Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

I think the point here is, this is the first "private" space mission that wasn't using government/military hardware or staff.

It is a rocket designed by a commercial company, flying people who just made a few calls and then paid to do it.

It is pretty wild when you think about it - not so long ago (10 years maybe?) this sort of thing would have been unthinkable.

Say what you will about Elon Musk, but you've got to give the guy credit for SpaceX and Tesla for that matter - I suspect history will look back on SpaceX and Tesla as being quite significant inflection points. It feels like we are at the Model-T or early commercial jet flight stage here but for spaceflight and EVs. What was once only for the super rich and gov/mil is now becoming available to more people, with rapid iteration/improvements and lower prices. More of it please!

View on HN

When we're drooling over these accomplishments, we should direct more of our praise to the thousands of really, really good engineers who did the work, built on the accumulated experience of millions, over decades. People seem to be very eager to ascribe success to heroic individuals, and while leadership is certainly something remarkable, I think that there is a severe imbalance in who we're thanking for these achievements.

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.

This is a pretty new development. The cynic in me thinks he's finally listened to some PR people on how to get people to like him. It sort of coincided with the SNL appearance, too.

> This is a pretty new development.

No it's not at all. It's something he's done since the very beginning. You can go back to the 2000s with the first few public interviews he's given since starting Tesla and SpaceX after accomplishments (first few years of both had no accomplishments to redirect praise) and he's constantly redirecting to the team. It's always driven me nuts how many people misquote him and consistently ignore all these redirections of praise.

Sorry, but why does one go through someone elses tweets? Twitter is focused on current events - and they do not age well. So why read up on the past utterances of anyone? This seems.. strange.. sorry, if that offends.

Absolutely no offence at all! I tend to avoid Reddit these days and wanted to catch up on some SpaceX stuff. Avoiding Reddit means my main source of SpaceX news, a mix of r/SpaceX and r/SpaceXLounge, was something I was avoiding. Going back through Elon’s tweets seemed a decent way to catch up in a general sense. He seems to really like tweeting about SpaceX.

I learned through that attempt at going back through his tweets that, as you pointed out, Twitter is really not built for that. I guess I hadn’t really put much thought it in at the time, was just on my phone, curious about SpaceX, and thought it might be an OK way to get some updates.

Hopefully that makes at least a bit of sense…

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.

We'll see. I feel like the key differences this time are reusable boosters (order of magnitude supply cost reduction) + Starlink (order of magnitude demand absorber).

It's as though some smart people said "Hmm, what if we realize the ability to launch payload into space more cheaply than anyone else? What's the most durable moat we could build with that advantage?"

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.

In fact there is quite a bit of research on 'John Smith' just as people are interested in the engineers at SpaceX (multiple books, podcasts, talks and so on).

What is bothersome is that some people that do not like Musk have come out of the woodwork with the 'but he is not responsible' argument. Its is such a tiered line of argument by now.

Everybody knows a company is not one person but equally everybody knows that Musk is most responsible for SpaceX by literally any definition. I hope at some point we can evolve past this endlessly repeating line of argument.

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.

Surely it should be the person who founded the company, put his money into it and whose vision drives it?

> 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.

> It is pretty wild when you think about it - not so long ago (10 years maybe?) this sort of thing would have been unthinkable.

10 years ago many people thought it would happen well before 2021. The "first operational Dragon spacecraft was launched in December 2010" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX) and commercial flights to the ISS were right around the corner (cargo first happened May 2012).

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.

If you told my kids not only will they own a robot, their grandmother actually owns one, they wouldn't believe you. Just before they tripped over her roomba.

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

Wasn't that a government flight aboard a government spacecraft that notably didn't make it to space? Not sure how that's related to a civilian flight aboard a civilian spacecraft.

You can still live the dream :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc8hFLyWDOM

I have two robots in my house that sweep & mop the floor.

Wouldn't Virgin Galactic's flight be the first for this then?

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.

Well that's exactly the point. GP didn't state whether a private space mission meant achieving orbit or not.

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.

Serious question: while I understand making the comparison in Mach number to illustrate the difference in speed, is the speed of sound actually well defined near or above the Karman line?

I had no idea either so I asked, apparently it's about 0.85 Mach:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=speed+of+sound+at+100+...

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

Not sure why you've been downvoted, but the world classes space at the Kármán line, 100km above Sea Level. Spaceship One reached this back in 2003, but Virgin Unity didn't.

Blue Origin's New Shepard did reach 100km though, so was a "space trip". It was sub orbital though, so more Freedom 7 than Vostok 1 (Freedom 7 reached a far higher apogee and speed than New Shepard)

SpaceX has the civilian equivalent of Vostok 1, albeit larger and far more advanced. It's an order of magnitude more impressive.

How often the VSS Unity fly around the planet?

It was a thing 10-20 years ago already. Civilians paid for a trip (on the Soyuz iirc) and got it. It was just very expensive.

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.

While Elon Musk deserves credit for SpaceX, I fail to see what credit he deserves for Tesla. The founders of Tesla and the designers of the first car should absolutely get credit, but Musk is neither. He delayed the release of their first car to get rid of the founder, in fact.

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.

Running a mile in less than four minutes has also been done many times. But it's still extremely remarkable to me.

That’s fair. Can I suggest that “aren't really remarkable achievements” be replaced with: ”are remarkable but increasingly commonplace achievements”

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.

> first $25k mass produced electric car

That ship has sailed a few years ago: Volkswagen e-Up, Seat Mii, Renault Twingo, several models from BYD, Dacia Spring, Smart EQ, Fiat 500e, and even Renault Zoe or MG ZS in some markets. All under 25k€, including value added tax

Indeed. I was recently considering getting an ev and it's amazing how much choice you have in the "budget" segment. Dacia Spring is 17k€ (VAT included) and it offers 250km of range. Granted, it's equipped only with an airco and a basic infotainment, but still.

The only way Tesla can make a dent in this market is by offering autopilot and much greater range at 20k or so. Or by making a bloody fast car for young people (which will cannibalize their own sales probably).

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

Disagree.

During those times, that car is the only thing that made combustion engine people even note Tesla — because of its blinding performance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com