I wonder what the Space X engineers think of the Tesla engineers. I wonder how much crossover there is, and if the folks at Space X are hesitant working with the newest crop of Tesla engineers given the quality of the product coming off the line.
It's not where he's involved, it's how he's involved. He's a terrible leader. At SpaceX Gwynne runs the show, she's a strong hand at the tiller. In his other two companies, no one can check him so his instability ruins things.
Seriously? I'm as critical of Elon as anyone, but SpaceX is knocking it out of the park. Falcon is arguably the most reliable launcher ever created, and one of the most affordable. There's simply no contest. SpaceX could sit on their laurels for a decade and the rest of the worldwide space industry might catch up. But Starship will give them a further advantage that might last a century.
Starship didn’t reach orbit. Starship isn’t a development of Falcon, it’s a new platform. You can’t use the performance of one to excuse the failure of another. Reuse is also meaningless without a public audit of what is done to turn them round. That’s not been shared.
> Remarkably, this will be the sixth Falcon 9 launch in less than eight days, more flights than SpaceX's main US rival, United Launch Alliance, has launched in 17 months.
The guys who've blown up a billion dollars of tax payer money because rather than carefully design it to work the first time, they slap something together and let it fail to 'iterate'? It sounds like it's same guys working at both companies.
I'm not sure if SpaceX's approach to development is a problem. We don't have to like it, but they develop faster and cheaper than the competition... and as proven by Falcon 9, Dragon, etc, it works. The competitors designing it "carefully" are often slow and still have failures[0] while costing more.
I'm not going to say that the SpaceX approach doesn't have disadvantages or that everyone should use it because I don't believe that, but it works for them, even if you get to see more failures (and I understand that many have a fear of public failure, but not everyone is like that).
Their money comes from the same sources as the other space companies: public and private investment/contracts. If a different company takes twice as long and charges twice as much for the service and SpaceX does it faster while charging less for the same service, then if I was a tax payer, I wouldn't care much about the way they develop and test their rockets.
It's important to not allow our views about Musk to cloud our view about what some of his companies are doing. Cybertruck seems to be a bad product. Falcon 9, Starlink, etc, are good products. It is what it is.
Loath as I am to say, but the SLS has a program cost over $20 billion and has launched only once to date (it did work, to be fair). Every single one they launch will be a one-way trip, so it's going to be a long time, if ever, until they can even get the per-launch cost down to under a billion.
Starship/Super Heavy "only" cost 5 billion as a program and also has 1 successful flight (and two Earth-shattering kabooms). So far, they're the economical ones by quite some margin.
It's not like Northrop Grumman and Boeing are known for being parsimonious with their money.
Because I'm very much not the type to simp after people like Elon Musk and put them on some pedestal of genius, which is what, due to the wierd meme shit surrounding him, praise tends to sound like. Also it is sad that NASA is being worn like a meat-suit by the MIC, but that really isn't a new thing, and its almost its true purpose really.
But the engineers and even the managers at SpaceX really have done something very special.
And the engineers at NASA too, for that matter - nailing it on the first go is bloody hard and a great technical feat. It's also extremely expensive, but the spec is the spec.
James Webb alone cost NASA $10 billion, with $4.5 billion in overruns. It took 30 years to design and construct. Carefully designing things to work the first time is expensive and slow; blowing up a billion dollars is the more effective use of money here.
Their point is that if you "waste" $1B as many as nine times with exploding rockets and it leads to working, good rockets, then its economically better than spending $10B to get it right the first time with no explosions.
Of course there's also environmental harm from exploded rockets, and the potential to never find success before running out of money, but as long as they succeed in getting it working perfectly before they've spent as much as it would cost to be confident of it working on the first launch, they'll be happy.
They're just completely different projects that are not comparable. The Webb telescope had no choice but to work.
The SpaceX team has a choice, and they choose "fail fast". There's a gradient that SpaceX can sit on for their development, and for a suite of companies owned by Musk, people would like to see less fail fast and often.
If I have agency over the spending of course I won't complain, when tax money is allocated then I'm feel pretty free to complain :) I don't live in the USA though so don't have a horse in the race.
