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Comment by bilbo0s | Hacker News Reader

The world with him, is a whole lot like the world without him though.

I mean, I did the thought experiment, and I honestly don't see many things that would be different?

Are you arguing that without Musk, we wouldn't have commercial space companies, or electric cars? If so, I find that a bit difficult to believe.

The part of your comment about no one being a hero is correct. None of us are any better than anyone else, that's for sure. (It's the main reason I try never to point fingers in life actually.) But the idea that we would be worse off without Musk is just a bridge too far.

Even a world absent Steve Jobs, would have created PCs and smart phones. And, with respect to impact, Musk is no Steve Jobs.

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I, living in Germany and having worked with and for our car companies, am completely convinced that without him we wouldn't have the electric shift we're seeing right now. We'd have another two decades of half hearted attempts at all kinds of technologies, especially bio fuels but no real progress. Tesla changed the game and I can only imagine it's the same with SpaceX.

Thank God for that. I don't mean anything bad about Germany when I say that. It's just that I don't think people realize how important it is to have good incentives. Getting rich on the basis of successfully electrifying the world is a very good incentive to have. Legacy automakers have to fight their own incentives. As a consequence, they can't quite manage to make the full turn. Regulation has helped curb this a little, but Elon Musk founded the company without the corrupted incentives. Their market capitalization in the electrical energy sector is a direct consequence of this. Anyone who knows about climate science ought to be happy with his accomplishments.

There is a causal link between Elon Musk putting all his money into SpaceX and Tesla and their successes. This is true from the obvious way (they were literally close to death with his last infusion), but its a truth that is more than superficial.

And at least 15 Years of "clean diesel" marketing.

Tesla completely changed the public perception of electric cars, from slow eco-friendly compacts to high-performance sports cars. Without Tesla I doubt that Mercedes would be spending $12 billion on electric cars, or Porsche would be releasing an electric car next year with a 0-60 time of 3.5 seconds and a nationwide fast charging network in the U.S. Tesla proved that it's possible and that there's demand for it.

SpaceX significantly lowered launch costs even before achieving reusability, and with reusability is changing the game completely. However, Jeff Bezos isn't that far behind with Blue Origin, and probably wasn't inspired by SpaceX; he started a long time ago and was a space nut from an early age. Still, it's better to have two great companies with cheap reusable rockets, rather than just one, and the two companies have somewhat different long-term goals.

Well, Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin is so far behind that they haven't launched anything to the Low Earth Orbit yet, and as far as I know they don't have plans to launch to LEO for the next few years. So wrg to reusable launch vehicles, so far SpaceX is the only game in town. OTOH, Jeff Bezos has more money and can speed things up if he wants.

Sure, I'm just saying that without Musk we'd still get reusable launch, just a few years later. Blue Origin is definitely behind but they've been focusing on advanced engines, and just licensed one to ULA, which is flying it in 2020. And of course BO is planning to fly suborbital passengers next year. Suborbital is way easier the LEO, but flying passengers at all is something SpaceX hasn't gotten to yet.

I'm a huge SpaceX fan and until recently I kinda scoffed at Blue Origin, but after seeing more about it I was more impressed. (On the other hand, the New Glenn is only first-stage reusable, so they might need to get that flying well before the BFR is ready.)

SpaceX is the only serious private company. And without government launches they would have a hard time as well. In the de-facto public sector you have the Russians, Ariane, the Chinese, the Indians... It's not that there wouldn't be anything in space without SpaceX. The thing I love about SpaceX is how they showed what can be done without the over abundance of bureaucracy you see elsewhere. Not that programs like Ariane would have learned the smallest bit from it.

What's really different about SpaceX is the cost of launch. Governments and their contractors are happy to launch your stuff into space for thousands of dollars per pound, but nobody was putting significant work into reusable rockets. Just a reusable first stage drops the cost by about 80%, and the BFR is supposed to take the cost down to about $50/lb once it's flying at high volume. That completely changes what we're able to do in space.

Refcently I stumbled over an article regarding SpaceX cost structure raising the theory that commercial launches are subsidized by government launches. Also that reusing stages is not such a relevant cost driver. I simply don't know enough about rocket technology and costs to actually judge the validity of these points, but they seemd plausible. As this point is coming up regularly I really have to take a deper look SpaceX costs and launch costs in general.

There's a reason we don't throw away a 747 after one flight.

Fuel is only a couple percent of the cost of a rocket launch. Rockets are expensive, and on the Falcon 9 the first stage is 80% of the cost of the rocket.

In the early days of SpaceX I saw claims that expendables were more economical because you could build them cheaper, but then SpaceX went and build reusable rockets that are also cheap; their rockets cost less than competitors even without reuse.

They're getting government business because they charge the government less than their competitors charge. The subsidy argument doesn't make sense unless it's only the commercial launches that are cheap.

There are a lot of vested interests in this industry that are strongly incentivized to say reusable rockets are no big deal. I think they'll continue to say that until the BFR flies and SpaceX drops their rates to levels far below what disposables could ever achieve.

Well, one point made in the article I mentioned above was that thermal stress limits the life time of a reusable rocket. Plus the lost payload as you need fuel to land the rocket again. Also, and at least that part I can confirm, a missile is tube is not a lot more than a aluminium tube. So, there is my home work for the weekend: rocket science and LEO launch economics!

There's also the rocket engine, which is a lot more than a tube. Disposables throw that away too. You can just look at the cost of the rocket to see how much expensive stuff is getting thrown away.

SpaceX does still use the Falcon 9 as a disposable for extra-heavy payloads. That doesn't mean you have to throw your rocket away for all payloads, and the capacity difference isn't dramatic. And there won't be that many payloads too big for the BFR in reusable mode.

It's true that the rocket wears out eventually. SpaceX is aiming for about ten reuses initially, thus lowering hardware costs by 90%. They hope to do much better than that later.

We agree on the hardware cost side. The missing step now is to compare these saved hardware costs against the lost payload and the revenue value of that payload. Averages will be fine I think.

Just looking at the hardware side without opportunity cost aonewhat misses the point. A really thorough cost analysis would need to factor in the impact on reliability, the risk of failed launches due to reused rocket stages. I assume these numbers are impossible to come by.

One other data point would be, if that's the case, how much premium SpaceX is asking for the use of virgin rockets as compared to reused ones. This would allow a rough estimation of the increase risk for failure and other costs. Again, I don't expect these numbers to be available.

Jeff Bezos has more money and can speed things up if he wants.

The first part is obviously true. The latter, I’m not so sure —- Blue’s budget has increased dramatically over the past few years, but New Glenn flights remain rare, and New Shepard remains well in the future.

It’s interesting to ponder where Blue would have gone if SpaceX (which was founded later) hadn’t happened. I think there’s a very real chance they’d still be thrashing, talking up bits and pieces of technology but without any complete vehicles (even of New Glenn size).

As far as I remember he was laughed at for just thinking to build reusable rockets or to sell electric cars. Either I or you have very serious memory problems. But I’m pretty confident that I can link several sources to corroborate my recalling of the events, can you do the same? If you can prove that the people that were laughing at him would have brought the electric car mainstream and would have invented reusable rockets without him than you are right. I’m eagerly waiting for your ironclad proof.

It's hard to not admire somebody who get all those laughs and delivered in very short time span. Not only that, we don't only have reusable rockets, we have freakin' vertical landing! Thought to be unrealistic by proper NASA engineers. For a very long time people didn't have that WOW experience for space technologies, and this one delivered.

Mankind needs people like him - with all ecological doom and gloom slowly unfolding, next mandatory frontier is clearly space. Also, disrupting entrenched monopolies/oligopolies that got just too comfortable milking people of their money for very minor improvements of their products.

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