9 ms·

Elon and the collective

93 points by theaeolist 8y ago

m0zg 8y ago
"People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it." Dude literally is, to quote the author, "the next Steve Jobs, but better". Is he occasionally an idiot? Yes. Is he occasionally an asshole? Also yes. But he's on track to have done not one, not two, but _three_ things others widely consider impossible (SpaceX, Tesla, StarLink) and may even squeeze in 2-3 more of those things in his remaining lifespan. If that's not genius, I don't know what is.
- xiphias2 8y ago
  I wouldn't say PayPal is nothing, although lot of people hate it, I always prefer paying with it than giving my credit card number to a new merchant. What's the most important for me is that Elon showed people that clean great electric cars are possible (and China already has a higher growth rate in electric cars than Tesla). I'm literally sick of the toxic air pollution that cars make, which is a problem I didn't have when I was younger.
  - m0zg 8y ago
    It's not "nothing". I only listed the "impossible" things he's done or is in the advanced stages of doing.
  - wpietri 8y ago
    What exactly did Musk do at PayPal? He didn't start it. He was CEO for a hot minute, but that's about it. From what I can tell, his major initiative during his short CEO stint was to try to shift them from a Unix infrastructure to Windows, for which they fired him. I have no idea why people give him credit for it.
    - acover 8y ago
      Elon founded x.com which merged with confinity. The combined company was renamed PayPal [0]. Doesn't that mean he co-founded PayPal? [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com
      - wpietri 8y ago
        No. PayPal, the money transfer service, was created before the merger. X.com was an online bank. PayPal clearly existed by October 1999: https://web.archive.org/web/19991013140707/http://paypal.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/19991013140707/http://paypal.com... Your web page shows the merger was in March 2000. Musk was pushed out by October 2000.
    - xiphias2 8y ago
      I don't think Peter Thiel would have given so much shares to Elon if he didn't think about X.com as a serious competitor. Peter still looks up to Elon for a reason. At the same time Elon is making huge mistakes and huge risks as well (and also has borderline lies that sometimes step over the border), so I'm not saying he's perfect, just the best we have right now.
      - wpietri 8y ago
        That avoids the question. What did he do at PayPal? As far as I can tell he deserves no credit for his success.
- tejohnso 8y ago
  Starlink, Tesla, and SpaceX are not at all considered impossible. In fact, all three have active competition. I'd put mars colonization and hyperloop under the "widely considered impossible" category though.
  - m0zg 8y ago
    Sure, _now_ they have competition. But when he was starting out, they were all considered impossible. In fact, StarLink is still "impossible" to compete with. No one knows how to operate such an enormous satellite constellation, let alone do so profitably.
    - gamblor956 8y ago
      Starlink hasn't succeeded yet. Is Elon now getting pre credit for things he hasn't even done?
      - m0zg 8y ago
        Two satellites are in orbit already, and SpaceX employees are playing multiplayer games over that link. It's way past the point of where it was "impossible" for SpaceX to accomplish. I _can't wait_ to ditch Frontier, and I'm sure there are millions of others like me just in the US alone.
        jcranmer 8y ago
        You yourself said that the difficulty of Starlink is in operating a large satellite constellation. By that metric, two satellites in orbit tells you almost nothing about SpaceX's ability to actually overcome the difficulty.
        tbabb 8y ago
        I would posit that StarLink is impossible for anyone except SpaceX, who can get launches at-cost or for free as piggyback on other customers. Without that, I am sure that it looks economically impossible. The technological challenges are probably more tractable.
bischofs 8y ago
This article started out good but got pretty lazy toward the end. "This idea is stupid" is not a good description. Also I think Elon is generally looking at problems we have (traffic congestion, expensive space travel, fossil fuel cars) and trying different things to fix them with his considerable funding. Why is this a problem? It's much easier to criticize others ideas on a blog then it is to generate and execute ideas yourself.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  This article started out good but got pretty lazy toward the end. It started getting lazy a lot sooner than the end. The "debunking" by pointing out that there are some destinations that are more than 30 minutes away? That's not the actual position they were presenting. There is a lot of the world's population which lives in a strategically drawn circle of that travel radius. They know full well that going halfway around will take a bit longer. Also, the issue of flying around bombs is already mitigated by SpaceX's current practices with reusable Falcon boosters. (Namely that on approach, the trajectory is designed such that everything has to go right for the booster to do other than land in the ocean. Also, by the time the ship gets to the end of a flight, it will be mostly empty, so the explosion risk will be much less than 20kt.) The fact that none of that is talked about indicates to me that this is a hit piece.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    How can travel by rocket even be considered in today's world? Are Falcon launches carbon neutral?
    - maccam94 8y ago
      No, but it might be comparable or better than airplanes. https://cleantechnica.com/2017/10/07/musks-suborbital-flights-likely-lower-carbon-not-actually-cheap-pleasant/ https://cleantechnica.com/2017/10/07/musks-suborbital-flight... And for the moment, flights are nowhere near numerous enough to have any effect on CO2 levels.
- wpietri 8y ago
standardUser 8y ago
"No one in the engineering community ever questioned whether it would be technically feasible to land a rocket booster on a barge." Not to be pedantic, but it was technically impossible to land a rocket booster on a barge. SpaceX did the R&D to make it happen. They made it technically feasible by developing the technology for a task that was previously not technically feasible.
- elteto 8y ago
  Actually, you are not being pedantic at all. No one in the space industry thought it could be done in a commercially viable way. SpaceX was dismissed time after time by space pundits until it landed a rocket, and then another, and then another. Now the goalpost is 100 reusable flights! I wonder what the next one will be when SpaceX gets to that one. The article started with a biased premise and then worked to prove that.
  - Rebelgecko 8y ago
    I don't think it's true to say that no one thought reuse could be done in a commercially viable way. After all, the entire DC-X program cost about the same as a single F9 launch.
    - Robotbeat 8y ago
      "No one", sure. There were some who thought reuse could be viable. But the "grown ups" in aerospace leadership? Yeah, it's a fair point. The DC-X program was cancelled because the future was the horizontal landing X-33. After that failed, the industry consensus for the "serious" folk was that reuse was a dead end.
  - rjdagost 8y ago
    SpaceX executives have stated several times that their company is profitable. But, when SpaceX was trying to do a $750M debt raise just last month, their internal financials were divulged: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-08/musk-said-to-divide-wall-street-with-demands-for-new-spacex-loan https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-08/musk-said.... It's a company running in the red. Unfortunately EBITDA is still negative (much less earnings). The jury is still out on whether or not SpaceX's approach is in fact commercially viable.
derekp7 8y ago
On the reusable boosters -- has Spacex released any information on what the inspection / refurbishment costs (and time) are for the ones that have been reused already (or is there any educated guesses)? Also, if they end up being highly reliably reusable, wouldn't that slow down the production of new boosters, thereby making them much more expensive to produce?
- stcredzero 8y ago
  Also, if they end up being highly reliably reusable, wouldn't that slow down the production of new boosters, thereby making them much more expensive to produce? Only if you assume the market demand is constant. We already know that's not true.
- annerajb 8y ago
  They give customers a discount for reused boosters and their production rate is kinda stable thanks to falcon heavy and customers like the federal government asking for brand new rockets for some missions.
- Robotbeat 8y ago
  Folks at forum.nasaspaceflight.com and reddit.com/r/spacex do a meticulous job of tracking the booster numbers. You can tell when a reused booster was last flown which puts an upper limit on the amount of time it takes to refurb a booster (and a rough proxy upper limit for cost). This info is summarized in this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_Heavy_launches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He... One booster seems to have been reused in just 2 and a half months (launched July 25, 2018 and October 8, 2018), compared to a new-production time of about 18-24 months from aluminum stock to launch. So a ~tenth the time of production and so probably about a tenth the labor (for the first stage). As far as slowing down production... ...SpaceX's production rate of new boosters has been roughly flat while their launch rate has increased, so this effect has not occurred. In fact, you can make a good argument that the primary benefit of reuse for SpaceX is that it has allowed them to squeeze a lot more launches (double) out of the same production capacity. They launched cores 23 times (3 at once for Falcon Heavy) in 2018, and only 10 of those were new. In 2017, it was 18 total launches, 5 with reused cores and 13 new. SpaceX can switch resources between upper stages and first stages, too, and eventually mothball first stage production or convert it to BFR production, thus giving them a benefit from reuse that you might not consider from a first-pass analysis.
skilled 8y ago
I get the impression that this post repeatedly tries to make it sound like 'we' are the dumb guys for believing Musk. I think he's done some good things, is a likeable marketing personality, and genuinely cares for a lot of the projects he's working on. And this is me saying this without ever having owned a product of his. There's a bit of emotion in this post, but that's alright.
- tachyonbeam 8y ago
  I think the most important thing is that he's moving the goalpost and forcing the competition to innovate. Whether one believes Tesla will become profitable long term or not, that company has definitely accelerated the shift towards electric cars, which is a good thing for all of us. I feel like SpaceX is doing the same for the aeronautic industry. It would be amazing to see SpaceX send astronauts to Mars, but even if that doesn't happen, now other space launch companies are thinking about reusable launchers, bigger rockets, and finding creative ways to reduce costs.
- atomical 8y ago
  He falsely accuses people that disagree with him of being pedophile. Likeable?
evrydayhustling 8y ago
Here's a much more thorough look at SpaceX economics: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/7lp52o/a_thorough_examination_of_the_economics_of_falcon// https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/7lp52o/a_thorough_e... tl;dr - Recoup on development costs is slow right now, but the post-development economics of rocket reuse are a big game change. Space shuttle comparison is flawed because both the nature of the system and the need for teardown were significantly impacted by being manned. Comparing tunnels to planes is weird too - the target is an order of magnitude greater passenger throughput at a majorly reduced energy cost. The speed comparison is superficial.
arijun 8y ago
> when one of the SpaceX boosters will have flown 100 times with between flights maintenance at an economical level, then it will be an actual success Talk about moving the goalposts! They already reuse boosters, and they already give discounts for doing so! And using the shuttle as proof that reusability is not tenable is disingenuous: we know the reasons why the shuttle was expensive and absolutely could design a version where it was not. Looking through the rest, it's clear this guy has goggles on where he sees everything around Musk in a negative light. There is absolutely stuff to criticize about about Musk, and there for sure exists a cult around him. But I think this guy is in another cult, where Musk can do no right.
- agildehaus 8y ago
  Not to mention that when the reasons why the Shuttle was expensive to reuse became known, absolutely nothing was done to rectify that over the 30+ year program. SpaceX has already made numerous modifications to support reuse based on data from previous flights.
- nphard85 8y ago
  You're attacking a strawman. That quote makes sense in the context (basically the whole previous paragraph): The rocket as it performs ascent and then descent undergoes some serious accelerations (way higher than a typical plane), while being built extremely delicately to minimize the mass (much tighter margins than an airliner). The rocket engine undergoes much higher stress than a jet engine. Hence all that stress can cause material fatigue and small malfunctions, while the margin for error on a rocket is extremely small. Hence if e.g. it turns out that the risk of mission failure on these reused boosters increases substantially after every use, all the anticipated savings from reusability may be quickly wiped out by one or two lost missions. And it should be noted, that the cargo that goes into space is often MUCH more expensive than the rocket itself.
  - avmich 8y ago
    There are two problems with quoted text. First problem is "if". In "if e.g. it turns out that the risk of mission failure...". The problem is - what if not? What if those "much tighter margins" and "much higher stress" nevertheless don't translate into substantially higher - and unpredictable - mission failure risks? Then all those anticipated savings will just keep accumulating. Second problem is with costs of cargo. There are reasons why a lot of cargo going to space is expensive. A lot of those reasons are related to the incentive to make cargo working on the first try. You can't go and fix things, saying goes, so you have to make your payload reliable - on the first and often only attempt. That's a good recipe for raising costs. This is admittedly not the only reason. You can imagine unique enough telescope which would be as hard - relatively speaking - to build on Mauna Kea as it would be to launch to Sun-Earth L2. But even in those cases you could perhaps split the system, build pieces with some spares and assemble them - given that you could actually fly, repeatedly, there. And for all others less exclusive payloads, that's even more true. Now, the big reason why we usually don't consider that a viable option is because we used to think - over 60 years of Space Age - that Getting There Is Expensive. But the whole point of many efforts - of both SpaceX and their likely-minded colleagues elsewhere - is to make getting there cheaper. First somewhat cheaper, then seriously cheaper, and then commodity-level cheaper. Then we won't need to create so unique payloads - because we'll have the benefits of available extra mass, for fuel, for construction margins, for extra systems, for docking, for service flights etc. We'll do building systems more and more as we do it with orbital station - instead of building unique Skylab we launch more specialized ISS modules, and much less of them are so critical to the whole project that we need to spend so much efforts to get them right the first try. So this quote appears to me missing some important points.
gfodor 8y ago
Some fair critiques but the tunnel one is way off base. Showing that mass transit is more efficient than cars in tunnels has nothing to do with the question of if building cheaper tunnels for cars will result in a virtuous cycle of commercial investment and development of underground tunnel infrastructure. One of the core theses of boring as far as I understand it is that people prefer cars over subway trains for the most part from a comfort standpoint and so if anything drawing on some of the on-paper benefits of underground rail but transferring them towards passenger vehicles seems like a no-brainer if the economics and logistics work.
alexandros 8y ago
Many of the flaws with the article have been pointed out, but can I just point out the author is so lazy that he doesn't even remove the weight of the fuel from the Boeing 737, nevermind the jet engine and the many other optimisations that can be done when designing from scratch without the ICE constraints. His thought experiment is literally a Boeing 737 with a 25T battery attached to it, and he takes that to be the best case of what Elon is proposing... What makes smart people write things so trivially dumb? And in case the author objects to me dissecting his rough sketch of an argument and drawing conclusions about him from it, he should have thought of that before taking 5 sentences spoken in a podcast and assuming he understands what the complete idea someone else has in mind is.
- reitzensteinm 8y ago
  The author replaced the 25 tonnes of fuel a 737 carries with 25 tonnes of batteries, which is generous towards the electric jet (as the fuel burns during the trip). Edit: It looks like you deleted the post I was replying to, but a 737 with 72 tonnes of MTOW does not carry just 17 tonnes of fuel; you can easily look up the product matrix on Wikipedia.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - sk5t 8y ago
    Also note that landing a 737 with a full load of fuel is... not normal.
  - alexandros 8y ago
    The author doesn't really state that he did that, but I ran the numbers, and it seems he's doing that indeed. Not sure how he came to the conclusion that 25T fuel is in the 737, as that doesn't seem to be the case. He still didn't consider the engines that would be almost completely gone weightwise, and of course the main point stands -- the 737 is a specific model, with specific tradeoffs, to handle specific cost variables, including engines and fuel. If one is considering a new design, with drastically different variables, different cost of fuel (almost 1/5th or less) different weight distribution, different acceleration capabilities, different aerodynamics (no more bulky engines at the wings), different takeoff strategies, then this kind of "what if I flipped the fuel on the 737 for a battery" approach cannot be used as proof that an idea is "ridiculous". The author comes to the fight extremely underprepared, and honestly if we all reasoned like that we'd still be in caves. I'm all for calling Elon out on things he's more vulnerable on, but the author tips his hand with shoddy work like this.
tbabb 8y ago
- Comparison to the space shuttle: Not remotely apt. The space shuttle, among other reasons, was a failure when it came to its design requirements because those requirements were expanded in incompatible directions by a congress that doesn't understand engineering. "It was done badly before, therefore it is not possible to do well" isn't a good argument. - "Rockets are irreconcilably more dangerous than planes": That might actually be true, at least for many more decades. Rockets are at least 10^5 times more dangerous than planes and the failure modes are much, much worse. That doesn't mean that SpaceX can't revolutionize space transport for satellites, unmanned commercial endeavors, and limited manned missions. A tenfold decrease in the cost of space access would make entire new industries economically feasible, even after accounting for risk. SpaceX is currently kicking ass, and I have no reason to doubt they will continue at it. - "Earth-to-Earth passenger rockets are insane": Yes, they may well be. I did a detailed analysis here: https://www.bzarg.com/p/some-numbers-about-the-spacex-passenger-rocket/ https://www.bzarg.com/p/some-numbers-about-the-spacex-passen... As before, safety needs revolutionary changes, probably several times over. Economics and engineering will be very difficult, and the hardest part-- still totally unsolved-- is making something that can withstand re-entry many dozens of times without being totally rebuilt. - "The advertised orbital travel times are wrong": This is likely garbage. The details of flight navigation are something SpaceX has down pat and would not reasonably lie to themselves or the public about. Without a proper orbital analysis to back up this claim, I would not give it much credence. The point about transport to and from the launch pad adding time is likely valid, though-- his figure of a 5 mile journey from city center would actually be more like 10 miles, minimum. In a ferry this would be multiple dozens of minutes, which would add up at either end, especially once you account for travel to the ferry terminal itself. 30-40 minutes would be launch-to-landing time only, not door-to-door. - Colonizing mars: Mars being inhospitable is a solvable problem. Radiation can be avoided by living underground, and temperature and pressure can be maintained inside a habitat. The unanswered question is economics and logistics-- It would require many billions of dollars of infrastructure-- flight costs not included-- to get a colony going. SpaceX isn't working on these logistics; their attitude is "someone else will figure that out." It's not clear what pot of gold would drive that initial investment, and by whom. - "Extinction danger is a bad reason to go to Mars" - Agree that this is mostly BS; even the worst Earth is much more comfortable than Mars. But I would say there are plenty of other, better philosophical reasons to try-- What is the economic and social value of an entire inhabited planet? We should treat the failure to pursue it as an opportunity cost of that magnitude. - "We should go to the moon first" - Going to the moon is not mutually exclusive with going to other places in the solar system. - "Hyperloop is infeasible" - Maybe. I'll believe it when I see it, but happy to let them try. - "Neuralink is garbage" - Neuroscientists I've spoken to would love to see more advanced neural probes. Money toward that problem could reasonably do a lot of good and make a lot of progress. Right now we can get about 100 neuron readings from a small area, and this is already used in humans with various degrees of paralysis to control artifical limbs. We are a long way from a "seamless brain-computer interface", and it is probably 10 times harder than Elon imagines-- I doubt he understands it-- and healthy skepticism is in order. But investment in the problem would give real returns, especially for the quality of life of disabled people. A limited consumer brain-computer interface within the next three decades is probably not terribly outlandish if resources are dedicated to making it happen. A hell of a lot can happen in 30 years. - "Boring company is dumb" - Solution to mass transit? I agree that the idea is probably not very thoroughly thought through. Are 10x gains in the efficiency of tunnel drilling possible? I could believe it. If Elon and his company have to convince themselves that subterranean packet-routed car skates are the future, only to arrive at mass transit later on, so be it if that results in making infrastructure 10 times cheaper to construct. - "Self-driving is dangerous" - Self driving does not have to be impeccable to be a benefit-- it only has to be better than the average driver, which is often quite bad in some pretty trivial/preventable ways. About 50,000 Americans die in cars per year, so there is a lot of room for improvement and a lot of potential good. As a society, we should try to make this work. I do agree that Elon way oversells its capability, and that's dangerous/disingenuous. I also think that many car localization and navigation problems are very solveable, but Tesla does not seem to be solving them effectively-- see examples of autopiloted cars hitting dividers earlier this year. The hard part is getting machines to participate in the nonverbal social environment that is a road full of human drivers... but Tesla seems to be struggling on problems several tiers below this. - Problems in Tesla management - From the outside, it looks as if Musk's stubbornness may have lead to his underlings being unable to convery to him what is realistic to accomplish, resulting in repeated missed deadlines, as predicted by the people who appear to have been oustered for saying so. He does not seem like someone who it is easy to give bad news to, which means he and his company are going to have a hard time seeing and reacting to peril. I do not side fully with the shorts, though; Tesla is positioned to completely change the auto industry. I just hope they can execute without shooting themselves in the foot. - Elon's childish toxicity - Completely agree. Not behavior becoming of a leader at his level, let alone any emotionally well-adjusted adult. It's a huge liability, c.f. the SEC fiasco, which Musk still doesn't seem to comprehend. Musk supporters frustratingly seem to attribute his companies' success as being due to these flaws instead of in spite of them.
myegorov 8y ago
Don't have experience with most of the industries that Musk dabbles in, but did spend a decade in construction. I have no doubt in my mind that Musk's roofing and tunneling ventures are sham.
TheChaplain 8y ago
I can't imagine what Elon goes through, the amount of trash talk he receives on social media is just insane. On Twitter there are people whose existence is only to bring anything about Elon/Tesla into a negative light and whip up storms in teacups. Sure, he's probably not a saint but man that must be tiring.
- atomical 8y ago
  So tiring that he tells the world he's taking the company private in his pointless battle with "short sellers." So tiring that he falsely accuses a critic of being a pedophile. He can't control his emotions.
rick22 8y ago
When writing about Elon negatively start the core argument in the first line. Go straight to the core of the argument instead of wining about elon fan's e.t.c. The reason is simple, the people who write negatively about Elon have accomplished very little compared to Elon and so the reader will give as little time to judge your argument and if you waste your first few lines with BS then there is no chance of getting people to read the entire article.
ricardobeat 8y ago
> Wind, tiny earthquakes or even birds walking along the roof displace the tiles ever so slightly and they loose contact. Once the circuit is broken it is difficult to find and fix the fault. Even worse a short circuit can lead to heating and fire danger. Turns out regular solar panels are way easier and cheaper to work with. How can you say this much about an unreleased product to which you have zero insight on technical details? This is even more bs than if the tiles never come to market... Also, you can’t call a machine-bored tunnel a “tube” and expect to be taken seriously. Questioning lofty, sci-fi-is goals? Fine and reasonable. Gaslighting actual, tangible products? Sounds shady.
- mrpopo 8y ago
  About the roof tiles : Other companies already have solar roof tiles on the market. http://www.dyaqua.it/invisiblesolar/_en/ http://www.dyaqua.it/invisiblesolar/_en/ They are popular in areas of Europe where architecture is regulated. Sure they are more expensive and less efficient, but there is a niche market for it.
  - ricardobeat 8y ago
    I can’t find any record of those being actually sold/installed, or any issues like mentioned in the article? Either way, it is pointless to speculate on technical issues affecting the viability of the Tesla product that doesn't exist yet. We'll only know when solar roof is on the market.
sidcool 8y ago
It seems the article was written as an experiment to gauge people's reaction on a critical Elon article. Not much credibility.

93 points by theaeolist 8y ago

m0zg 8y ago

"People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it." Dude literally is, to quote the author, "the next Steve Jobs, but better". Is he occasionally an idiot? Yes. Is he occasionally an asshole? Also yes. But he's on track to have done not one, not two, but _three_ things others widely consider impossible (SpaceX, Tesla, StarLink) and may even squeeze in 2-3 more of those things in his remaining lifespan. If that's not genius, I don't know what is.

xiphias2 8y ago
I wouldn't say PayPal is nothing, although lot of people hate it, I always prefer paying with it than giving my credit card number to a new merchant. What's the most important for me is that Elon showed people that clean great electric cars are possible (and China already has a higher growth rate in electric cars than Tesla). I'm literally sick of the toxic air pollution that cars make, which is a problem I didn't have when I was younger.
- m0zg 8y ago
  It's not "nothing". I only listed the "impossible" things he's done or is in the advanced stages of doing.
- wpietri 8y ago
  What exactly did Musk do at PayPal? He didn't start it. He was CEO for a hot minute, but that's about it. From what I can tell, his major initiative during his short CEO stint was to try to shift them from a Unix infrastructure to Windows, for which they fired him. I have no idea why people give him credit for it.
  - acover 8y ago
    Elon founded x.com which merged with confinity. The combined company was renamed PayPal [0]. Doesn't that mean he co-founded PayPal? [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com
    - wpietri 8y ago
      No. PayPal, the money transfer service, was created before the merger. X.com was an online bank. PayPal clearly existed by October 1999: https://web.archive.org/web/19991013140707/http://paypal.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/19991013140707/http://paypal.com... Your web page shows the merger was in March 2000. Musk was pushed out by October 2000.
  - xiphias2 8y ago
    I don't think Peter Thiel would have given so much shares to Elon if he didn't think about X.com as a serious competitor. Peter still looks up to Elon for a reason. At the same time Elon is making huge mistakes and huge risks as well (and also has borderline lies that sometimes step over the border), so I'm not saying he's perfect, just the best we have right now.
    - wpietri 8y ago
      That avoids the question. What did he do at PayPal? As far as I can tell he deserves no credit for his success.
tejohnso 8y ago
Starlink, Tesla, and SpaceX are not at all considered impossible. In fact, all three have active competition. I'd put mars colonization and hyperloop under the "widely considered impossible" category though.
- m0zg 8y ago
  Sure, _now_ they have competition. But when he was starting out, they were all considered impossible. In fact, StarLink is still "impossible" to compete with. No one knows how to operate such an enormous satellite constellation, let alone do so profitably.
  - gamblor956 8y ago
    Starlink hasn't succeeded yet. Is Elon now getting pre credit for things he hasn't even done?
    - m0zg 8y ago
      Two satellites are in orbit already, and SpaceX employees are playing multiplayer games over that link. It's way past the point of where it was "impossible" for SpaceX to accomplish. I _can't wait_ to ditch Frontier, and I'm sure there are millions of others like me just in the US alone.
      - jcranmer 8y ago
        You yourself said that the difficulty of Starlink is in operating a large satellite constellation. By that metric, two satellites in orbit tells you almost nothing about SpaceX's ability to actually overcome the difficulty.
        tbabb 8y ago
        I would posit that StarLink is impossible for anyone except SpaceX, who can get launches at-cost or for free as piggyback on other customers. Without that, I am sure that it looks economically impossible. The technological challenges are probably more tractable.

bischofs 8y ago

This article started out good but got pretty lazy toward the end. "This idea is stupid" is not a good description. Also I think Elon is generally looking at problems we have (traffic congestion, expensive space travel, fossil fuel cars) and trying different things to fix them with his considerable funding. Why is this a problem? It's much easier to criticize others ideas on a blog then it is to generate and execute ideas yourself.

stcredzero 8y ago
This article started out good but got pretty lazy toward the end. It started getting lazy a lot sooner than the end. The "debunking" by pointing out that there are some destinations that are more than 30 minutes away? That's not the actual position they were presenting. There is a lot of the world's population which lives in a strategically drawn circle of that travel radius. They know full well that going halfway around will take a bit longer. Also, the issue of flying around bombs is already mitigated by SpaceX's current practices with reusable Falcon boosters. (Namely that on approach, the trajectory is designed such that everything has to go right for the booster to do other than land in the ocean. Also, by the time the ship gets to the end of a flight, it will be mostly empty, so the explosion risk will be much less than 20kt.) The fact that none of that is talked about indicates to me that this is a hit piece.
- ams6110 8y ago
  How can travel by rocket even be considered in today's world? Are Falcon launches carbon neutral?
  - maccam94 8y ago
    No, but it might be comparable or better than airplanes. https://cleantechnica.com/2017/10/07/musks-suborbital-flights-likely-lower-carbon-not-actually-cheap-pleasant/ https://cleantechnica.com/2017/10/07/musks-suborbital-flight... And for the moment, flights are nowhere near numerous enough to have any effect on CO2 levels.
wpietri 8y ago

standardUser 8y ago

"No one in the engineering community ever questioned whether it would be technically feasible to land a rocket booster on a barge." Not to be pedantic, but it was technically impossible to land a rocket booster on a barge. SpaceX did the R&D to make it happen. They made it technically feasible by developing the technology for a task that was previously not technically feasible.

elteto 8y ago
Actually, you are not being pedantic at all. No one in the space industry thought it could be done in a commercially viable way. SpaceX was dismissed time after time by space pundits until it landed a rocket, and then another, and then another. Now the goalpost is 100 reusable flights! I wonder what the next one will be when SpaceX gets to that one. The article started with a biased premise and then worked to prove that.
- Rebelgecko 8y ago
  I don't think it's true to say that no one thought reuse could be done in a commercially viable way. After all, the entire DC-X program cost about the same as a single F9 launch.
  - Robotbeat 8y ago
    "No one", sure. There were some who thought reuse could be viable. But the "grown ups" in aerospace leadership? Yeah, it's a fair point. The DC-X program was cancelled because the future was the horizontal landing X-33. After that failed, the industry consensus for the "serious" folk was that reuse was a dead end.
- rjdagost 8y ago
  SpaceX executives have stated several times that their company is profitable. But, when SpaceX was trying to do a $750M debt raise just last month, their internal financials were divulged: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-08/musk-said-to-divide-wall-street-with-demands-for-new-spacex-loan https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-08/musk-said.... It's a company running in the red. Unfortunately EBITDA is still negative (much less earnings). The jury is still out on whether or not SpaceX's approach is in fact commercially viable.

derekp7 8y ago

On the reusable boosters -- has Spacex released any information on what the inspection / refurbishment costs (and time) are for the ones that have been reused already (or is there any educated guesses)? Also, if they end up being highly reliably reusable, wouldn't that slow down the production of new boosters, thereby making them much more expensive to produce?

stcredzero 8y ago
Also, if they end up being highly reliably reusable, wouldn't that slow down the production of new boosters, thereby making them much more expensive to produce? Only if you assume the market demand is constant. We already know that's not true.
annerajb 8y ago
They give customers a discount for reused boosters and their production rate is kinda stable thanks to falcon heavy and customers like the federal government asking for brand new rockets for some missions.
Robotbeat 8y ago
Folks at forum.nasaspaceflight.com and reddit.com/r/spacex do a meticulous job of tracking the booster numbers. You can tell when a reused booster was last flown which puts an upper limit on the amount of time it takes to refurb a booster (and a rough proxy upper limit for cost). This info is summarized in this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_Heavy_launches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He... One booster seems to have been reused in just 2 and a half months (launched July 25, 2018 and October 8, 2018), compared to a new-production time of about 18-24 months from aluminum stock to launch. So a ~tenth the time of production and so probably about a tenth the labor (for the first stage). As far as slowing down production... ...SpaceX's production rate of new boosters has been roughly flat while their launch rate has increased, so this effect has not occurred. In fact, you can make a good argument that the primary benefit of reuse for SpaceX is that it has allowed them to squeeze a lot more launches (double) out of the same production capacity. They launched cores 23 times (3 at once for Falcon Heavy) in 2018, and only 10 of those were new. In 2017, it was 18 total launches, 5 with reused cores and 13 new. SpaceX can switch resources between upper stages and first stages, too, and eventually mothball first stage production or convert it to BFR production, thus giving them a benefit from reuse that you might not consider from a first-pass analysis.

skilled 8y ago

I get the impression that this post repeatedly tries to make it sound like 'we' are the dumb guys for believing Musk. I think he's done some good things, is a likeable marketing personality, and genuinely cares for a lot of the projects he's working on. And this is me saying this without ever having owned a product of his. There's a bit of emotion in this post, but that's alright.

tachyonbeam 8y ago
I think the most important thing is that he's moving the goalpost and forcing the competition to innovate. Whether one believes Tesla will become profitable long term or not, that company has definitely accelerated the shift towards electric cars, which is a good thing for all of us. I feel like SpaceX is doing the same for the aeronautic industry. It would be amazing to see SpaceX send astronauts to Mars, but even if that doesn't happen, now other space launch companies are thinking about reusable launchers, bigger rockets, and finding creative ways to reduce costs.
atomical 8y ago
He falsely accuses people that disagree with him of being pedophile. Likeable?

evrydayhustling 8y ago

Here's a much more thorough look at SpaceX economics: https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/7lp52o/a_thorough_examination_of_the_economics_of_falcon// https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/7lp52o/a_thorough_e... tl;dr - Recoup on development costs is slow right now, but the post-development economics of rocket reuse are a big game change. Space shuttle comparison is flawed because both the nature of the system and the need for teardown were significantly impacted by being manned. Comparing tunnels to planes is weird too - the target is an order of magnitude greater passenger throughput at a majorly reduced energy cost. The speed comparison is superficial.

arijun 8y ago

> when one of the SpaceX boosters will have flown 100 times with between flights maintenance at an economical level, then it will be an actual success Talk about moving the goalposts! They already reuse boosters, and they already give discounts for doing so! And using the shuttle as proof that reusability is not tenable is disingenuous: we know the reasons why the shuttle was expensive and absolutely could design a version where it was not. Looking through the rest, it's clear this guy has goggles on where he sees everything around Musk in a negative light. There is absolutely stuff to criticize about about Musk, and there for sure exists a cult around him. But I think this guy is in another cult, where Musk can do no right.

agildehaus 8y ago
Not to mention that when the reasons why the Shuttle was expensive to reuse became known, absolutely nothing was done to rectify that over the 30+ year program. SpaceX has already made numerous modifications to support reuse based on data from previous flights.
nphard85 8y ago
You're attacking a strawman. That quote makes sense in the context (basically the whole previous paragraph): The rocket as it performs ascent and then descent undergoes some serious accelerations (way higher than a typical plane), while being built extremely delicately to minimize the mass (much tighter margins than an airliner). The rocket engine undergoes much higher stress than a jet engine. Hence all that stress can cause material fatigue and small malfunctions, while the margin for error on a rocket is extremely small. Hence if e.g. it turns out that the risk of mission failure on these reused boosters increases substantially after every use, all the anticipated savings from reusability may be quickly wiped out by one or two lost missions. And it should be noted, that the cargo that goes into space is often MUCH more expensive than the rocket itself.
- avmich 8y ago
  There are two problems with quoted text. First problem is "if". In "if e.g. it turns out that the risk of mission failure...". The problem is - what if not? What if those "much tighter margins" and "much higher stress" nevertheless don't translate into substantially higher - and unpredictable - mission failure risks? Then all those anticipated savings will just keep accumulating. Second problem is with costs of cargo. There are reasons why a lot of cargo going to space is expensive. A lot of those reasons are related to the incentive to make cargo working on the first try. You can't go and fix things, saying goes, so you have to make your payload reliable - on the first and often only attempt. That's a good recipe for raising costs. This is admittedly not the only reason. You can imagine unique enough telescope which would be as hard - relatively speaking - to build on Mauna Kea as it would be to launch to Sun-Earth L2. But even in those cases you could perhaps split the system, build pieces with some spares and assemble them - given that you could actually fly, repeatedly, there. And for all others less exclusive payloads, that's even more true. Now, the big reason why we usually don't consider that a viable option is because we used to think - over 60 years of Space Age - that Getting There Is Expensive. But the whole point of many efforts - of both SpaceX and their likely-minded colleagues elsewhere - is to make getting there cheaper. First somewhat cheaper, then seriously cheaper, and then commodity-level cheaper. Then we won't need to create so unique payloads - because we'll have the benefits of available extra mass, for fuel, for construction margins, for extra systems, for docking, for service flights etc. We'll do building systems more and more as we do it with orbital station - instead of building unique Skylab we launch more specialized ISS modules, and much less of them are so critical to the whole project that we need to spend so much efforts to get them right the first try. So this quote appears to me missing some important points.

gfodor 8y ago

Some fair critiques but the tunnel one is way off base. Showing that mass transit is more efficient than cars in tunnels has nothing to do with the question of if building cheaper tunnels for cars will result in a virtuous cycle of commercial investment and development of underground tunnel infrastructure. One of the core theses of boring as far as I understand it is that people prefer cars over subway trains for the most part from a comfort standpoint and so if anything drawing on some of the on-paper benefits of underground rail but transferring them towards passenger vehicles seems like a no-brainer if the economics and logistics work.

alexandros 8y ago

Many of the flaws with the article have been pointed out, but can I just point out the author is so lazy that he doesn't even remove the weight of the fuel from the Boeing 737, nevermind the jet engine and the many other optimisations that can be done when designing from scratch without the ICE constraints. His thought experiment is literally a Boeing 737 with a 25T battery attached to it, and he takes that to be the best case of what Elon is proposing... What makes smart people write things so trivially dumb? And in case the author objects to me dissecting his rough sketch of an argument and drawing conclusions about him from it, he should have thought of that before taking 5 sentences spoken in a podcast and assuming he understands what the complete idea someone else has in mind is.

reitzensteinm 8y ago
The author replaced the 25 tonnes of fuel a 737 carries with 25 tonnes of batteries, which is generous towards the electric jet (as the fuel burns during the trip). Edit: It looks like you deleted the post I was replying to, but a 737 with 72 tonnes of MTOW does not carry just 17 tonnes of fuel; you can easily look up the product matrix on Wikipedia.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- sk5t 8y ago
  Also note that landing a 737 with a full load of fuel is... not normal.
- alexandros 8y ago
  The author doesn't really state that he did that, but I ran the numbers, and it seems he's doing that indeed. Not sure how he came to the conclusion that 25T fuel is in the 737, as that doesn't seem to be the case. He still didn't consider the engines that would be almost completely gone weightwise, and of course the main point stands -- the 737 is a specific model, with specific tradeoffs, to handle specific cost variables, including engines and fuel. If one is considering a new design, with drastically different variables, different cost of fuel (almost 1/5th or less) different weight distribution, different acceleration capabilities, different aerodynamics (no more bulky engines at the wings), different takeoff strategies, then this kind of "what if I flipped the fuel on the 737 for a battery" approach cannot be used as proof that an idea is "ridiculous". The author comes to the fight extremely underprepared, and honestly if we all reasoned like that we'd still be in caves. I'm all for calling Elon out on things he's more vulnerable on, but the author tips his hand with shoddy work like this.

tbabb 8y ago

- Comparison to the space shuttle: Not remotely apt. The space shuttle, among other reasons, was a failure when it came to its design requirements because those requirements were expanded in incompatible directions by a congress that doesn't understand engineering. "It was done badly before, therefore it is not possible to do well" isn't a good argument. - "Rockets are irreconcilably more dangerous than planes": That might actually be true, at least for many more decades. Rockets are at least 10^5 times more dangerous than planes and the failure modes are much, much worse. That doesn't mean that SpaceX can't revolutionize space transport for satellites, unmanned commercial endeavors, and limited manned missions. A tenfold decrease in the cost of space access would make entire new industries economically feasible, even after accounting for risk. SpaceX is currently kicking ass, and I have no reason to doubt they will continue at it. - "Earth-to-Earth passenger rockets are insane": Yes, they may well be. I did a detailed analysis here: https://www.bzarg.com/p/some-numbers-about-the-spacex-passenger-rocket/ https://www.bzarg.com/p/some-numbers-about-the-spacex-passen... As before, safety needs revolutionary changes, probably several times over. Economics and engineering will be very difficult, and the hardest part-- still totally unsolved-- is making something that can withstand re-entry many dozens of times without being totally rebuilt. - "The advertised orbital travel times are wrong": This is likely garbage. The details of flight navigation are something SpaceX has down pat and would not reasonably lie to themselves or the public about. Without a proper orbital analysis to back up this claim, I would not give it much credence. The point about transport to and from the launch pad adding time is likely valid, though-- his figure of a 5 mile journey from city center would actually be more like 10 miles, minimum. In a ferry this would be multiple dozens of minutes, which would add up at either end, especially once you account for travel to the ferry terminal itself. 30-40 minutes would be launch-to-landing time only, not door-to-door. - Colonizing mars: Mars being inhospitable is a solvable problem. Radiation can be avoided by living underground, and temperature and pressure can be maintained inside a habitat. The unanswered question is economics and logistics-- It would require many billions of dollars of infrastructure-- flight costs not included-- to get a colony going. SpaceX isn't working on these logistics; their attitude is "someone else will figure that out." It's not clear what pot of gold would drive that initial investment, and by whom. - "Extinction danger is a bad reason to go to Mars" - Agree that this is mostly BS; even the worst Earth is much more comfortable than Mars. But I would say there are plenty of other, better philosophical reasons to try-- What is the economic and social value of an entire inhabited planet? We should treat the failure to pursue it as an opportunity cost of that magnitude. - "We should go to the moon first" - Going to the moon is not mutually exclusive with going to other places in the solar system. - "Hyperloop is infeasible" - Maybe. I'll believe it when I see it, but happy to let them try. - "Neuralink is garbage" - Neuroscientists I've spoken to would love to see more advanced neural probes. Money toward that problem could reasonably do a lot of good and make a lot of progress. Right now we can get about 100 neuron readings from a small area, and this is already used in humans with various degrees of paralysis to control artifical limbs. We are a long way from a "seamless brain-computer interface", and it is probably 10 times harder than Elon imagines-- I doubt he understands it-- and healthy skepticism is in order. But investment in the problem would give real returns, especially for the quality of life of disabled people. A limited consumer brain-computer interface within the next three decades is probably not terribly outlandish if resources are dedicated to making it happen. A hell of a lot can happen in 30 years. - "Boring company is dumb" - Solution to mass transit? I agree that the idea is probably not very thoroughly thought through. Are 10x gains in the efficiency of tunnel drilling possible? I could believe it. If Elon and his company have to convince themselves that subterranean packet-routed car skates are the future, only to arrive at mass transit later on, so be it if that results in making infrastructure 10 times cheaper to construct. - "Self-driving is dangerous" - Self driving does not have to be impeccable to be a benefit-- it only has to be better than the average driver, which is often quite bad in some pretty trivial/preventable ways. About 50,000 Americans die in cars per year, so there is a lot of room for improvement and a lot of potential good. As a society, we should try to make this work. I do agree that Elon way oversells its capability, and that's dangerous/disingenuous. I also think that many car localization and navigation problems are very solveable, but Tesla does not seem to be solving them effectively-- see examples of autopiloted cars hitting dividers earlier this year. The hard part is getting machines to participate in the nonverbal social environment that is a road full of human drivers... but Tesla seems to be struggling on problems several tiers below this. - Problems in Tesla management - From the outside, it looks as if Musk's stubbornness may have lead to his underlings being unable to convery to him what is realistic to accomplish, resulting in repeated missed deadlines, as predicted by the people who appear to have been oustered for saying so. He does not seem like someone who it is easy to give bad news to, which means he and his company are going to have a hard time seeing and reacting to peril. I do not side fully with the shorts, though; Tesla is positioned to completely change the auto industry. I just hope they can execute without shooting themselves in the foot. - Elon's childish toxicity - Completely agree. Not behavior becoming of a leader at his level, let alone any emotionally well-adjusted adult. It's a huge liability, c.f. the SEC fiasco, which Musk still doesn't seem to comprehend. Musk supporters frustratingly seem to attribute his companies' success as being due to these flaws instead of in spite of them.

myegorov 8y ago

Don't have experience with most of the industries that Musk dabbles in, but did spend a decade in construction. I have no doubt in my mind that Musk's roofing and tunneling ventures are sham.

TheChaplain 8y ago

I can't imagine what Elon goes through, the amount of trash talk he receives on social media is just insane. On Twitter there are people whose existence is only to bring anything about Elon/Tesla into a negative light and whip up storms in teacups. Sure, he's probably not a saint but man that must be tiring.

atomical 8y ago
So tiring that he tells the world he's taking the company private in his pointless battle with "short sellers." So tiring that he falsely accuses a critic of being a pedophile. He can't control his emotions.

rick22 8y ago

When writing about Elon negatively start the core argument in the first line. Go straight to the core of the argument instead of wining about elon fan's e.t.c. The reason is simple, the people who write negatively about Elon have accomplished very little compared to Elon and so the reader will give as little time to judge your argument and if you waste your first few lines with BS then there is no chance of getting people to read the entire article.

ricardobeat 8y ago

> Wind, tiny earthquakes or even birds walking along the roof displace the tiles ever so slightly and they loose contact. Once the circuit is broken it is difficult to find and fix the fault. Even worse a short circuit can lead to heating and fire danger. Turns out regular solar panels are way easier and cheaper to work with. How can you say this much about an unreleased product to which you have zero insight on technical details? This is even more bs than if the tiles never come to market... Also, you can’t call a machine-bored tunnel a “tube” and expect to be taken seriously. Questioning lofty, sci-fi-is goals? Fine and reasonable. Gaslighting actual, tangible products? Sounds shady.

mrpopo 8y ago
About the roof tiles : Other companies already have solar roof tiles on the market. http://www.dyaqua.it/invisiblesolar/_en/ http://www.dyaqua.it/invisiblesolar/_en/ They are popular in areas of Europe where architecture is regulated. Sure they are more expensive and less efficient, but there is a niche market for it.
- ricardobeat 8y ago
  I can’t find any record of those being actually sold/installed, or any issues like mentioned in the article? Either way, it is pointless to speculate on technical issues affecting the viability of the Tesla product that doesn't exist yet. We'll only know when solar roof is on the market.

sidcool 8y ago

It seems the article was written as an experiment to gauge people's reaction on a critical Elon article. Not much credibility.