Considering the long jump record is 30ft, I'd say he technically failed his lofty goal, but was still more successful at jumping than anyone else.

I think that's the point the OP above is trying to get at.

and if your leap is 1 foot instead?

"It's like if you can see the robot move, it's too slow. We should be caring about air friction like things moving so fast. You should need a strobe light to see it"

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4122890-tesla-approaches-te...

He wasn't saying that air resistance is currently a problem. The current problem is that the robots don't move fast enough for air resistance to be a problem. He's basically pushing the question 'Going faster is obviously good. What happens if we go really really fast?'

I think you've got this totally back-to-front.

Tesla makes cars. We've known how to make cars for a while now - even electric cars. What was critical for Tesla was the vision: to see that we were approaching a tipping point where battery technology and cost would make a fully- (and only-) electric car feasible, and the strength of mind and purpose to ignore and/or out-think peoples' legacy objections and misgivings - e.g. with the Supercharger network. There are some Musk-ian details that are advances, such as the single integrated computer system, but that's a relatively small part of the whole.

In contrast, yes, SpaceX (just!) makes rockets, and yes, we've known how to make rockets for a long time. But they have done some things that the rest of the rocket industry haven't even got close to. Firstly, they've revolutionised the process and cost of producing a rocket in this class, by insourcing so much of it, and rethinking the necessary components and technology. Secondly, they've taken the concept of re-use and made it orders of magnitude cheaper (versus, what, the Shuttle?) than before, to the extent that it has/will completely turn the industry on its head. And the techniques and technology they've pioneered to facilitate this --not least the ability to land a 70m rocket upright on a robot barge floating out at sea-- are genuinely, truly revolutionary.

You are totally wrong about SpaceX. SpaceX is totally revolutionary and they have already achieved a huge amount of remarkable stuff that most people did not think was possible.

Lots of stuff has been test or tried before, but bringing things from idea to production ready with the efficiency required and cheap production is fantastically impressive.

You can claim 'it is not basic research' or whatever, but the reality is that they are pushing the envelop on so many topics at the same time that they are leafing all competition in the dust.

To be clear, the DC-X was not capable of reaching orbital velocity.

"The idea existed for awhile"

Yep, SpaceX has barely innovated at all. Their contributions to space flight are not really of note.

In the sense that both were effectively rebuilt from almost-but-not-quite-scratch for each launch, yes.

Yes, because it is incredibly hard to bring reusable rockets from concept to full execution.

The idea has been arouns for a long time and there have ben dozens of attempts of course, just as flying cars, autonomous cars, real A.I, space elevators.

Concept an execution are vastly different animals, it is at least 1000 times more difficult to achieve resuable rockets than to have the idea and at least 100 times more difficult than to try it.

It really isn't a working program if it's never going to have enough payload capacity to lift its own fuel to orbit. It's a shiny prototype of computer controlled autonomous stabilized flight, like SpaceX Grasshopper. But that's about it.

To answer your deleted question, there would be no point in listing their achievements for you because you're obviously determined to ignore them, and having them listed for you won't change that.