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> If Elon can understand even half of how "his" rockets work I'd eat my hat. Bon appétit! > When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scien

> If Elon can understand even half of how "his" rockets work I'd eat my hat. Bon appétit! > When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn't come just from hanging out with people. Robert Zubrin - aerospace engineer > Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction. He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy. He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years. Kevin Watson - Head of Avionics, Launcher 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...

gw98 4y ago
Stupidity is not necessarily a lack of intelligence, but also a lack of common sense. He's clearly intelligent. Some of the most intelligent people I've ever known are quite frankly the most stupid and dangerous with actions conceptually and verbally.
joshstrange 4y ago
Fair enough, I stand corrected. I guess I expected more from someone who is actually an engineer. Like to be smart enough to see WFH isn't some evil thing (and if instead it's a move to get people to leave on their own then he is just an asshole, I mean he is a well established asshole/troll, it would just further cement that legacy). My hat is old and pretty gross though so instead I hope you'll accept a donation to the EFF: https://cs.joshstrange.com/xVwcRY https://cs.joshstrange.com/xVwcRY
- gw98 4y ago
  Having worked with a lot of intelligent engineers (mostly EE) I would suggest that they are no more capable of making rational business decisions than anyone else. The only thing I really took from the experience is to learn from other people’s mistakes because it hurts less than learning from your own. My take home is that you should use a proper decision analysis framework for issues like this to test your own biases, reasonings and criteria. Sometimes your conclusion is not what you expected. Much pain saved.
- theonething 4y ago
  Hat's off (ha!) for your admission. When encountering the same scenario on Reddit, people there invariably just double down in the face of undeniable facts. A donation to the EFF is more than enough. I was actually going to just let you off the hook based on your honest response and strengthening my faith in HN:) As for WFH, for some perspective, Apple, Google (and others) asked their employees to come back to the office this year. Is management there stupid too? I think a more nuanced view is there are significant pros and cons to WFH and Musk decided that the cons outweigh in this case.
  - joshstrange 4y ago
    > Apple, Google (and others) asks their employees to come back to the office this year. Is management there stupid too? I do and I've consistently voiced that opinion no matter the CEO/company. I don't think they think it is stupid, I know they have their reasons. I disagree with their reasons, I think there is more at play than only logical thinking on this point (real estate, asses in chair, etc), and I think it's shortsighted. WFH is an amazing perk and while I get not everyone wants it there are a large number of people who do and to cut off that entire group is incredibly short-sighted. It's fine though, I'll never work for any of those companies, I have zero desire to do so, I much prefer smaller companies that understand WFH. Though I'd make 1 exception I think, for Apple, to gut and replace App Store Connect/The Developer Portal or at least have better feedback/errors/displaying the current state (which is a common complaint I have with Apple when their software needs to talk to server, the feedback is always lackluster or non-existent). Those websites look broken and/or are confusing/vague way too often. At least the Google Play dev console is so busy and incoherent that you'd not notice most issues. Though props to the Google Play devs for making apk/aab upload/release errors as confusing as possible in most cases :chefs-kiss:
lupire 4y ago
Guys who works at a company where Elon fires productive people who say a wrong word in an elevator ride, say Elon is as great as Elon thinks he is.
- theonething 4y ago
  This is the kind of response I expect on Reddit not here. To me it is indicative of being influenced more by personal bias than truth and reason. To answer your point though, Zubrin does not and never has worked for any of Musk's companies. Watson did work at SpaceX 8 years ago, but works somewhere else now so he has nothing to lose or gain from Musk. And here is an account of a top NASA engineering official's interactions with Musk who also has never worked for Musk. > He dispatched one of his lieutenants, Liam Sarsfield, then a high-ranking NASA official in the office of the chief engineer, to California to see whether the company was for real or just another failure in waiting. Most of all, he was impressed with Musk, who was surprisingly fluent in rocket engineering and understood the science of propulsion and engine design. Musk was intense, preternaturally focused, and extremely determined. “This was not the kind of guy who was going to accept failure,” Sarsfield remembered thinking. Throughout the day, as Musk showed off mockups of the Falcon 1 and Falcon 5, the engine designs, and plans to build a spacecraft capable of flying humans, Musk peppered Sarsfield with questions. He wanted to know what was going on within NASA. And how a company like his would be perceived. He asked tons of highly technical questions, including a detailed discussion about “base heating,” the heat radiating out from the exhaust going back up into the rocket’s engine compartment—a particular problem with rockets that have clusters of engines next to one another, as Musk was planning to build. Now that he had a friend inside of NASA, Musk kept up with the questions in the weeks after Sarsfield’s visit, firing off “a nonstop torrent of e-mails” and texts, Sarsfield said. Musk jokingly warned that texting was a “core competency.” “He sends texts in a constant flow,” Sarsfield recalled. “I found him to be consumed by whatever was in front of him and anxious to solve problems. This, combined with a tendency to work eighteen hours a day, is a sign of someone driven to succeed.” Musk was particularly interested in the docking adapter of the International Space Station, the port where the spacecraft his team was designing would dock. He wanted to know the dimensions, the locking pin design, even the bolt pattern of the hatch. The more documents Sarsfield sent, the more questions Musk had. “I really enjoyed the way he would pore over problems anxious to absorb every detail. To my mind, someone that clearly committed deserves all the support and help you can give him.” 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...
bee_rider 4y ago
> He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy. This seems like a weird thing to highlight, to me. Like, I don’t know anything about rockets, but we all know a bit about CPU design here, right? If someone said that Tim Cook really knew his stuff and wanted answers about the M1 that got down the the fundamental laws of physics, we’d probably say — well, that’s pretty stupid, right? You’d have to talk about thing like pipeline stages, decoder width, memory bandwidth, branch prediction — obviously these parts have to follow the fundamental laws of physics but that isn’t really the interesting part. Fundamental physical limits aren’t the bottleneck yet. Maybe rockets science is just much easier but that seems surprising to me, given the expression.
- Animats 4y ago
  "This seems like a weird thing to highlight, to me." Classic NASA. Read Gene Kranz's "Failure is not an option". In rocketry you're usually up against physical limits. You need materials near the limits of physical strength and temperature resistance. You need fuels near the limits of energy density. And still you're launching with a payload to destination that's maybe 5% of the mass, if you're lucky. Which is why rocketry has to obsess on weight reduction. If fuels were 2x as powerful, or gravity was 1/2 as much, this would be easy. A spacecraft would have the weight budget and safety margins of an airliner. If earth's gravity were somewhat greater, you'd never make it to orbit with chemical fuels. This is the tyranny of the rocket equation.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    But the most interesting thing about his rockets, that they land, which enables a totally different economic proposition, is in direct defiance of this sort of physical limitations first way of looking at the problem. It would clearly be more efficient fuel-wise to not do a controlled landing, right?
    - Animats 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

gw98 4y ago

Stupidity is not necessarily a lack of intelligence, but also a lack of common sense. He's clearly intelligent. Some of the most intelligent people I've ever known are quite frankly the most stupid and dangerous with actions conceptually and verbally.

joshstrange 4y ago

Fair enough, I stand corrected. I guess I expected more from someone who is actually an engineer. Like to be smart enough to see WFH isn't some evil thing (and if instead it's a move to get people to leave on their own then he is just an asshole, I mean he is a well established asshole/troll, it would just further cement that legacy). My hat is old and pretty gross though so instead I hope you'll accept a donation to the EFF: https://cs.joshstrange.com/xVwcRY https://cs.joshstrange.com/xVwcRY

gw98 4y ago
Having worked with a lot of intelligent engineers (mostly EE) I would suggest that they are no more capable of making rational business decisions than anyone else. The only thing I really took from the experience is to learn from other people’s mistakes because it hurts less than learning from your own. My take home is that you should use a proper decision analysis framework for issues like this to test your own biases, reasonings and criteria. Sometimes your conclusion is not what you expected. Much pain saved.
theonething 4y ago
Hat's off (ha!) for your admission. When encountering the same scenario on Reddit, people there invariably just double down in the face of undeniable facts. A donation to the EFF is more than enough. I was actually going to just let you off the hook based on your honest response and strengthening my faith in HN:) As for WFH, for some perspective, Apple, Google (and others) asked their employees to come back to the office this year. Is management there stupid too? I think a more nuanced view is there are significant pros and cons to WFH and Musk decided that the cons outweigh in this case.
- joshstrange 4y ago
  > Apple, Google (and others) asks their employees to come back to the office this year. Is management there stupid too? I do and I've consistently voiced that opinion no matter the CEO/company. I don't think they think it is stupid, I know they have their reasons. I disagree with their reasons, I think there is more at play than only logical thinking on this point (real estate, asses in chair, etc), and I think it's shortsighted. WFH is an amazing perk and while I get not everyone wants it there are a large number of people who do and to cut off that entire group is incredibly short-sighted. It's fine though, I'll never work for any of those companies, I have zero desire to do so, I much prefer smaller companies that understand WFH. Though I'd make 1 exception I think, for Apple, to gut and replace App Store Connect/The Developer Portal or at least have better feedback/errors/displaying the current state (which is a common complaint I have with Apple when their software needs to talk to server, the feedback is always lackluster or non-existent). Those websites look broken and/or are confusing/vague way too often. At least the Google Play dev console is so busy and incoherent that you'd not notice most issues. Though props to the Google Play devs for making apk/aab upload/release errors as confusing as possible in most cases :chefs-kiss:

lupire 4y ago

Guys who works at a company where Elon fires productive people who say a wrong word in an elevator ride, say Elon is as great as Elon thinks he is.

theonething 4y ago
This is the kind of response I expect on Reddit not here. To me it is indicative of being influenced more by personal bias than truth and reason. To answer your point though, Zubrin does not and never has worked for any of Musk's companies. Watson did work at SpaceX 8 years ago, but works somewhere else now so he has nothing to lose or gain from Musk. And here is an account of a top NASA engineering official's interactions with Musk who also has never worked for Musk. > He dispatched one of his lieutenants, Liam Sarsfield, then a high-ranking NASA official in the office of the chief engineer, to California to see whether the company was for real or just another failure in waiting. Most of all, he was impressed with Musk, who was surprisingly fluent in rocket engineering and understood the science of propulsion and engine design. Musk was intense, preternaturally focused, and extremely determined. “This was not the kind of guy who was going to accept failure,” Sarsfield remembered thinking. Throughout the day, as Musk showed off mockups of the Falcon 1 and Falcon 5, the engine designs, and plans to build a spacecraft capable of flying humans, Musk peppered Sarsfield with questions. He wanted to know what was going on within NASA. And how a company like his would be perceived. He asked tons of highly technical questions, including a detailed discussion about “base heating,” the heat radiating out from the exhaust going back up into the rocket’s engine compartment—a particular problem with rockets that have clusters of engines next to one another, as Musk was planning to build. Now that he had a friend inside of NASA, Musk kept up with the questions in the weeks after Sarsfield’s visit, firing off “a nonstop torrent of e-mails” and texts, Sarsfield said. Musk jokingly warned that texting was a “core competency.” “He sends texts in a constant flow,” Sarsfield recalled. “I found him to be consumed by whatever was in front of him and anxious to solve problems. This, combined with a tendency to work eighteen hours a day, is a sign of someone driven to succeed.” Musk was particularly interested in the docking adapter of the International Space Station, the port where the spacecraft his team was designing would dock. He wanted to know the dimensions, the locking pin design, even the bolt pattern of the hatch. The more documents Sarsfield sent, the more questions Musk had. “I really enjoyed the way he would pore over problems anxious to absorb every detail. To my mind, someone that clearly committed deserves all the support and help you can give him.” 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...

bee_rider 4y ago

> He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy. This seems like a weird thing to highlight, to me. Like, I don’t know anything about rockets, but we all know a bit about CPU design here, right? If someone said that Tim Cook really knew his stuff and wanted answers about the M1 that got down the the fundamental laws of physics, we’d probably say — well, that’s pretty stupid, right? You’d have to talk about thing like pipeline stages, decoder width, memory bandwidth, branch prediction — obviously these parts have to follow the fundamental laws of physics but that isn’t really the interesting part. Fundamental physical limits aren’t the bottleneck yet. Maybe rockets science is just much easier but that seems surprising to me, given the expression.

Animats 4y ago
"This seems like a weird thing to highlight, to me." Classic NASA. Read Gene Kranz's "Failure is not an option". In rocketry you're usually up against physical limits. You need materials near the limits of physical strength and temperature resistance. You need fuels near the limits of energy density. And still you're launching with a payload to destination that's maybe 5% of the mass, if you're lucky. Which is why rocketry has to obsess on weight reduction. If fuels were 2x as powerful, or gravity was 1/2 as much, this would be easy. A spacecraft would have the weight budget and safety margins of an airliner. If earth's gravity were somewhat greater, you'd never make it to orbit with chemical fuels. This is the tyranny of the rocket equation.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  But the most interesting thing about his rockets, that they land, which enables a totally different economic proposition, is in direct defiance of this sort of physical limitations first way of looking at the problem. It would clearly be more efficient fuel-wise to not do a controlled landing, right?
  - Animats 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]