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There's a lot of amazing real world technical accomplishments seen from SpaceX. They recently landed a 1st stage booster for the 9th time. There's been more tha

There's a lot of amazing real world technical accomplishments seen from SpaceX. They recently landed a 1st stage booster for the 9th time. There's been more than 50 successful landings now. The idea that you don't have to throw away 2/3rds of a rocket for every launch is a game changer. I do wonder if some of these same things could, or would have been accomplished in the absence of Musk, but with the same amount of capital and under the leadership of Gwynne Shotwell. I think they would have. Musk has a big dream, and is great at hyping stuff, but it's not like he's personally engineering the Falcon 9 and its recovery system. Shotwell hired the right people to implement the grand vision. What I'm concerned about is the people who think that Tesla can do no wrong, and it's the most amazing thing ever. When the reality between the sales/marketing pitch, as you've documented above, and what actually exists in the real world on a certain date is so divergent.

908087 6y ago
> but it's not like he's personally engineering the Falcon 9 and its recovery system. Try telling his followers that without being immediately attacked, buried in downvotes, etc..
wilg 6y ago
> it's not like he's personally engineering the Falcon 9 and its recovery system It does seem like his is heavily involved in the engineering, and he does say he's the chief engineer of SpaceX. https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/evidence_that_musk_is_the_chief_engineer_of_spacex/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
- JshWright 6y ago
  He says a lot of things... I think it's generally best to take most of what he says with a Falcon 9 fairing full of salt...
  - wilg 6y ago
    That's why I linked to a list of evidence about it.
  - nickik 6y ago
    Sandy Munro (former Chief Engineer at Ford and worked on lots of Aerospace projects) was invited to SpaceX design review session (@6:17): https://youtu.be/S1nc_chrNQk?t=377 https://youtu.be/S1nc_chrNQk?t=377
- henrikschroder 6y ago
  His official title at Tesla is now "Technoking", so make of that what you will.
  - toiletfuneral 6y ago
    Jesus he’s so fucking stupid and embarrassing. I didn’t think you were serious but then I remembered he’s a 50 year old thinks that 420 jokes are funny
  - hyperbovine 6y ago
    Convincing him to insert the “echn” must have been fun.
  - sschueller 6y ago
    I think "Space Karen" is more fitting.
CryptoPunk 6y ago
>>I do wonder if some of these same things could, or would have been accomplished in the absence of Musk, but with the same amount of capital and under the leadership of Gwynne Shotwell. That assumes the same objectives would have been pursued without Musk, which I find unlikely, given the skepticism and criticism Musk had to endure, and dispel, in order to keep his companies on-target, without a scale-back of ambitions, all those years.
konjin 6y ago
There's a list of quotes just as wrong for spacex. The issue isn't the predictions. It's the time frames he makes the predictions about. We will have everything he's said one day, but in the mean time we need to call him out for what he's done: lying, and why he's done it: to get money.
- simonh 6y ago
  I actually don’t think he’s lying, I think he believes his own hype. That’s why he’s so incredibly motivated.
  - konjin 6y ago
    If you believe that I have a bridge to sell you. The reason why he's so motivated is because his compensation package is so ridiculous.
    - solveit 6y ago
      I think it's fair to say that an extra marginal tens of millions of dollars or so will not affect Musk's life in the slightest. I find it hard to believe that Musk is motivated by money at this point.
      - konjin 6y ago
        I was talking about the 50 billion or so from Tesla: https://observer.com/2019/09/tesla-elon-musk-compensation-package-stock-option-lawsuit/ https://observer.com/2019/09/tesla-elon-musk-compensation-pa... If he is so uninterested by money he can of course show that by giving it to charity.
    - simonh 6y ago
      He was always like that, which is why he did two internships in one summer and dropped out of Stanford to founded Zip2. He slept in the office. They had one computer, so it ran the service during the day and he used it as a dev machine through the night. Some people, that's just the way they are.
simonh 6y ago
Musk has clearly been way off base with self driving, and Tesla’s manufacturing is nowhere near where he said it would be by now. However with SpaceX it seems like he really it directly in charge of engineering. It was him pushing the booster recovery program and leading it technically. Yes of course it took a fantastic team to get it to work but I honestly believe there’s no way they’d have got there without him first relentlessly trying out every technical workaround got every problem for years, and second being willing to throw massive resources at it. I can’t see Shotwell doing any of that. She’s great, but she’s the one that makes it a viable company, not a red hot innovator.
- axlee 6y ago
  > It was him pushing the booster recovery program and leading it technically. In which way did he lead the program technically?
  - Geee 6y ago
    Sandy Munro was invited to SpaceX design review session, so he has some first-hand comments about that on this video (@6:17): https://youtu.be/S1nc_chrNQk?t=377 https://youtu.be/S1nc_chrNQk?t=377
- api 6y ago
  I love SpaceX, but I don't find them quite as miraculously impressive as some people. SpaceX is "just" doing what NASA did in their glory days: rapidly iterating, innovating, and then carrying those innovations all the way through to real world flight. That last part is key. In industry we call that "shipping." NASA didn't stop innovating per se. In the 1980s and 1990s they worked out their own version of vertical take-off and landing and actually test flew it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv9n9Casp1o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv9n9Casp1o Linear aerospike engines are pretty neat too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcW9kUUTfxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcW9kUUTfxY Problem is absolutely none of this stuff ever got close to operational. It kept getting cancelled in the prototype stage. If the DC-X had been developed into a fully reusable first stage, we'd have had something like Falcon 9 by the year 2000 and might be on Mars by now.
lamontcg 6y ago
The optimization problem of hoverslamming a rocket is something that I can fairly easily wrap my head around. Even without the advances in convex optimization of solving that problem you likely could have done it with somewhat less robust approaches. I'm pretty certain that rockets could have been landed using the engineering pieces that existed in 2001 with incremental improvements and learning (maybe not as robust so your optimizer eats a few rockets in your first 100 landings). When it comes to automated driving though you're really requiring solving entirely novel never-before-solved problems. If there is a spectrum between "found a company on doing some existing engineering twice as good" and "found a company on solving the Goldbach conjecture" then driverless cars are a bit more towards the latter than hoverslamming rockets is.
jandrese 6y ago
The devil is always in the details. Problems that are conceptually simple can still be very complex once all of the details are added. Theoretically landing a rocket is a simple matter of turning it into a giant model aircraft and doing the math on how much fuel you need to reserve. Re-lighting an engine is conceptually easy too. In practice we know this is a huge accomplishment. Self driving is a problem that starts out hard. Think about how you get a computer to recognize other objects, especially other cars, based on it's fairly limited set of sensor inputs. Once you add in the details, like dealing with unexpected road conditions, detecting vehicles that are partially invisible to your sensors, etc... and it's hard to see a future where the technology is viable, at least in the near term. All computer vision stuff currently has a sizeable false positive/negative error rate that you just have to accept. But on the road a false negative or false positive can be fatal.

908087 6y ago

> but it's not like he's personally engineering the Falcon 9 and its recovery system. Try telling his followers that without being immediately attacked, buried in downvotes, etc..

wilg 6y ago

> it's not like he's personally engineering the Falcon 9 and its recovery system It does seem like his is heavily involved in the engineering, and he does say he's the chief engineer of SpaceX. https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/evidence_that_musk_is_the_chief_engineer_of_spacex/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...

JshWright 6y ago
He says a lot of things... I think it's generally best to take most of what he says with a Falcon 9 fairing full of salt...
- wilg 6y ago
  That's why I linked to a list of evidence about it.
- nickik 6y ago
  Sandy Munro (former Chief Engineer at Ford and worked on lots of Aerospace projects) was invited to SpaceX design review session (@6:17): https://youtu.be/S1nc_chrNQk?t=377 https://youtu.be/S1nc_chrNQk?t=377
henrikschroder 6y ago
His official title at Tesla is now "Technoking", so make of that what you will.
- toiletfuneral 6y ago
  Jesus he’s so fucking stupid and embarrassing. I didn’t think you were serious but then I remembered he’s a 50 year old thinks that 420 jokes are funny
- hyperbovine 6y ago
  Convincing him to insert the “echn” must have been fun.
- sschueller 6y ago
  I think "Space Karen" is more fitting.

CryptoPunk 6y ago

>>I do wonder if some of these same things could, or would have been accomplished in the absence of Musk, but with the same amount of capital and under the leadership of Gwynne Shotwell. That assumes the same objectives would have been pursued without Musk, which I find unlikely, given the skepticism and criticism Musk had to endure, and dispel, in order to keep his companies on-target, without a scale-back of ambitions, all those years.

konjin 6y ago

There's a list of quotes just as wrong for spacex. The issue isn't the predictions. It's the time frames he makes the predictions about. We will have everything he's said one day, but in the mean time we need to call him out for what he's done: lying, and why he's done it: to get money.

simonh 6y ago
I actually don’t think he’s lying, I think he believes his own hype. That’s why he’s so incredibly motivated.
- konjin 6y ago
  If you believe that I have a bridge to sell you. The reason why he's so motivated is because his compensation package is so ridiculous.
  - solveit 6y ago
    I think it's fair to say that an extra marginal tens of millions of dollars or so will not affect Musk's life in the slightest. I find it hard to believe that Musk is motivated by money at this point.
    - konjin 6y ago
      I was talking about the 50 billion or so from Tesla: https://observer.com/2019/09/tesla-elon-musk-compensation-package-stock-option-lawsuit/ https://observer.com/2019/09/tesla-elon-musk-compensation-pa... If he is so uninterested by money he can of course show that by giving it to charity.
  - simonh 6y ago
    He was always like that, which is why he did two internships in one summer and dropped out of Stanford to founded Zip2. He slept in the office. They had one computer, so it ran the service during the day and he used it as a dev machine through the night. Some people, that's just the way they are.

simonh 6y ago

Musk has clearly been way off base with self driving, and Tesla’s manufacturing is nowhere near where he said it would be by now. However with SpaceX it seems like he really it directly in charge of engineering. It was him pushing the booster recovery program and leading it technically. Yes of course it took a fantastic team to get it to work but I honestly believe there’s no way they’d have got there without him first relentlessly trying out every technical workaround got every problem for years, and second being willing to throw massive resources at it. I can’t see Shotwell doing any of that. She’s great, but she’s the one that makes it a viable company, not a red hot innovator.

axlee 6y ago
> It was him pushing the booster recovery program and leading it technically. In which way did he lead the program technically?
- Geee 6y ago
  Sandy Munro was invited to SpaceX design review session, so he has some first-hand comments about that on this video (@6:17): https://youtu.be/S1nc_chrNQk?t=377 https://youtu.be/S1nc_chrNQk?t=377
api 6y ago
I love SpaceX, but I don't find them quite as miraculously impressive as some people. SpaceX is "just" doing what NASA did in their glory days: rapidly iterating, innovating, and then carrying those innovations all the way through to real world flight. That last part is key. In industry we call that "shipping." NASA didn't stop innovating per se. In the 1980s and 1990s they worked out their own version of vertical take-off and landing and actually test flew it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv9n9Casp1o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv9n9Casp1o Linear aerospike engines are pretty neat too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcW9kUUTfxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcW9kUUTfxY Problem is absolutely none of this stuff ever got close to operational. It kept getting cancelled in the prototype stage. If the DC-X had been developed into a fully reusable first stage, we'd have had something like Falcon 9 by the year 2000 and might be on Mars by now.

lamontcg 6y ago

The optimization problem of hoverslamming a rocket is something that I can fairly easily wrap my head around. Even without the advances in convex optimization of solving that problem you likely could have done it with somewhat less robust approaches. I'm pretty certain that rockets could have been landed using the engineering pieces that existed in 2001 with incremental improvements and learning (maybe not as robust so your optimizer eats a few rockets in your first 100 landings). When it comes to automated driving though you're really requiring solving entirely novel never-before-solved problems. If there is a spectrum between "found a company on doing some existing engineering twice as good" and "found a company on solving the Goldbach conjecture" then driverless cars are a bit more towards the latter than hoverslamming rockets is.

jandrese 6y ago

The devil is always in the details. Problems that are conceptually simple can still be very complex once all of the details are added. Theoretically landing a rocket is a simple matter of turning it into a giant model aircraft and doing the math on how much fuel you need to reserve. Re-lighting an engine is conceptually easy too. In practice we know this is a huge accomplishment. Self driving is a problem that starts out hard. Think about how you get a computer to recognize other objects, especially other cars, based on it's fairly limited set of sensor inputs. Once you add in the details, like dealing with unexpected road conditions, detecting vehicles that are partially invisible to your sensors, etc... and it's hard to see a future where the technology is viable, at least in the near term. All computer vision stuff currently has a sizeable false positive/negative error rate that you just have to accept. But on the road a false negative or false positive can be fatal.