6 ms·

Or worse, pursuing something already proven not to work.

porkbrain 2y ago
Viewed through the lens of personal development I suppose one could make an argument that there wasn't much difference between rediscovering an existing valid or invalid solution. Both lead to internalisation of a domain's constraints.
somenameforme 2y ago
The problem is that when the proof is wrong, as in this case a related conjecture held up for 40 years, which is not a "proof" per se, but still ostensibly an extremely high reliability indicator of correctness. Another example is when SpaceX was first experimenting with reusable self landing rockets. They were being actively mocked by Tory Bruno, who was the head of ULA (basically an anti-competitive shell-but-not-really-corp merger between Lockheed and Boeing), claiming essentially stuff along the lines of 'We've of course already thoroughly researched and experimented with these ideas years ago. The economics just don't work at all. Have fun learning we already did!' Given that ULA made no efforts to compete with what SpaceX was doing it's likely that they did genuinely believe what they were saying. And that's a company with roots going all the way back to the Apollo program, with billions of dollars in revenue, and a massive number of aerospace engineers working for them. And the guy going against them was 'Silicon Valley guy with no aerospace experience who made some money selling a payment processing tool.' Yet somehow he knew better.
- necovek 2y ago
  All the cases you bring up are not "proofs": a conjecture is very much not one, it's just that nobody bothered to refute this particular one even if there were results proving it isn't (cited in the paper). Similarly, ULA had no "proof" that this would be economically infeasible: Musk pioneered using agile ship-and-fail-fast for rocket development which mostly contradicted common knowledge that in projects like these your first attempt should be a success. Like with software, this actually sped things up and delivered better, cheaper results.
  - vkou 2y ago
    Also, SpaceX was exactly one failed launch (with every prior one being a failure) from bankruptcy. Had that one also been a failure, he wouldn't be running the US government and we'd all be talking about how obviously stupid reusable rockets were.
    - necovek 2y ago
      Had they received the same grant money as Boeing ($4.2b vs $2.6b), it wouldn't have been such a close call. I'd also note that they were also late by 3 years or so: this did not produce miracles, it was just much cheaper and better in the end than what Boeing is still trying to do.
      - Manabu-eo 2y ago
        He is talking about Falcon 1, not CCDev. There was no close call at CCDev, nor any grant money for Falcon 1.
        necovek 2y ago
        Thanks for the correction/clarification. Still, I would be surprised if SpaceX did not greatly benefit from knowledge gained in Falcon 1 development when building their Falcon 9 rocket and then optimizing it for reusability — they started development of Falcon 9 while Falcon 1 was still operating.
    - NateEag 2y ago
      This illustrates beautifully how stupid labeling ideas stupid is. To know that that an idea or approach is fundamentally stupid and unsalvageable requires a grasp of the world that humans may simply not have access to. It seems unthinkably rare to me.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    On the other hand, I knew from the beginning that the Space Shuttle design was ungainly, looking like a committee designed it, and unfortunately I was right. (Having a wing, empennage and landing gear greatly increased the weight. The only thing that really needs to be returned from space are the astronauts.)
- scheme271 2y ago
  Do we know that the economics work for SpaceX? It's a private company and it's financials aren't public knowledge, it could be burning investor money? E.g. Uber was losing around 4B/yr give or take for a very long time.
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    You can't know anything for certain but most of every analysis corroborates what they themselves say - they're operating at a healthy (though thin) margin on rocket launches and printing money with Starlink. The context of this of course is that they've sent the cost of rocket launches from ~$2 billion per launch during the Space Shuttle era, to $0.07 billion per launch today. And the goal of Starship is to chop another order of magnitude or two off that price. By contrast SLS (Boeing/NASA's "new" rocket) was estimated to end up costing around $4.1 billion per launch.
    - varjag 2y ago
      To be fair cost per launch was in that ballpark already ($$0.15-0.05) with Ariane, Atlas and Soyuz non-reusable vehicles. SpaceX maintains the cost just about to undercut the competition.
      - eru 2y ago
        I think they maintain the price there. They'll want to drive the cost as low as possible, because price - cost = profit for them. A penny saved is a penny earned.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    Does SpaceX have any investors other than Musk? I thought he bootstrapped it.
    - skissane 2y ago
      Musk owns 42% of SpaceX's total equity and 79% of the voting equity. The non-Musk shareholders range from low-level SpaceX employees (equity compensation) through to Alphabet/Google, Fidelity, Founders Fund. There are actually hundreds of investors. If you are ultra-wealthy, it isn't hard to invest in SpaceX. If you are the average person, they don't want to deal with you, the money you can bring to the table isn't worth the hassle–and the regulatory risk you represent is a lot higher
- ExoticPearTree 2y ago
  I think Musk had a better imagination and the money to fund that imagination without constraints or internal politics.
phyzix5761 2y ago
That's how the best discoveries are made.
- Manabu-eo 2y ago
  Or how a lot of time is wasted. For example on perpetual motion machines and infinite data compression.
  - phyzix5761 2y ago
    A lot of major scientific discoveries were made while people were trying to turn base metals into gold; also known as alchemy. Some examples include discovering phosphorus, the identification of arsenic, antimony, and bismuth as elements rather than compounds, and the development of nitric acid, sulfuric acid, and hydrochloric acid. Alchemy ultimately evolved into modern chemistry. I think the key is that thinking that something is a waste of time is the type of mentality that prevents individuals from pursuing their interests to the point where they actually make important discoveries or make great inventions. If you put enough time and energy into anything you're bound to learn a lot and gain valuable insights at the very least.
SkyBelow 2y ago
Outside of math and computational science, nothing is proven to not work because scientific research doesn't work in proofs. Even in math and computational science, there are fields dedicated to researching known proven wrong logic because sometimes there are interesting findings, like hypercomputation.

Viewed through the lens of personal development I suppose one could make an argument that there wasn't much difference between rediscovering an existing valid or invalid solution. Both lead to internalisation of a domain's constraints.

somenameforme 2y ago

The problem is that when the proof is wrong, as in this case a related conjecture held up for 40 years, which is not a "proof" per se, but still ostensibly an extremely high reliability indicator of correctness. Another example is when SpaceX was first experimenting with reusable self landing rockets. They were being actively mocked by Tory Bruno, who was the head of ULA (basically an anti-competitive shell-but-not-really-corp merger between Lockheed and Boeing), claiming essentially stuff along the lines of 'We've of course already thoroughly researched and experimented with these ideas years ago. The economics just don't work at all. Have fun learning we already did!' Given that ULA made no efforts to compete with what SpaceX was doing it's likely that they did genuinely believe what they were saying. And that's a company with roots going all the way back to the Apollo program, with billions of dollars in revenue, and a massive number of aerospace engineers working for them. And the guy going against them was 'Silicon Valley guy with no aerospace experience who made some money selling a payment processing tool.' Yet somehow he knew better.

necovek 2y ago
All the cases you bring up are not "proofs": a conjecture is very much not one, it's just that nobody bothered to refute this particular one even if there were results proving it isn't (cited in the paper). Similarly, ULA had no "proof" that this would be economically infeasible: Musk pioneered using agile ship-and-fail-fast for rocket development which mostly contradicted common knowledge that in projects like these your first attempt should be a success. Like with software, this actually sped things up and delivered better, cheaper results.
- vkou 2y ago
  Also, SpaceX was exactly one failed launch (with every prior one being a failure) from bankruptcy. Had that one also been a failure, he wouldn't be running the US government and we'd all be talking about how obviously stupid reusable rockets were.
  - necovek 2y ago
    Had they received the same grant money as Boeing ($4.2b vs $2.6b), it wouldn't have been such a close call. I'd also note that they were also late by 3 years or so: this did not produce miracles, it was just much cheaper and better in the end than what Boeing is still trying to do.
    - Manabu-eo 2y ago
      He is talking about Falcon 1, not CCDev. There was no close call at CCDev, nor any grant money for Falcon 1.
      - necovek 2y ago
        Thanks for the correction/clarification. Still, I would be surprised if SpaceX did not greatly benefit from knowledge gained in Falcon 1 development when building their Falcon 9 rocket and then optimizing it for reusability — they started development of Falcon 9 while Falcon 1 was still operating.
  - NateEag 2y ago
    This illustrates beautifully how stupid labeling ideas stupid is. To know that that an idea or approach is fundamentally stupid and unsalvageable requires a grasp of the world that humans may simply not have access to. It seems unthinkably rare to me.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  On the other hand, I knew from the beginning that the Space Shuttle design was ungainly, looking like a committee designed it, and unfortunately I was right. (Having a wing, empennage and landing gear greatly increased the weight. The only thing that really needs to be returned from space are the astronauts.)
scheme271 2y ago
Do we know that the economics work for SpaceX? It's a private company and it's financials aren't public knowledge, it could be burning investor money? E.g. Uber was losing around 4B/yr give or take for a very long time.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  You can't know anything for certain but most of every analysis corroborates what they themselves say - they're operating at a healthy (though thin) margin on rocket launches and printing money with Starlink. The context of this of course is that they've sent the cost of rocket launches from ~$2 billion per launch during the Space Shuttle era, to $0.07 billion per launch today. And the goal of Starship is to chop another order of magnitude or two off that price. By contrast SLS (Boeing/NASA's "new" rocket) was estimated to end up costing around $4.1 billion per launch.
  - varjag 2y ago
    To be fair cost per launch was in that ballpark already ($$0.15-0.05) with Ariane, Atlas and Soyuz non-reusable vehicles. SpaceX maintains the cost just about to undercut the competition.
    - eru 2y ago
      I think they maintain the price there. They'll want to drive the cost as low as possible, because price - cost = profit for them. A penny saved is a penny earned.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Does SpaceX have any investors other than Musk? I thought he bootstrapped it.
  - skissane 2y ago
    Musk owns 42% of SpaceX's total equity and 79% of the voting equity. The non-Musk shareholders range from low-level SpaceX employees (equity compensation) through to Alphabet/Google, Fidelity, Founders Fund. There are actually hundreds of investors. If you are ultra-wealthy, it isn't hard to invest in SpaceX. If you are the average person, they don't want to deal with you, the money you can bring to the table isn't worth the hassle–and the regulatory risk you represent is a lot higher
ExoticPearTree 2y ago
I think Musk had a better imagination and the money to fund that imagination without constraints or internal politics.

phyzix5761 2y ago

That's how the best discoveries are made.

Manabu-eo 2y ago
Or how a lot of time is wasted. For example on perpetual motion machines and infinite data compression.
- phyzix5761 2y ago
  A lot of major scientific discoveries were made while people were trying to turn base metals into gold; also known as alchemy. Some examples include discovering phosphorus, the identification of arsenic, antimony, and bismuth as elements rather than compounds, and the development of nitric acid, sulfuric acid, and hydrochloric acid. Alchemy ultimately evolved into modern chemistry. I think the key is that thinking that something is a waste of time is the type of mentality that prevents individuals from pursuing their interests to the point where they actually make important discoveries or make great inventions. If you put enough time and energy into anything you're bound to learn a lot and gain valuable insights at the very least.

SkyBelow 2y ago

Outside of math and computational science, nothing is proven to not work because scientific research doesn't work in proofs. Even in math and computational science, there are fields dedicated to researching known proven wrong logic because sometimes there are interesting findings, like hypercomputation.