I couldn't even hold the phone. I just blurted out, 'I love you guys!’" Pelley asks in the clip, "They saved you," Yeah, they did,” Musk is heard saying. He describes that he had “virtually no money, a fourth failure would have been absolutely game over. Done.” [2]
Musk deserves credit for avoiding that 4th failure, but that's not the same as saying the business was viable without govt support. That's where I think you're initial response is off the mark. To your earlier points, though, I think this is where the hybrid model excels. The govt, due to it's size, can take on a disproportionate risk to help nascent companies/technologies. But let's not lose sight of the fact that many of these success stories are predicated on socializing that risk to the taxpayer early on.
> Musk deserves credit for avoiding that 4th failure, but that's not the same as saying the business was viable without govt support. That's where I think you're initial response is off the mark.
You can't seem to understand that NASA offer is not the same as closing the company without it. While NASA offer was nice, I never heard Musk saying certainly that without that offer - after Falcon-1 flew successfully - SpaceX would close.
Government takes risk just like commercial companies take risk. Nothing unusial here. Taking such risk means that some ventures will fail, but overall it will get better than without taking risk.
How do you expect them to continue, let alone get commercial contracts, when they are out of money? NASA gave them their first major contract and they didn't have a commercial contract until they got an AsiaSat three and a half years later, which came in at a paltry 5% of the NASA contract. How long do you think they could reasonably bleed money while operating on hopes and dreams without the massive NASA contract? The numbers just don't add up and Musk himself corroborated that fact. To the point I've been making all along, part of Musk's business plan has been to leverage govt contracts.
>Government takes risk just like commercial companies take risk.
Incorrect. Govt payloads are self-insured. This is essentially saying "We have such deep pockets that it doesn't matter if we lose the payload, it won't hurt us financially." I don't know many private organizations with that risk threshold. This is partly why the early govt contract is so important. It allows SpaceX to get enough experience while being funded by a customer that isn't risk-adverse. This buys them time to improve to a point where commercial payloads can be insured without being cost-prohibitive. Again to my original point, this means the govt shoulders a disproportionate amount of risk.
I guess when the CEO says "Yep, they saved us. Without that contract, we'd be done because we were out of money" and that isn't clear enough, you've transitioned to fanboy-dom. Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a hurdle.
This could be argued about :) as e.g. NASA beat Soviets in the Moon Race by behaving central-planning, while Soviets tried to grow local market competition (Korolyov, Chelomey, Yangel).
His success isn't all due to luck, he has genuine skills.
But his success isn't all due to skill, either. Someone with the same brain and no seed money from Daddy would have been far less successful.
> "We were very wealthy. We had so much money at times we couldn’t even close our safe,” [said Elon's father] adding that one person would have to hold the money in place with another closing the door. “And then there’d still be all these notes sticking out and we’d sort of pull them out and put them in our pockets.”
> More background: I arrived in North America at 17 w $2000, a backpack & a suitcase full of books. Paid my own way thru college. Dropped out of Stanford Eng/Phys grad school w $110k in college debt.
> We started Zip2 with ~$2k from me plus my overclocked home-built PC, ~$5k from my bro & ~$8k from Greg Kouri (such a good guy — he is greatly missed).
> My Dad provided 10% of a ~$200k angel funding round much later, but by then risk was reduced & round would’ve happened anyway.
As a general principle I don't credit that kind of statement by that kind of person. This is because every time I've looked into one of them in depth it was very misleading. That kind of rich person generally misunderstands the question and misses significant support.
Edit: For example, while he did work on a farm to pay for college that farm was owned by his Mom's cousin. Working for family is generally a significant advantage.
Edit2: Having a wealthy childhood has enduring benefits even if the money doesn't last. For example, it significantly increased his chance of having access to a computer at age 12, which probably had an enduring impact on his coding skills.
I'm not saying that means he didn't work hard and isn't smart. I am saying that it's telling he thinks that kind of thing didn't also contribute.
> I am saying that it's telling he thinks that kind of thing didn't also contribute.
I don't see why you think that this is what he thinks? It's certainly not what I think. What he is doing is answering persistent claims going too far the other way; that his success is only because of seed money from his father.
Or, as you say seemingly somewhat derogatory, "daddy". Their relationship wasn't always that great as far as I understand it, but I don't know the details.
Fair point, I shouldn't have said "seed money". I stand by my earlier statements that
1. If someone has wealthy family members this tends to benefit them, and they tend not to realize it.
2. Growing up wealthy didn't guarantee Musk's success, but it made it easier than it would have been if he grew up poorer. This happens in ways that are hard for someone like him to realize. For example, he might not realize that if he'd grown up worrying about money there's a significant chance his brain would have noticably changed in a way that made it harder for him to function.
There are many people who had the resources but didn't, not sure about millions. There are also many people who could have been as successful but didn't have the resources. That's why I said:
> His success isn't all due to luck, he has genuine skills. ... But his success isn't all due to skill, either.
Successful people make their own luck. For example, going to tech conferences is making your own luck, because it's there that tech companies can find you. (In fact, tech companies sponsor conferences often for the express purpose of finding talent.)
Remember "Field of Dreams"? "Build it and they will come?" That's typical hollywood bullshit advice. You've got to proactively market something, i.e. make your own luck.
> Remember "Field of Dreams"? "Build it and they will come?" That's typical hollywood bullshit advice.
Apparently you don't. Costner's character heard a voice saying, "Build it and he will come", referring to his father. So you took this as personal advice, albeit "bullsh!t" advice. More power to you ...
It's not that people (including myself) say he's a failure, for me, it's a massive amount of skepticism with admittedly a fair amount of snark. To me, he seems to want to take all the credit - I've rarely seen media reports of him saying the efforts of someone else were paramount (edit: other than a team at one of his companies) - It could be the media I'm consuming, but even on his Twitter feed, I've not seen him mention Shotwell for instance. One man, I don't care how smart, cannot be this involved in so many projects and succeed so wildly without being incredibly demanding, maybe too demanding of those who work for him. Let's give credit to those there day to day, like Shotwell, who realistically is a lot more involved and hands-on than he is.
Or you know - maybe he is that amazing, I doubt it, but Trump did invent the MRNA vaccines all by himself as well, so...
I didn't mean to say he wasn't involved at all, just that imho (which doesn't matter) most of these companies would be fine without him. He is a savvy business player, knows how to grab available resources as well as the spotlight. I don't see anyone heralding Bezos or a few other CEOs I could name to this level and he's quite a bit more successful.
Sidenote, all but a few of his twitter mentions of Shotwell are responses to mentions of her and it seems like he's injecting himself into the discussion.
Yes there's definitely a yearning for a person with crap politics to be also a fraud and under-performer. The most famous auto maker of the last century was a Nazi sympathizer and the previous space program darling an SS officer, you'd think people figure it out by now.
How many musicians do you like who are complete lunatics or toxic narcissists in real life?
There just doesn't seem to be a correlation between success in some narrow domain like engineering, business, art, or music and being a good human being in general.
I also wonder if there's a causative factor. When someone becomes super successful they tend to get surrounded by people telling them what a genius they are. That can definitely distort someone's self image. Could you stay balanced if millions of people compared you to a comic book superhero for years and loads of people did whatever you said because you had tons of money? Now throw in tons of stress and quite possibly a good helping of loneliness due to the difficulty all this creates with forming real deep relationships with others.
> There just doesn't seem to be a correlation between success in some narrow domain like engineering, business, art, or music and being a good human being in general.
I don't see any particular correlation with being a bad human, either. Look hard enough at anyone and you'll find feet of clay.
Success in their domains greatly outshine the clay.
It's possible to be successful in business and still be an insufferable douche. Elon regularly punches down, not up. It's hard to really respect a man like that.
And Tesla is a famously consumer-hostile company. We don't need more success like that. SpaceX is a much better example, and a lot of that can be attributed to how well he delegated leadership to someone competent.
Now he's waded into one of the most difficult lines of business and we'll find out in the next couple of years whether he's just been lucky and well-funded, or if he really is a business genius.
I own a Tesla, and I was a technician at a Ford dealership decades ago. Despite what you read on the internet, Tesla had better service and comparable quality to almost any vehicle on the road today. It's not Lexus, but Tesla's quality easily surpasses and other American brand. There are tons of issues, sure, but that is no different than any other car company. You just don't hear about the others.
It seems to me that being a technology company in addition to being a car company, Tesla's buyers are more likely than other brands' buyers to complain on the internet. And every supposed journalist knows that a Tesla hit piece will garner clicks.
>Tesla had better service and comparable quality to almost any vehicle on the road today.
Initially, Consumer Reports seemed to really like Tesla. But much more recently, they have not generally rated Tesla comparable to other cars. They only have one model (the Model 3) that even scored average.
One of their issues is that they like to move fast in their designs. Changing sensors, suppliers, components etc. means it's really hard to nail reliability and quality. As the saying goes...move fast and, well...break things.
Eh, I've had a number of cars. A lot, you might say, given that I buy a new one at least every 18 months. I've also owned a Tesla. My Camaro was built better ;-). Not joking, either. I got a pretty good Model 3, to be honest, but it still had weird inconsistent problems I don't routinely see on other mainstream makes.
In any case, by consumer hostile I mean: Tesla will turn features off on your car if it believes you are not entitled to them. Sometimes years later. They may cut your battery range significantly because it presents a fire risk, without ever 1) asking, 2) compensating you, or 2) fixing the battery. They may turn off the radar you bought with your car. They take liberties with the OTA updates that warn me away from wanting to buy another Tesla. Fortunately the competition in the EV space has gotten really good in the last couple years and is accelerating.
The Tesla owners I know are all happy with their Teslas.
> whether he's just been lucky
Being successful once might be luck. Being successful twice looks like business acumen. Being successful 3 times is business genius.
Bill Gates was successful 3 times, so was Steve Jobs.
Being successful in three unrelated industries: paypal, rockets and cars, is very very unusual. The number of successful new car manufacturers from scratch in the last 100 years or so is about zero (Delorean, Tucker, Bricklin, etc.) which makes Tesla all the more impressive.
> Now he's waded into one of the most difficult lines of business
Harder than car manufacturing or making rockets? Twitter is nothing compared to that.
> The Tesla owners I know are all happy with their Teslas.
I was happy enough. I won't buy another. There's another data point for you.
But putting aside anecdotes, I'm talking about things we know Tesla has done. Like taking away battery capacity (with no compensation) for existing owners in order to reduce liability risk for the company. Or how about deciding to take away features from individual customers because they've determined that customer should never have had the feature? Something that costs Tesla nothing but is a great big middle finger to their customers.
Anyone who buys a Tesla knowing their record of screwing over their own customers is foolish.
> Harder than car manufacturing or making rockets? Twitter is nothing compared to that.
It's worse. Much worse. With sufficient cash I can go hire an incredible amount of expertise building both cars and rockets. Rocketry in particular is an engineering problem. Twitter is a human nature problem. Good luck with that. And especially Elon, who has questionable social skills to begin with.
> With sufficient cash I can go hire an incredible amount of expertise building both cars and rockets. Rocketry in particular is an engineering problem
Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are pretty good arguments against this.
Take a look at the growing graveyard of failed small launch startups. Sure, rockets are mostly just engineering these days, but it is still very difficult engineering.
SpaceX was the also first to reuse an orbital rocket booster. They have now done so 150 times. It's hard to understate how big of a deal this is, to not throw away your rocket every time you launch it. And they are on the cusp of a fully reusable rocket with Starship.
Elon Musk is an arrogant asshole, at the least. But you are really downplaying the accomplishments of SpaceX.
> But putting aside anecdotes, I'm talking about things we know Tesla has done. Like taking away battery capacity (with no compensation) for existing owners in order to reduce liability risk for the company. Or how about deciding to take away features from individual customers because they've determined that customer should never have had the feature? Something that costs Tesla nothing but is a great big middle finger to their customers.
Those are tiny examples that only applied to a really small number of users. Hardly some grand plans of fraud.
More relevant things would be FSD not being transferable, at least while its in Beta. That is actually user hostile.
I agree with your argument about repeated business success, and am happy to credit Jobs with repeated business success (like Musk). But I'm not seeing the repeated business success you credit to Gates. Gates was half lucky, half nastily ruthless in getting his initial success with Microsoft (along with another half perhaps of having parents with influence, unlike Musk & Jobs). But his later 'successes' built on that early monopoly (Windows & Internet Explorer). They weren't independent successes like Pixar and Spacex were.
Yes, of course. He has many peers that he could throw punches at. He's only top of the hill at times when we measure strictly on paper wealth. There are plenty of successful businesspeople in this world. And he's not the leader of the free world, so he can always swing that direction.
> Elon regularly punches down, not up. It's hard to really respect a man like that.
He was punching up plenty. He has always been combative and would respond 2x to each perceived insult. He sued DoD and NASA. He went after the large car companies. He went after Bezos when Bezos was pretending BlueOrigin is even remotely in the same league as SpaceX.
But at this point, there is not many place to punch but down.
I'm also not a fan of twitter thing and its certainty a part of his character that is not flattering.
Elon recently 'punched up' against Hillary Clinton (only using the word 'punch' because of context here; actually it was a gentle questioning of a propagandistic line she was trying to push). I've also seen him lightly mock Joe Biden.
SpaceX build one engine per day while the competition is building one every 91 days. They're landing and re-using rockets every single week. They're taking humans into space.
Tesla build cars that have won basically every award there is. They're are basically the safest cars on the road. They outsell other EVs enormously.
There is no marketing it any of that, it's simply all facts.
Success and failure are, of course, highly subjective terms. Success, according to what definition? What flavor of failure?
I'd almost be inclined to suspect that Musk says (privately, to his closest confidants) that he's had very few successes and a great many failures.
Now, on the other hand, if one wanted to say that his public persona is often that of a pompous windbag, I'd be hard-pressed to disagree, though I'd hasten to add that (unfortunate as it might be) one almost has to be a pompous windbag in public to get far in business in contemporary culture. We live in the Era of Outrage, after all; "number of people pissed off" might as well be currency.
I haven’t really seen him called a failure unless it’s in the context of habitual over-promising and failing to meet frequently and very publicly stated goals. But, the stuff his companies are doing is hard so it is what it is. Couldn’t hurt to be more realistic from time to time though.
People do this all the time. Remember the times when people used to go around hating Steve Jobs(He didn't build the entire iPhone or iPod by himself etc etc, "so why does he get the credit" sort of reasons).
I was there when Bill Gates would attract similar hate. Jeff Bezos is only lucky that there isn't much of public facing information on Bezos, like Bezos speeches or Bezos is not known to routinely give out success advice on commonly accessible media.
Elon Musk is a highly successful immigrant entrepreneur, built several companies, some of them happen to be some of the hardest businesses ever to win in. Has a very powerful social media presence, he announces his intentions often, which many feel are impossible, but he wins nevertheless. He also is also very good in social culture scene too, which many people find cool. He is what most people want to be, but can't for various (at times valid)reasons.
Being a counter thesis to your (at times valid)excuses is bound to attract some resentment and hate.
Does it mean one engine rolls off the assembly line each day or that they build one from start to finish in a day? Probably the first assumption I guess.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 345 ms ] threadSo not only are you getting ~90x as many engines/year you are also getting a similar amount of thrust but at half the weight, likely meaning considerably mission mass / vehicle when configured for like for like thrust.
rs-25 vacuum thrust = 512,000 lbs, sea level = 418,00 lbs
raptor2 thrust = 510,000 lbs
It's not clear if that's sea level or vacuum for raptor2 but i would assume sea level since it came from a test stand and raptor2 hasn't flown in a vacuum yet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Raptor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-25
However that isn't the most important factor, it's that the thrust/weight ratio is so much better.
Here is a really good overview of what sets it apart: https://everydayastronaut.com/raptor-engine/
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceLaunchSystem/comments/pbk4am/t...
> more like 4 years for ONE
That is disingenuous. The message you pointed to says "4-4.5 years from when we order material" which is comparing the manufacturing of an assembled item with the full length of the supply chain.
This is bad, because a sole supplier of viable orbital rocketry is almost as bad as only nation-states having the capability.
Hopefully, someone steps up to the plate. My guess is that Russia and/or China both have "black" programs to copy and replicate SpaceX's technology...
Completely agree.
> They won't recover for decades from the tech embargoes that started in 2014 and are very extensive now.
I hope they'll change approaches rather soon, 180 degrees, and will start digging out. It will still take time.
Putin never saw the space industry as anything but a profit center he can squeeze to fund other stuff, once SpaceX made it hard to compete they just gave up.
Well, it's still way better than none having the capability IMHO, so kudos for SpaceX to make it possible! One of those cases where being technologically brilliant gives you a big competitive advantage IMHO.
Veritasium did a video on their rocket: https://youtu.be/kz165f1g8-E
If it manages to "land" successfully just above the water, then they'll go for landings back at the pad.
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-elon-musk-starship-orbital-...
(Although I guess you could refly the same tanker a few times)
If you were really going to Mars you would need all the Starships you could get, even operations around the Earth and cislunar space could keep a substantial fleet busy if the cost per pound is low enough to encourage new applications. You will also need to replace engines at some rate.
A full stack Starship right now needs 39 engines (33 for Super Heavy, 6 for Starship). SpaceX will definitely lose some to testing (and indeed last I checked they are 100% going to lose all the initial ones, because they're going to do a mock-landing over the ocean before attempting a real landing, so even if it goes perfectly all those are going into the salt water). Once they have SH being recovered, ideally starting launch 2, that will cut the burn rate big time but they'll still probably take a bit to start successfully recovering SS. That's entirely expected and acceptable for MVP and as a worst case for HLS (because Lunar Starship and such aren't coming back to Earth at all, that's Orion's job). SpaceX runs hardware rich, so they will need hundreds just for testing.
Long term though they want 1000+ Starships for Mars and other efforts. There will still be expended Starship profiles, and reuse doesn't mean that cadence won't require having more raw vehicles. Fueling orbital depots quickly requires lots of vehicles and trips, and boil off particularly early on means just depending on a few isn't ideal (and that's assuming they have reuse working by then, if they have to just eat the refueling as expended to meet their contract obviously they'll need more). With the current design that's tens of thousands of engines, so at current production they'd be hitting the right numbers in about 22 years which seems in the ballpark of when such an effort might actually get going.
At any rate mass production is very important for their plans and how they operate. It's let them iterate very quickly, iron out more kinks, be much more aggressive about testing which in turn feeds back into doing each better, and pushes down the cost per engine dramatically. If you go to the Ars comments first page you'll see pictures comparing Raptor 1 and Raptor 2 and can just visually see the massive simplification (though note it's a little bit unfair because Raptor 1 was much more heavily instrumented, but there is far more stuff removed/improved then just that).
Are they going to pick them up or let them sink?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban
0. https://www.uthsc.edu/its/business-productivity-solutions/le...
Recommended podcast episodes about Deming: https://smallbatches.fm/search?query=deming
One thing I've noticed that the owners' or CEO's personality tends to permeate throughout the organization, for better or worse.
[0]: https://thedriven.io/2021/01/12/the-factory-is-the-product-m...
Can't argue with SpaceX, though - an engine a day is an insane pace.
Talk to an actual industrial engineer and they can tell you how laughably bad some of Tesla's manufacturing practices. You're never going to catch up to Toyota or Honda in pure speed or quality.
But Tesla has figured out a ton of clever ways to cut corners (mostly by having a customer base that accepts a very tiny static lineup of car models) and have gone all out on economies of scale.
> "What's driving Mr Terashi's effort is the EV's faster-than-anticipated takeoff and rapid-fire adoptions of cutting-edge innovations by Tesla and others," one of the people said.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/exclus...
Go and actually watch the disassembly and analysis done by Munro engineers. They do detailed analysis and costing. And Tesla is routinely doing things nobody else is doing that is highly effective.
Their use of aluminum casting is industry leading. Their electronics are industry leading by a wide margin. They are great at working with large glass panels. Their battery packs are industry leading. Their heating-cooling loop is fantastic. I could go on.
Just go and look a Tesla looks under the frunk and then look at how a VW ID.4 looks.
That doesn't mean they are the best at everything. Their suspensions are not as good. Their fit and finish is not as good. Again, there is more one could mention.
To just flat say that Tesla it worse at manufacturing the their competition is simply not true. If it were true they could never achieve anywhere close the margin they got. And this margin is achieved with pure EV, something most companies barley make profit on.
Tesla is also amazing at iteration. They are iterating faster then Toyota. In 2017 Model 3 had a lot of issues, if you look at Model 3 in 2021 the internals are very different.
> But Tesla has figured out a ton of clever ways to cut corners (mostly by having a customer base that accepts a very tiny static lineup of car models)
A the old 'all their costumers are idiots' defense that can't be backed up by anything substantial.
> and have gone all out on economies of scale.
They are pretty small car company still in terms of volume. And centralizing and vertically integrating production is a valid and effective industrial practice.
They had better margin then the competition while having 1/2 or less production on a architecture so just saying 'economics of scale' is just nonsense.
> They are iterating faster then Toyota. In 2017 Model 3 had a lot of issues, if you look at Model 3 in 2021 the internals are very different.
To put it in perspective in these 4 years, Toyota iterated for every single model year across 14 different model. And on top of that released all new platforms for the Yaris, the Camry, the Rav4, the Corolla, the Land Cruiser, the Tundra, and the Avalon.
This actually undermines your point to a certain extent. Tesla is great at iterating but that often comes at a cost to quality. It is very hard to manage reliability when parts and suppliers are constantly churning.
"Older models typically fare better in reliability, as companies tend to make tweaks and redesigns to solve known problems, while sticking with the same parts and suppliers.
But Tesla deviates from this approach, Fisher explained. “At almost random times during the year Tesla will switch major components, suppliers or sensors and other units. The more you change, the greater the chances you’re going to have some problems.” [1]
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/18/consumer-reports-2021-auto-r...
"5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs." - Edwards Deming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming
This does make version and revision management and service harder, but that you can manage with software and its worth the cost.
However, what you say is partially true, its not all positive. If you endlessly make the same car with very little change you can also hit very high quality and reliability. That is why sometimes cars like Jeep look good in quality rankings.
Overall however, I think there is good reason for iteratively interdicting changes.
>"but that you can manage with software"
This is a take that seems accurate on it's surface but belies a lot of additional problems. Leaning on software for improving reliability can be a dangerous path. It's tempting because it's cheap and easy to iterate on. Software doesn't wear out like mechanical components. But software makes reliability pretty tough when you constantly iterate because it tends to fail at interfaces. Not only do the number of these interfaces tend to grow exponentially, they are notoriously difficult to test fully. Nancy Leveson has some good articles that demonstrate this distinction.
A automotive example from my own experience is a comparison with mechanical vs. electrical robots used in the stamping process of body panels. Plant managers like electrical retrofits because they held the promise of being much cheaper to build and modify. But they needed near-constant tweaking of the control system. The number of interfaces causes a lot more failure modes and impacts the reliability. By contrast, a mechanical system is, by it's nature, constrained by mechanical linkages. Once the mechanical system is tuned and working, it works for a long time. Gradually the parts wear, but they tend to be much easier to predict and troubleshoot.
Since this thread is about aerospace, you can see where software failure caused catastrophic failures by lulling engineers into complacency about how software can enhance reliability. From Ariane V, to Falcon, to CST-100 all have examples of how software did not fulfill its promises to increase reliability and often it does the opposite. Don't confuse the ability to move a design change faster with an inherent ability to make things more reliable.
What I mean by 'manage with software' is that each car has an exact description of what hardware is in it. Meaning what revision of every part. Tesla has some advantage because they manage the process end to end, knowing exactly what vehicle was sold to what costumer and the control the service center and write the diagnostic software so the service center should know exactly what car they are working on and what potential problems each revision of the software has.
In the 70s when Deming advocated for this such extensive version tracking would likely be much harder.
The software management issue I was talking about was a different animal. Take the Ariane V; the idea was the could iterate faster if they leveraged software reuse. Since it was previously verified software, they didn't think it needed much testing. But the new rocket design exceeded the assumptions in the previous iteration and the vehicle was lost. There's a lot of instances where software allows you to iterate faster, but you have to very careful about the baked in assumptions.
But that brings ups up a specific example of where Tesla has struggled. They used to keep HUGE backstocks of excess inventory (I believe they have since tamed this) which is a classic manufacturing mistake. So if you have any production mistakes or improvements in the part, you have to scrap or just cycle through the entire inventory until the improvements show up in the car.
This is why Just-In-Time is such an important concept in manufacturing. You can iterate constantly. Meanwhile, Tesla would crank out huge batches of identical fenders and doors and mirrors to maximise efficiency (economies of scale) but then struggle with part fits and panel gaps.
Tesla has since dealt with a lot of this when they went through their production hell period. But a lot of what they had to do was re-learn things like Lean Manufacturing and JIT.
Yes Tesla had to re-learn a lot about manufacturing. They certainty didn't start out being good. But by now they are doing pretty well.
Just 5 years ago, they had 10k cars per quarter.
You need to look at rate of change of improvement. Or, we can check back on Tesla 40 years from now.
Are you comparing the rate of change of improvement of Tesla to Toyota during their first 5 years?
For comparison, if Toyota was as efficient as Tesla they would've posted 2022 Q3 profits of ~$24 billion, not $3.1B. Tesla achieved $3.9B from only 344k cars. Operational efficiency is their leverage.
Cars sold (2022 Q3)
Toyota: 2.6M (+5% y/y) Tesla: 344K (+42% y/y)
Operating profit excl. FX impact Toyota: $3.1B (-38% y/y) Tesla: $3.9B (+97% y/y)
They have a different business model than OEMs, this is not apples-to-apples. OEMs act as wholesalers.
Besides the fact that you're talking about the efficiency of a company that literally produces 10x the number of cars. Let's see what happens to Tesla if they ever reach that scale.
>Toyota: 2.6M (+5% y/y) Tesla: 344K (+42% y/y)
Base rate fallacy. Why not use absolute numbers of cars, rather than percentage increase? It would tell a different story, wouldn't it?
10x higher production should in itself bring a lot in terms of economies of scale. Generally, the more you make of something, the cheaper one unit is to make.
So Tesla's position is certainly more impressive in this comparison.
I'm not even saying they don't have great manufacturing practices objectively - if you compare them to a lot of other industries they absolutely do. But auto manufacturing has always been the cutting edge of manufacturing tech and they simply are not at the top of that highly competitive field yet.
I'm curious, because sometimes exceptional supplier expectations come from a customer not really knowing what they need, so they ask for the world.
In doing something as simple as making their own seats, they were able to also improve the safety. They've put sensors directly in the seats to reprogram airbag deploy sequences, in software, on the fly. They know if there is a child sitting on the very edge of the seat vs an adult laying down across the seat and have the airbags fire differently based on this knowledge. Recently[2], they stepped this up a notch and are in the process of using millimeter wave radars to confirm this. They're industry leading in this regard and previously just used pressure sensors plus the cabin camera above the rearview mirror.
In short, Tesla is not perfect, but they are trying to rethink the problems from first principals. In doing this, they are coming up with very novel approaches that are actually big improvements over the entire industry. In other areas (fit and finish) they're towards the middle of the pack when compared against peer auto manufacturers.
[1] https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-patent-refrigerant-seat-temp...
[2] https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-driver-monitoring-system-fcc...
One of the ultimate "business metric" for auto manufacturers is the gross margin aka "how much profit does the company make as a percentage of the cost of the vehicle"
Before Tesla, Toyota[1] generally held the crown as the highest with just under 18% over the past five years. Ford[2] averages around 14%. Tesla[3], is industry leading with an average of 20.61%. GM[4] has always sort of been a laggard with the average at 11.26%. The German manufacturers, known for their efficiency, also do very well with VW[5] at 18.75% (this includes Porsche, which significantly tips the scales upwards for Volkswagen) and Mercedes[6] at 19.66%.
So Tesla makes approximately 6% more profit per vehicle sold at the low end (GM) and almost exactly 1% more than Mercedes on the higher end. Mercedes has ~173,000 employees and (per your own comment) Tesla has ~110,000 employees. So doing "less with more" is a pretty nice way to say they're more efficient, is it not?
[1] https://ycharts.com/companies/TM/gross_profit_margin
[2] https://ycharts.com/companies/F/gross_profit_margin
[3] https://ycharts.com/companies/TSLA/gross_profit_margin
[4] https://ycharts.com/companies/GM/gross_profit_margin
[5] https://ycharts.com/companies/VWAPY/gross_profit_margin
[6] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/02/tesla-tsla-q3-2022-vehicle-d...
How long does it take to cook dinner? Well, depends on whats in the fridge, does it count going to the grocery, who grew the food?
Each one could take five years to build for all the title says.
Though their launch payloads are often classified, that they're launching DOD payloads isn't classified and given the contracts that are public as reasonable proxies for the ones that aren't, there's simply no chance the DOD's manifest is SpaceX's biggest in terms of launches or dollars.
NASA, for example, launches on SpaceX way more often than DOD. You can easily count the launches yourself by reviewing SpaceX's historical manifest on Wikipedia. I think there have been 6 or 7 DOD launches in the last three years while there have been 15 or 16 NASA launches in the same time period. Some DOD launches are a bit more lucrative than some NASA launches, but the inverse is also true.
You might go on to assert that SpaceX has other DOD projects like its Starlink/missile tracking and E2E cargo (and potentially troop) delivery (and even money for Raptor dev and other smaller programs like the long ago DARPA investment in Falcon 1) but it's clear from various reporting that those are tiny investments compared to a year or three's worth of orbital launches.
Yes, the USG is SpaceX's biggest customer. No, the DOD is not SpaceX's biggest USG customer. That title, for now, belongs squarely to NASA.
You can see, clearly, far more launches for DOD umbrella agencies than for NASA.
Historically, von Braun had to use 70% ethanol - i.e., diluted with water - to avoid V2 engines burning through. So, loss of efficiency. It took quite some efforts to e.g. Glushko with Liliput to switch to kerosene (and cylindrical chamber and flat injector head) - the result was R-7 engines. Some decades of improvements - for example, V2 uses hydrogen peroxide to drive turbopumps, modern engines all use main components, which at least simplifies the engine overall, the closed cycles don't have separate exhaust after turbine, turbopumps are much more efficient (geometry in 1940-s wasn't too good from fluid dynamic point of view, turbine vanes didn't use that high temperature gas, losing in efficiency - here some material development work is important), and others. Raptor has an order of magnitude higher thrust.
A lot more complexity, I'd say.
And that's before we get into insane complexities of a full flow combustion cycle vs the open cycle of the V2's engine.
Definitely a lot more complex.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-9_Desna
So, it might be considered, I guess. Even though Starship looks rather from another era...
It's because SpaceX and Tesla are the clear leaders in opposing the de-industrialization trend in the hyper-financialized American economy. It's so incredibly stupid and short-sighted to move manufacturing and the associated technological R&D outside the United States, as it results in the loss of critically important technological skills. Follow that route and you end up with financial institutions desperately trying to retain control of technology via intellectual property lawsuits targeting countries with their factories in China, which as history has shown, will alway be a losing battle.
Rolling back the financialization of the American economy, and re-introducing industrial activities at scale, is the only way the country will avoid devolving into a dystopian Third World system of wealthy enclaves with large capital holdings (protected by private security armies) surrounded by miles and miles of festering slums.
Twitter banning the discussion of preferences was a bridge too far with the role it plays geopolitically.
The biggest threat is really a matter of time management. He is now spreading his time really really thin across some of his companies.
Most of the people who are on that bandwagon would place their favorite celebrity on a higher pedestal than EM. Which is to say the way we rank people and go after people seems off. It's easier to stay on people's "good side" when you're not doing anything different.
As far as I can tell, the people who "smear" Musk don't do so because of his companies, it's because they oppose his ideas and how much influence he has to implement them. Whatever you think of Musk, it's a little scary that someone can just buy the megaphone that is Twitter and disseminate whatever information you wish.
And also, no. Many people I know are barely aware of him. Tesla is more famous than Elon Musk, who is more famous than SpaceX.
But it doesn't seem like there's any fundamental tension in assessing that in some domains he has done good/useful work and in other domains he's acting like an idiot. It needn't be the case that he's either an all-around genius or an all-around fraud/charlatan/megalomaniac/whatever.
Now, by how much you can change the delta on value creation with some specialized knowledge is part of the risk/unknown that Elon seems to understand.
Sad to see his comment turn gray and magically disappear because his opinion is “unworthy”.
https://everydayastronaut.com/spacex-raptor-engine-compariso...
SpaceX is following a "fully reusable" strategy, I am not even sure if the BFR booster has an expendable option, Starship may be expendable but it is clearly not the configuration they are pushing for. And yet, SpaceX is producing these engines as if they were consumables.
We only need so many launches, especially super heavy rocket launches before we run out of payload. And if they build as many rockets as they have engines for, where are they going to store them? What about the launch pads? Etc...
I am not criticizing SpaceX strategy, I know that Musk is a fan of assembly lines, for a lot of good reasons, so maybe they are just making so many engines just because they can, or so that they can blow them up later during testing (another SpaceX hallmark), but I am curious about their medium term strategy (i.e. after Starship is operational but before crazy projects like Mars settlements).
In the short term, they need hundreds of full stage rockets, and in the medium term, thousands. That's tens of thousands of engines needed in the next ~10 years. I don't think 1/day is fast enough and I'm sure they will increase that rate as soon as possible.
Also for testing, SpaceX doesn't want to be afraid of blowing up rockets and losing engines, so the first few hundred engines will likely not be reused.
Going to space in the 1960s made sense from the perspective of scientific advancement, and let's be honest, showing off. Now, we realize that the world has serious problems - but the people with influence are decidedly un-serious and so would rather continue to show off instead of fixing the mess they helped to create.
Depends on what exactly are you mining and whether it is possible to make fuel out there. And with launch cost falling drastically I expect to see this in my lifetime.
Now, it's important to note that there are some wonderful research insights that could be gleaned by landing things on Mars, and also perhaps by using martian resources to launch things further away from Earth. None of these require 1000 rockets landing on Mars though.
Human history is progress and this is progress.
“As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, the Whale
> And why is it the pro space people who need to stay on earth and save it, what about everyone else?
If we limit "pro-space people" to the billionaires sucking up all the oxygen in the room with their dick-waving, the "why do they need to save it" is obvious - they have the money to make a positive difference. Failing that though, if Papa Musk wants to blast himself off to Mars and die of radiation sickness, he's welcome to do so.
Money does not magically fix people however much you want to believe that.
But I guess you made my point for me… your argument has nothing to do about actually fixing anything, it’s entirely about optics.
That's tremendously valuable, because it's off planet and out of our gravity well, so we can launch much bigger rockets (measured in interplanetary payload capacity) than we can from earth (though the moon itself may be better, depending on what we can get there).
If you want to do science, then I wager it is better to do more of the work on Earth and head straight for your destination, avoiding the Mars gravity well entirely.
The world is and will always be a mess. That’s the nature of human being, we have different ideas, priorities, mindset. We can’t stop progress in an area just to fix some other areas. Besides, it is baffling that space is always singled out when it comes to fixing earth’s issues. Why not says, divert all resources of the video gaming industry to fixing climate; stopping all sporting competition, especially professional ones, for the same goal? That’s of course straw man and unrealistic argument, but space skeptics repeat the same argument on every single space discussion.
Elon has said that his motivation is to make humanity a multi planetary species thereby lowering the risk of extinction (asteroid impact, nuclear war, pandemic, biological warfare, catastrophic climate change, what have you).
Personally, I suspect he might just be doing it because he's nerdy and likes the idea.
For all of us who may not agree with his motives, the technological innovation required to make such a project a reality will benefit all of us anyway; so, for my part, I hope that SpaceX/EM succeed in their goals.
None of those will leave the Earth even a millionth as inhospitable to life as Mars already is - so this motivation makes no logical sense.
Not to mention, with anything resembling current technology, any Mars colony will be highly dependent on Earth for a good few hundred years - there is no way to bootstrap a fully functioning high tech economy any quicker than that, and life on Mars would depend critically on the highest of high-tech (there is no way to live on Mars without computers, for example - so you would need to be able to build, supply and man advanced chip fabs on Mars before you could have a self-sufficient colony).
It also can't be forgotten that there is no proof that a human population can survive on Mars at all, given our current technology. For example, we have no way of knowing yet if humans could successfully reproduce and bear children healthy enough to reproduce themselves in such a low-G environment. We may require genetic engineering to actually be able to live on Mars (or at least human settlements might require huge centrifuges of some kind simulating high-G, which is way beyond our current abilities to do on a planet, or at least increases the costs thousand-fold).
Not to mention, there are good reasons why the ancient Egyptians did not start work on a rocket program, even though they did want to fly.
> there are good reasons why the ancient Egyptians did not start work on a rocket program.
They didn’t have the required knowledge to do so. The rocket equation, after all, was only established a hundred years ago.
Also, computers are useful even if we didn't think of the Internet. 1000 space ships on their way to Mars are not very useful if we can't actually live on Mars.
If you need both thrust & efficiency, a large number of ion thrusters is often a good option.
Put another way, we might one day look at Starship as a big rig semi truck (though the ISP of Raptor is actually really good while a big rig's is very much not). The fuel efficiency isn't really that important.
I think (or hope at least) we're far away from being able to really see how much space access is going to change if Starship actually pulls off what they're trying.
You’d use your whole manufacturing capacity then to do 90 missions a year.
Why do you believe this is true? It's entirely possible that there's a massive amount of unmet demand that's only economically feasible at lower price points that SpaceX is beginning to unlock with reusability and economies of scale.
Even SpaceX themselves is a huge customer with Starlink. An extremely low cost of launch not only means that you can put drastically more satellites up, but you can put them in lower orbit where they will have a shorter lifespan, because they decay orbit and burn up exponentially faster, mitigating the risk of Kessler Syndrome. You can also iterate the satellites much faster as technology advances and waste less time making sure that the satellite is 'perfect' because you only have one shot at launching a JWST after 20 years of work.
On that note, why is one Hubble or JWST enough? We probably need hundreds if not thousands of them if we want a sufficient observation coverage to be fully away of all extraterrestrial (asteroids and commets) threats that might be coming our way.
The Starship is about changing the approach, not applying state of the art to a changed parameter. Currently there is a limit. After Starship is offered on the market, that limit may significantly change, as its main reason to exist is the high price of the launch services.
> All those payloads cost serious money
Right, but if you, say, are going to send off-the shelf - or, ok, almost off-the-shelf :) - Caterpillar to the Moon, the payload cost suddenly drops. This is exaggerration, of course, but the idea is that payloads may become much - orders of magnitude - cheaper to produce.
Today. Space telescopes are much more expensive than their Earth-bound cousins. In a large part because you can't afford failure. With cheap launches you'll send much cheaper telescopes, which will still do the same science - and they are cheaper because they are not made not to fail with very high probability.
Starships bringing fuel up is a stop-gap.
Yes, this one shot mentality is extremely expensive and limiting.
Blast those probes out there in quantity, and iteratively fix them.
Do you have the same attitudes towards helmets whether you're walking on the street or riding a motorcycle? I'm assuming not, because you understand they are different risk profiles.
When risk profiles differ, so do the mitigation strategies. One of the ways spaceflight manages different risk profiles is by implementing a risk-based approach. For example, NASA classifies their software risk based on probability and severity. When risk is high, they leverage more requirements and more oversight as a way of mitigating the risk to an acceptable level.
What you seem to be insinuating is we should be willing to accept more risk. While I agree in principle, the hard part is getting stakeholders (from astronauts to contractors, administrators, politicians, and taxpayers) to agree. They get a say, too.
Each booster uses about 33 Raptors, and each Starship uses 6. I assume the boosters can be reused between launches to some extend. So they might not need 100 boosters.
But you'll need more than 100 ships active; I assume they wouldn't launch 100/year, but rather 200 every 2 years (due to the 26 month launch windows to Mars). Not sure about the return windows and strategy.
That's at least 200 ships (1200 engines) you need active at any given time + boosters + refueling vessels (Each launch will require 6-9 refuels in orbit).
Additionally, there is the whole Earth-to-Earth transport idea (i.e. New York to Tokyo in 50 minutes).
Payload will not run out, demand is there (Starlink, military etc.)
If you're only able to make 4 a year (as does Rocketdyne, as mentioned in the article) then your ability to respond to failures during testing is abysmal at best. Also your ability to optimize and improve, simplify, harden, etc the manufacturing process and drive costs down also sucks.
Slow iteration for testing and enhancing rocket engines has been the bane of the industry since inception.
Things move fast until something bad happens; then layers and layers of oversight are added to avoid bad things happening again. Years go by without bad things happening and people begin to wonder why we need so much oversight so they begin to peel them back. Rinse and repeat.
In that context, a major mishap is a very big risk to SpaceX because it can erode their efficiency. One of the advantages of the CCP approach is that there is much less oversight, so things can move quicker. I'm not so sure NASA will be okay with that if they lose an astronaut.
A lot of the stuff SpaceX has been able to do is down to automated systems. Maybe we would have had rockets that could land in the late 80’s if that turf war had gone the other way.
I don't think anyone's expecting anyone else to actually abide by all those space-related treaties if there's another Great Powers war. Which, this century, means only one pairing: the US and China.
More surveillance, satellite kill vehicles with perhaps a little plausible deniability, dark, redundant GPS and comm sats, maybe some new, secret constellations at novel orbital heights for when all that debris gets spread around the lower orbits and screws everything up... maybe not actual space-based ground-targeting or anti-ICBM weapons, but then again, countries do cheat on treaties.
But maybe I'll be surprised and military launches will remain about the same while StarLink competitors and elementary school students launching cubesats will eat up all that new, cheaper capacity.
She pulled 9Gs out of Khazakstan just so she could see you on Christmas day.
And she has to cruise back in the Morning!
Talk about rocket lag
You can't jump from Mayfair, London to Manhattan with this system, at which point any flight time improvement becomes negligible.
All the check-in gets handled on shore, then a fifteen minute ride out to the platform on a high speed ferry, 20 minutes to onboard, then 30 minutes to any other offshore platform in the world, followed by a 20 minute offboarding, and another fifteen minute ferry ride.
The actual travel time would be less than the time you're expected to wait in the airport prior to boarding an international flight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SR.N4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSC_Francisco
Maybe a future revival of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-effect_vehicle ?
Or some shiny airtaxi vtol running on renewables, electricity, handwavium?
(still sounds handwavy and not very realistic, though)
Think of British East India Company, except the scope is way more than anything we can imagine.
If you are a super power, a project like this is something you must absolutely consider.
The explicit goal, as has been stated several times by SpaceX leadership in the past, is for Starship to eventually cannabalize Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches. They've said they'll keep launching them as long as there is demand for them, but there will be more and more incentive for companies/governments to stop buying Falcon 9 launches. Already SpaceX sells some launch contracts for "arbitrary vehicle" launches where SpaceX can elect to launch the spacecraft on Starship instead of Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy if SpaceX so wishes.
2. They mostly don't get government grants, they get government contracts. Do you call it a grant when the Forest Service buys an F-150 from Ford?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX?wprov=sfti1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX?wprov=sfti1
The government had decades to try this strategy and couldn’t figure it out.
Drastically more wealth concentration has existed in humanity's past, but they weren't building reusable rockets because of it.
Also, SpaceX in particular was founded and started advancing this technology well before Musk at least was anywhere close to such extreme wealth. You might be putting the cart before the horse.
(Opposed to government contracts which were traditionally cost-plus, meaning the cost reduction would actually decrease profits.)
Who exactly do you think built the Saturn V?
I wish my businesses "failed" like Tesla and SpaceX!
buildings teams is part of my day job, Musk's ability to get the right people in the right spot at the right time and motivated is his biggest gift IMO. If you're good at that then there's really nothing you can't actually do.
Elon contributed the "what if we landed the rocket?" moonshot ambition. Definitely need both.
Musk's contributions can pretty much be summed up by "already had a lot of money" and "hired smart people". Contrast w/ the founding of Microsoft or Apple, in which the founders were the actual people creating their first products from scratch.
Musk is certainly a big-idea person, but I think he is a prime example of somebody who was in the right place to get lucky at the top of the dotcom boom, which in turn rested on him being from an already wealthy family. His foray into Twitter, "how to solve the Ukraine-Russia war", and the Thai cave rescue suggest he's not quite the genius his fans make him out to be.
He almost went bankrupt getting their first small rocket to space. He wasn't exactly poor at the time thanks to paypal, but he didn't have anything close to unlimited funds. He is a billionaire now because he succeeded, not the other way around.
> [..] which the founders were the actual people creating their first products from scratch.
If your claim is that Elon was not involved in creating the products, this is misinformed. https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden... is the link I have handy.
> which in turn rested on him being from an already wealthy family.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1005593651219582977, "I arrived in North America at 17 w $2000, a backpack & a suitcase full of books. Paid my own way thru college. Dropped out of Stanford Eng/Phys grad school w $110k in college debt."
> Thai cave rescue
The "pedo"-thing was stupid and deserve criticism, but he was actually asked to continue working on the submarine: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1016684366083190785
Of course. But he was the first person to make it work, which was very non-trivial. NASA failed at it for 60 years.
From sratch? I don't think so. DOS was bought from Tim Patterson. Microsoft BASIC ran on a computer created by others. Microsoft didn't invent BASIC. Neither did Apple. Apple didn't invent the 6502. The Apple 1 was built from off-the-shelf parts available to anyone.
Being a genius does not require being a success at everything. In fact, most successful people fail quite a lot. The difference between successful people and unsuccessful ones is the successful ones:
1. are not dissuaded by failure
2. learn from their mistakes and failures
3. try again and again
The unsuccessful ones "learn" from their failure by not trying again. Or they quit before they start.
Of course all the early people, Shotwell, Mueller, Königsmann, Bazza were all really important. Shotwell by now being the the most important.
But there really is no question that Musk deserves by far the most credit.
>And, uh, I’ve seen that hurt us before, I’ve seen that fail, but I’ve also seen— where nobody thought it would work— it was the right decision. It was the harder way to do it, but in the end, it was the right thing. One of the things that we did with the Merlin 1D was; he kept complaining— I talked earlier about how expensive the engine was. [inaudible] [I said,] “[the] only way is to get rid of all these valves. Because that’s what’s really driving the complexity and cost.” And how can you do that? And I said, “Well, on smaller engines, we’d go face-shutoff, but nobody’s done it on a really large engine. It’ll be really difficult.” And he said, “We need to do face-shutoff. Explain how that works?” So I drew it up, did some, you know, sketches, and said “here’s what we’d do,” and he said “That’s what we need to do.” And I advised him against it; I said it’s going to be too hard to do, and it’s not going to save that much. But he made the decision that we were going to do face-shutoff.
>So we went and developed that engine; and it was hard. We blew up a lot of hardware. And we tried probably tried a hundred different combinations to make it work; but we made it work. I still have the original sketch I did; I think it was— what was it, Christmas 2011, when I did that sketch? And it’s changed quite a bit from that original sketch, but it was pretty scary for me, knowing how that hardware worked, but by going face-shutoff, we got rid of the main valves, we got rid of the sequencing computer; basically, you spin the pumps and pressure comes up, the pressure opens the main injector, lets the oxygen go first, and then the fuel comes in. So all you gotta time is the ignitor fluid. So if you have the ignitor fluid going, it’ll light, and it’s not going to hard start. That got rid of the problem we had where you have two valves; the oxygen valve and the fuel valve. The oxygen valve is very cold and very stiff; it doesn’t want to move. And it’s the one you want open first. If you relieve the fuel, it’s what’s called a hard start. In fact, we have an old saying that says, “[inaudible][When you start a rocket engine, a thousand things could happen, and only one of those is good]“, and by having sequencing correctly, you can get rid of about 900 of those bad things, we made these engine very reliable, got rid of a lot of mass, and got rid of a lot of costs. And it was the right thing to do.
>And now we have the lowest-cost, most reliable engines in the world. And it was basically because of that decision, to go to do that. So that’s one of the examples of Elon just really pushing— he always says we need to push to the limits of physics. Like, an example I’ll give is, on the car factory; you know, a car moves through a typical factory, like a Toyota or a Chevy factory; a car is moving at you know, inches per second. It’s like, much less than walking speed. And his thoughts are that the machinery, the robots that are building the car should move as fast as they can. They should be moving so fast you can’t see them. That’s why you can’t have people in there, because they’d get crushed; people move too slow. That’s the way he thinks. “So, what are the physical limits of how fast you can make a car?” He looks at videos of like, coke cans being made, and things like that, where you can’t even see them; it’s just a blur. And, you know, the puck of aluminum, cut it up, deep-draw, fill it with coke, you put the lid on, you put the lid on it; it’s just like going down the assembly line so fast you can’t even see it. And Elon wants to do that with cars.
People often claim SpaceX was just Musk's show rather than a team effort where Mueller and Shotwell at least were just as important and probably more people besides. And he's had his share of bad ideas. But at the same time the sort of restless perfectioni...
Any other exec would have pulled the plug. For example, in 2017 Blue Origin blew up an engine and test stand. Bezos freaked out, fired the CEO and brought in an oldspace stooge who has basically killed the company.
It's when things get tough that you find out what leaders are made of. SpaceX and Tesla have gone through some really tough times.
> insufferable megalomaniac
Nah. He's arrogant, to be sure, but nobody would attempt SpaceX or Tesla without being arrogant. It's a feature, not a bug.
> I don't think his goals at twitter are long term profitability or a healthier American society/democracy
Do you really think he spent $44B on Twitter to lose money on purpose?
To the last point: Yes, I think he could. When you have $150,000,000,000, even losing $149,000,000,000 would leave you with $1,000,000,000, which is hundreds and hundreds of times the lifetime net worth of most Americans.
Meaning yes, I can completely imagine someone with his money spending a lot of money to have major influence over how the world communicates. Bloomberg spent a billion dollars of his own money trying to be president and he's still quite rich.
The Clintons made around $100 million for being President. The Clinton Foundation is worth $300m, and is largely used to fund the Clintons. Obama is worth $70 million. Trump initially viewed his run for office as publicity stunt for his businesses. He was obviously surprised that he won.
Being President is very, very lucrative.
> FWIW Tesla literally did exist before he was involved
I know. And without Musk nobody would have ever heard of it.
[1] https://www.clintonfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11...
Shotwell runs certain parts of the business day to day. Elon heads up new projects whereas daily operations goes to Shotwell, which makes sense given her position of Chief Operating Officer. For example, by her own words, she has little involvement in the Starship project, or didn't as of early 2021 when asked about it.
Business is about improving the quality of life of the consumer.
Musk never went directly at that, he always involved himself in industries whose main customer is Government, or that would not exist without Government.
Apple, Microsoft, Google, Walmart, JPM...those are real businesses, which would thrive even if Govt. expense were to plummet at 5% of GDP (actually they'd do much better).
If Govt. expense were to plummet at 5% of GDP all the functional companies which Musk has would go belly up, not to mention the scam ones such as the NeuraLink and Boring.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing. The hybrid contractor/govt model has many upsides. SpaceX deserves a lot of credit for what they've done, but that context is important when gushing about when big gambles pay off. Those risks may never occur in a different paradigm.
Commentators and pundits were fooled by GPS , Sat-TV and Internet and are extrapolating loads of quality of life which would come from space if only could be cheaper to send stuff up there.
The world is increasingly urbanised. Fiber and 5G for telecomms will always be cheaper in an urban setting compared with sat-internet.
Space is already paying for itself.
If SpaceX had failed to do the human launch, the cost would have been on SpaceX. As it is right now on Boeing.
This is not how govt launches work. The payload (which is sometimes worth more than the rocket) is self-insured, meaning SpaceX is not responsible for eating that cost if it's lost. They are paid for the service (i.e., the ride) but have little to no cost regarding the cargo on govt launches.
Whatever method or rocket design the govenrment uses this is always an issue. Just flying on a government provided rocket doesn't change that cargo is at risk of being lost because it is not insured. In this case the risk to the tax payer is always at risk, it has nothing to do with SpaceX as such or the method of rocket procurement.
But the way the contracting model has been changed, the fact is, if SpaceX had not performed on their development and test campaign, they would have been stuck with the cost of most of that. Just as Being likely had to eat 600M+ because of their delays.
So in terms of developing capabilities for the government to use, this was an incredibly low risk and cost effective one.
Yes, but this is somewhat missing the forest for the trees. The larger point is that relatively untested tech is going to be more expensive to insure because there is greater uncertainty. This makes it less economically viable until it proves itself to be reliable. Can a commercial company forego that and take on greater risk? Of course, but they aren't likely to because they are more risk-adverse for a variety of reasons. But because the govt is self-insured, the economic risk considerations related to that becomes a moot point. Meaning, the govt is in a unique position to take on risk to help an upstart like SpaceX. Note that 100% of Falcon Heavy contracts are govt (military/NASA).
>Just as Being likely had to eat 600M+ because of their delays.
But this is a different point. They are being penalized for contractual delays. This has the potential to increase risk because it incentivizes rushed development. We saw this with CST-100. The only reason it came to light is because the mission did not go as planned, and as a result NASA started to trigger additional oversight (which slows down development).
This is part of why the CCP can move faster than NASA. They don't have to build to the same requirements as an in-house NASA build. To an extent, all NASA cares about is the ride. That works well as long as things go as planned. As soon as they don't, NASA will start doing engaging more oversight. This has already happened with SpaceX, too. When some unfavorable things came to light, NASA wanted more govt in-person inspections/audits.
What we are seeing is actually the commercial company are far more willing to risk these things the governments.
Companies like Astra (not that I think they are good) almost celebrates blowing up rockets.
> Note that 100% of Falcon Heavy contracts are govt (military/NASA).
This is true but Falcon Heavy was developed on spec. DoD didn't pay for its development unlike for almost all other rockets the military uses or used historically.
> This has the potential to increase risk because it incentivizes rushed development. We saw this with CST-100. The only reason it came to light is because the mission did not go as planned, and as a result NASA started to trigger additional oversight (which slows down development).
Yes but it rewards those that do development well and punishes those that don't. Of course oversight and verification is still a function government has to provide for the goods they buy.
> This is part of why the CCP can move faster than NASA. They don't have to build to the same requirements as an in-house NASA build.
CCP is learning the same lessens that NASA has. They have constantly rockets blowing up. They will have to also establish internal requirements that they follow.
And honesty, in terms of rocket development there isn't much evidence that China is better or faster from what I can see. We also don't know how much China is spending on these things.
> As soon as they don't, NASA will start doing engaging more oversight. This has already happened with SpaceX, too. When some unfavorable things came to light, NASA wanted more govt in-person inspections/audits.
Sure they will check everything and want to know about potential problems. The intensive structure however is still aliened better. The functions of the different parts are aligned better. NASA can tell contracts to change some process and have done so before but that doesn't imply automatically that these contracts will then drop in efficiency to the point NASA would have been at.
NASA own efforts like Ares 1 were so catastrophic that basically convinced large parts of NASA to not try that again. And NASA had a huge amount of success with the new model.
>What we are seeing is actually the commercial company are far more willing to risk these things the governments.
My personal opinion is that that NASA (less so the military) are risk-adverse in terms of political risk. When there's little political risk, they are quite fine blowing stuff up to learn.
One thing that I've noticed is that commercial companies tend to take an engineering perspective and NASA tends to take a more fundamental science perspective. For example, when SpaceX had COPV issues, they were fine to just change the design and move on without understanding the root failure mechanism. NASA funded their own studies to try and understand what was going on. This is the direction I'd like to see the hybrid model continue.
I do think that contract changes can risk efficiency drops, though. Right now, CCP doesn't have to show a lot of their work. This may mean that their "efficiency" is a product of process gaps, rather than better processes. The CST-100 software validation was a prime example. It was a definite process gap that allowed them to get to launch quicker. If they were lucky and didn't run into issues, NASA would be none the wiser.
Tesla: Climate change political trend
SpaceX: Defense/National Pride political trend
Organic exports, investments and consumption would not be benefiting such companies, the big winners would be the real bona fide and non-political companies I already mentioned: Apple, Microsoft, Exxon, JPM, Google, Amazon, Walmart.
Meaning the stuff that people use daily as opposed to only reading about it in the tech and the financial press as aspirational goals after billions of dollars in subsidies and govt. contracts
If it's not DoD then it's military stuff from allies or Turkey, if it's not that then it's Starlink.
In any event the point still stands. This company only exists in the financial press and the tech press. Regular people aren't using SpaceX nor they ever will considering how the world is increasingly urbanised so sat-tv and sat-internet are dead on arrival matched against fiber and 5G. The only exception is maybe the yacht crowd but they aren't regular people.
Yes, you're plainly wrong. All Starlink customers may point to why.
The point doesn't seem to stand?
Also, at 100+Mbps, this is the first generation of the technology. Is it feasible that they hit 1Gpbs by end of decade? I wouldn't rule out the possibility.
Hell would freeze over before Musk would even dream about making a philantropic service for poor people, because that's what you are describing. The poorest of the poorest in the next 50 years will be the last 10-20% who for whatever reason remains stuck in the badlands as opposed to moving to the urbanized world
Starlink satellites spend a lot of time flying over Africa. And if it's priced at $110/month it will not see a lot of use. So for a very low marginal cost he can provide a very valuable service. Therefore I wouldn't be surprised if somebody talks him into giving it away for the next cause du jour, especially if its structured so he only gives away the service (low marginal cost) and not the terminals (high marginal cost).
DirecTV and Dish Network alone have over 30 million U.S. customers combined. Keep in mind Starlink has been engineered for portability unlike DirecTV and Dish. More than 11 million families own an RV. And 12 million own registered boats. How many own second homes? Starlink takes 2 minutes to setup and 2 minutes to tear down.
Back to residential service though. There are tens of millions of households that are limited by old copper lines that were never filled in or cable extensions that were never dug. Or if the cable does exist, it's still at slower speeds and certainly not gigabit. Relying on mobile isn't a great option as most services today still throttle speeds down to 600 kbps when exceeding 15GB a month (which is nothing these days).
But worldwide, including in all the BRICS countries and the global south that rapidly growing in GDP and global importance is about 2-3 billion people with varying levels of spotty, congested, unreliable internet. These communities are probably lucky if they have 4G in many cases. That market is worth hundreds of billions over the next few decades, even when adjusting for purchasing power. Easily.
And your assumptions about relative competitiveness vs the highest quality residential speeds (which are only largely available to people in dense urban cores) are perhaps one upgrade away from being achieved. They already solved the hardest problem with regards to satellite communication: latency. It will be interesting to see how far they can push the bandwidth at scale over the years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink
Microsoft as made gigantic amount of money selling to government. So do large banks. GM and Ford have much larger better organized departments selling to the government. Amazon has huge contracts with DoD as well.
> Microsoft as made gigantic amount of money selling to government
Microsoft , you mean the company almost dissolved by the DOJ? I will retract my statements on Tesla being propped by cronysm when Govt. produces even 1/100th of scrutiny endured by Microsoft. Who am I kidding? It will never happen...for the DOJ to go after a company it needs to have market share of 70% and upwards, whereas despite billions of dollars in subsidies and credits Tesla can't even make it to 1% of yearly global new car sales.
1% in 20 years. Ladies and gentlemen the backbone of the global industrial economy. Not. However that's how the cult leader...ehm I mean the CEO advertises it to the world.
Great dominance in the Financial press, tech press and gossip press though. And surprisingly even on HN and reddit people have fallen for the scam.
> It's a company selling subsidised go-karts to rich people in California and New York due to the out-of-touch worries of neurotic politicians in D.C. , Glasgow, Davos and Paris.
Wow tell us how you really feel, you must feel so superior. Of course its just unsubstantiated nonsense.
So lets go threw some actual facts.
Most vehicles Tesla sells are pretty close to avg new sale car price. So I guess you can call everybody that buys a new rich if you want but Tesla is not really spacial or unique in terms of selling to rich people.
In terms of your 1%, they actually are more then 1%. 78 million are sold globally, Tesla this year will close to 1.5 million cars. Can you do the math? (And you can also do the numbers 12 month rolling if you don't want to include Q4 of this year). But don't let facts stop your rant.
And if you want to look at it in terms of profit, Tesla is way larger fraction of the automotive market then that.
And of course as far as your comment about how the press, the reality is Tesla profits this Quarter were higher then Ford and GM combined, close in profit to Toyota while having much better debt position and selling far fewer cars and models. And of course while still growing at incredible rates. Maybe just maybe that is why the financial press focuses on them more then many other companies.
Go and search some historically comparable companies in terms of revenue and profit growth and tell me how Tesla is doing badly.
> 1% in 20 years. Ladies and gentlemen the backbone of the global industrial economy. Not. However that's how the cult leader...ehm I mean the CEO advertises it to the world.
Have you actually done literally any research on the topic ever? Tesla is one of the faster growing manufacturing companies in history and doing that while also interdicting a product that had not existed to any series degree in the market before.
And Elon never said that Tesla is the 'backbone of global industrial economy' that just seems like something you made up. Please provide a source.
> whereas despite billions of dollars in subsidies and credits
In terms of subsidies Tesla got the same type of tax abatement's literally every large industrial player gets when making large. So if VW, Toyota or whoever had built a Gigafactory in Nevada they could have gotten the same kind of deal.
This is just a reality of the way the system works. It doesn't give Tesla some magical advantage that they can exploit against other companies. Its just how the economy works, you can like it or hate it, but as a reason why Tesla is successful its absurdly terrible argument. And its also not cash they can just spend, its just a reduced expenditure over the next 20 years.
So the idea that because of those subsidies Tesla got some competitive advantage is nonsense.
Another thing people mention is the tax credits program. This is a program that only applied to 250k cars and again was available 10 years after Tesla was funded. Again this provides no competitive advantage to Tesla, ever car company could take advantage of that. And GM and other companies used these credits too. So again to claim that Tesla success can be explained by this mostly falls flat.
The next and favorite thing people bring up is fuel credits. Fuel credits are system to reward companies that do good in terms of following regulations and punishes companies that are bad. This is not money from the government, this is money from car companies that pollute more then they are should. Again, these are the universal rules of the market. This rule was not designed for Tesla or with any intention of promoting Tesla. These are just the laws the car market operates under.
We can have a discussion if fuel credits are the best policy tools for government to use. But fundamentally are you gone disagree with the concept that governments should have fuel standards give intensives to companies to do the right...
Show me somewhere, anywhere, where someone of any relevance says Musk is a "failure".
What people actually say is that he's not the uber-genius, gods-gift-to-humanity that he and his super supporters extoll.
Here's one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33390278
As for gods-gift-to-humanity, there are very, very, very few people who have contributed to humanity like he has.
People aren't pissing on him when he's right, they are pissing on him when he's wildly, wildly wrong, because he can't stay in his lane. Pedo guy submarine cave rescue is a great example of that. Covid will go away by April 2020 was another. Full Self-driving Tesla robotaxi that makes you money while you sleep in 201? is a third...
However that argument alone doesn’t support the posts conclusion: “he's simply a highly privileged technocrat who has quite successfully failed upwards his entire career”
Imagine how suffocating life would be for him if he endeavored to live up to the expectations of his detractors.
He would never start a company without being certain of success.
He’d be super nice to the diver (who told Elon to stick a submarine up his ass).
He’d never speculate about anything or discuss his vision for the future, because imperfect foresight makes people mad!
…and the haters would still hate. Happily for Elon, he seems content to be himself and deal with the silly complaints.
Pulling a publicity stunt while people's lives were literally on a deadline was not helpful, and only served to distract the professionals involved in the rescue.
Throwing a tantrum and calling the diver a paedophile when they declined (on the basis that the submarine would not be able to fit into the caves and thus would be unfit for purpose, assuming it could even be built before the trapped group were killed by the monsoon) was a spectacularly awful move. And that's just one of the many fiascos he's been involved in.
Elon may be a successful businessman but he is also a disaster of a human being and has thoroughly earned any "haters" he may possess.
So was everyone who offered to help the trapped kids presumed to be a self-serving asshole for doing so, or only Elon?
> Throwing a tantrum and calling the diver a paedophile when they declined (on the basis that the submarine would not be able to fit into the caves and thus would be unfit for purpose, assuming it could even be built before the trapped group were killed by the monsoon) was a spectacularly awful move.
But the diver didn't just decline. He declined and told Elon to stick the submarine up his ass on national television. In that context, Elon's reply is childish, sure, but you'll have to explain what makes it "spectacularly awful" and/or a "fiasco".
> Elon may be a successful businessman but he is also a disaster of a human being
Help me to understand the standard by which I can judge whether someone is a "disaster of a human being". Is one bad tweet sufficient? Or one bad tweet and one bad prediction regarding future tech? How many judgmental internet posts would be required to hit the standard? I'm genuinely curious.
From the abrupt change in discourse about Elon in the last couple years, I assume most are judging him by his politics he recently started expressing.
I'm sure the offers of help from experienced cave divers, folk who could help with logistical support, etc. were appreciated. Even the SpaceX engineers and supplies Elon sent were probably appreciated (I could not find anything about them actually being used, although I did not search extensively).
A techbro CEO throwing out half-baked whimsical bullshit ideas for social media attention, not so much. Not to mention personally injecting himself into the situation, touring the rescue site, and otherwise getting in the way of the rescue workers.
>In that context, Elon's reply is childish, sure, but you'll have to explain what makes it "spectacularly awful" and/or a "fiasco".
Falsely accusing someone of being a paedophile is not just childish, if taken seriously it can completely derail a person's life, get them fired from their job, turn them into a social pariah, and even result in them being assaulted or killed by vigilantes. Thankfully no one took Elon seriously.
Even if the diver was impolite when calling Elon out on the submarine thing, it was a completely disproportionate escalation.
>Help me to understand the standard by which I can judge whether someone is a "disaster of a human being".
Making such judgements can be complex. But attempting to socially destroy a person who is literally risking their life [1] to rescue children from certain death because they were mildly rude when rebuking them for being an attention-seeking twit is about as clear a signal as you can get.
[1] and that was not a hypothetical risk, two of the other divers involved died either directly during or later as a result of injuries sustained during the rescue.
Elon/SpaceX's offer to help _was_ in fact appreciated by the lead diver.
Private Joker: I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir.
Disingenuous, bad-faith half-truths are the most you will get out of the anti-Musk crowd.
It is simply too fashionable; and any iota of defense will get you labeled a boot-licking puppet.
It is just raw, distillable jealousy, combined with the new social paradigm of "this man is uber-bad and the single point of all problems" that long-Trump-Derangement-Syndrome has left ingrained into the thoughtless, NPC-eqsue masses.
Elon Musk is no worse than any other billionaire, and by many objective counts, the best yet for humanity.
You will be forgotten, he won't - and that pisses most off at a mammalian level.
Your link brings us to a 3-day old comment which argues SolarCity failed (which, yeah, nobody disagrees there) and that Musk "failed upwards" and is not a "tech deity". This is not claiming Musk is overall a "fraud and failure."
It’s totally legitimate for you to think that Musk is the target of unfair criticism, particularly around the influence he’s had on his businesses’ obvious successes. But you don’t have to build a straw man to make this argument. Virtually nobody would describe Musk as a failure - but they will argue frequently that he’s an arrogant narcissist, or that his success is unjustified. There’s plenty of criticism like that out there—justified and not—and it’s weird to make stuff up to get all “lol u mad bro” about.
Sometimes I think that the fact that he looks so superhuman sort of proves that wealth is not a meritocracy. If it were, Musk would be an average billionaire at best.
Also there's extra incentive to tear down anyone with multiple successes, as they're a constant reminder that success isn't all due to luck.
this is the crux of it.
If he isn't just lucky, than that pushes one's own perils from misfortune to the realm of a lack of self-actualization and agency.
Hard work makes you much more lucky, and that oxymoron is a hard pill for the "unfortunate" masses to swallow.
No one wants to admit to not working hard; they want to push the responsibility to (mis)fortune.
(The space shuttle had to be essentially rebuilt after every mission, the boosters were thrown away, the concept was a dead-end from the start.)
E.g., NASA cannot build a major program with an assembly line mentality. The need to spread their work out across multiple constituencies to ensure continued support. Ever wonder why major NASA centers are in key political states like Florida, California, Texas, and Ohio?
Also, when they lose govt payloads, the govt (i.e. taxpayers) shoulder most of the risk because they are self-insured. That means SpaceX gets to take bigger risks because they don't have to pay for them through the typical privatized mechanisms of risk mitigation like insurance.
>Downvote; go learn.
You might benefit from learning a bit from the HN Guidelines regarding discourse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yes, I might :) . Just went with existing practice, not with guidelines. Will try to do better next time :) .
> Except Musk himself has said they were hours away from bankruptcy before NASA's contract had come through after that fourth launch.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. I think you're proving my point - your "Unless you're Musk, who gets the taxpayers to fund his risk. What's the saying? It's socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor?" says that Musk didn't risk his own money developing Falcon-1, and almost lost.
Remember Falcon-5? That was SpaceX approach to relatively slowly conquering the market in case NASA won't give them contracts. But NASA did, and Falcon-5 went to history, and Falcon-9 got full steam ahead.
> Also, when they lose govt payloads, the govt (i.e. taxpayers) shoulder most of the risk because they are self-insured. That means SpaceX gets to take bigger risks because they don't have to pay for them through the typical privatized mechanisms of risk mitigation like insurance.
SpaceX happily serves commercial customers. And commercial customers are happily served by SpaceX. And US government wants its own share of cheap and reliable - comparatively - launches, so SpaceX gets their orders too. Will you say anybody dealing with US government rides on the backs of taxpayers?
Do you understand that you're wrong with your socialism and capitalism?
I have no qualms with the hybrid govt/contractor approach. I've said elsewhere on this thread that I think both sides can benefit from it. But, to a certain extent, I'm saying that limits Musk's claims to great business acumen, at least outside of relying on large govt contracts. To a certain extent, many on this thread have said that constitutes a type of grift. A grift that requires taxpayer money. I'm playing a little loose with the socialism definition, for sure, but that's what I mean in the larger point.
To that point, there would be no SpaceX without govt funding. One of the reasons they now have commercial customers is because the NASA contracts allowed them to get better to a point where private customers saw them as a viable option. If they didn't have that opportunity with NASA, I don't think they'd have private customers. For one, they likely wouldn't have enough early private customers to be economically viable. And two, those early flights would be much more expensive because they were unproven and that uncertainty makes insuring those flights much more expensive if not impossible. To that extent, a viable SpaceX business model is completely predicated on government contracts and not on private sector capitalism. The govt split the CCP contract to try and spread risk across multiple vendors and essentially fund an upstart in the hope that it pays off.
It's paying off so far, so I'm not saying that's all bad. But it does make their model divorced from a purely capitalistic endeavor. I'm not saying Musk had no skin in the game, but I am saying he had almost nil chance of winning that game without taxpayer support. Other people on this thread have pointed out how that distinction matters when comparing to better examples of business leaders.
>Will you say anybody dealing with US government rides on the backs of taxpayers?
I would say if the business model is only viable with government contracts and is particularly viable because it forces taxpayers to shoulder the early risk, yes. If your business only works by being propped up by the govt, it's a bastardized form of socialism. I'm glad SpaceX is able to move away from that, but let's not revise history to ignore those early facts because they don't fit our preferred narrative of Musk being a clever paragon of capitalism.
The simplest way of framing it is saying, "If they required taxpayer money in order to become/remain viable, it's a form of socialist intervention." I would put a lot of other companies in that list, from automotive to finance, so I'm not just picking on SpaceX.
> there would be no SpaceX without govt funding
Strictly speaking, historically things evolved one particular way, and we don't know exactly what would happen if something have changed in the past. Here you state your opinion, and I'd say yes, SpaceX used US govt money, but that doesn't mean they couldn't grow without them. They already had an orbital launch on private money - a significant achievement by itself - and there were plans to grow without NASA, which - in my opinion - were reasonable. So I'm skeptical about their guaranteed death without support from US govt money.
> But it does make their model divorced from a purely capitalistic endeavor.
Maybe you mean some rather theoretical, simple pure market model. In reality US govt supports growing industries - Internet is an example - so this is at least rather traditional.
> I am saying he had almost nil chance of winning that game without taxpayer support
This is an opinion. Here is what I know: there is a community, called alt-space (from a Usenet section), or New Space, which basically talked about what SpaceX was doing about a decade before SpaceX. It was a matter of time who'd get this done successfully first. An example of this New Space approach would be Northrop Grumman Lunal Lander Challenge, where John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace showed a lot of impressive technology, and which was eventually won by Masten Space - all of that with reusable rocket technology, landing under power, years before SpaceX made first stages of Falcon-9 reusable. Because of this I think that Elon's stated approach of developing more modest, but cheaper rockets - like Falcon-5 (while continuing flying Falcon-1) - or partnering with Virgin Galactic on droppable launcher - relying only on private market could actually work.
> but I am saying he had almost nil chance of winning that game without taxpayer support.
Beal Aerospace "folded" a few years before SpaceX; now people have doubt if he did the right thing, given that his technology was perhaps even cheaper than SpaceX. NASA also learned a lesson from Beal closing the doors, and was more careful to the next entrant. The final result, by today, is rather good, by popular opinion, I would say - NASA got a good launch supplier, SpaceX got a good anchor customer, so US govt would likely lose if it didn't support SpaceX, and relying on that support was a good approach. Yet even without that support there is no guarantee SpaceX wouldn't succeed; there are some arguments for that.
> if the business model is only viable with government contracts and is particularly viable because it forces taxpayers to shoulder the early risk, yes.
SpaceX brought significant savings to US govt, so that risk - from US point of view - was rather justified. Remember, US govt can't work with only zero-risk schemes, and in such a complex area as space access it has to tolerate some risk, even with existing providers.
> If your business only works by being propped up by the govt
There is no proof that SpaceX couldn't work without govt help. Also govt help brought taxpayers savings - in exchange for some risk, which is not obviously comparable to existing non-zero risk elsewhere.
> it's a bastardized form of socialism.
I doubt many on HN will agree with you.
> but let's not revise history to ignore those early facts
I want to emphasize - if the history would repeat, those choices made would better be repeated. Even if SpaceX lost, US govt would be better keeping betting on new companies for the launch services, because alternatives are likely worse. In this sense SpaceX is a lucky opportunity for US.
> because they don't fit our preferred narrative of Musk being a clever paragon of capitalism.
For long time rocket startups assumed one of their customers - perhaps biggest, or the only one - would be US govt, bec...
>This is an opinion.
>There is no proof that SpaceX couldn't work without govt help.
These are all refuted by Musk's own words. He literally said NASA bailed him out when they were so close to failure he thought he might have a mental breakdown. The irony is that your push against that seems to be your own opinion, that goes against his. I am also aware of the previous work with similar ideas, including others that you didn't mention. Yes, the ideas existed. However, there wasn't the right climate or the right timing to execute it. Hell, govt essentially subsidizing flight goes back to the Wright brothers competing for military contracts. In a sense, that's what changed the pursuit from hobbyists to professionals. I give all the credit to Musk for capitalizing on that when the timing was right. But that is conflating good business timing that secures govt support with being a good capitalist businessman, irrespective of govt support.
As to whether the govt is better off, I agree. I've already said that much in this discussion and elsewhere on the thread. But the same applies to when the govt bailed out GM to save a major manufacturing supply chain, or bailing out the financial sector during the housing crises. This feels very much like a strawman. I'm simply pointing out they benefit from a form of socialized risk; I'm not saying the effects of socialist policies are inherently bad.
So, to your statement about this is just how things work, I generally agree there as well. What I disagree on is when people pretend it's not so in order to justify a fairy tale of capitalistic virtue. I don't think it's wrong for the govt to support businesses like this; if you recall, my original post was simply refuting the framing of the problem as a false dichotomy between NASA and SpaceX while failing to recognize that the differences are actually part of the intent, not the result of some boondoggle.
I do think you may have had a knee-jerk reaction to my initial comment, which is understandable given the amount of Elon hate. Maybe if you re-read it with a critical eye and some emotional distance, you'll interpret it differently. It seems like the only part we really disagree on is the viability of SpaceX without govt support early. Sure, maybe there's a chance they would have still succeeded, but given Musk's own words on the matter, I highly doubt it. And I'm pretty happy they've done well.
We disagree in interpretation of Musk's words - indeed, I never heard him saying that he would certainly close SpaceX if NASA funding wouldn't materialize.
That’s because the fourth launch succeeded, reportedly due to engineers changing a single line of code to fix a problem from the third attempt. The success helped SpaceX land a commercial contract with NASA valued at roughly $1.6 billion, extending the young company a lifeline."[1]
“NASA called and told us we won a $1.5 billion contract,” Musk can be heard saying in the clip. “I couldn't even hold the phone. I just blurted out, 'I love you guys!’" Pelley asks in the clip, "They saved you," Yeah, they did,” Musk is heard saying. He describes that he had “virtually no money, a fourth failure would have been absolutely game over. Done.” [2]
Musk deserves credit for avoiding that 4th failure, but that's not the same as saying the business was viable without govt support. That's where I think you're initial response is off the mark. To your earlier points, though, I think this is where the hybrid model excels. The govt, due to it's size, can take on a disproportionate risk to help nascent companies/technologies. But let's not lose sight of the fact that many of these success stories are predicated on socializing that risk to the taxpayer early on.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/30/elon-musk-warning-not-first-...
[2] https://www.republicworld.com/technology-news/science/nasa-2...
You can't seem to understand that NASA offer is not the same as closing the company without it. While NASA offer was nice, I never heard Musk saying certainly that without that offer - after Falcon-1 flew successfully - SpaceX would close.
Government takes risk just like commercial companies take risk. Nothing unusial here. Taking such risk means that some ventures will fail, but overall it will get better than without taking risk.
>Government takes risk just like commercial companies take risk.
Incorrect. Govt payloads are self-insured. This is essentially saying "We have such deep pockets that it doesn't matter if we lose the payload, it won't hurt us financially." I don't know many private organizations with that risk threshold. This is partly why the early govt contract is so important. It allows SpaceX to get enough experience while being funded by a customer that isn't risk-adverse. This buys them time to improve to a point where commercial payloads can be insured without being cost-prohibitive. Again to my original point, this means the govt shoulders a disproportionate amount of risk.
I guess when the CEO says "Yep, they saved us. Without that contract, we'd be done because we were out of money" and that isn't clear enough, you've transitioned to fanboy-dom. Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a hurdle.
This could be argued about :) as e.g. NASA beat Soviets in the Moon Race by behaving central-planning, while Soviets tried to grow local market competition (Korolyov, Chelomey, Yangel).
But his success isn't all due to skill, either. Someone with the same brain and no seed money from Daddy would have been far less successful.
> "We were very wealthy. We had so much money at times we couldn’t even close our safe,” [said Elon's father] adding that one person would have to hold the money in place with another closing the door. “And then there’d still be all these notes sticking out and we’d sort of pull them out and put them in our pockets.”
> More background: I arrived in North America at 17 w $2000, a backpack & a suitcase full of books. Paid my own way thru college. Dropped out of Stanford Eng/Phys grad school w $110k in college debt.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211064937004589056
> We started Zip2 with ~$2k from me plus my overclocked home-built PC, ~$5k from my bro & ~$8k from Greg Kouri (such a good guy — he is greatly missed).
> My Dad provided 10% of a ~$200k angel funding round much later, but by then risk was reduced & round would’ve happened anyway.
Edit: For example, while he did work on a farm to pay for college that farm was owned by his Mom's cousin. Working for family is generally a significant advantage.
Edit2: Having a wealthy childhood has enduring benefits even if the money doesn't last. For example, it significantly increased his chance of having access to a computer at age 12, which probably had an enduring impact on his coding skills.
I'm not saying that means he didn't work hard and isn't smart. I am saying that it's telling he thinks that kind of thing didn't also contribute.
I don't see why you think that this is what he thinks? It's certainly not what I think. What he is doing is answering persistent claims going too far the other way; that his success is only because of seed money from his father.
Or, as you say seemingly somewhat derogatory, "daddy". Their relationship wasn't always that great as far as I understand it, but I don't know the details.
1. If someone has wealthy family members this tends to benefit them, and they tend not to realize it.
2. Growing up wealthy didn't guarantee Musk's success, but it made it easier than it would have been if he grew up poorer. This happens in ways that are hard for someone like him to realize. For example, he might not realize that if he'd grown up worrying about money there's a significant chance his brain would have noticably changed in a way that made it harder for him to function.
> His success isn't all due to luck, he has genuine skills. ... But his success isn't all due to skill, either.
Remember "Field of Dreams"? "Build it and they will come?" That's typical hollywood bullshit advice. You've got to proactively market something, i.e. make your own luck.
Apparently you don't. Costner's character heard a voice saying, "Build it and he will come", referring to his father. So you took this as personal advice, albeit "bullsh!t" advice. More power to you ...
Or you know - maybe he is that amazing, I doubt it, but Trump did invent the MRNA vaccines all by himself as well, so...
Here he thanks Tom Mueller: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1333544636137283586
Here he thanks some Tesla club members: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211836235762880512
Here he thanks NASA for all the support over the years, "without which this would not have happened": https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1219127317957615617
Here he says that "Gwynne is the best": https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1538400836669296640
That's just a random collection I found with a couple of quick google searches.
If you have actually watched for example the starbase tours with Elon, it's difficult to claim that he isn't "involved": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw
Sidenote, all but a few of his twitter mentions of Shotwell are responses to mentions of her and it seems like he's injecting himself into the discussion.
So there must be some difference between them on this point.
There just doesn't seem to be a correlation between success in some narrow domain like engineering, business, art, or music and being a good human being in general.
I also wonder if there's a causative factor. When someone becomes super successful they tend to get surrounded by people telling them what a genius they are. That can definitely distort someone's self image. Could you stay balanced if millions of people compared you to a comic book superhero for years and loads of people did whatever you said because you had tons of money? Now throw in tons of stress and quite possibly a good helping of loneliness due to the difficulty all this creates with forming real deep relationships with others.
I don't see any particular correlation with being a bad human, either. Look hard enough at anyone and you'll find feet of clay.
Success in their domains greatly outshine the clay.
And Tesla is a famously consumer-hostile company. We don't need more success like that. SpaceX is a much better example, and a lot of that can be attributed to how well he delegated leadership to someone competent.
Now he's waded into one of the most difficult lines of business and we'll find out in the next couple of years whether he's just been lucky and well-funded, or if he really is a business genius.
It seems to me that being a technology company in addition to being a car company, Tesla's buyers are more likely than other brands' buyers to complain on the internet. And every supposed journalist knows that a Tesla hit piece will garner clicks.
Initially, Consumer Reports seemed to really like Tesla. But much more recently, they have not generally rated Tesla comparable to other cars. They only have one model (the Model 3) that even scored average.
One of their issues is that they like to move fast in their designs. Changing sensors, suppliers, components etc. means it's really hard to nail reliability and quality. As the saying goes...move fast and, well...break things.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/17/cars/tesla-consumer-reports-d...
In any case, by consumer hostile I mean: Tesla will turn features off on your car if it believes you are not entitled to them. Sometimes years later. They may cut your battery range significantly because it presents a fire risk, without ever 1) asking, 2) compensating you, or 2) fixing the battery. They may turn off the radar you bought with your car. They take liberties with the OTA updates that warn me away from wanting to buy another Tesla. Fortunately the competition in the EV space has gotten really good in the last couple years and is accelerating.
The Tesla owners I know are all happy with their Teslas.
> whether he's just been lucky
Being successful once might be luck. Being successful twice looks like business acumen. Being successful 3 times is business genius.
Bill Gates was successful 3 times, so was Steve Jobs.
Being successful in three unrelated industries: paypal, rockets and cars, is very very unusual. The number of successful new car manufacturers from scratch in the last 100 years or so is about zero (Delorean, Tucker, Bricklin, etc.) which makes Tesla all the more impressive.
> Now he's waded into one of the most difficult lines of business
Harder than car manufacturing or making rockets? Twitter is nothing compared to that.
It's a good thing the natural laws of Newtonian physics also covers content moderation. /s
I was happy enough. I won't buy another. There's another data point for you.
But putting aside anecdotes, I'm talking about things we know Tesla has done. Like taking away battery capacity (with no compensation) for existing owners in order to reduce liability risk for the company. Or how about deciding to take away features from individual customers because they've determined that customer should never have had the feature? Something that costs Tesla nothing but is a great big middle finger to their customers.
Anyone who buys a Tesla knowing their record of screwing over their own customers is foolish.
> Harder than car manufacturing or making rockets? Twitter is nothing compared to that.
It's worse. Much worse. With sufficient cash I can go hire an incredible amount of expertise building both cars and rockets. Rocketry in particular is an engineering problem. Twitter is a human nature problem. Good luck with that. And especially Elon, who has questionable social skills to begin with.
Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are pretty good arguments against this.
Take a look at the growing graveyard of failed small launch startups. Sure, rockets are mostly just engineering these days, but it is still very difficult engineering.
SpaceX was the also first to reuse an orbital rocket booster. They have now done so 150 times. It's hard to understate how big of a deal this is, to not throw away your rocket every time you launch it. And they are on the cusp of a fully reusable rocket with Starship.
Elon Musk is an arrogant asshole, at the least. But you are really downplaying the accomplishments of SpaceX.
Those are tiny examples that only applied to a really small number of users. Hardly some grand plans of fraud.
More relevant things would be FSD not being transferable, at least while its in Beta. That is actually user hostile.
How regularly? Examples aside from "pedo guy"? Which I think all, including himself, would agree was a punch down.
I mean, is there any direction besides down that it is possible for Elon to punch?
He was punching up plenty. He has always been combative and would respond 2x to each perceived insult. He sued DoD and NASA. He went after the large car companies. He went after Bezos when Bezos was pretending BlueOrigin is even remotely in the same league as SpaceX.
But at this point, there is not many place to punch but down.
I'm also not a fan of twitter thing and its certainty a part of his character that is not flattering.
Elon recently 'punched up' against Hillary Clinton (only using the word 'punch' because of context here; actually it was a gentle questioning of a propagandistic line she was trying to push). I've also seen him lightly mock Joe Biden.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587894226695884800
It's darned good marketing. Simple and effective.
SpaceX build one engine per day while the competition is building one every 91 days. They're landing and re-using rockets every single week. They're taking humans into space.
Tesla build cars that have won basically every award there is. They're are basically the safest cars on the road. They outsell other EVs enormously.
There is no marketing it any of that, it's simply all facts.
I'd almost be inclined to suspect that Musk says (privately, to his closest confidants) that he's had very few successes and a great many failures.
Now, on the other hand, if one wanted to say that his public persona is often that of a pompous windbag, I'd be hard-pressed to disagree, though I'd hasten to add that (unfortunate as it might be) one almost has to be a pompous windbag in public to get far in business in contemporary culture. We live in the Era of Outrage, after all; "number of people pissed off" might as well be currency.
I was there when Bill Gates would attract similar hate. Jeff Bezos is only lucky that there isn't much of public facing information on Bezos, like Bezos speeches or Bezos is not known to routinely give out success advice on commonly accessible media.
Elon Musk is a highly successful immigrant entrepreneur, built several companies, some of them happen to be some of the hardest businesses ever to win in. Has a very powerful social media presence, he announces his intentions often, which many feel are impossible, but he wins nevertheless. He also is also very good in social culture scene too, which many people find cool. He is what most people want to be, but can't for various (at times valid)reasons.
Being a counter thesis to your (at times valid)excuses is bound to attract some resentment and hate.