It takes both engineering and leadership. There's no shortage of talent at NASA, but much of it has been and still is squandered over political machinations almost entirely unrelated to the task at hand. Case study: how the Space Shuttle was crippled by Air Force requirements that turned out to be completely unnecessary in the end.

Totally agree! I have been avoiding Twitter the last few years but was recently going through Elon’s tweets. Something I noticed is that he is often giving credit to the teams at SpaceX and Tesla. There are a number of times where he responds to a tweet and point out how it was the teams at X company, and sometimes calling out people by name for their work. It was also something during his presentation during the Model S Plaid release. He said numerous times how important the teams at Tesla were to its success.

Well, there is a mass grave of failed private space companies that predate SpaceX so Mr. Musk was entering some pretty hazardous territory, business wise. While the engineering work is of course non-trivial, in this case I would not downplay Mr. Musk's role in creating a company that put payload to orbit before becoming bankrupt.

Compare Musk taking questions with one of the engineers. They answer it; he sells a vision.

Vision is how you get the best out of people - colleagues, customers, suppliers, investors. Like Steve Jobs, he loves the best part of his engineers more than they do themselves - how can you not respond to that?

Extending the circle of gratitude is certainly a good practice. Don’t forget all the husbands and wives supporting the families of these people either.

When you follow the process, you realize this is an accomplishment of humanity.

Popular history is being written in a way allowing it to be easily consumed. So no, it shouldn't contain a list of thousands of engineers. I'm not arguing that it is good or bad, just stating how it is.

In a way it is a progress. Wars had thousands or even millions of causalities, but history says mostly about generals. No one interested enough in a fate of a private John Smith. Now education came to a point when privates of army of brilliant engineers is not interesting enough, because there are too many of them for a cognitive abilities of a regular consumer of a history.

Maybe some day in a future, we'll come to a history ignoring individuals from an army of Elons, and focusing instead on some superhuman who led them.

eh, whataboutism

as much as it pains me to say it, but those "really really good engineers" are just cogs in the machine, providing services for money; the management running the machine, ultimately decide which direction the machines runs.

it's a cynical take, but cogs are replaceable, and would (often with not that major of an adjustment) easily fit other machines, ones that perhaps run in directions we don't like or care about.

(like seriously, tech companies like SpaceX etc burn through engineers like crazy, they literally take this metaphor to heart, iirc most fresh engineers last barely the vesting period, much cheaper to replace them with the fresh batch from the next semester)

Therefore the people running the machine are the ones that matter, since they are responsible for the good and the bad.

Or if you are going to pick an individual it should be Gwynne Shotwell at least.

> I think that there is a severe imbalance in who we're thanking for these achievements.

There you go.

The hard work from brilliant engineers of any giant tech company to make all of this actually work and become a reality is always overlooked and the spotlight is focused on the individual who gives out unrealistic deadlines for the engineers to meet.

If they meet the deadline, no one cares and it's business as usual. If they miss it; angry meetings, delays, reshuffles and layoffs happen.

I remember going to Disney Epcot Center as a kid and it showed how we would be living on the ocean floor by the year 2000. That is what I consider wild.

If you told me as a kid that I will go my whole life without owning a robot and that the main difference is we will replace a rotary phone with a hand held phone I would want my money back.

I guess poor Christa McAuliffe has been totally forgot about also.

Depends on your definition of ‘space mission’, I suppose.

But clearly there is a difference between a suborbital flight with a few minutes of weightlessness and a flight that orbits for three days.

That would be the first private space flight, while this is the first private orbital flight.

Surely the SpaceShipOne flight whose tech the Virgin Galactic’s flight was based on?

Virgin Galactic only reached Mach 3 speed and was nowhere near achieving orbital velocity which requires Mach 23 (28,000 kph) ie order of magnitude more difficult.

They didn't even hit 100km mark, leave alone making an orbit.

How often the VSS Unity fly around the planet?

The difference is, that was a state-operated flight to the ISS which sold surplus seats. Equally, the shuttle could have carried a tourist on some missions.

This flight is purely for paying customers, organized and conducted by a private company. If there were enough paying customers, SpaceX probably would be happy to have such a flight every month. With this mission, space travel has become something you can commercially book, though at a very steep price - that might come down with the Starship.

The Soyuz is a part of the Russian government driven space project.

In all seriousness, founding a company and designing[0] a car aren't really remarkable achievements. This has been done many times. What's really impressive is moving from a glorified proof-of-concept to manufacturing at a massive scale—a feat rarely achieved by startup automotive companies anywhere in the world.

[0] Especially when "design" really just means an electric drivetrain and bits of custom trim for a Lotus skateboard.

Musk was a founding investor and Chairman of the company. The company was incorporated shortly before that. He also oversaw design of the Roadster. Before Musk's involvement it consisted of a handful of people and some plans to build a prototype adapted from an existing vehicle, the AC Propulsion T Zero. The Roadster project didn't start until after Musk's involvement and he participated in design discussions from day 1.

The first Tesla is a car for rich people only. The reason for Tesla's 700b valuation is the innovation that Tesla has made in producing the model y and model 3 and the current goal of producing the first $25k mass produced electric car.

Apart from being a proof of concept (MVP if you prefer) the original roadster has had little influence on Tesla's success.