6 ms·

SpaceX succeeds despite any Musk's involvement.

by slaw 4y ago

terafo 4y ago
SpaceX is something that Musk created and controlled fully for the entirety the full period of existence of SpaceX. I think it is delusional to think it is successful despite Musk, especially with how many better funded space players such as ULA, Blue Origin and various government initiatives are falling behind.
- slaw 4y ago
  I would like to read opinion from someone working at SpaceX. I don't trust what Elon Musk brags at all.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    Sure I have, you disagree with pretty much all of the leader of SpaceX who have said the opposite. Have you not bothered to look? You disagree with the journalist who has spent most time investigating space. You disagree with most experts who have studied the topic.
  - dotnet00 4y ago
    Fortunately there are entire books written on SpaceX's founding years from interviewing employees which support the point that Musk played a pretty big role in SpaceX getting to where it is now.
  - damagednoob 4y ago
    At the very least you have to say he has a knack for hiring the right people.
    - joshxyz 4y ago
      this. guy got flaws for sure but he's good at finding and funding talent.
    - chasd00 4y ago
      > has a knack for hiring the right people buildings teams is part of my day job, Musk's ability to get the right people in the right spot at the right time and motivated is his biggest gift IMO. If you're good at that then there's really nothing you can't actually do.
badwolf 4y ago
I'd say a big part of SpaceX successes can be attributed to Gwynn Shotwell
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  She's definitely critical for the the commercial success, and probably federal contracts. Elon contributed the "what if we landed the rocket?" moonshot ambition. Definitely need both.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Elon contributed the company and contributed getting the talent hired and pointed in the right direction.
  - LargeWu 4y ago
    Ambition, backed by a lot of money. He's certainly not the first person to say "What if we could reuse the rocket?". Musk's contributions can pretty much be summed up by "already had a lot of money" and "hired smart people". Contrast w/ the founding of Microsoft or Apple, in which the founders were the actual people creating their first products from scratch. Musk is certainly a big-idea person, but I think he is a prime example of somebody who was in the right place to get lucky at the top of the dotcom boom, which in turn rested on him being from an already wealthy family. His foray into Twitter, "how to solve the Ukraine-Russia war", and the Thai cave rescue suggest he's not quite the genius his fans make him out to be.
    - dhedberg 4y ago
      > Musk's contributions can pretty much be summed up by "already had a lot of money" and "hired smart people". He almost went bankrupt getting their first small rocket to space. He wasn't exactly poor at the time thanks to paypal, but he didn't have anything close to unlimited funds. He is a billionaire now because he succeeded, not the other way around. > [..] which the founders were the actual people creating their first products from scratch. If your claim is that Elon was not involved in creating the products, this is misinformed. https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/evidence_that_musk_is_the_chief_engineer_of_spacex/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden... is the link I have handy. > which in turn rested on him being from an already wealthy family. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1005593651219582977 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1005593651219582977, "I arrived in North America at 17 w $2000, a backpack & a suitcase full of books. Paid my own way thru college. Dropped out of Stanford Eng/Phys grad school w $110k in college debt." > Thai cave rescue The "pedo"-thing was stupid and deserve criticism, but he was actually asked to continue working on the submarine: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1016684366083190785 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1016684366083190785
Symmetry 4y ago
Here's Tom Mueller, the main rocket expert at early SpaceX, describing his experience working with Elon: >And, uh, I’ve seen that hurt us before, I’ve seen that fail, but I’ve also seen— where nobody thought it would work— it was the right decision. It was the harder way to do it, but in the end, it was the right thing. One of the things that we did with the Merlin 1D was; he kept complaining— I talked earlier about how expensive the engine was. [inaudible] [I said,] “[the] only way is to get rid of all these valves. Because that’s what’s really driving the complexity and cost.” And how can you do that? And I said, “Well, on smaller engines, we’d go face-shutoff, but nobody’s done it on a really large engine. It’ll be really difficult.” And he said, “We need to do face-shutoff. Explain how that works?” So I drew it up, did some, you know, sketches, and said “here’s what we’d do,” and he said “That’s what we need to do.” And I advised him against it; I said it’s going to be too hard to do, and it’s not going to save that much. But he made the decision that we were going to do face-shutoff. >So we went and developed that engine; and it was hard. We blew up a lot of hardware. And we tried probably tried a hundred different combinations to make it work; but we made it work. I still have the original sketch I did; I think it was— what was it, Christmas 2011, when I did that sketch? And it’s changed quite a bit from that original sketch, but it was pretty scary for me, knowing how that hardware worked, but by going face-shutoff, we got rid of the main valves, we got rid of the sequencing computer; basically, you spin the pumps and pressure comes up, the pressure opens the main injector, lets the oxygen go first, and then the fuel comes in. So all you gotta time is the ignitor fluid. So if you have the ignitor fluid going, it’ll light, and it’s not going to hard start. That got rid of the problem we had where you have two valves; the oxygen valve and the fuel valve. The oxygen valve is very cold and very stiff; it doesn’t want to move. And it’s the one you want open first. If you relieve the fuel, it’s what’s called a hard start. In fact, we have an old saying that says, “[inaudible][When you start a rocket engine, a thousand things could happen, and only one of those is good]“, and by having sequencing correctly, you can get rid of about 900 of those bad things, we made these engine very reliable, got rid of a lot of mass, and got rid of a lot of costs. And it was the right thing to do. >And now we have the lowest-cost, most reliable engines in the world. And it was basically because of that decision, to go to do that. So that’s one of the examples of Elon just really pushing— he always says we need to push to the limits of physics. Like, an example I’ll give is, on the car factory; you know, a car moves through a typical factory, like a Toyota or a Chevy factory; a car is moving at you know, inches per second. It’s like, much less than walking speed. And his thoughts are that the machinery, the robots that are building the car should move as fast as they can. They should be moving so fast you can’t see them. That’s why you can’t have people in there, because they’d get crushed; people move too slow. That’s the way he thinks. “So, what are the physical limits of how fast you can make a car?” He looks at videos of like, coke cans being made, and things like that, where you can’t even see them; it’s just a blur. And, you know, the puck of aluminum, cut it up, deep-draw, fill it with coke, you put the lid on, you put the lid on it; it’s just like going down the assembly line so fast you can’t even see it. And Elon wants to do that with cars. People often claim SpaceX was just Musk's show rather than a team effort where Mueller and Shotwell at least were just as important and probably more people besides. And he's had his share of bad ideas. But at the same time the sort of restless perfectionism he tries to get people to have in their engineering is a net force for good, similar to what Steve Jobs did with design at Apple.

SpaceX succeeds despite any Musk's involvement.

by slaw 4y ago

SpaceX succeeds despite any Musk's involvement.

SpaceX is something that Musk created and controlled fully for the entirety the full period of existence of SpaceX. I think it is delusional to think it is successful despite Musk, especially with how many better funded space players such as ULA, Blue Origin and various government initiatives are falling behind.

slaw 4y ago
I would like to read opinion from someone working at SpaceX. I don't trust what Elon Musk brags at all.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  Sure I have, you disagree with pretty much all of the leader of SpaceX who have said the opposite. Have you not bothered to look? You disagree with the journalist who has spent most time investigating space. You disagree with most experts who have studied the topic.
- dotnet00 4y ago
  Fortunately there are entire books written on SpaceX's founding years from interviewing employees which support the point that Musk played a pretty big role in SpaceX getting to where it is now.
- damagednoob 4y ago
  At the very least you have to say he has a knack for hiring the right people.
  - joshxyz 4y ago
    this. guy got flaws for sure but he's good at finding and funding talent.
  - chasd00 4y ago
    > has a knack for hiring the right people buildings teams is part of my day job, Musk's ability to get the right people in the right spot at the right time and motivated is his biggest gift IMO. If you're good at that then there's really nothing you can't actually do.

badwolf 4y ago

I'd say a big part of SpaceX successes can be attributed to Gwynn Shotwell

bpodgursky 4y ago
She's definitely critical for the the commercial success, and probably federal contracts. Elon contributed the "what if we landed the rocket?" moonshot ambition. Definitely need both.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Elon contributed the company and contributed getting the talent hired and pointed in the right direction.
- LargeWu 4y ago
  Ambition, backed by a lot of money. He's certainly not the first person to say "What if we could reuse the rocket?". Musk's contributions can pretty much be summed up by "already had a lot of money" and "hired smart people". Contrast w/ the founding of Microsoft or Apple, in which the founders were the actual people creating their first products from scratch. Musk is certainly a big-idea person, but I think he is a prime example of somebody who was in the right place to get lucky at the top of the dotcom boom, which in turn rested on him being from an already wealthy family. His foray into Twitter, "how to solve the Ukraine-Russia war", and the Thai cave rescue suggest he's not quite the genius his fans make him out to be.
  - dhedberg 4y ago
    > Musk's contributions can pretty much be summed up by "already had a lot of money" and "hired smart people". He almost went bankrupt getting their first small rocket to space. He wasn't exactly poor at the time thanks to paypal, but he didn't have anything close to unlimited funds. He is a billionaire now because he succeeded, not the other way around. > [..] which the founders were the actual people creating their first products from scratch. If your claim is that Elon was not involved in creating the products, this is misinformed. https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/evidence_that_musk_is_the_chief_engineer_of_spacex/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden... is the link I have handy. > which in turn rested on him being from an already wealthy family. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1005593651219582977 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1005593651219582977, "I arrived in North America at 17 w $2000, a backpack & a suitcase full of books. Paid my own way thru college. Dropped out of Stanford Eng/Phys grad school w $110k in college debt." > Thai cave rescue The "pedo"-thing was stupid and deserve criticism, but he was actually asked to continue working on the submarine: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1016684366083190785 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1016684366083190785

Symmetry 4y ago

Here's Tom Mueller, the main rocket expert at early SpaceX, describing his experience working with Elon: >And, uh, I’ve seen that hurt us before, I’ve seen that fail, but I’ve also seen— where nobody thought it would work— it was the right decision. It was the harder way to do it, but in the end, it was the right thing. One of the things that we did with the Merlin 1D was; he kept complaining— I talked earlier about how expensive the engine was. [inaudible] [I said,] “[the] only way is to get rid of all these valves. Because that’s what’s really driving the complexity and cost.” And how can you do that? And I said, “Well, on smaller engines, we’d go face-shutoff, but nobody’s done it on a really large engine. It’ll be really difficult.” And he said, “We need to do face-shutoff. Explain how that works?” So I drew it up, did some, you know, sketches, and said “here’s what we’d do,” and he said “That’s what we need to do.” And I advised him against it; I said it’s going to be too hard to do, and it’s not going to save that much. But he made the decision that we were going to do face-shutoff. >So we went and developed that engine; and it was hard. We blew up a lot of hardware. And we tried probably tried a hundred different combinations to make it work; but we made it work. I still have the original sketch I did; I think it was— what was it, Christmas 2011, when I did that sketch? And it’s changed quite a bit from that original sketch, but it was pretty scary for me, knowing how that hardware worked, but by going face-shutoff, we got rid of the main valves, we got rid of the sequencing computer; basically, you spin the pumps and pressure comes up, the pressure opens the main injector, lets the oxygen go first, and then the fuel comes in. So all you gotta time is the ignitor fluid. So if you have the ignitor fluid going, it’ll light, and it’s not going to hard start. That got rid of the problem we had where you have two valves; the oxygen valve and the fuel valve. The oxygen valve is very cold and very stiff; it doesn’t want to move. And it’s the one you want open first. If you relieve the fuel, it’s what’s called a hard start. In fact, we have an old saying that says, “[inaudible][When you start a rocket engine, a thousand things could happen, and only one of those is good]“, and by having sequencing correctly, you can get rid of about 900 of those bad things, we made these engine very reliable, got rid of a lot of mass, and got rid of a lot of costs. And it was the right thing to do. >And now we have the lowest-cost, most reliable engines in the world. And it was basically because of that decision, to go to do that. So that’s one of the examples of Elon just really pushing— he always says we need to push to the limits of physics. Like, an example I’ll give is, on the car factory; you know, a car moves through a typical factory, like a Toyota or a Chevy factory; a car is moving at you know, inches per second. It’s like, much less than walking speed. And his thoughts are that the machinery, the robots that are building the car should move as fast as they can. They should be moving so fast you can’t see them. That’s why you can’t have people in there, because they’d get crushed; people move too slow. That’s the way he thinks. “So, what are the physical limits of how fast you can make a car?” He looks at videos of like, coke cans being made, and things like that, where you can’t even see them; it’s just a blur. And, you know, the puck of aluminum, cut it up, deep-draw, fill it with coke, you put the lid on, you put the lid on it; it’s just like going down the assembly line so fast you can’t even see it. And Elon wants to do that with cars. People often claim SpaceX was just Musk's show rather than a team effort where Mueller and Shotwell at least were just as important and probably more people besides. And he's had his share of bad ideas. But at the same time the sort of restless perfectionism he tries to get people to have in their engineering is a net force for good, similar to what Steve Jobs did with design at Apple.