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SpaceX's booster landings continue to be pretty much the only thing(s) that have properly, legitimately stunned me as an adult. i'm not a Musk fan generally, b

• capableweb 4y ago
  I'm in the same box (SpaceX seems amazing, Musk less so) and I keep wondering: Is SpaceX succeeding because of Musk or despite of Musk?
  • ghiculescu 4y ago
    Because of.
  • jutrewag 4y ago
    His style of management is effective because it’s fear based and slave driverish. Fortunately in this case he can get people to work purely on the basis of the ideals and lofty goals they are working towards.
    • wongarsu 4y ago
      In a way, the ideals are part of the compensation package. SpaceX don't have to have good work conditions because people want to work there. The same way the video game industry has bad pay with bad work conditions because there's a steady flow of people wanting to make games, even if only as a tiny cog in a massive machine. Or how teachers or nurses are paid poorly, because enough people want to do it anyways. Which isn't supposed to be an endorsement of any of this. Ethically it's very questionable, but it is a logical outcome in our flavor of capitalism.
  • jfengel 4y ago
    Some from column A, some from column B. He picked the right people to work SpaceX and Tesla, which is his greatest feat and deserves much praise. He informed himself, then involved himself more than was probably required or even good, but he had adult supervision. He's deliberately ignoring adult supervision in Twitter and making a hash of it. The fact that both Tesla and SpaceX continue in his absence suggest that whatever direct benefit he once provided does not seem to require more.
  • Abroszka 4y ago
    > Is SpaceX succeeding because of Musk or despite of Musk? Probably because. Just look at Blue Origin with Jeff Bezos. Or look at the US, EU, Chinese space industry. It does look like Musk adds something to SpaceX that makes them achieve above the rest.
    • IshKebab 4y ago
      I think it's pretty clear what that something is too. a) pushing people to question assumptions and continually try new things to cut costs and improve performance, b) slave driving employees in exciting industries where you can get away with that.
  • pclmulqdq 4y ago
    Musk is great at raising money on empty promises, and that is what SpaceX has really needed. They are on series O or P at this point. Anyone who was less good at turning hype into money would not have gotten to that point.
    • photonbeam 4y ago
      Part of that is refusing to IPO, and still wanting to grow into new areas that revenue doesn’t yet support
      • pclmulqdq 4y ago
        There's a big story floating around that Musk didn't run a SpaceX IPO by choice. I think the reality is probably pretty different: SpaceX doesn't look like it's in any shape to support being a public company from the financial breadcrumbs we have been given. The IPO would be huge, but the company needs more than just an IPO, it will need to continue doing secondary offerings to raise money (in contrast to Tesla, which doesn't at all). For those secondary offerings, you put downward pressure on your stock price, and markets start to eventually pick up expectations that you will make enough money to support a given valuation if you want to keep it. SpaceX's valuation is too high for just the Falcon 9 launch business to be worth continual secondary offerings. So they need something amazing - which is supposed to be Starlink today, but could have been "mars" or "asteroid mining" or whatever else. Without this rocket, Starlink doesn't look like it has massively positive unit economics either. Hence you get a company that is eternally raising money from private and venture markets on future promise and hype, paired with the perfect CEO to do those raises.
    • Nevermark 4y ago
      > Anyone who was less good at turning hype into money would not have gotten to that point. FTFY: Anyone who was less good at turning hype into money into significant achievements ... Musk might not hit his target time tables. He might not deliver everything he plans to. But he still delivers things other entities have yet to match, or took a serious amount to time to match. Investors, and people who care about his projects, don't care about him keeping every promise. They care about results. If a CEO and his team get motivated by impossible time tables, then let them motivate themselves with impossible time tables. (Counter example? FWIW, any benefits of his foray into Twitter are not yet clear to me.)
  • samwillis 4y ago
    Mostly ignoring the Musk aspect. I believe their success comes down to how they go about these massive development projects. They start super scrappy, quick to iterate, build and throwaway hardware quickly. But then are experts of transitioning into a sustainable late stage development within the regulatory bounds of a highly controlled industry. They did it with Falcon, Dragon, Starlink, and I suspect they will with Starship too. They could only go about this by having a "crazy" and very rich benefactor, along with the management of COO Gwynne Shotwell.
    • svachalek 4y ago
      It does seem crazy wasteful but in the end they are far more cost effective than more traditional companies like Boeing. Signing off on these original programs took incredible bravery but by now investors should be punishing companies that timidly launch once every five years.
      • wongarsu 4y ago
        It's the same lesson the software industry learned roughly 20 years ago: For an omniscient being the waterfall process might be the most efficient, for mere mortals it's more valuable to have a process that allows you to verify assumptions and find flaws as early in the process as possible, when it's still cheap to fix them.
      • pixl97 4y ago
        Waste when the waste is cheap and easy recyclable. People get confused by this when they see bits of metal get blown up and fail. The cost of that metal isn't really that high at the end of the day and the bits of metal that are recovered get melted down and reused. Do you know what cannot be recycled and reused? Human effort when we spend tens of thousand of hours on something that doesn't pan out. In so many mega project we see design ideas carried on because of the sunk cost fallacy. The key to prevent this is being able to bail out as fast as possible when the idea isn't going to work, and being able to focus on what is going to work.
        • 4y ago
  • wongarsu 4y ago
    SpaceX is Musk doing the things he's good at, and delegating everything else. He's mostly there as the visionary and the person running R&D, with most other stuff handled by Gwynne Shotwell. This combination works incredibly well. Musk regularly questions conventional wisdom and reimagines things from first principles, and then has the balls to go through with it. Channeled properly this is incredibly powerful and propels SpaceX on a trajectory far beyond their competition. Channeled improperly ... well, just look at some of his other companies.
    • exohell 4y ago
      [dead]
  • ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
    Definitely because of him. He is doing what nation states cannot do. People forget that before his "turn" towards right wing politics, he would provide detailed answers and be part of the engineering that made space x great. Add his enormous talent of hiring some of the greatest talent, with an unquenchable thirst for childlike wonder and drive, it is hard to imagine how something like space x would have ever come into fruition without him. Now his turn is actually a strategic manoeuvre to make the right like him and buy his products. He is solving for global warming after all. And like a lot of immigrants, he is very sensitive to free speech becoming less free due to the whole social justice warrior movement which was getting out of hand. So he did all the memes and said a bunch of things that one can say when they are at a certain level in their lives without society being able to cancel them. Bottomline is, we are enormously blessed to have talented immigrants like Einstein and Musk coming to our shores and we wouldn't be half the country without them.
  • chippiewill 4y ago
    Both. The way SpaceX has revolutionised the space industry is largely down to Elon's unique vision and drive. Elon has set the mission of getting to Mars and SpaceX has relentlessly pursued that goal and hasn't paused to soak up cash for shareholders (Falcon 9 Block 5 would be ludicrously profitable if SpaceX just scrapped R&D and rested on their laurels). People who work in Space tech generally _want_ to work in Space tech and want to do the big things (like reaching Mars etc.) so SpaceX has an easier time hiring highly motivated and highly capable people because it has such ambition. Elon managed to hire very capable senior leadership. Like Tom Mueller who led SpaceX propulsion development. And most importantly, SpaceX's President and COO Gwynne Shotwell who basically runs SpaceX in most meaningful ways. Elon as CEO is more like a very involved chairman than a traditional CEO which is why I would say SpaceX is also successful in spite of Musk, because he's actually not that involved day-to-day which is probably his most negative influence.
  • Nevermark 4y ago
    Musk had the insight to aim for the overwhelmingly practical and economic benefits of reusable rockets. While the road to achieving those benefits directly was a long road, the immediate indirect benefits of having a clear path to a major competitive (and customer) advantage were the quality of people he was able to inspire to work on the problem. And as SpaceX began delivering reusability, their profit margins, and industry respect, have risen to a level that gives them overwhelming advantages for now and seemingly for some time to come. A clear vision counts for a lot.
    • ancientworldnow 4y ago
      There are 0 hard numbers on profit margins and cost, just taking PR or best guesses at face value.
      • Nevermark 4y ago
        We don't have access to their dollar per-launch costs in their private ledger, but we do have very reliable access to their rocketry hardware per-launch costs. In percentage of rocket stages consumed / launch, their costs are significantly lower than any other entity in the industry. Also launch frequencies are higher, and their turnaround time on launches is significantly lower, reducing the fixed costs of having a launch system per launch significantly over the competition again.
  • grecy 4y ago
    If you read Eric Burger's fantastic book about the early days of SpaceX, there are some great anecdotes from engineers and what it was like working with Elon. Many of them came from Boeing or Lockheed, and they talk about how getting approval for a new piece of equipment or new manufacturing tech would take 12 months, then budgeting, then whatever and you might have the thing in 2 years if you were lucky. With Elon, you go into his office and lay out your ask. He will ask one or two directed questions, they say "yes, do it" and pull out the check book then and there, and you can spend millions and get something new in weeks. Even when it doesn't work out down the road, Elon will ask if you learned something and if you're now on the right track, and if the answer is yes, Elon says "You did the right thing". So it sounds like he removes a ton of barriers, and I'd love to work for someone like that.
• GalenErso 4y ago
  SpaceX's reusable launch technology has become a strategic American national security asset. The U.S. would, in all probability, bail out SpaceX if, for some reason, it was about to fail. SpaceX's success is a Sputnik moment for countries like China and Russia, which are desperately trying to develop reusable rockets of their own. Also, Gwynne Shotwell deserves as much credit as Elon Musk.
  • JohnCClarke 4y ago
    This is what makes me wonder about the commercial viability of Starship. A single rapidly resuable Starship will lead to a launch capacity glut. Now factor in a fleet of them. And that China and the EU will definitely respond, and Russia too if they can afford it. Launch prices are going to be driven down brutally. It's not clear to me how any launch provider will make a profit.
    • photonbeam 4y ago
      They’ll charge the similar prices, just putting cheaper heavier better-fueled robust satellites in orbit Satellites are super expensive due to weight concerns, demand should go way up with the per-unit cost down
    • DennisP 4y ago
      By enabling entirely new applications that aren't remotely economical otherwise. Asteroid mining, orbital manufacturing, all that scifi stuff that we've been talking about for half a century and can't do at thousands of dollars per pound to LEO. Cheap high-volume launch means you can build things heavier and in some cases mass-produce them, so space hardware doesn't have to cost so much anymore either.
    • AlchemistCamp 4y ago
      Consider how CPU manufacturing became a bigger industry as the cost per computation plummeted over the past 50 years. When it gets cheaper to do something, demand tends to increase because people start purchasing it for purposes that would have been ridiculous in the past.
    • 4y ago
• newsclues 4y ago
  "SpaceX's booster landings continue to be pretty much the only thing(s) that have properly, legitimately stunned me as an adult." Born in the 80s, but I feel that they have done such a good job on regularly launching and landing that they made space boring.
• yowzadave 4y ago
  > i'm not a Musk fan generally, but when it comes to SpaceX i doff my hat Like all of us, he has a mix of qualities, some of which are positive and some of which are negative. It’s a mistake to try to put a person in a “good” or “bad” box, and it some cases particular traits can be helpful in certain contexts and harmful in others. He does have too much money for his own good, however.