5 ms·

“Best case, 10 years. Worst case, 15 to 20 years” - Elon Musk in 2011 on when men would get to Mars.

• al_borland 1y ago
  Who among us hasn't been wrong when estimating a timeline, especially decades into the future?
  • lawn 1y ago
    There's a difference between well-informed estimates and picking estimates out of thin air.
    • al_borland 1y ago
      We are still within his estimate window; he hasn't missed it yet. Giving ambitious public goals can help to create some urgency around finding solutions. It's not all that dissimilar to Kennedy claiming we'd make it to the moon within the decade back in 1961. I'm sure he has his skeptics as well. Without a target, and the expectation being decades, it can easily stretch on forever as teams bike shed around various things. Will SpaceX hit their target... who knows. But it's not like it's a vaporware company that hasn't made any progress. Dismissing everything they've done so far based on an assumption that they will miss an ambitious target set 14 years ago just seems like being a hater.
      • lawn 1y ago
        Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. It's disingenuous to look at this estimate in isolation while Elon has a decade of (with the charitable take) completely failed predictions.
    • Zigurd 1y ago
      What made me very skeptical about Starship is that Elon seems to think that software people have the right idea about project management for everything. When in fact software is the oddball. Almost every other kind of project should be done the traditional way. Agile doesn't work for most things outside of software and the way Elon views. The style of management is as an excuse to make bullshit pronouncements about timelines.
  • Timon3 1y ago
    The same man has been making predictions about his products for over a decade without meeting them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autonomous_Tesla_vehicles_by_Elon_Musk https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_auto...