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Comment by endtime | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone hate SpaceX?

There was that 60 Minutes piece that had astronauts criticizing SpaceX harshly enough to make Elon Musk cry.

I had seen this, but I guess I was so taken aback at seeing Elon Musk's reaction that that I missed another interesting aspect. The American astronauts are calling out against the "commercialization of space". The same astronauts that were used as a propaganda tools against the communists.

So they're pro-imperialism but anti-capitalism.

As far as I'm concerned, the Jury's still out on whether SpaceX is actually doing anything interesting. I mean, lifting things into orbit at cheaper rates is useful, but there's no evidence of anything game-changing yet.

From the history of business it seems to me that many/most of the great innovations are making things a lot cheaper and convenient. Cars weren't transformational when only a few rich people could afford them. So depending on how successful SpaceX is at "lighting things into orbit cheaper", yes, I think they might actually be doing something interesting.

The responses here are pretty much on the money, but just to expand on my original remark: yes, you're right that just achieving their goals might be transformative. However, that would require someone to come up with a use for the tech that is outside of what's already being achieved. SpaceX's _goals_ are nowhere near the level of tech required to have a sustainable human presence anywhere other than earth, or even put more interesting objects on other planets. And to date we're still talking about costs out of the reach of many nations, never mind companies.

Don't get me wrong, what they're doing is hugely impressive and the nerd in me thinks it's amazing. But making a difference in a way that (to go back up the chain) gets people upset? I don't think SpaceX has got close to that.

Elon said (at the MIT lecture) that reducing launch costs by 99% was what was needed to colonize Mars with humans, so that's the goal. I have no idea what you think their goal is, but it doesn't appear to be the same.

Okay, I wasn't aware of that, but _he's wrong_. There's a lot of problems required to colonize Mars they're not even working on. The ISS is, but to date no-one's really got any idea what to do about the fact that that people's health deteriorates massively in a few months out of our gravity well.

Getting there is pretty hard too, even if you're in earth orbit.

He didn't present launch costs as the only problem to be solved.

Ah, I get you, but as I say, it kind of feels like he's working on the easiest part of the problem. Not that it's particularly easy by any normal measure.

SpaceX explicit stated purpose is to colonize Mars.

"no evidence of anything game-changing yet"

What about the speed at which they are managing to implement new designs - that seems much better than some of the existing players in that space.

When Clayton Christensen came up with the concept of "disruptive innovation" it originally referred to a specific phenomenon. Normal innovation is when the large firms servicing a market make incremental improvements to their products, when those products already serve the market needs very well but at high cost. A disruptive innovation is when you can service some of the needs of the market with a worse product which is dramatically cheaper. Nowadays, people refer to disruption for anything and everything, but SpaceX could be an example of this classical definition. I say "could be" because I'm not totally sure that SpaceX's service is or was worse than other launch companies in a technical sense.

Anyway, according to the theory when the much cheaper but worse technology gains momentum, it gets better and better, until it's serving the high-end needs even better than the original technology and at a lower cost.

Getting first stages of rockets that completed actual missions both in LEO and GTO to land safely both on ground and on water doesn't count as game-changing?

Landing the first stage is impressive but actually useful only in so far as it allows you to reuse it. SpaceX has yet to show that they can actually reuse the first stage. It will take longer still to show that they can do it reliably.

Let's skip a few steps and assume they've achieved that. That's an important innovation, it changes the economics, will allow SpaceX to drop prices and potentially grow the market substantially.

All of that would be amazing and a huge achievement but it would not push the frontier, it only brings in money that can be used for projects that do that. I would argue that for this reason it's not game-changing, it's incremental progress that enables further innovation that could be game-changing.

To be fair it was an Anti-Obama stances more then an anti-SpaceX stance.

This summons up most issues:

The genetic fallacy (also known as the fallacy of origins or fallacy of virtue[1]) is a fallacy of irrelevance where a conclusion is suggested based solely on someone's or something's history, origin, or source rather than its current meaning or context. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy

> harshly enough to make Elon Musk cry.

Which itself was probably a marketing ploy to try and portray Musk as doing things out of the kindness of his heart.

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) has been a vocal opponent of SpaceX in Congress for quite some time. Example from 2010: http://blog.al.com/breaking/2010/04/spacexs_elon_musk_sen_ri...

Would be this the same Richard Shelby who has Boeing Co. as one of his top 5 contributors.

Boeing of course been one of the partners in ULA a direct SpaceX competitor[0].

[0] https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N000...

What's sad is that they don't even pretend anymore, it's absolutely and completely blatant and rigged.

other defense contractors

Jeff Bezos?

Environmentalists

Why?

Martians

I don’t hate it, but it does actually rank pretty low amongst projects I care about. I just don’t find it that interesting.

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