Fun fact, the rockets launching tomorrow are out-of-data designs. They use hydraulics for thrust vectoring while the newer models use electric, among the many changes.
It is 'common knowledge' in that people say it a lot on HN/reddit. In this case, Shotwell is responsible for overseeing integration at Starbase, so it at least makes some sense to give her credit for the test flight.
In general though, Musk is the CEO and lead engineer and it really feels like people talk up Shotwell's contribution as a childish way of downplaying Musk's.
Written by the great Gavin Smith, a project manager at some consultancy no one has ever heard of, with no mechanical engineering or software experience, and writer of hard-hitting pieces that sound like they were written by a high schooler.
i don't understand using that as a source, there's literally a giant banner on it showing that the tweet you linked is wrong
poorly sourced hit pieces aside, go watch an interview where elon walks a journalist engineer through a tesla plant or spacex facility. he clearly knows the engineering that's happening there and there's even videos of him using autocad/solidworks/whatever in a manner that clearly demonstrates he's familiar with the software. Does he sit there designing some small piece of hardware in autocad for months at a time? No, but that also doesn't mean he's not an engineer.
What is wrong about it? Here is what Snopes, a site who does fact checking found about it. Please talk specifics instead of making generic judgement statements.
- "...Another area of controversy concerns the appearance and nature of the physics degree, specifically. Certificates of both a Penn economics degree and an alleged physics degree are included in documents filed as part of the O'Reilly and Eberhard lawsuits. While the economics diploma filed as evidence specifically indicates the academic discipline, name, and other details involved in the degree, the physics diploma appears to be a largely blank diploma and indicates no specific concentration..."
- "...The University of Pennsylvania Department of Physics and Astronomy does describe Musk as an alumnus. In 2009 — the same year the dispute with Eberhard was litigated — Musk gave Penn's Center for Particle Cosmology a "generous endowment" allowing for an annual "Elon Musk Public Lecture"..."
- " Musk's past statements about his educational background, however, have been, at best, imprecise. He has claimed on several occasions to have received a physics degree in 1995 — a claim that was never fully true but which may have aided Musk's early business career..."
Engineers aren't immune from making poor judgment calls, but the second part - having no clue what you're talking about and not knowing when to just shut up and learn - is certainly a marker for a poor engineer in my experience.
Do you actually think Musk engineered any part of SpaceX? In this case, it literally is rocket science, you can’t just hop in and pick it up as you go.
>Do you actually think Musk engineered any part of SpaceX?
Yes, especially after watching his extremely in depth interviews with Tim Dodd abou the Starship program.
Do you have some reason to think he didn't, other than the fact that you don't like him? I am already aware that he, like most engineers in the US, does not have an engineering degree.
Aerospace engineering actually requires you to do years of study for a reason. This isn't engineering a cute little website for your company, this is, as I said, literally rocket science. Your measurements and calculations have to be extremely precise and that knowledge doesn't magically sprout out of nowhere.
> I am already aware that he, like most engineers in the US, does not have an engineering degree.
Bold claim. I'm sure you have a source. And even if you did, I'm pretty sure aerospace engineering would be an exception rather than the rule. But I highly doubt this claim in the first place.
I find it strange that people don't acknowledge the significant contributions made by him at SpaceX on HN. However, figures such as Jim Keller, John Carmack, and Tom Mueller all recognize and appreciate his contributions.
I don't find it strange at all. To acknowledge his contribution you have to accept that a person might not be entirely 1 dimensional, and they may be extremely accomplished in some areas yet apparently incompetent in others.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
I can only imagine the relief at SpaceX that he’s too busy shitposting alt-right memes and lighting billions of dollars on fire to get in the way of their genuinely incredible achievement.
They are stocking extra propellants at the suborbital tank farm for backup and shorter turn around times should they need it. It takes a lot of trucks to bring enough fuel for a full load
NET is just slightly different than 'attempt'. Look at NET as 'cannot happen before'. SpaceX is going to start the process tomorrow but any number of conditions and delays could arise that will push the launch attempt back.
If we don't hit Monday there is a very good possibility it cannot happen on Tuesday because of weather.
And the countless grifters on youtube DEBUNKING and SLAMMING starship. I think there's a channel that is basically just living off debunking spacex at this point. It's a really weird phenomenon.
Exactly. I could understand the more recent ones simply due to political nature. Especially in the US. But slamming Starship goes back much further than that, as if they dont want this to happen. It is really strange.
Yeah I totally get not liking the billionaire, and I'm sure some of it started as a reaction to the elon musk worship that used to be common back then... but then it turned into a weird culture of random dudes thinking that they are smarter than NASA, SpaceX, the american military, the FAA... and having an audience for their groundbreaking "research".
I don't think that's unique to SpaceX specifically.
It's just that it's packed with recognised emotive names like Musk and SpaceX and it's unconventional: no prior rocket looks like that or does the same landing thing. However, rockets are basically understandable enough ("big fire go down, thing go up") that everyone can have some opinion, and when they go wrong there's often a huge cinematic explosion. Musk's companies are also high-cadence and PR-rich so there's always a video to make, unlike, say, SLS which just grinds away dully outside the limelight. A diss video rather than a technical video is easier to make and draws using emotions: fans to argue and critics to validate. It's perfect capital-C Content.
What video gets more clicks: "Elon Musk's new StarShip is DOOMED, here's why" with a flaming explosion in the thumbnail. Or "TLB invalidation strategy in certain ARMv7a cores is slow on some workloads: here's why"?
If there are clicks on the table, there's money on the table.
Most of those are not skeptical that starship can work. Lots of doubt around the specific claims for the amount that it can drop launch costs by, launch cadence, first launch time frame (which was correct in it's prediction of no 2022 launch), but not really much actual doubt that SpaceX can successfully launch starship.
The skepticism is always around the ability to have a successful Starship program, which includes all of the above. I don't think people are doubting the physics of it.
The 2022 timeline comment focus for me was about the need to fundraise and have a "down round", which was wrong. Also their implication with "there's never been an engine production line which could build much more than one engine per week" and "the raptor engine production line is running much too slow" was resolved less than a year later when SpaceX was up to building a raptor engine every day[1] and is, as of February, at nearly 2 engines a day [2]
I think you are trying too hard to fit those comments to your narrative.
Even if starship fails to fully achieve the very optimistic estimates on every one of those fronts, the starship program can be very successful.
HN has in my experience been fairly supportive of Starship's chance of success while pushing back on some of the wildly optimistic claims made about the program.
"Will be landing uncrewed Starship on Mars in 3 to 5 years"
I assume you quoted this to demonstrate it being inaccurate or wrong. My point is that Starship is theoretically able to do this today. The launch got scrubbed so we're missing confirmation of how ready it is, but presumably there's a high confidence level it's ready for orbital flight because otherwise the wouldn't be launching it just to explode millions of dollars of rocket. And going from orbital flight to ready to land on mars is a pretty simple roadmap and clearly something they'll have within 4 years (5 years from the comment being made)
If you really believe they will be on Mars in 3 to 5 years, I publicly commit to pay you a dinner on the best restaurant of your choice, in the Olympus Mons district.
> My point is that Starship is theoretically able to do this today.
Well, no, its theoretically capable of doing it in 6 months from an optimal launch window, which eats up at least 10% (I don’t have a calendar of launch windows for the 6 month to Mars mission profile handy) of the high end of the 3-5 year window for landing off the bat.
But theory and practice are only the same in theory, not in practice.
> And going from orbital flight to ready to land on mars is a pretty simple roadmap
Not really, unless you mean "crash" landing.
The 4 year estimate is overly optimistic as a result. Forget launch windows, just handling refueling and long term loitering (with engine restart after that) required for Mars mission with any reasonable chance of success will take majority of those 4 years. Especially if you are not willing to blow starships all the time.
And that's also ignoring the tiny detail that Mars is not even in top3 priorities for starship even after successful fully orbital test and landing of both stages. Getting to high flight rate / launching Starlink v2 sats / HLS is much more important for SpaceX
Sadly, the internet has become a place to criticize and throw hate and doubt on basically anyone doing anything that is new, different or extraordinary.
Heck, even when I set out to drive around Africa there was a mountain of hatred and anger saying it was impossible, and I would be beheaded in the first country. (Spoiler: I wasn't, I had a great time).
I think it's important to remember that the very, VERY vast majority of people on the internet have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. Unfortunately it seems the people with the least idea are the loudest, and get given the biggest microphone.
Of course doubts are allowed, but what I'm saying is that SpaceX clearly have a team of world-class experts. They've all spend decades training, practising and honing their craft. Based on their track record, I'd say they're pretty good at what they do. They may even be the best in the world.
That makes it hard when some rando on the internet comes in to doubt or criticize, because it's virtually impossible for that rando to have more expertise than the entire SpaceX team.
If a person actually run the numbers and backed up their thoughts with legitimate reasons and a better idea that would be one thing. But that never happens, which is the problem.
If a government is aiming to increase the amount of renewable power, or a car company aims to make their cars more efficient, or a public transit operator wants to increase their service, or literally any one of billions of things that can be done, it is a waste of everyone's time for someone to chime in and say "Won't work because I said so" when they have absolutely zero experience, expertise or evidence to back up their thought that has no basis in reality.
Does it never happen, or do you just never see it?
Earlier today there was an HN post of an article suggesting that the Starship launch has more environmental and property risk than FAA or SpaceX has acknowledged, using data like the fact that a 50% thrust test in February produced sound pressures of 110db three miles away, while SpaceX estimates 100% thrust will produce 90-100db at that distance.
The post was flagged and removed very quickly.
I don't know the provenance of the article or its author, and maybe they made numbers up out of whole cloth, but none of the HN commenters rebutted the data or conclusions, it was just lots of "this anti-progress scumbag wants us to live in communist China" ad hominems.
So maybe there just is no legitimate, fact-based criticism. Or, maybe, there is and it is just filtered out from the communities I typically frequent. Seeing that this morning definitely gave me some pause.
Perhaps the acoustics are different when the engines are actually accelerating a rocket, rather than held down on a test stand? Presumably, a test stand needs to direct all the sustained power outward horizontally in order to keep from being destroyed. A launch stand only needs to withstand exposure to high power for a few seconds, a relatively modest amount of total energy. Once the rocket is
released and in the air, ideally all of the power is turning into kinetic energy rather than acoustic or thermal.
Yes! Those are all reasonable and plausible. It would have been great to have a discussion rather than banning the content because it dared to question SpaceX. At the very least, it was only because I happened to see the post before it was removed that I even knew that the February test produced between 10x and 100x as much sound as estimates suggested.
As it stands, I don't know if your explanations are spot-on and the actual sound pressure will be as SpaceX estimates, and most people don't even know if there's a question about it. That doesn't seem... ideal, for the principles HN purports to support.
I don't know about what happened with the HN thread. I worked at SpaceX for 3 years 10 years ago, though, and at least at the time I didn't observe any hint of intentional impropriety. I personally was in a handful of meetings with NASA folk, and not only was I brutally honest with them, but I can also say that there was no one pressuring me to do otherwise. On the contrary, not that I can provide details, but I witnessed one person immediately getting fired for being less than radically honest in their external communication.
I maintain a very high ethical standard for the people I choose to associate with personally and professionally. I would happily go back to working at SpaceX if there was good alignment with my personal goals. It seems unlikely since I now have kids and appreciate infinitely flexible work life balance, but I do look back fondly on my years at SpaceX. Financially and career wise, it was a mutually beneficial arrangement. I don't feel taken advantage of at all. Viewed as an investment, I can only describe my experience as a cornucopia of riches.
I agree that posts getting flagged and taken off HN is a very big problem, and I think it needs to stop.
This forum attracts some of the smartest and most influential people on the planet (The person most directly responsible for the search results of the biggest search engine on the planet used to contribute regularly...)
Taking 'controversial' discussions off the table is a dangerous thing, because it means many real issues are never being discussed or addressed, and there is no hope of them ever being fixed.
It's exactly like a family forbidding conversations about topics that are difficult. That leads to very bad things down the road, and I think HN is the same, but potentially has even more responsibility.
I think it's fine to express relatively uninformed/layman/"gut feeling" opinions, but I also believe these posts need to be presented as such so it doesn't give readers the impression that the writer is imbuing them with undue confidence/credibility. I've learned a good deal through such posts, but that's only possible if the writer isn't presenting opinion as fact and is open to new information.
In fairness we still don’t know that reusability is going to work. The heat shielding is afaict a big unknown.
Can they use a mostly modular tile? Can they hold the tiles in place with their current strategy? Will their approach to both of the above sufficiently protect the vehicle? How much will it take to reset the shielding after each launch?
Yeah those tiles are clearly the weakest link in the whole Starship ecosystem. The shuttle was built on the idea those tiles could be inspected and replaced within days. It ended up taking half a year.
Well it's vastly scaled down from what was originally proposed.
The original proposal (ITS) was for a vehicle that could deliver 300 tons to LEO. Then that got scaled to down to 150 tons.
They had proposed doing "Earth to Earth" (rocket travel from city to city) with it. Not on the table now as I understand it.
They did pull off a steel-based design and an FFSC engine which is really cool. But they HN commenters were absolutely right that the original design was a fantasy.
If I'm not mistaken, MCT/ITS is something that's potentially still on the table, just kicked down the road until after Starship+Superheavy have proven themselves and demand for cargo+crew delivery capacity greater than what Starship is capable of (which is already absurdly high relative to predecessors) has materialized. It makes sense, because at that point building MCT/ITS is a matter of "just" scaling up Starship+Superheavy instead of starting from a blank slate.
I believe earth-to-earth is still a consideration, too, if only because the US military has expressed interest in such capabilities.
It is still not done, in fact there is a good chance that this launch will go boom, which is actually expected by SpaceX as part of the iterative development process and not as bad as, say, a failure of the SLS, but it still means we are not ready yet. Remember that the Soviet N1 launched 4 times, all failures, and it was the end of the program, I don't think Starship will suffer the same fate, for many reasons, but just because we get to launches don't mean the program will succeed.
That it can be done never really was the question. The tech is actually pretty well proven, a lot of it coming from soviet design. The issue is more about economics: do we need a super heavy reusable rocket, will reusability keep its promises. It is not like everyone and his dog has to put something into orbit, and in fact, we don't want too much stuff into orbit mostly because of the risk of space debris. Interestingly, the biggest customer may be SpaceX itself, with Starlink, and I think it is not a coincidence. We already had the Space Shuttle which was supposed to revolutionize space operation, and while the shuttle did work as a launcher, but it was ultimately a failure, hence the skepticism over Starship, it addition to the well known tendency of Elon Musk to overpromise and underdeliver.
Personally, I think SpaceX did better than I expected, and I think Starship will become at least a working launcher. SpaceX is essentially the only hope of the US government when it comes to rocketry, they won't let them go, especially now that the relationship with Russia is a bit tense. But as for how game changing it will be, I have absolutely no idea.
It is something Elon Musk himself said and I don't really know the details.
But the Soviet were at the forefront of staged combustion engines, of which the Raptor engine famously is. And the "Super Heavy" booster is reminiscent of the N1 rocket, using a large number of small, efficient engines.
Giving the N1 as the source of these so-called soviet designs is such a cop-out. The N1 was overtly complicated, poorly planned, didn't even use the same fuel as Starship and had an extra stage.
It's comparing two rockets that are kind-of similar in height when you squint and arguing we have to somehow give the soviet the credit.
Elon was probably talking about the engines, which the soviets toyed with as a concept, but SpaceX delivered as an existing product.
The N1 certainly was a failure, but still, a lot of research went into it. Research that was hidden from the west.
What I think Elon Musk and engineers at SpaceX though was: hey, we are not in the cold war anymore, we have access to what the soviet did, so let's pick that up, take the good parts implement them with modern technology.
The way I understand it, the USSR was better in some fields, like metallurgy, and made designs that took advantage of it. So now that the US can do even better metallurgy, then maybe take these soviet designs instead of the US designs that were made with material limitations. And also take advantage of, say, better electronics to succeed where the soviet failed.
Maybe I am wrong, but that's my interpretation. It is not full credit to the soviet, but more like giving them credit because they couldn't have done it on western technology alone.
You are wrong. The Soviets were better than the US at only one thing: engines, and nothing else really. SpaceX wanted to use Russian rockets initially. They were unable to buy them, and started their own development instead. They were greatly inspired by Russian engine designs, which were very well made, but they have honestly improved and surpassed the Russians at this point.
The N1 has no connection with Starship. The only similar thing is the amount of engines, but Starship uses a different fuel which means a completely different plumbing technology. They have nothing in common. I mean, have you heard about that whole coming back part?
It indeed started as the "Interplanetary Transport System", but there isn't a Mars mission yet, so it is a solution looking for a problem. The challenges of getting to Mars are huge, and that essentially ended the "pissing contest" era of space travel that gave us Apollo, and pretty much all of what we know about space travel today. Political figures understood that the next step after the Moon was Mars and that neither the US nor USSR were ready to take it despite the ridiculous amount of effort they could spare. Landing people on Mars is hard, very hard, and having a launcher capable of that is only part of the equation. There are radiation, travel time, etc... There is no way SpaceX can do it by itself, and the US government is not ready. So it might be the big goal, but certainly not the product SpaceX will sell.
There is a Moon mission though, and I think SpaceX quickly switched the focus on that as soon as Artemis was starting to become a reality. But while it is part of the plan, the real "moon rocket" is SLS and the spaceship is Orion, Starship is "just" a lander. A weird situation if you ask me, but hey, politics.
So yeah, the think SpaceX is selling is a rocket to put tons of heavy stuff into orbit, with Mars and the Moon being the extra plan, if the government decides to take it. I am not convinced about Mars, unless maybe China starts a pissing contest, which may be the best thing that can happen to space travel, but it looks like the Moon is getting at least something (of which China is probably no stranger to), still wait an see of a settlement.
I'm pretty sure most of the discussion here was suggesting that he could get one of these off the ground, but that it won't necessarily accomplish its goals. The skepticism was more about whether the claimed cost reductions could be reached, whether the craft could do any sort of reasonable missions, or whether the desired launch cadence could be achieved. Falcon heavy is still doing 1 launch per year or so, so that doesn't seem to be a given at all.
> The Starship and its Super Heavy rocket will launch from SpaceX's Starbase test site near Boca Chica Beach in South Texas, with the Super Heavy booster attempting a soft water landing splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico while the Starship vehicle circles the Earth for a water splashdown off the coast of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.
Once around the planet in low earth orbit is about 90 minutes. This is just how long these things take. In other words it would be difficult for a suborbital flight around the planet from Texas to Hawaii to take anything other than about 90 minutes.
I hope it goes well, but I'm concerned that they've never done a test flight or a full-duration 33 engine static fire on the first stage booster. SpaceX has always been about real-world testing and rapid iteration based on the (often catastrophic) results of that testing. I worry that the lack of testing is due to a business desire to avoid the (stunning) cost of building and losing 33 Raptor engines on each failed test article, rather than an engineering judgement that such tests are not needed.
Every engine has been through a full cycle test at their engine facility before being installed. This is the case for all of SpaceX engines from Falcon to Starship. The first trip to space is not the first full duration fire
To be fair, firing 33 engines at the same time when they're a meter or two apart is a pretty different environment. But as others said and I agree, this is that test.
>I worry that the lack of testing is due to a business desire to avoid the (stunning) cost of building and losing 33 Raptor engines on each failed test article, rather than an engineering judgement that such tests are not needed.
Determining whether it is worth risking 33 Raptor engines in a static fire is an engineering decision.
They did a short duration static fire, they seemed to do a lot to keep it held down at ~50% throttle, full LOX tank, just enough methane for combustion.
It is probably impossible to have a full thrust or duration static fire on the existing launch mount, or any?
>I worry that the lack of testing is due to a business desire to avoid the (stunning) cost of building and losing 33 Raptor engines on each failed test article
Uh, what? They are going to lose them, and it's fine because it's not a stunning cost at all. If everything goes absolutely perfectly here, the engines are all going straight to the bottom of the ocean. There is no effort to save anything, they're being cautious with the part that actually matters (the ground infrastructure). Minimum goal for that same reason is getting a thousand feet above the tower or whatever it was before it explodes, again so that ground infra is ok. Like Starship overall, Raptors are designed to be cheap and mass produced. Long term it's definitely very important to economic viability to recover SH, recovered SH and expended SS (if it took awhile to nail down reentry say) would be a fine MVP, expended both would not, but a few tens of millions of dollars out of a multibillion R&D effort is fine at this stage. My understanding is that the booster they're launching is indeed already obsolete, because it doesn't have the new full electric+torch ignition system. They've been building up to this steady and deliberately, and there is no sign of a rush or that they've made this decision for any reason but that they're ready to give it a go again. Their plans of course have all been thoroughly reviewed by government as well.
So this is kind of an odd take? They've already been dealing with 27 engines in F9H, this is hardly their first rodeo. F9 is already arguably the most reliable rocket ever. These aren't amateurs.
I'm heading down there, but my flight has been delayed and I missed a connection so I'm only flying to Houston and then am going to have to drive overnight to get there on time...
SpaceX's booster landings continue to be pretty much the only thing(s) that have properly, legitimately stunned me as an adult.
i'm not a Musk fan generally, but when it comes to SpaceX i doff my hat and try hard to pause whatever i'm doing if i see an upcoming launch + first stage landing live on youtube.
as a Gen-Xer, brought up on footage of [the now] archaic space systems like the various Skylab & Shuttle missions, this is truly an extraordinary time for space fans.
His style of management is effective because it’s fear based and slave driverish. Fortunately in this case he can get people to work purely on the basis of the ideals and lofty goals they are working towards.
In a way, the ideals are part of the compensation package. SpaceX don't have to have good work conditions because people want to work there. The same way the video game industry has bad pay with bad work conditions because there's a steady flow of people wanting to make games, even if only as a tiny cog in a massive machine. Or how teachers or nurses are paid poorly, because enough people want to do it anyways.
Which isn't supposed to be an endorsement of any of this. Ethically it's very questionable, but it is a logical outcome in our flavor of capitalism.
He picked the right people to work SpaceX and Tesla, which is his greatest feat and deserves much praise. He informed himself, then involved himself more than was probably required or even good, but he had adult supervision.
He's deliberately ignoring adult supervision in Twitter and making a hash of it. The fact that both Tesla and SpaceX continue in his absence suggest that whatever direct benefit he once provided does not seem to require more.
> Is SpaceX succeeding because of Musk or despite of Musk?
Probably because. Just look at Blue Origin with Jeff Bezos. Or look at the US, EU, Chinese space industry. It does look like Musk adds something to SpaceX that makes them achieve above the rest.
I think it's pretty clear what that something is too. a) pushing people to question assumptions and continually try new things to cut costs and improve performance, b) slave driving employees in exciting industries where you can get away with that.
Musk is great at raising money on empty promises, and that is what SpaceX has really needed. They are on series O or P at this point. Anyone who was less good at turning hype into money would not have gotten to that point.
There's a big story floating around that Musk didn't run a SpaceX IPO by choice. I think the reality is probably pretty different: SpaceX doesn't look like it's in any shape to support being a public company from the financial breadcrumbs we have been given. The IPO would be huge, but the company needs more than just an IPO, it will need to continue doing secondary offerings to raise money (in contrast to Tesla, which doesn't at all).
For those secondary offerings, you put downward pressure on your stock price, and markets start to eventually pick up expectations that you will make enough money to support a given valuation if you want to keep it. SpaceX's valuation is too high for just the Falcon 9 launch business to be worth continual secondary offerings. So they need something amazing - which is supposed to be Starlink today, but could have been "mars" or "asteroid mining" or whatever else. Without this rocket, Starlink doesn't look like it has massively positive unit economics either.
Hence you get a company that is eternally raising money from private and venture markets on future promise and hype, paired with the perfect CEO to do those raises.
> Anyone who was less good at turning hype into money would not have gotten to that point.
FTFY: Anyone who was less good at turning hype into money into significant achievements ...
Musk might not hit his target time tables. He might not deliver everything he plans to. But he still delivers things other entities have yet to match, or took a serious amount to time to match.
Investors, and people who care about his projects, don't care about him keeping every promise. They care about results. If a CEO and his team get motivated by impossible time tables, then let them motivate themselves with impossible time tables.
(Counter example? FWIW, any benefits of his foray into Twitter are not yet clear to me.)
You didn't need to fix it - I meant what I said. Given the money, the achievements are not that hard.
According to people I know who worked at SpaceX, there is a whole layer of management that exists to handle Musk the way you would handle a boy king. They basically insulate him from making any decisions that can really hurt the company. I have heard of one instance where they spent 3 weeks quietly convincing him out of a wrong decision before announcing that he made the other choice (once he changed his mind and agreed to it).
It doesn't sound like a company that needs such a management layer is getting their ability to accomplish things from the boy king, just the name and the money.
AFAICT this management scheme is shotwell's doing, and you should probably credit her for the accomplishments.
Also, we're seeing this dynamic play out in electric cars. Once they became economical to make (and no, Tesla wasn't really responsible for that), other carmakers are now out-competing them.
> Given the money, the achievements are not that hard.
I have no idea what you would think would be hard.
What SpaceX has done with their investors money hasn't been matched by anyone in the rocket industry. Many attempts have ended in complete failure.
The closest competitors in recent years, in terms of a consistent string of steady solid advancements, have been the Chinese. And they are still far behind.
Whether Musk is a challenging person to work for, doesn't add or subtract from that.
Nobody in the rocket industry has had anywhere near that level of money invested in them, so they haven't gotten the results. SpaceX outspends them 100:1 or more on R&D. Everyone else in the industry has to make a profit on their services, too.
If you want to see companies with comparable levels of spending to Musk companies, you have to look outside rockets.
By the way, I'm not knocking the man: getting that much money to spend on rockets is an incredible achievement. Someone who did something comparable literally won a Nobel prize (the administrator responsible for making sure LIGO got enough money). Actually spending it on rocket technology once you have it isn't hard.
Edit: Hard projects in the space sector would be things like landing and operating a massive rover or a human colony on mars (or the moon for that matter), or building very new instruments like the JWST - doing things that are fundamentally new.
Starlink with cubesats would have been pretty revolutionary (instead of car-sized, 1-ton monsters), and absolutely crushed the economics. The current version of starlink is basically LeoSat (one of a fee companies Musk probably heard about before starting the Starlink project) with enough initial capital to not go broke.
If they can get starship launches up and running with the economics they promise, that would be hard.
The first vertically-landing rocket did it in the 1960's. Commercializing from that point was just a matter of investment. SpaceX has contributed meaningfully to rocket engine technology, but I doubt Musk knew anything about that.
Well China has outspent Tesla by a massive margin.
So has Russia. So has NASA. Same with Europe.
Not to mention Boeing, ULA, or other long time rocket technology suppliers.
So there are examples of large extended spending budgets (on rocketry programs, specifically) with nowhere near as much progress as SpaceX has done with far fewer people, less time, and less money.
The difference really begs the question of how he did it. And I think the answer is he did many things differently.
He didn't just have a clear vision of reusability, but also the time, cost and complexity savings of vertical integration, the faster progress that comes of tolerating intermediate failures as a source of fast feedback, and casting his overworked employees as crusaders in a meaningful mission to best the best, and turn sci-fi into reality, all with contagious enthusiasm.
He also seems to have a secret superpower for plowing through government red tape and bureaucracy. I have no idea how he does that, but both with Tesla and SpaceX it has made a significant difference. Easy not to notice that, but a lot of ambitions have been ground down with resource attrition on that mountain.
>So there are examples of large extended spending budgets (on rocketry programs, specifically) with nowhere near as much progress as SpaceX has done with far fewer people, less time, and less money.
at least in the US, a lot of the budget is really glorified government pork, unfortunately. Boeing and even NASA have to spend their money sub optimally in order to secure future funding from government bodies.
> Well China has outspent Tesla by a massive margin.
> So has Russia. So has NASA. Same with Europe.
> Not to mention Boeing, ULA, or other long time rocket technology suppliers.
Do you have sources for these claims with respect to rocket technology? SpaceX has raised $10 billion to spend pretty much only on rockets - again, the easiest part of space technology by far. The rest of the money is going to comm satellites, which are also know to be a pretty easy technology. The budgets for these space agencies are bigger, but they are also spending on much more complicated things like science mission payloads. Not to mention all the pork.
> He also seems to have a secret superpower for plowing through government red tape and bureaucracy. I have no idea how he does that, but both with Tesla and SpaceX it has made a significant difference. Easy not to notice that, but a lot of ambitions have been ground down with resource attrition on that mountain.
That superpower is lying. When you claim that you have capabilities you don't, they pay you to develop them until they figure out you were BS-ing in the first place. This is what happened with the rural broadband subsidies.
SpaceX has sunk enormous sums into building and launching thousands of their own satellites. Roughly one half of all operating satellites.
Their investment dollars up to now have also covered development of their next rocket, with planned capabilities of refueling in space and round trips, including site landings, to anywhere in the solar system, and have a greater lift capacity than the SLS, beyond their current achievements in rocketry.
They also had to, from scratch, develop an organization, build out design, manufacturing and flight control capacities, their own launch facilities including unique water landing platforms.
NASA already had extensive facilities and capabilities, prior to their latest rocket project.
Of course, both NASA and SpaceX were able to leverage NASA's previous experience with rocketry. (I am a fan, not a critic of NASA.)
> NASA reports the official cost of the SLS as $11.8 billion [1]
> NASA estimates will cost $13.8 billion to develop through its first crewed launch in 2024. [1]
That doesn't cover the costs of additional rockets. Which get discarded after every launch.
> each SLS/Orion launch will have a price tag of about $4.1 billion. [2]
When you consider the cost of NASA launches vs. SpaceX launches, there are now between an order or two of magnitudes between them. Which is reflected in SpaceX launch prices. Starship will eliminate the second stage losses, resulting in even cheaper per launch costs.
I cannot think of another time in history where a company has managed to so decisively leave all competition, including major strategic nation-state initiatives, behind.
Not sure how I missed the opening paragraph of [1]:
> From its inception in 2011 through the year of its first flight, the Space Launch System rocket program has cost $23.8 billion. The Orion deep space capsule has cost $20.4 billion since the program began in 2006. Related ground infrastructure upgrades cost an additional $5.7 billion since 2012. In total, NASA spent $49.9 billion on these programs between 2006 and their first test launch in 2022.
I believe their success comes down to how they go about these massive development projects. They start super scrappy, quick to iterate, build and throwaway hardware quickly. But then are experts of transitioning into a sustainable late stage development within the regulatory bounds of a highly controlled industry.
They did it with Falcon, Dragon, Starlink, and I suspect they will with Starship too.
They could only go about this by having a "crazy" and very rich benefactor, along with the management of COO Gwynne Shotwell.
It does seem crazy wasteful but in the end they are far more cost effective than more traditional companies like Boeing. Signing off on these original programs took incredible bravery but by now investors should be punishing companies that timidly launch once every five years.
It's the same lesson the software industry learned roughly 20 years ago: For an omniscient being the waterfall process might be the most efficient, for mere mortals it's more valuable to have a process that allows you to verify assumptions and find flaws as early in the process as possible, when it's still cheap to fix them.
Waste when the waste is cheap and easy recyclable.
People get confused by this when they see bits of metal get blown up and fail. The cost of that metal isn't really that high at the end of the day and the bits of metal that are recovered get melted down and reused.
Do you know what cannot be recycled and reused? Human effort when we spend tens of thousand of hours on something that doesn't pan out. In so many mega project we see design ideas carried on because of the sunk cost fallacy. The key to prevent this is being able to bail out as fast as possible when the idea isn't going to work, and being able to focus on what is going to work.
Not only a rich benefactor, also someone who can inspire and convince others. SpaceX has gone through multiple financing rounds, the last one in January raising $750M at a valuation of $137B.
> They start super scrappy, quick to iterate, build and throwaway hardware quickly. But then are experts of transitioning into a sustainable late stage development within the regulatory bounds of a highly controlled industry.
I wish something like this could happen in software, too.
I have worked in a a couple regulated industries, and in all cases the firm's decision to impose the same level of governance at all levels of the software value chain was a horrible impediment to innovation. After a certain number of iterations of having to do governance reviews of spikes and PoCs that were going to be thrown away regardless of whether the idea worked, any developer who values their own time will eventually settle into avoiding true prototype and PoC work and instead dive straight into writing production-bound code from the beginning.
I've wondered if we could get more innovation and more quality by allowing rapid iteration (without all the paperwork) during early development and prototyping of an idea, followed by a complete and in-depth review, documentation and certification of the final design and implementation as part of preparing it to ship to production.
It does seem like a method that'd apply well to software. It's kind of like, "move fast and break things," except that which was broken gets fixed in subsequent iterations instead of being forgotten about as priorities are shifted to the feature of the week and becoming so deeply rooted that they won't get fixed until the next big rewrite.
"We are going to fly to Mars!" attract different kind of engineers than "We are going to eke out 5 per cent more growth for our shareholders!"
Most publicly traded corporations fall into the latter trap: find some cash cow and milk it endlessly so that the shareholders are happy, and screw any innovation.
Privately owned corporations such as SpaceX can afford "loftier" goals.
SpaceX is Musk doing the things he's good at, and delegating everything else. He's mostly there as the visionary and the person running R&D, with most other stuff handled by Gwynne Shotwell.
This combination works incredibly well. Musk regularly questions conventional wisdom and reimagines things from first principles, and then has the balls to go through with it. Channeled properly this is incredibly powerful and propels SpaceX on a trajectory far beyond their competition. Channeled improperly ... well, just look at some of his other companies.
Definitely because of him. He is doing what nation states cannot do. People forget that before his "turn" towards right wing politics, he would provide detailed answers and be part of the engineering that made space x great. Add his enormous talent of hiring some of the greatest talent, with an unquenchable thirst for childlike wonder and drive, it is hard to imagine how something like space x would have ever come into fruition without him.
Now his turn is actually a strategic manoeuvre to make the right like him and buy his products. He is solving for global warming after all. And like a lot of immigrants, he is very sensitive to free speech becoming less free due to the whole social justice warrior movement which was getting out of hand. So he did all the memes and said a bunch of things that one can say when they are at a certain level in their lives without society being able to cancel them.
Bottomline is, we are enormously blessed to have talented immigrants like Einstein and Musk coming to our shores and we wouldn't be half the country without them.
The way SpaceX has revolutionised the space industry is largely down to Elon's unique vision and drive. Elon has set the mission of getting to Mars and SpaceX has relentlessly pursued that goal and hasn't paused to soak up cash for shareholders (Falcon 9 Block 5 would be ludicrously profitable if SpaceX just scrapped R&D and rested on their laurels).
People who work in Space tech generally _want_ to work in Space tech and want to do the big things (like reaching Mars etc.) so SpaceX has an easier time hiring highly motivated and highly capable people because it has such ambition.
Elon managed to hire very capable senior leadership. Like Tom Mueller who led SpaceX propulsion development. And most importantly, SpaceX's President and COO Gwynne Shotwell who basically runs SpaceX in most meaningful ways. Elon as CEO is more like a very involved chairman than a traditional CEO which is why I would say SpaceX is also successful in spite of Musk, because he's actually not that involved day-to-day which is probably his most negative influence.
Musk had the insight to aim for the overwhelmingly practical and economic benefits of reusable rockets.
While the road to achieving those benefits directly was a long road, the immediate indirect benefits of having a clear path to a major competitive (and customer) advantage were the quality of people he was able to inspire to work on the problem.
And as SpaceX began delivering reusability, their profit margins, and industry respect, have risen to a level that gives them overwhelming advantages for now and seemingly for some time to come.
We don't have access to their dollar per-launch costs in their private ledger, but we do have very reliable access to their rocketry hardware per-launch costs.
In percentage of rocket stages consumed / launch, their costs are significantly lower than any other entity in the industry.
Also launch frequencies are higher, and their turnaround time on launches is significantly lower, reducing the fixed costs of having a launch system per launch significantly over the competition again.
If you read Eric Burger's fantastic book about the early days of SpaceX, there are some great anecdotes from engineers and what it was like working with Elon.
Many of them came from Boeing or Lockheed, and they talk about how getting approval for a new piece of equipment or new manufacturing tech would take 12 months, then budgeting, then whatever and you might have the thing in 2 years if you were lucky.
With Elon, you go into his office and lay out your ask. He will ask one or two directed questions, they say "yes, do it" and pull out the check book then and there, and you can spend millions and get something new in weeks.
Even when it doesn't work out down the road, Elon will ask if you learned something and if you're now on the right track, and if the answer is yes, Elon says "You did the right thing".
So it sounds like he removes a ton of barriers, and I'd love to work for someone like that.
SpaceX's reusable launch technology has become a strategic American national security asset. The U.S. would, in all probability, bail out SpaceX if, for some reason, it was about to fail. SpaceX's success is a Sputnik moment for countries like China and Russia, which are desperately trying to develop reusable rockets of their own.
Also, Gwynne Shotwell deserves as much credit as Elon Musk.
This is what makes me wonder about the commercial viability of Starship. A single rapidly resuable Starship will lead to a launch capacity glut. Now factor in a fleet of them. And that China and the EU will definitely respond, and Russia too if they can afford it.
Launch prices are going to be driven down brutally. It's not clear to me how any launch provider will make a profit.
By enabling entirely new applications that aren't remotely economical otherwise. Asteroid mining, orbital manufacturing, all that scifi stuff that we've been talking about for half a century and can't do at thousands of dollars per pound to LEO.
Cheap high-volume launch means you can build things heavier and in some cases mass-produce them, so space hardware doesn't have to cost so much anymore either.
Consider how CPU manufacturing became a bigger industry as the cost per computation plummeted over the past 50 years. When it gets cheaper to do something, demand tends to increase because people start purchasing it for purposes that would have been ridiculous in the past.
Until other cheap lifters show up, SpaceX can dictate the floor on costs. But profit means there must be a demand for Starship, perhaps more than Starlink provides. There are businesses that may flourish in near space given cheap enough access to low orbit.
As for launch providers surviving, nation-states have a vested interest in subsidizing their space programs, even at a loss, until they can bootstrap their own cheap lifters.
SpaceX a few years ago pretty much completely wiped out their Falcon 9 launch manifest because their launch cadence was so high, and the cost for SpaceX of doing so was so low. They briefly had a dip in launch cadence and it's only now building back up for two reasons:
1. They've dropped launch costs so their customers have new opportunities they can pursue at the new cost basis.
2. They started Starlink to soak up all their spare launch capacity. Hundreds of flights to low-earth orbit launching cheap satellites.
Starship/Super heavy is meant to be the next evolution of this. If the cost of launching heavy payloads massively drops then demand will appear to match it. They hope.
It's hard to make money on infrastructure, which space launches are in a way. But there is a lot of induced demand here: the main costs of satellites are the costs of the launch and the cost of the satellite, and satellites are in no small part expensive because launches are expensive (low weight, high reliability, long lifespan is expensive). If launches become cheaper, a lot more people will want to use them. Entire industries like zero-gravity fabrication, moon mining or space tourism only become viable as launch costs decrease.
I don't think you can assume that launch prices will drop substantially.
The problem is that demand for launches over the next 5 years is fairly static. Almost everything that will be launched in the next 5 years will already be well into the design phase.
SpaceX will keep prices below the competition, but they're already lower than the competition so why would they lower it further?
They want to retire Falcon9, so they do have a bit of a conundrum. They'd rather launch a Falcon9 size payload using Starship than using Falcon9 which puts pressure on them to charge Falcon9 per launch prices for Starship, but since Starship is much more capable than Falcon9, if per launch prices are the same, the Starship price is a lot less per ton.
But they have a way out: Launch as a service as an extension of their current rideshare model to larger payloads. Charge per kg rather than per launch. If you want to launch 17 tonnes into LEO you pay a different price than if you're launching 150 tonnes into LEO, even if both payloads go on a dedicated Starship.
OTOH being a private company they do have the ability to sandbag their profits over the next 5 years in the hope that they'll make up for it in >5 years. If they price at 10% of their current prices their launch profits over the next 5 years will be 10% of what they would be otherwise, but if it enables an asteroid mining startup that will buy hundreds of launches per year in a decade....
> i'm not a Musk fan generally, but when it comes to SpaceX i doff my hat
Like all of us, he has a mix of qualities, some of which are positive and some of which are negative. It’s a mistake to try to put a person in a “good” or “bad” box, and it some cases particular traits can be helpful in certain contexts and harmful in others.
He does have too much money for his own good, however.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/davidgojr/status/1647184578648449024
https://www.nasa.gov/content/national-space-council-users-ad...
In general though, Musk is the CEO and lead engineer and it really feels like people talk up Shotwell's contribution as a childish way of downplaying Musk's.
"Elon Musk: The Fake Engineer" - https://www.processindustryinformer.com/elon-musk-the-fake-e...
poorly sourced hit pieces aside, go watch an interview where elon walks a journalist engineer through a tesla plant or spacex facility. he clearly knows the engineering that's happening there and there's even videos of him using autocad/solidworks/whatever in a manner that clearly demonstrates he's familiar with the software. Does he sit there designing some small piece of hardware in autocad for months at a time? No, but that also doesn't mean he's not an engineer.
- "...Another area of controversy concerns the appearance and nature of the physics degree, specifically. Certificates of both a Penn economics degree and an alleged physics degree are included in documents filed as part of the O'Reilly and Eberhard lawsuits. While the economics diploma filed as evidence specifically indicates the academic discipline, name, and other details involved in the degree, the physics diploma appears to be a largely blank diploma and indicates no specific concentration..."
- "...The University of Pennsylvania Department of Physics and Astronomy does describe Musk as an alumnus. In 2009 — the same year the dispute with Eberhard was litigated — Musk gave Penn's Center for Particle Cosmology a "generous endowment" allowing for an annual "Elon Musk Public Lecture"..."
- " Musk's past statements about his educational background, however, have been, at best, imprecise. He has claimed on several occasions to have received a physics degree in 1995 — a claim that was never fully true but which may have aided Musk's early business career..."
If anyone doubts: https://twitter.com/pwnsdx/status/1605442608603463680
Musk suggests rewriting all of Twitter, can't answer any basic questions about the tech stack, gets angry when challenged on technical specifics.
Yes, especially after watching his extremely in depth interviews with Tim Dodd abou the Starship program.
Do you have some reason to think he didn't, other than the fact that you don't like him? I am already aware that he, like most engineers in the US, does not have an engineering degree.
Aerospace engineering actually requires you to do years of study for a reason. This isn't engineering a cute little website for your company, this is, as I said, literally rocket science. Your measurements and calculations have to be extremely precise and that knowledge doesn't magically sprout out of nowhere.
> I am already aware that he, like most engineers in the US, does not have an engineering degree.
Bold claim. I'm sure you have a source. And even if you did, I'm pretty sure aerospace engineering would be an exception rather than the rule. But I highly doubt this claim in the first place.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Part of being a good CEO is knowing when to delegate.
There's a lot of credit to his engineering prowess in your link et al. But engineering alone does not a successful company make.
You always have to keep grounded expectations for launch dates otherwise you will be sorely disappointed.
If we don't hit Monday there is a very good possibility it cannot happen on Tuesday because of weather.
It's just that it's packed with recognised emotive names like Musk and SpaceX and it's unconventional: no prior rocket looks like that or does the same landing thing. However, rockets are basically understandable enough ("big fire go down, thing go up") that everyone can have some opinion, and when they go wrong there's often a huge cinematic explosion. Musk's companies are also high-cadence and PR-rich so there's always a video to make, unlike, say, SLS which just grinds away dully outside the limelight. A diss video rather than a technical video is easier to make and draws using emotions: fans to argue and critics to validate. It's perfect capital-C Content.
What video gets more clicks: "Elon Musk's new StarShip is DOOMED, here's why" with a flaming explosion in the thumbnail. Or "TLB invalidation strategy in certain ARMv7a cores is slow on some workloads: here's why"?
If there are clicks on the table, there's money on the table.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33973607
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31368497
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31153986
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21944855
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30353028
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21400885
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215739
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27010713
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27765151
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23077358
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24460854
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10497425
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19874192
The 2022 timeline comment focus for me was about the need to fundraise and have a "down round", which was wrong. Also their implication with "there's never been an engine production line which could build much more than one engine per week" and "the raptor engine production line is running much too slow" was resolved less than a year later when SpaceX was up to building a raptor engine every day[1] and is, as of February, at nearly 2 engines a day [2]
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/11/spacex-is-now-buildi...
[2] https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2022/02/starships-self-susta...
Even if starship fails to fully achieve the very optimistic estimates on every one of those fronts, the starship program can be very successful.
HN has in my experience been fairly supportive of Starship's chance of success while pushing back on some of the wildly optimistic claims made about the program.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31368497
And there was nothing in the comment saying Starship could not be done. Was about something else.
I assume you quoted this to demonstrate it being inaccurate or wrong. My point is that Starship is theoretically able to do this today. The launch got scrubbed so we're missing confirmation of how ready it is, but presumably there's a high confidence level it's ready for orbital flight because otherwise the wouldn't be launching it just to explode millions of dollars of rocket. And going from orbital flight to ready to land on mars is a pretty simple roadmap and clearly something they'll have within 4 years (5 years from the comment being made)
Well, no, its theoretically capable of doing it in 6 months from an optimal launch window, which eats up at least 10% (I don’t have a calendar of launch windows for the 6 month to Mars mission profile handy) of the high end of the 3-5 year window for landing off the bat.
But theory and practice are only the same in theory, not in practice.
Not really, unless you mean "crash" landing.
The 4 year estimate is overly optimistic as a result. Forget launch windows, just handling refueling and long term loitering (with engine restart after that) required for Mars mission with any reasonable chance of success will take majority of those 4 years. Especially if you are not willing to blow starships all the time.
And that's also ignoring the tiny detail that Mars is not even in top3 priorities for starship even after successful fully orbital test and landing of both stages. Getting to high flight rate / launching Starlink v2 sats / HLS is much more important for SpaceX
Heck, even when I set out to drive around Africa there was a mountain of hatred and anger saying it was impossible, and I would be beheaded in the first country. (Spoiler: I wasn't, I had a great time).
I think it's important to remember that the very, VERY vast majority of people on the internet have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. Unfortunately it seems the people with the least idea are the loudest, and get given the biggest microphone.
That makes it hard when some rando on the internet comes in to doubt or criticize, because it's virtually impossible for that rando to have more expertise than the entire SpaceX team.
If a person actually run the numbers and backed up their thoughts with legitimate reasons and a better idea that would be one thing. But that never happens, which is the problem.
If a government is aiming to increase the amount of renewable power, or a car company aims to make their cars more efficient, or a public transit operator wants to increase their service, or literally any one of billions of things that can be done, it is a waste of everyone's time for someone to chime in and say "Won't work because I said so" when they have absolutely zero experience, expertise or evidence to back up their thought that has no basis in reality.
Does it never happen, or do you just never see it?
Earlier today there was an HN post of an article suggesting that the Starship launch has more environmental and property risk than FAA or SpaceX has acknowledged, using data like the fact that a 50% thrust test in February produced sound pressures of 110db three miles away, while SpaceX estimates 100% thrust will produce 90-100db at that distance.
The post was flagged and removed very quickly.
I don't know the provenance of the article or its author, and maybe they made numbers up out of whole cloth, but none of the HN commenters rebutted the data or conclusions, it was just lots of "this anti-progress scumbag wants us to live in communist China" ad hominems.
So maybe there just is no legitimate, fact-based criticism. Or, maybe, there is and it is just filtered out from the communities I typically frequent. Seeing that this morning definitely gave me some pause.
As it stands, I don't know if your explanations are spot-on and the actual sound pressure will be as SpaceX estimates, and most people don't even know if there's a question about it. That doesn't seem... ideal, for the principles HN purports to support.
I maintain a very high ethical standard for the people I choose to associate with personally and professionally. I would happily go back to working at SpaceX if there was good alignment with my personal goals. It seems unlikely since I now have kids and appreciate infinitely flexible work life balance, but I do look back fondly on my years at SpaceX. Financially and career wise, it was a mutually beneficial arrangement. I don't feel taken advantage of at all. Viewed as an investment, I can only describe my experience as a cornucopia of riches.
This forum attracts some of the smartest and most influential people on the planet (The person most directly responsible for the search results of the biggest search engine on the planet used to contribute regularly...)
Taking 'controversial' discussions off the table is a dangerous thing, because it means many real issues are never being discussed or addressed, and there is no hope of them ever being fixed.
It's exactly like a family forbidding conversations about topics that are difficult. That leads to very bad things down the road, and I think HN is the same, but potentially has even more responsibility.
Can they use a mostly modular tile? Can they hold the tiles in place with their current strategy? Will their approach to both of the above sufficiently protect the vehicle? How much will it take to reset the shielding after each launch?
The original proposal (ITS) was for a vehicle that could deliver 300 tons to LEO. Then that got scaled to down to 150 tons.
They had proposed doing "Earth to Earth" (rocket travel from city to city) with it. Not on the table now as I understand it.
They did pull off a steel-based design and an FFSC engine which is really cool. But they HN commenters were absolutely right that the original design was a fantasy.
https://spacewatch.global/2022/01/spacex-wins-102-million-ai...
I believe earth-to-earth is still a consideration, too, if only because the US military has expressed interest in such capabilities.
That it can be done never really was the question. The tech is actually pretty well proven, a lot of it coming from soviet design. The issue is more about economics: do we need a super heavy reusable rocket, will reusability keep its promises. It is not like everyone and his dog has to put something into orbit, and in fact, we don't want too much stuff into orbit mostly because of the risk of space debris. Interestingly, the biggest customer may be SpaceX itself, with Starlink, and I think it is not a coincidence. We already had the Space Shuttle which was supposed to revolutionize space operation, and while the shuttle did work as a launcher, but it was ultimately a failure, hence the skepticism over Starship, it addition to the well known tendency of Elon Musk to overpromise and underdeliver.
Personally, I think SpaceX did better than I expected, and I think Starship will become at least a working launcher. SpaceX is essentially the only hope of the US government when it comes to rocketry, they won't let them go, especially now that the relationship with Russia is a bit tense. But as for how game changing it will be, I have absolutely no idea.
But the Soviet were at the forefront of staged combustion engines, of which the Raptor engine famously is. And the "Super Heavy" booster is reminiscent of the N1 rocket, using a large number of small, efficient engines.
It's comparing two rockets that are kind-of similar in height when you squint and arguing we have to somehow give the soviet the credit.
Elon was probably talking about the engines, which the soviets toyed with as a concept, but SpaceX delivered as an existing product.
What I think Elon Musk and engineers at SpaceX though was: hey, we are not in the cold war anymore, we have access to what the soviet did, so let's pick that up, take the good parts implement them with modern technology.
The way I understand it, the USSR was better in some fields, like metallurgy, and made designs that took advantage of it. So now that the US can do even better metallurgy, then maybe take these soviet designs instead of the US designs that were made with material limitations. And also take advantage of, say, better electronics to succeed where the soviet failed.
Maybe I am wrong, but that's my interpretation. It is not full credit to the soviet, but more like giving them credit because they couldn't have done it on western technology alone.
The N1 has no connection with Starship. The only similar thing is the amount of engines, but Starship uses a different fuel which means a completely different plumbing technology. They have nothing in common. I mean, have you heard about that whole coming back part?
There is a Moon mission though, and I think SpaceX quickly switched the focus on that as soon as Artemis was starting to become a reality. But while it is part of the plan, the real "moon rocket" is SLS and the spaceship is Orion, Starship is "just" a lander. A weird situation if you ask me, but hey, politics.
So yeah, the think SpaceX is selling is a rocket to put tons of heavy stuff into orbit, with Mars and the Moon being the extra plan, if the government decides to take it. I am not convinced about Mars, unless maybe China starts a pissing contest, which may be the best thing that can happen to space travel, but it looks like the Moon is getting at least something (of which China is probably no stranger to), still wait an see of a settlement.
> the entire flight will take around 90 minutes
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGfSrVZh7fM (this sunday show will catch you up)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhJRzQsLZGg (24/7 live stream, apparently they already have a countdown timer lol)
They've gotten up to 31 at an unspecified less than full throttle
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/09/business/spacex-static-fire-s...
This _is_ the test flight
Determining whether it is worth risking 33 Raptor engines in a static fire is an engineering decision.
It is probably impossible to have a full thrust or duration static fire on the existing launch mount, or any?
Uh, what? They are going to lose them, and it's fine because it's not a stunning cost at all. If everything goes absolutely perfectly here, the engines are all going straight to the bottom of the ocean. There is no effort to save anything, they're being cautious with the part that actually matters (the ground infrastructure). Minimum goal for that same reason is getting a thousand feet above the tower or whatever it was before it explodes, again so that ground infra is ok. Like Starship overall, Raptors are designed to be cheap and mass produced. Long term it's definitely very important to economic viability to recover SH, recovered SH and expended SS (if it took awhile to nail down reentry say) would be a fine MVP, expended both would not, but a few tens of millions of dollars out of a multibillion R&D effort is fine at this stage. My understanding is that the booster they're launching is indeed already obsolete, because it doesn't have the new full electric+torch ignition system. They've been building up to this steady and deliberately, and there is no sign of a rush or that they've made this decision for any reason but that they're ready to give it a go again. Their plans of course have all been thoroughly reviewed by government as well.
So this is kind of an odd take? They've already been dealing with 27 engines in F9H, this is hardly their first rodeo. F9 is already arguably the most reliable rocket ever. These aren't amateurs.
Obviously, the actual flying is autonomous.
I fully believe that they will attempt tomorrow, but we'll see if any mechanical issues delay the actual launch.
I'm heading down there, but my flight has been delayed and I missed a connection so I'm only flying to Houston and then am going to have to drive overnight to get there on time...
i'm not a Musk fan generally, but when it comes to SpaceX i doff my hat and try hard to pause whatever i'm doing if i see an upcoming launch + first stage landing live on youtube.
as a Gen-Xer, brought up on footage of [the now] archaic space systems like the various Skylab & Shuttle missions, this is truly an extraordinary time for space fans.
Which isn't supposed to be an endorsement of any of this. Ethically it's very questionable, but it is a logical outcome in our flavor of capitalism.
He picked the right people to work SpaceX and Tesla, which is his greatest feat and deserves much praise. He informed himself, then involved himself more than was probably required or even good, but he had adult supervision.
He's deliberately ignoring adult supervision in Twitter and making a hash of it. The fact that both Tesla and SpaceX continue in his absence suggest that whatever direct benefit he once provided does not seem to require more.
Probably because. Just look at Blue Origin with Jeff Bezos. Or look at the US, EU, Chinese space industry. It does look like Musk adds something to SpaceX that makes them achieve above the rest.
For those secondary offerings, you put downward pressure on your stock price, and markets start to eventually pick up expectations that you will make enough money to support a given valuation if you want to keep it. SpaceX's valuation is too high for just the Falcon 9 launch business to be worth continual secondary offerings. So they need something amazing - which is supposed to be Starlink today, but could have been "mars" or "asteroid mining" or whatever else. Without this rocket, Starlink doesn't look like it has massively positive unit economics either.
Hence you get a company that is eternally raising money from private and venture markets on future promise and hype, paired with the perfect CEO to do those raises.
FTFY: Anyone who was less good at turning hype into money into significant achievements ...
Musk might not hit his target time tables. He might not deliver everything he plans to. But he still delivers things other entities have yet to match, or took a serious amount to time to match.
Investors, and people who care about his projects, don't care about him keeping every promise. They care about results. If a CEO and his team get motivated by impossible time tables, then let them motivate themselves with impossible time tables.
(Counter example? FWIW, any benefits of his foray into Twitter are not yet clear to me.)
According to people I know who worked at SpaceX, there is a whole layer of management that exists to handle Musk the way you would handle a boy king. They basically insulate him from making any decisions that can really hurt the company. I have heard of one instance where they spent 3 weeks quietly convincing him out of a wrong decision before announcing that he made the other choice (once he changed his mind and agreed to it).
It doesn't sound like a company that needs such a management layer is getting their ability to accomplish things from the boy king, just the name and the money.
AFAICT this management scheme is shotwell's doing, and you should probably credit her for the accomplishments.
Also, we're seeing this dynamic play out in electric cars. Once they became economical to make (and no, Tesla wasn't really responsible for that), other carmakers are now out-competing them.
I have no idea what you would think would be hard.
What SpaceX has done with their investors money hasn't been matched by anyone in the rocket industry. Many attempts have ended in complete failure.
The closest competitors in recent years, in terms of a consistent string of steady solid advancements, have been the Chinese. And they are still far behind.
Whether Musk is a challenging person to work for, doesn't add or subtract from that.
If you want to see companies with comparable levels of spending to Musk companies, you have to look outside rockets.
By the way, I'm not knocking the man: getting that much money to spend on rockets is an incredible achievement. Someone who did something comparable literally won a Nobel prize (the administrator responsible for making sure LIGO got enough money). Actually spending it on rocket technology once you have it isn't hard.
Edit: Hard projects in the space sector would be things like landing and operating a massive rover or a human colony on mars (or the moon for that matter), or building very new instruments like the JWST - doing things that are fundamentally new.
Starlink with cubesats would have been pretty revolutionary (instead of car-sized, 1-ton monsters), and absolutely crushed the economics. The current version of starlink is basically LeoSat (one of a fee companies Musk probably heard about before starting the Starlink project) with enough initial capital to not go broke.
If they can get starship launches up and running with the economics they promise, that would be hard.
The first vertically-landing rocket did it in the 1960's. Commercializing from that point was just a matter of investment. SpaceX has contributed meaningfully to rocket engine technology, but I doubt Musk knew anything about that.
So has Russia. So has NASA. Same with Europe.
Not to mention Boeing, ULA, or other long time rocket technology suppliers.
So there are examples of large extended spending budgets (on rocketry programs, specifically) with nowhere near as much progress as SpaceX has done with far fewer people, less time, and less money.
The difference really begs the question of how he did it. And I think the answer is he did many things differently.
He didn't just have a clear vision of reusability, but also the time, cost and complexity savings of vertical integration, the faster progress that comes of tolerating intermediate failures as a source of fast feedback, and casting his overworked employees as crusaders in a meaningful mission to best the best, and turn sci-fi into reality, all with contagious enthusiasm.
He also seems to have a secret superpower for plowing through government red tape and bureaucracy. I have no idea how he does that, but both with Tesla and SpaceX it has made a significant difference. Easy not to notice that, but a lot of ambitions have been ground down with resource attrition on that mountain.
at least in the US, a lot of the budget is really glorified government pork, unfortunately. Boeing and even NASA have to spend their money sub optimally in order to secure future funding from government bodies.
> So has Russia. So has NASA. Same with Europe.
> Not to mention Boeing, ULA, or other long time rocket technology suppliers.
Do you have sources for these claims with respect to rocket technology? SpaceX has raised $10 billion to spend pretty much only on rockets - again, the easiest part of space technology by far. The rest of the money is going to comm satellites, which are also know to be a pretty easy technology. The budgets for these space agencies are bigger, but they are also spending on much more complicated things like science mission payloads. Not to mention all the pork.
> He also seems to have a secret superpower for plowing through government red tape and bureaucracy. I have no idea how he does that, but both with Tesla and SpaceX it has made a significant difference. Easy not to notice that, but a lot of ambitions have been ground down with resource attrition on that mountain.
That superpower is lying. When you claim that you have capabilities you don't, they pay you to develop them until they figure out you were BS-ing in the first place. This is what happened with the rural broadband subsidies.
Their investment dollars up to now have also covered development of their next rocket, with planned capabilities of refueling in space and round trips, including site landings, to anywhere in the solar system, and have a greater lift capacity than the SLS, beyond their current achievements in rocketry.
They also had to, from scratch, develop an organization, build out design, manufacturing and flight control capacities, their own launch facilities including unique water landing platforms.
NASA already had extensive facilities and capabilities, prior to their latest rocket project.
Of course, both NASA and SpaceX were able to leverage NASA's previous experience with rocketry. (I am a fan, not a critic of NASA.)
> NASA reports the official cost of the SLS as $11.8 billion [1]
> NASA estimates will cost $13.8 billion to develop through its first crewed launch in 2024. [1]
That doesn't cover the costs of additional rockets. Which get discarded after every launch.
> each SLS/Orion launch will have a price tag of about $4.1 billion. [2]
When you consider the cost of NASA launches vs. SpaceX launches, there are now between an order or two of magnitudes between them. Which is reflected in SpaceX launch prices. Starship will eliminate the second stage losses, resulting in even cheaper per launch costs.
I cannot think of another time in history where a company has managed to so decisively leave all competition, including major strategic nation-state initiatives, behind.
[1] https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-sls-and-orion....
[2] https://www.space.com/artemis-1-space-launch-system-rocket-c....
-- EDIT --
Not sure how I missed the opening paragraph of [1]:
> From its inception in 2011 through the year of its first flight, the Space Launch System rocket program has cost $23.8 billion. The Orion deep space capsule has cost $20.4 billion since the program began in 2006. Related ground infrastructure upgrades cost an additional $5.7 billion since 2012. In total, NASA spent $49.9 billion on these programs between 2006 and their first test launch in 2022.
$49.9 Billion!
I believe their success comes down to how they go about these massive development projects. They start super scrappy, quick to iterate, build and throwaway hardware quickly. But then are experts of transitioning into a sustainable late stage development within the regulatory bounds of a highly controlled industry.
They did it with Falcon, Dragon, Starlink, and I suspect they will with Starship too.
They could only go about this by having a "crazy" and very rich benefactor, along with the management of COO Gwynne Shotwell.
People get confused by this when they see bits of metal get blown up and fail. The cost of that metal isn't really that high at the end of the day and the bits of metal that are recovered get melted down and reused.
Do you know what cannot be recycled and reused? Human effort when we spend tens of thousand of hours on something that doesn't pan out. In so many mega project we see design ideas carried on because of the sunk cost fallacy. The key to prevent this is being able to bail out as fast as possible when the idea isn't going to work, and being able to focus on what is going to work.
I wish something like this could happen in software, too.
I have worked in a a couple regulated industries, and in all cases the firm's decision to impose the same level of governance at all levels of the software value chain was a horrible impediment to innovation. After a certain number of iterations of having to do governance reviews of spikes and PoCs that were going to be thrown away regardless of whether the idea worked, any developer who values their own time will eventually settle into avoiding true prototype and PoC work and instead dive straight into writing production-bound code from the beginning.
I've wondered if we could get more innovation and more quality by allowing rapid iteration (without all the paperwork) during early development and prototyping of an idea, followed by a complete and in-depth review, documentation and certification of the final design and implementation as part of preparing it to ship to production.
"We are going to fly to Mars!" attract different kind of engineers than "We are going to eke out 5 per cent more growth for our shareholders!"
Most publicly traded corporations fall into the latter trap: find some cash cow and milk it endlessly so that the shareholders are happy, and screw any innovation.
Privately owned corporations such as SpaceX can afford "loftier" goals.
This combination works incredibly well. Musk regularly questions conventional wisdom and reimagines things from first principles, and then has the balls to go through with it. Channeled properly this is incredibly powerful and propels SpaceX on a trajectory far beyond their competition. Channeled improperly ... well, just look at some of his other companies.
Now his turn is actually a strategic manoeuvre to make the right like him and buy his products. He is solving for global warming after all. And like a lot of immigrants, he is very sensitive to free speech becoming less free due to the whole social justice warrior movement which was getting out of hand. So he did all the memes and said a bunch of things that one can say when they are at a certain level in their lives without society being able to cancel them.
Bottomline is, we are enormously blessed to have talented immigrants like Einstein and Musk coming to our shores and we wouldn't be half the country without them.
The way SpaceX has revolutionised the space industry is largely down to Elon's unique vision and drive. Elon has set the mission of getting to Mars and SpaceX has relentlessly pursued that goal and hasn't paused to soak up cash for shareholders (Falcon 9 Block 5 would be ludicrously profitable if SpaceX just scrapped R&D and rested on their laurels).
People who work in Space tech generally _want_ to work in Space tech and want to do the big things (like reaching Mars etc.) so SpaceX has an easier time hiring highly motivated and highly capable people because it has such ambition.
Elon managed to hire very capable senior leadership. Like Tom Mueller who led SpaceX propulsion development. And most importantly, SpaceX's President and COO Gwynne Shotwell who basically runs SpaceX in most meaningful ways. Elon as CEO is more like a very involved chairman than a traditional CEO which is why I would say SpaceX is also successful in spite of Musk, because he's actually not that involved day-to-day which is probably his most negative influence.
While the road to achieving those benefits directly was a long road, the immediate indirect benefits of having a clear path to a major competitive (and customer) advantage were the quality of people he was able to inspire to work on the problem.
And as SpaceX began delivering reusability, their profit margins, and industry respect, have risen to a level that gives them overwhelming advantages for now and seemingly for some time to come.
A clear vision counts for a lot.
In percentage of rocket stages consumed / launch, their costs are significantly lower than any other entity in the industry.
Also launch frequencies are higher, and their turnaround time on launches is significantly lower, reducing the fixed costs of having a launch system per launch significantly over the competition again.
Many of them came from Boeing or Lockheed, and they talk about how getting approval for a new piece of equipment or new manufacturing tech would take 12 months, then budgeting, then whatever and you might have the thing in 2 years if you were lucky.
With Elon, you go into his office and lay out your ask. He will ask one or two directed questions, they say "yes, do it" and pull out the check book then and there, and you can spend millions and get something new in weeks.
Even when it doesn't work out down the road, Elon will ask if you learned something and if you're now on the right track, and if the answer is yes, Elon says "You did the right thing".
So it sounds like he removes a ton of barriers, and I'd love to work for someone like that.
Also, Gwynne Shotwell deserves as much credit as Elon Musk.
Launch prices are going to be driven down brutally. It's not clear to me how any launch provider will make a profit.
Satellites are super expensive due to weight concerns, demand should go way up with the per-unit cost down
Cheap high-volume launch means you can build things heavier and in some cases mass-produce them, so space hardware doesn't have to cost so much anymore either.
As for launch providers surviving, nation-states have a vested interest in subsidizing their space programs, even at a loss, until they can bootstrap their own cheap lifters.
SpaceX a few years ago pretty much completely wiped out their Falcon 9 launch manifest because their launch cadence was so high, and the cost for SpaceX of doing so was so low. They briefly had a dip in launch cadence and it's only now building back up for two reasons:
1. They've dropped launch costs so their customers have new opportunities they can pursue at the new cost basis. 2. They started Starlink to soak up all their spare launch capacity. Hundreds of flights to low-earth orbit launching cheap satellites.
Starship/Super heavy is meant to be the next evolution of this. If the cost of launching heavy payloads massively drops then demand will appear to match it. They hope.
The problem is that demand for launches over the next 5 years is fairly static. Almost everything that will be launched in the next 5 years will already be well into the design phase.
SpaceX will keep prices below the competition, but they're already lower than the competition so why would they lower it further?
They want to retire Falcon9, so they do have a bit of a conundrum. They'd rather launch a Falcon9 size payload using Starship than using Falcon9 which puts pressure on them to charge Falcon9 per launch prices for Starship, but since Starship is much more capable than Falcon9, if per launch prices are the same, the Starship price is a lot less per ton.
But they have a way out: Launch as a service as an extension of their current rideshare model to larger payloads. Charge per kg rather than per launch. If you want to launch 17 tonnes into LEO you pay a different price than if you're launching 150 tonnes into LEO, even if both payloads go on a dedicated Starship.
OTOH being a private company they do have the ability to sandbag their profits over the next 5 years in the hope that they'll make up for it in >5 years. If they price at 10% of their current prices their launch profits over the next 5 years will be 10% of what they would be otherwise, but if it enables an asteroid mining startup that will buy hundreds of launches per year in a decade....
Born in the 80s, but I feel that they have done such a good job on regularly launching and landing that they made space boring.
Like all of us, he has a mix of qualities, some of which are positive and some of which are negative. It’s a mistake to try to put a person in a “good” or “bad” box, and it some cases particular traits can be helpful in certain contexts and harmful in others.
He does have too much money for his own good, however.
> scheduled to launch ... no earlier than Monday at 8 a.m. EDT (1200 GMT). It will be 7 a.m. EDT (1100 GMT) local time.
Looking at other websites the correct time is 8 EDT, 7 CDT, 1200 GMT.
[1]https://www.bonestell.org/Image-Gallery.aspx