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Hmm, who do I trust, the guy who figured out how to land rockets onto a barge, or some “analyst” desk jockey who has been consistently wrong his entire career?
by throwaway84742 9y ago
Hmm, who do I trust, the guy who figured out how to land rockets onto a barge, or some “analyst” desk jockey who has been consistently wrong his entire career? Tough question. I think I’ll go with the rocket guy. He has a pretty good track record.
- dx034 9y agoBut SpaceX builds very complex machines at a low rate, whereas Tesla tries to build less complex machines at a very high rate. I'm not sure if knowledge is transferable.
- qubex 9y agoThis is an interesting juxtaposition, but I’m not (really) sure it’s true. Is a rocket, even one with an advanced control system such as those designed by SpaceX, really ‘simpler’ than an electric vehicle? We certainly think in those terms, because rockets are exotic to our experience whereas cars are experientially mundane for most of us, but I don’t think the facts of the matter are that clear cut.
- ggm 9y agoWerner von Braun had to crash hundreds into London and Antwerp to learn how not to crash them at white sands and Cape Canaveral
- wongarsu 9y agoAnd how does that compare to the development of early combustion or electric engines? I'm not so sure about electric cars, but I would judge a rocket to be less complex than an ICE car. Rockets just have much more spectacular failure modes and are more expensive due to size.
- regularfry 9y agoThere was a point in the early 2000s (and I don't know how long it persisted for) when ESA had a very hard time hiring rocket scientists because they were all being slurped up by car manufacturers to work on drive-by-wire systems.
- dx034 9y agoThey're certainly more complex as a result of higher quality demands. A car can be tested under real-world conditions and fixed if it shows any manufacturing defects. Any mistakes with a rocket are very expensive. Testing is also very different. For a car, you can build a batch and test it extensively under all conditions, fixing errors as they come up. If you develop an assistance system, you can test this extensively before releasing it. Rockets are so expensive that SpaceX had only a few trials for their landing system. You need to make sure that both hardware and software work perfectly without ever testing them in production.
- greglindahl 9y agoIt's worth noting that one big advantage SpaceX has over other rocket makers is that SpaceX gets to inspect landed first stages. That makes their rocket development closer to airplane development than everyone else's rocket development, and no, it doesn't have to be perfect before it is tested. It just has to be good enough to land.
- pretendscholar 9y agoDoes he really have a good track record? If I recall correctly the Falcon 9 has a terrible success rate for a modern rocket. Something like 94 percent.
- basdp 9y agoHow many years did SpaceX do over that modern rocket? How many years did NASA do to get to said modern rocket? I'd say he's on a pretty good roll.
- ant6n 9y agoSpaceX didn't start in a vacuum, or in the 40s.
- tajen 9y agoAnd don’t forget in 1969 when they landed on the moon, they had to code all the timestamps in negative.
- wongarsu 9y agoNeither did Ariane 5, Atlas V, Delta IV or Soyuz-FG. Of course SpaceX profits from the state of the art, but not developing the Xth iteration over a proven and battle-tested design with decades of flight-data is a disadvantage for SpaceX.
- greglindahl 9y agoSpaceX benefits from being able to inspect landed boosters. This comparison is apples-to-oranges.
- arrrg 9y agoFalcon 9 51 launches 48 completely successful 49 partially successful 94% success rate (complete success) 96% success rate (partial success) Ariane 5 97 launches 92 completely successful 95 partially successful 95% success rate (complete success) 98% success rate (partial success) Atlas V 76 launches 75 completely successful 76 partially successful 99% success rate (complete success) 100% success rate (partial success) Delta IV (including Heavy) 36 launches 35 completely successful 36 partially successful 97% success rate (complete success) 100% success rate (partial success) Proton (since 2010 as an arbitrary cutoff) 65 launches 58 completely successful 59 partially successful 89% success rate (complete success) 91% success rate (partial success) I don’t really think there is any way in which the adjective “terrible” would be an appropriate use of the word here. Also note the low numbers involved here, the different contexts and the plain arbitrariness of such comparisons. One failure more or less can make a world of difference here, despite maybe not being the most reliable indicator. 94% is about the long term ballpark figure for successful orbital launches but it is true that some newer rocket families may have ever so slightly higher reliabilities.
- prostoalex 9y agoThe report also seems to discuss the evils of excessive automation in general. So yeah, this could apply to Tesla cars. Or rubber toys, which are also manufactured in a highly automated environment.
- simonh 9y agoNot a comparison I would choose. He has a pretty good track record of producing a few dozen rockets a year. You could be generous and say a few hundred rocket engines a year. A comedian might say he has the same track record with cars - ba dum - tish! Tesla's inability to quickly ramp up Model 3 production is pretty much one of those "fact" things at this point. The same goes for every model they've brought out, it's taken a long time to get decent production rates on any of them. So this isn't so much predicting problems he's going to have, but explaining the causes of all the problems they've already had and are having right now.
- aerovistae 9y agoBut that's the great trick he pulled....convincing everyone that not reaching 500,000 cars per year in 2 years is "failure"-- that Tesla is exhibiting an "inability."
- jacquesm 9y agoBut it is a failure. If you make predictions as a public company and then you can't live up to them you have a problem. That's not to say Musk has done some spectacular stuff but he's definitely not on target. Let's hope it all gets fixed before time runs out.
- ggm 9y agoInvestors are entitled to believe goals are achievable. If the goals are not achievable, they have to be corrected as quickly as possible or else legal consequences may stem. If you made an investment even with all the flowery legal contract language, how would you feel if the CEO said "it was always a moonshot" having previously said "it's achievable"
- blackbagboys 9y ago"He" figured this out, or some of the hundreds of engineers and scientists employed by him in an entirely separate enterprise figured it out?
- nickik 9y agoYes. He figured out that it was absolutely necessary for the future that he wanted to see, he started a company with his own finances and then had to be Chief Engineer at that company. So, yes, he actually did figure out that it needed to be done and he lead the effort to do it. I don't know why in every thread about Tesla/SpaceX people have to point out that other people work there. Nobody has ever denied it. Its just sensitive little flowers like yourself who deliberately it in a way so that you can make that comment.
- dang 9y agoPersonal attacks will get you banned on HN. Please don't do that again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ballooney 9y agoThey guy who figured out how to land a rocket on a barge is a spacex employee who is an expert in control theory, who was probably hired by another employee of Elon Musk. So I’m not really sure what you comparison means.
- IshKebab 9y agoOr even more realistically, no "one guy figured it out". A team of people worked on it for years and eventually got it to work.
- sundvor 9y agoMusk created the company and instilled the work culture as well as the vision that made it happen - the hiring and all. Can't help but think that if learning to get really good at robotics is a strategic goal, then that's something which might pay off later.
- SubNoize 9y agohe's so obviously setting up for asteroid mining. autonomous spaceships, robotics and more autonomous vehicles, mining company etc. when his 100% robotic and autonomous ships mine an asteroids and bring back huge payloads we'll still probably see articles like this.
- provost 9y ago> Hmm, who do I trust, the guy who figured out how to land rockets onto a barge, or some “analyst” ... This kind of comment is a disservice to all the engineers who actually figured it out. Elon Musk is certainly a visionary and a financier, but is not a 1000x engineer/mathematician who did all the work himself
- examancer 9y agoWhile it is a good idea to spread to credit for SpaceX's acheivements around, Musk himself has done more engineering of products at SpaceX and Tesla than any of his peers. His title as CEO of both companies is somewhat misleading as he has very little involvement in business operations of either company and spends most of his time engineering.
- nickik 9y agoThe reality is that Elon is and was the Chief Engineer for the Falcon rocket family. He had the vision, the finance and he lead the engineering effort extremely directly and successfully. He overruled his top guys on multiple decisions and usually he turned out to be right. Go listen to Tom Mueller on the design choices made for the Merlin example. But of course nobody does everything himself, but for some reason I read this sort of comment made about Musk in every single thread but not with most other people.
- dingaling 9y ago
- jetru 9y agoWho do I trust? A person I can identify by name and track a person down who has written an article. Or an anonymous account on HN named 'throwaway*'. Yea...you see?
- empath75 9y agoAlternatively, do you trust the guy that is running a company that is going to be out of money in a few months?
- slivym 9y agoOr to put it another way. Why is the guy running a car company busy putting rockets into space?
- sveme 9y agoAppeal to authority is never a good argument for or against something.
- tajen 9y agoWho do I trust, the guy who was told “It is impossible to reuse rockets” by all NASA engineers and built a company around it, or the analyst described as follow: > Warburton, who spent his career before Wall Street at the International Motor Vehicle Program — a partly academic, partly commercial organization based at MIT — wrote that "automation in final assembly doesn't work." It doesn’t even matter since it’s not public money. Which makes me wonder about the analyst’s intent: Tell people not to invest? Do people not know Tesla is super-risky? but if they succeed to obliterate this anchored rule that automation doesn’t work in the final assembly, isn’t that a superwin that stakeholders dream of? Friends who invested in Tesla didn’t “invest” so much as “donated” money for what they think is a good cause. And perhaps because it’s fun to hear the NASA chief say “I had asked my engineers and they told me it wasn’t possible”. I’d pay for that kind of fun.
- kolinko 9y agoI digged out a report from Bernstein (the same company that delivered the one reported in the article) from 2011: "They have concluded that improvements to conventional engines will be key over the next 10 to 15 years and HEVs will become viable on a large scale by 2020. They believe near-term mass market adoption of electric vehicles is unlikely given the tough financial comparison with ever improving combustion engine vehicles. While premium-priced plug-ins may become viable earlier, by definition they will be niche products." https://seekingalpha.com/article/310159-bernstein-and-ricardo-report-cheap-will-beat-cool-in-vehicle-electrification https://seekingalpha.com/article/310159-bernstein-and-ricard...