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Comment by a-nikolaev | Hacker News Reader

Dreaming is fine, but Musk has a track record of not delivering on his over-optimistic promises. And a dream is not enough to overpower gravity and the laws of thermodynamics. There are very hard physical limits on how efficient a rocket can be, even in the most optimistic scenarios.

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Last I saw, the roads are full of Teslas and there have been 5 crewed launches to orbit on reflown Falcon boosters.

Without Tesla, the electric car market would probably be farther behind, and without SpaceX we'd definitely still be flying astronauts on Soyuz. These achievements seems routine now, but it's important to take stock of their significance.

So we were already flowing astrounauts in with proven technology. What new did SpaceX do in that field?

"We were already doing X with proven technology" is not really a good argument. In the United States, people have had video displays in their homes since the 1950's. Are we going to ask what new has been done in that field since then? Also, sometimes you have to rebuild technological capabilities on a new foundation in order to move things forward. Yes, humans have been able to send humans into space since the 1960's (though not beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972). SpaceX only recently caught up with that capability. They still haven't sent anyone beyond low Earth orbit. But they're catching up, and using a foundation of technology that will allow us to wildly surpass what was possible with the technology of the 1960's.

Cryogenic in-orbit refueling is not breaking any physics laws and allows to reset the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation from orbit, so you can gain 2 orders of magnitude on payload weight. The hardest part would be logistics management (10 tanker launches for refueling a Starship)

Musk has a track record of over-promising and under-delivering both on time and product, but deliver he does. And the over-promise is usually so bonkers ridiculous, that when you scale it back it's only somewhat ridiculous and a lot more than the people who were predicting complete failure.

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