Space X lands Falcon 9 stage 1 on drone ship (picture) | Hacker News Reader

Space X lands Falcon 9 stage 1 on drone ship (picture)

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172 pointsandrewtbham50 comments

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I grabbed this from another tweet: https://www.realms.org/pics/spacex-successful-barge-landing....

I'm so damn excited I can hardly contain myself.

Here's the video starting at the landing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pUAydjne5M&feature=youtu.be...

Gif from the other thread...

http://i.imgur.com/lH4qRaK.gifv

Here it is in reverse!

http://i.imgur.com/kpXtp9g.gifv

I'm not even american but still so proud of what humans can achieve.

Neither is Elon Musk. And the SpaceX team is multinational as well, talent knows no borders.

He is a US Citizen.

And the company is a US company.

I imagine its also because "SpaceX" is awkward to chant. Chanting too fast or with too many people and it will start sounding like "Space sex". Don't believe me? Say "Space X" ten times fast...

And that's a bad thing?? Space Sex sounds amazing.

Sounds actually quite hard and frustrating and I expect quite allot of bruises also.

Elon Musk is a naturalized American citizen since 2002[1]. Referring to him as American would be appropriate.

[1] http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a16681/elon-musk-interv...

I agree. It still bugs me when I hear the SpaceX control room chant U.S.A!

Agreed. Yet, for some reason, the SpaceX team was chanting "U-S-A, U-S-A" after witnessing the landing. I thought that it would have been far more appropriate to chant "SpaceX"

That was mostly the audience that showed up to watch the launch, not so much the SpaceX team

Chanting USA is pretty common in the US.

>Neither is Elon Musk.

Source? He is a US citizen so I'm not sure what 'American' would mean otherwise.

Elon is in fact American. He was born in South Africa gu moved to Canada in the '80 and got a Canadian citizenship through his mother. In 1992 he first came to the USA and go his citizenship 10 years later. He was not born in America nor were his parents but he is American like Linus Tovrvalds

I think is South African-Canadian-American.

Because of ITAR the vast majority of SpaceX employees are citizens or at least permanent residents. I'm sure he'd love to be able to hire outside of the US, but ITAR isn't going to change anytime soon.

Yep I don't think they could even hire a janitor that would not pass a security background check and be eligilble to hold at least basic clearance.

Which is why I'm surprised there is so much 'USA' chanting in the video?

This landing is epic!

Elon Musk, within the same week, sold 300,000+ preorders for the Model 3 (the largest dollar-figure launch of ANY product in history), AND landed a friggin rocket on a drone ship for the first time in history.

He is hands down the greatest entrepreneur within our lifetime, and possibly the greatest in modern history.

PS - yes, I'm a fanboy - jesus christ how can you not be? and yes, it goes without saying he couldn't have done it without all the hard-working employees at both companies.

Yes, he is innovating and by far the most inspirational living entrepreneur in the tech world.

But he's not even close to the most successful from a financial P&L standpoint yet. That honor would have to go to Larry Page.

And here lies the problem..

edit: By problem, I mean the strong push for P&L over Making Shit Better.

> And here lies the problem..

What problem? Google is something that helps billions of people every day in substantial ways.

No, it isn't revolutionary and exciting, but things that make the greatest impact rarely are. You either want to help people or you want to do flashy things that grab peoples' attention.

Linus had a great TED about this today.

http://www.ted.com/talks/linus_torvalds_the_mind_behind_linu...

BTW, Linus has done more for humanity than Musk ever will. Teslas run on Linux and I would be surprised if his rocket didn't use it in some way as well.

But yes, we all love Elon Musk.

Yeah... I should've been more clear. I mean to say that the poster I responded to is focused more on money rather than, "Holy shit, we landed a fucking rocket from the sky on a fucking barge in middle of the ocean. Fuck yeah!"

p&l is a silly goal when it comes to "Fuck yeah, progress!"

Not when you are an investor in Musk's projects (which I am). If investors don't see a return on "Fuck yeah, progress" type investments, they will stop making those investments and opportunities for progress to succeed will diminish.

> p&l is a silly goal when it comes to "Fuck yeah, progress!"

Is it though? We don't throw money at people for building useless shit. If you make a lot of money, it's because you helped a lot of people.

You throw money at these sorts of companies to build knowledge and skill. You're investing in the future's economy and not the now's. It's selfish to think otherwise.

Why does making money have to be intrinsic to helping people? Ugh. Ugh, I say.

I doubt you can concretely define this "problem." And that is the actual problem!

Not unless you're an investor. And you're probably not an investor in SpaceX, since it's a private company.

A good entrepreneur needs to do both.

I don't think you should be downvoted. It's true, perhaps entrepreneur is the wrong word to use here because the goal of most companies is to maximize profits/shareholder value.

how about "most inspiring entrepreneur"? The two people that come closest in recent times, in my opinion, are Steve Jobs and Howard Hughes.

Jobs wouldn't even make my top 3.

Manoj Bhargava for example is way more inspiring (to me) than Jobs ever was, the other two are Bill Gates and Elon Musk.

(Manoj Bhargava being best known for "5-Hour Energy" and pledging 99% of his wealth to philanthropic causes)

That and he is investing a lot of money into projects that will have a real world impact using technology we have now to solve problems.

For example a state of the art desalination plant that can be mass manufactured.

Elon might be able to take personal credit for booking 300k pre-orders (which is of debatable merit), but it was an army of incredibly dedicated SpaceX employees who landed that rocket. Credit where credit is due.

None of who would be working at SpaceX if he didn't dump a shit tonne of his time, skill and money into starting the thing.

The employees are incredibly skillful but Musk is the lynchpin.

If Elon can't take credit for the landing, he can't take credit for the pre-orders either.

Both companies' achievements are the result of thousands of people doing incredibly high-quality work, all overseen and directed and urged on by Elon.

The credit goes to him and to them, for both.

that's why I mentioned it in the "PS". To take a corny line from the Steve Jobs movie, Elon Musk is the conductor. Without him, none of this is possible. Look at Apple after Steve Jobs. Still got the same hard-working people there. Do we still have the same inspirational products coming out? Not even close.

PS - yes, I'm a fanboy - jesus christ how can you not be?

I am not a fanboy. (Perhaps it helps that I am not a boy.) But, whatevs. We all have our heroes. No need to justify yours, but also no need to make sweeping statements about what other people should be into.

> yes, I'm a fanboy - jesus christ how can you not be?

Do you really want an answer for that?

It doesn't matter, HN is pretty much the church of Elon.

Well feel free to criticize. You're comment as it stands will already attract downvotes because its lacking any info. Might as well stand behind it.

yeah, go for it. I'd like to hear your side.

I'm the biggest Musk fan there is, so don't take this the wrong way, but I have some serious doubts about that "largest launch" proclamation. That sort of statement needs some serious qualification. I think it's just a marketing thing. Has anyone really researched this claim?

yeah, there's definitely a bit of marketing hype there, but still incredibly impressive.

In the Soviet Union, people would pre-order cars, and wait for decades for them to be delivered.

Given that these orders will take years to fulfill, we seem to be hearkening back to an older, simpler time.

Well, yes, but they're getting Teslas, not Ladas.

I see him as a moderm Edison (without Menlo Park).

Maybe his company will become the biggest in the world like GE. A small posthumous revenge for Nikola Tesla.

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