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I find this, and SpaceX, so inspiring. It's easy to feel that technology just moves itself forward. After all there are billions of people on Earth with people
by rjf72 8y ago
I find this, and SpaceX, so inspiring. It's easy to feel that technology just moves itself forward. After all there are billions of people on Earth with people working on a countless array of different problems. And each day things seem to move forward, almost inexorably so. And so it's easy to feel that the value of the individual is really relatively low.
Yet imagine a world where Elon did not exist and thus SpaceX did not. Much of what he's done is stuff that we could have been working on decades ago. For some time we were. NASA as early as the 70s had already laid out plans for a Mars expedition including a tremendous space ship that would be assembled and fueled in orbit to take 5 man crew on a 600 day manned expedition to Mars, including landing of rovers similar to the moon.
Those plans got canned by Nixon, and space never really recovered. Not only did we not "inexorably advance" in space, we regressed. Today we're struggling to do a manned flyby of the Moon - when we went to having barely put a man in orbit in 1962, to putting a man on the moon in 1969. The point of this is that technology does not advance by itself, let alone inexorably so. I think it's extremely likely that had SpaceX not come to exist, it's entirely possible that we would still be effectively where we were at near the turn of the century.
Progress of our species, in spite of there being billions of us, is still dependent upon the individual. And SpaceX's plans have very much followed the old quote of Gandhi, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." But of course we've not yet won. As remarkable as this achievement is, it's but the starting line for where we need to be. And that line will not move forward unless we move it forward. But "we" does not mean waiting for somebody else to do so. As SpaceX and Musk have demonstrated, it's ultimately up to the individual to get up and move that line forward -- for the betterment of all.
- chasd00 8y agoif you want to talk inspiring, consider Gwynne Shotwell. She's tasked with turning Musk's crazy ideas and timelines into reality. I can't imagine a tougher job and she's killing it.
- TremendousJudge 8y agoI always read about Musk like he does the whole thing on his own. Never read about all the engineers that work their asses off to achieve these results
- sharcerer 8y agoThe way I see ot, ot goes both ways. He has taken a lot of shit for Tesla,SpaceX so obviously when something good happens then too he gets a lot. The dynamic is a bit similar to actors/actresses in movies. If it flops, nobody is blaming the makeup artist,dialogue writer. Btw, i do find some things related to Elon's life overglorified(those parts do not involve SpaceX,Tesla) BTW, read this thread about Tom Mueller. https://mobile.twitter.com/mekkaokereke/status/1081619342377156608?lang=en https://mobile.twitter.com/mekkaokereke/status/1081619342377... Really inspiring. This thread got picked up by many news sites. I just googled "spaceX engineer lumberjack" to find this.
- rjf72 8y agoHe constantly emphasizes that it's the entire team bringing SpaceX to what it is. However, there is an important difference between working for a company and leading one. Boeing/Lockheed, Arianespace, NASA, ESA, Roscosmos, etc, etc not also only have brilliant scientists and engineers working for them, but also have billions of dollars and have been around for many decades. The big difference in outcomes comes from the leadership. These other companies are headed by people of different abilities, different ideologies, different technical abilities, and so on. This is why they've all been, more or less, surpassed by a company started on a shoestring budget in 2002. In other words, I imagine if you had let Musk have complete control over ULA (united launch alliance - an arguably anticompetitive merger between Boeing and Lockheed) he'd not only achieved as much as he has already, but likely far more given their vast resources - both economic and human. Similarly, if you put Marilyn Hewson [1] (president, chair, CEO of Lockheed) in charge of SpaceX's people in 2002, SpaceX almost certainly would have catastrophically failed. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marillyn_Hewson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marillyn_Hewson
- woodandsteel 8y agoGwynne Shotwell is pretty amazing. But don't forget that Musk was smart enough to hire her, and she had enough confidence in him to take the job. A very large part of being a successful tech revolutionary is hiring the right people to work for you.