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Comment by dudus | Hacker News Reader

Watching live the announcement and presentation by Elon on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1YxNYiyALg

Where the hell did they get this audience from? Is this hosted on a frat house with some academic invites?

There's a dude jokingly saying that burning man felt like mars with a lot of shit and no water, there's a guy plugging his comic book, there's a guy making a joke on how we should send Michael Cera to Mars, a girl complaining about Space X not hiring people from other countries, a girl asking to go on stage and give him a kiss, a guy that identified himself as a local idiot that I'm pretty sure is completely drunk, ....

There are some good questions too, but I just can't understand it.

Elon just went on stage and delivered a plan so ambitious you couldn't even imagine. I have thousands of questions, and astonished these people couldn't think of anything else.

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I actually think this underscores the importance of doing what he is doing. If he were delivering some address about optimizing mobile websites for mobile, you wouldn't have had those questions. That market is incredibly saturated, with lots of expertise, a well-defined pecking order of companies and celebrities, and filling a packed house just with very competent and technical people would be a breeze.

But how many people do you know ACTUALLY working in Aerospace tech? For better or worse, that constituency is what today probably makes up a good chunk of people caring about this space, which just goes to show how little it is compared to what it probably SHOULD be.

I had some of the same reaction when I went to a lecture at NYU Law on interplanetary legal issues. There was the same mix of people with genuinely interesting and thoughtful questions, and people who I'm pretty sure did not know what Apollo was.

This kind of outreach is one of the many things to admire about Elon's work. Yes, he's kinda dorky and often touts timelines that are woefully inaccurate, but boy, does he get people fired up!

Just a pretty clear example: Yes, the audience there had some pretty awful questions, but think about the debate that the SpaceX telecast alone helped spur on HN!!! Yes, a lot of that audience was pretty unhelpful, but I think that especially by doing things like this, Elon is helping the proportion of those people diminish significantly.

Excellent point! If more people would get interested in this field - and this mission/vission, we should be able to endure a little (a lot actually) cringe-worthy questions. That burning man guy though...

> But how many people do you know ACTUALLY working in Aerospace tech?

A lot.

This is pretty standard work for many schools which offer a mix of Computer Science and Electronics. Alumni finish their degree and go into Aerospace.

If you ignore the Silicon Valley area which is dominated by trendy web startups, there is a lot of work in old school aircraft/aerospace/military/defence companies and contracts.

I could argue that there are actually more [decent and stable] jobs in Aerospace than in web startups.

Yeah, that aspect was cringeworthy.

Lesson learned: if you're running a big event with Q&A, always always either restrict it to qualified people or vet the questions before they're asked.

Don't allow a general audience to just form a line in front of a microphone.

If you're an organizer hosting Elon Musk, the heads of the major national space agencies, and the leadership of all major aerospace companies, you don't want to give some assclown 60 seconds of microphone time to ask whether there will be enough Portapotties on Mars.

Thought experiment: I'm sure that this video will get over 1m views on Youtube. 1m * 60s = about two years of people's time

I agree man, but "assclown" is unnecessarily rude.

I agree, if this turns out to be a historic announcement, this Q&A will definitely not make humanity look very intelligent to future viewers.

I guess the reason for inviting non-technical press (and being so patient with their silly questions) is to get access to a non-technical audience. Like he said, part of the challenge is to get more people to want to go to Mars (maybe not personally, but as a species), so appealing to people of all sorts, not just people to who read science & engineering reporting, would contribute to that. My best guess, but still, wow, at those questions.

The guy who identified himself as the "local idiot" was Zach Anner, who has cerebral palsy. He definitely wasn't drunk, palsy makes him sound like that.

Not your fault, they didn't show him on the stream.

Was going to add this. Such an awesome guy and his question was valid albeit goofy.

Where the hell did they get this audience from? Is this hosted on a frat house with some academic invites?

The announcement was held at the "International Astronautical Congress". "The IAC is attended by the agency heads and senior executives of the world's space agencies." [1]

[0] http://www.iac2016.org/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Astronautical_Co...

Yes, but to be fair a lot of people came to the confrence, only to see this speech.

Source: Me, I was there.

Aldo?

I hate to say it but this is what SpaceX fandom often looks like. I don't think this invalidates Musk's approach, but even on these forums the SpaceX hype is unbelievable and the worst of the worst are usually low information fanboys who aren't really serious about space exploration or space science but like to jump on a bandwagon, as this video illustrates. I also imagine SpaceX marketing wants to surround Musk with young people to make him seem hip enough to constantly go viral in the largely millennial dominated social networks. It'll be millennials riding these rockets, not baby boomers or even gen-x'ers, who be in their 50's by then. Space exploration is a young person's game and SpaceX knows it. The party boy and academically mediocre fratboy won't get a cush job at Goldman Sachs, he'll be the guy mining rocks on Mars. Winning over this demographic is probably seen as important. The first group of colonists will not have cushy lives.

Thankfully, as SpaceX matures and become mainstream, the weirdo element gets diluted. The same way the early web was little more than tribute pages to baby boomer rockstars and endless pages and commentary about the illuminati and the new world order.

He's doing a great job of only looking a little bit uncomfortable with the questions.

Seriously this Q&A is incredibly odd.

> that burning man felt like mars with a lot of shit and no water

It was one of the dumbest things I've heard in a while. Do these people not realise that these comments will go down in history. Also the "like, I was, like, thinking, like" valley girl talk was very odd (I'm from the UK) to hear as I didn't think people, like, talked like that in real life.

I've heard plenty of teenagers with strong american accent talk like that in Europe. It hurts your ears, amplifies the insecurity feeling radiating from them tremendously and is overall appalling to experience... and I'm like, you know, , quite a tolerant person

I don't think that person's first language is American-English, which might be why her word choices don't sound like normal American-English.

Yes, I was extremely irritated by the questions.

I was actually there in the audience. Trust me, all the experts in the room, from all over the aerospace industry, were very irritated too. Many folks walked out of the room when people started asking silly questions.

I cringed on his behalf, it feels like he's preaching to ants.

Don't forget the electric bus entrepreneur trying to get a meet with Musk. Unreal.

It's super weird, also that refueling question:

People have to wait weeks in space to just get refueled?

Why not send 4-5 tankers (supposedly reusable) up first and then refuel almost instantly? That thing seems really low scale/budget.

The goal is to maximize re-use in order to minimize cost, for a tanker to fuel a tanker in orbit you'd need two tankers. So 1 booster + 1 transporter + 1 tanker, vs. 1 booster + 1 transporter + 2 tankers. If the trip takes 100 days, adding 3 weeks is 20% longer, and you might get it 20% cheaper by saving one spacecraft ... I can see it going either way.

Why not just save a bunch of time and use new boosters? Then reuse those boosters for other missions? Reusing rockets is great for saving money, but that doesn't mean you need to reuse the same rocket for this one mission; if you have a business going with, say, 30 missions over the next year, you're probably going to need a lot more than one booster in stock anyway. Or, instead of new boosters, use a bunch of reused boosters for the Mars mission, letting other commercial customer who insist on brand-new boosters help subsidize your Mars mission.

With only one tanker, you can launch the tanker first and then launch the transporter, so it isn't any faster than launching a tanker and transporter simultaneously.

To go any faster you'd need more tankers as well. I don't forsee the tanker having commercial value short-term, so this would still increase the cost. With two tankers though, you can just have a full tanker waiting in orbit which is the fastest possibility, so there is no need of extra boosters in that case.

I agree with the premise of multiple boosters though. I wonder if a spacecraft could be made that could do both commercial earth orbit satellite missions, and serve as a tanker. This could finance a larger number of tankers. I think you'd need a 3rd stage on top of the tanker in this case to get the satellite in position. [EDIT: I mean either carry the extra fuel, or carry a 3rd stage + satellite, not both at the same time.]

I personally think it makes sense for SpaceX to offer to take over Tiangong I, the Chinese space station that's going to be deorbited soon. It's older and not suitable for safe habitation anymore. If SpaceX could use their launch capacity to bring up fuel tanks and to boost the orbit, it could do well as an orbiting fueling station.

Just launch tankers and fill up tanks on Tiangong and then the space craft with passengers would just have one trip to the space station to fuel up and then go to Mars.

China is going to throw away the station anyway, so might as well give it (or lease it) to SpaceX for a good price in exchange for at-cost refueling for their own ambitions.

What would they use it for?

If you're going to Mars, your vessel has a reasonable crew habitat, so you don't need Tiangong I for that.

Tiangong I is more payload than spaceship. Its tanks can only hold about 1000kg of propellant. Mr. Musk's proposed transfer stage has a propellant budget that's nearly 2,000,000kg.

Having to maintain compatibility with it may be hard (comms, docking, etc). There might be some hardware you could loot off it, but it's not worth flying a mission just for that, and launch windows mean visiting on a trip somewhere else would be prohibitively expensive.

I'd guess that maybe they have a limited supply of tankers and if they're only sending ships to Mars during a narrow window of time (due to planetary orbits), then it's helpful not to have a bunch of tankers sitting idle when they could be busy making trips back and forth from Earth to Leo.

There might be practical considerations, too, like if someone is on the ship for a couple days and then realizes that spending months on a ship or living on Mars is just not for them, they can get transferred to the next convenient ferry back to the surface.

We're probably overthinking this, though; what order the passengers, fuel, and cargo load is a pretty minor detail that could easily be revised when the plan is closer to completion.

I have an electric bus in the parking lot.........

Let's hope some of the people from the Q&A session will be banned from getting a ticket to Mars, or soon we'll make humans a specie of multiplanetary idiots.

I started cringing and stopped watching as soon as the guy started talking about himself at burning man, like Elon Musk gives a shit.

Honestly? Get over it. This sort of attitude smacks of elitism. You probably would have had a bunch of more technically interesting questions to ask.

However, Musk knows that in order for his vision to succeed, he needs support and engagement from more than just rocket scientists. He needs the engagement of the kind of people who ask these sorts of questions. He needs the interest of people who see something (of self interest) to gain from being associated with this project.

I'm really glad that Musk did a good job of taking some of the lower brow questions and turning them into informative and interesting answers.

Although to be fair Elon also talked about the infinite improbability drive and hhgttg

Musk has a, let's say, assorted fan base. Lots of, let's say, unusual personalities tend to come to his shindigs.

Thank you, yes - utterly! And, dare I say it, half of them sounded stoned too (and I'm a smoker)

He says mid-way through he'd gloss over detail and leave technical questions until the end, and what did we get..?

I feel so bad for the guy in that regard.

Let's hope the seed is planted - that's all that Musk has fundamentally wanted anyway.

Came here to say the same thing, I was really hoping for some better questions like the ones in the "How to build the future" [1] interview...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnBQmEqBCY0

> Where the hell did they get this audience from?

Same place that made a reality show from the election of one of the most powerful political positions on the planet.

The 21st century.

It's comedy night at the time traveller's agency.

Where were they that his talk was so unimportant that they cut him off? :O

Elon starts talking 22:05

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought that... That was ridiculous.

It actually made me realize that I may not want to go with others if the average person is like that.

I bet/hope that next time he has his staff vet the questioners. Those publicity stunts wasted valuable time.

Bike shedding.

You're so right. I had to stop watching after they started the Q&A. That was impossible to watch without self-harming.

Well, this is coming from a guy who apparently thinks the height of subversive humor is naming cars to spell SEX and sending people into fits of giggles that it's called the BFR. A frat house environment does not seem all that out of place in this context.

Isn't that just a part of having a personality? In the planning stages you give something a silly name and it kinda sticks, especially when it's the big boss who came up with the name.

Kinda like the "heart of gold" -- it tickles Elon.

There's nothing wrong with any of that, but you can't complain if your audience follows your lead. Not that Musk was complaining (to the best of my knowledge) but others on his behalf.

If I chair a board meeting wearing a clown nose, I can't complain when the members pull out squirt guns.

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