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Please, spare me. Uber had a pattern of malicious and immoral behavior from the start. As soon as I read about them tracking people's ride patterns at company p

Please, spare me. Uber had a pattern of malicious and immoral behavior from the start. As soon as I read about them tracking people's ride patterns at company parties for laughs, I knew exactly what kind of company Uber was. Since then, their moral shortcomings have only diversified, unsurprisingly. Musk, by contrast, has show over and over that he cares a lot about doing what's right, starting with the very fundamental purposes of his companies: not profit, but making things better for everyone, with profit as a necessary part of the real goal. To point to a recent quote from his twitter, he had said he didn't care if his participation in Trump's panels hurt his reputation or that of his companies, because it was right and he didn't care what people said. And it seems (and many people close to him have said as much in interviews) that this is very much in line with who he is as a whole. Every time someone has made an accusation against his companies of a customer or employee being shortchanged, he's publicly investigated it and resolved it within a couple days. I recall him saying in one such case that if indeed a contractor had been injured on Tesla property, he would have seen to it that they were completely compensated in every way, even if a court did not compel them to do so, simply because it was the right thing to do. I hate seeing a company mired in wrongdoing compared to a company like Tesla, which is the polar opposite. Then we come to this accusation of a "ponzi scheme of ambition." Did your creeping pattern recognition notice that Tesla is being led by the same person who leads SpaceX? I don't understand how people can write this off. No matter what your criticism or doubts of Tesla are, it's simply impossible to deny SpaceX's astounding accomplishments. This is obviously not a CEO who fails to deliver despite unparalleled challenges. Do you truly believe manufacturing another car, after having already succeeded with the Model S, is harder than starting a successful space program from scratch? Musk doesn't do Ponzi schemes. He builds Paypals and Model S's and rockets that have successfully landed when industry leaders mocked it as impossible. Your pattern recognition needs work.

babyrainbow 10y ago
>industry leaders mocked it as impossible. What achievement of Musk was "mocked as Impossible"? Now, was those really impossible or even hard enough; or some kind of cheap PR stunt to blow their achievements out of proportions?
- aerovistae 10y ago
  A great many people said reusable rockets were not going to happen and that the pursuit of the technology would end in failure. The same has been said (and continues to be said in this thread) of the ambition to revolutionize the automotive market with a compelling affordable electric car. Cheap pr stunt? What? How the hell is it even possible to blow SpaceX's accomplishments out of proportion? What they've done is indisputably astonishing. Are you trying to minimize it?
  - babyrainbow 10y ago
    >A great many people said reusable rockets were not going to happen and that the pursuit of the technology would end in failure. A great many people said? Where? And more importantly, why? For what reasons did they say it was not possible? Was it impossible by laws of physics? What "breakthrough" in physics did spacex make that made this suddenly possible? How come we never hear of any such breakthroughs, but only about these PR stunts?
    - Robotbeat 10y ago
      I had a colleague of mine (who works on rockets/spaceflight, has done so for decades) say the barge landing was impossible. As far as your other demanding questions, no breakthroughs in physics have been necessary to make reusable launch possible. People have constantly made predictions that somehow physics precludes reuse, let alone fast turnaround reuse, from being possible. But that has never, ever been the case. Still people (who ought to know better) will continue making such ridiculous statements. And yes, SpaceX has disproven a lot of these myths. Privately developed orbital rocket (i.e. not based on government missile parts, etc): Falcon 1, done. Privately developed capsule return from orbit: Dragon, done. Vertical landing recovery of a first stage for an orbital rocket: Falcon 9, done. First landing on an autonomous ship: Falcon 9, again, done. In less than a month, they'll also do their first orbital flight on a reused first stage. Lesser-known accomplishments by SpaceX: Merlin 1D has a thrust to weight ratio of about 180-200 in its latest incarnation. That's dramatically better than the next-best, the NK-33 (at 137). And it's a big reason they've been successful at recovering so many stages without a prohibitive performance penalty. And it accomplished this by using deep propellant subcooling, which had never been done before except in some subscale tests. Supersonic retropropulsion of the first stage is also something that had never been done before. It's a key enabling technology for Mars landings, and NASA was scared to baseline it for any of their Mars architectures and couldn't afford the tens of millions for a dedicated test. SpaceX gave them the data for free (in exchange for some in-kind services like data collection, but no money). Now every NASA human-scale Mars lander concept assumes the use of supersonic retropropulsion. This is a big change. Crew around the Moon is not a PR stunt but a revenue source for SpaceX. Red Dragon is not a PR stunt but a key in SpaceX's (and the world's) ability to land large payloads on Mars and test the ISRU technology needed for sustainable crewed Mars missions. Raptor, which has already had some test fires, is a truly scifi engine. It'll be the highest performance engine (in terms of chamber pressure, which is a key metric for thrust to weight ratio, and especially Isp for a given propellant combination, and also for thrust from a given engine size and thus for manufacturing efficiency) ever. A full-flow staged combustion engine, two-stage turbopump. It's insanely high performance and will get similarly high thrust-to-weight ratio as Merlin in spite of using a less dense propellant. The ITS will dwarf all other launch vehicles in terms of raw size, raw thrust, raw payload, and especially its fully reusable upper stage/spacecraft combo. And it's not even that SpaceX are the first ones to imagine these technologies (although some details are novel), it's that they're actually doing them. And that's a big difference. There are virtually no good ideas in aerospace that were not at least imagined by the end of the 1960s, but the vast, vast majority have languished. There have been several other abortive attempts to develop a low-cost private launch company, and (beside Orbital, which has a very different company mindset now) SpaceX is essentially the first successful one. There will be others, but they were catalyzed by SpaceX. SpaceX's high churn rate has fertilized the whole American rocket industry. And this is very good. Even if SpaceX fails now, Blue Origin will succeed where SpaceX has prepared the ground. (Blue Origin essentially /cannot/ fail, since it's bankrolled by Jeff Bezos, who has more money than God.)

babyrainbow 10y ago

>industry leaders mocked it as impossible. What achievement of Musk was "mocked as Impossible"? Now, was those really impossible or even hard enough; or some kind of cheap PR stunt to blow their achievements out of proportions?

aerovistae 10y ago
A great many people said reusable rockets were not going to happen and that the pursuit of the technology would end in failure. The same has been said (and continues to be said in this thread) of the ambition to revolutionize the automotive market with a compelling affordable electric car. Cheap pr stunt? What? How the hell is it even possible to blow SpaceX's accomplishments out of proportion? What they've done is indisputably astonishing. Are you trying to minimize it?
- babyrainbow 10y ago
  >A great many people said reusable rockets were not going to happen and that the pursuit of the technology would end in failure. A great many people said? Where? And more importantly, why? For what reasons did they say it was not possible? Was it impossible by laws of physics? What "breakthrough" in physics did spacex make that made this suddenly possible? How come we never hear of any such breakthroughs, but only about these PR stunts?
  - Robotbeat 10y ago
    I had a colleague of mine (who works on rockets/spaceflight, has done so for decades) say the barge landing was impossible. As far as your other demanding questions, no breakthroughs in physics have been necessary to make reusable launch possible. People have constantly made predictions that somehow physics precludes reuse, let alone fast turnaround reuse, from being possible. But that has never, ever been the case. Still people (who ought to know better) will continue making such ridiculous statements. And yes, SpaceX has disproven a lot of these myths. Privately developed orbital rocket (i.e. not based on government missile parts, etc): Falcon 1, done. Privately developed capsule return from orbit: Dragon, done. Vertical landing recovery of a first stage for an orbital rocket: Falcon 9, done. First landing on an autonomous ship: Falcon 9, again, done. In less than a month, they'll also do their first orbital flight on a reused first stage. Lesser-known accomplishments by SpaceX: Merlin 1D has a thrust to weight ratio of about 180-200 in its latest incarnation. That's dramatically better than the next-best, the NK-33 (at 137). And it's a big reason they've been successful at recovering so many stages without a prohibitive performance penalty. And it accomplished this by using deep propellant subcooling, which had never been done before except in some subscale tests. Supersonic retropropulsion of the first stage is also something that had never been done before. It's a key enabling technology for Mars landings, and NASA was scared to baseline it for any of their Mars architectures and couldn't afford the tens of millions for a dedicated test. SpaceX gave them the data for free (in exchange for some in-kind services like data collection, but no money). Now every NASA human-scale Mars lander concept assumes the use of supersonic retropropulsion. This is a big change. Crew around the Moon is not a PR stunt but a revenue source for SpaceX. Red Dragon is not a PR stunt but a key in SpaceX's (and the world's) ability to land large payloads on Mars and test the ISRU technology needed for sustainable crewed Mars missions. Raptor, which has already had some test fires, is a truly scifi engine. It'll be the highest performance engine (in terms of chamber pressure, which is a key metric for thrust to weight ratio, and especially Isp for a given propellant combination, and also for thrust from a given engine size and thus for manufacturing efficiency) ever. A full-flow staged combustion engine, two-stage turbopump. It's insanely high performance and will get similarly high thrust-to-weight ratio as Merlin in spite of using a less dense propellant. The ITS will dwarf all other launch vehicles in terms of raw size, raw thrust, raw payload, and especially its fully reusable upper stage/spacecraft combo. And it's not even that SpaceX are the first ones to imagine these technologies (although some details are novel), it's that they're actually doing them. And that's a big difference. There are virtually no good ideas in aerospace that were not at least imagined by the end of the 1960s, but the vast, vast majority have languished. There have been several other abortive attempts to develop a low-cost private launch company, and (beside Orbital, which has a very different company mindset now) SpaceX is essentially the first successful one. There will be others, but they were catalyzed by SpaceX. SpaceX's high churn rate has fertilized the whole American rocket industry. And this is very good. Even if SpaceX fails now, Blue Origin will succeed where SpaceX has prepared the ground. (Blue Origin essentially /cannot/ fail, since it's bankrolled by Jeff Bezos, who has more money than God.)