SpaceX is now building a Raptor engine a day, NASA says
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I wish my businesses "failed" like Tesla and SpaceX!
buildings teams is part of my day job, Musk's ability to get the right people in the right spot at the right time and motivated is his biggest gift IMO. If you're good at that then there's really nothing you can't actually do.
Elon contributed the "what if we landed the rocket?" moonshot ambition. Definitely need both.
Musk's contributions can pretty much be summed up by "already had a lot of money" and "hired smart people". Contrast w/ the founding of Microsoft or Apple, in which the founders were the actual people creating their first products from scratch.
Musk is certainly a big-idea person, but I think he is a prime example of somebody who was in the right place to get lucky at the top of the dotcom boom, which in turn rested on him being from an already wealthy family. His foray into Twitter, "how to solve the Ukraine-Russia war", and the Thai cave rescue suggest he's not quite the genius his fans make him out to be.
He almost went bankrupt getting their first small rocket to space. He wasn't exactly poor at the time thanks to paypal, but he didn't have anything close to unlimited funds. He is a billionaire now because he succeeded, not the other way around.
> [..] which the founders were the actual people creating their first products from scratch.
If your claim is that Elon was not involved in creating the products, this is misinformed. https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden... is the link I have handy.
> which in turn rested on him being from an already wealthy family.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1005593651219582977, "I arrived in North America at 17 w $2000, a backpack & a suitcase full of books. Paid my own way thru college. Dropped out of Stanford Eng/Phys grad school w $110k in college debt."
> Thai cave rescue
The "pedo"-thing was stupid and deserve criticism, but he was actually asked to continue working on the submarine: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1016684366083190785
Of course. But he was the first person to make it work, which was very non-trivial. NASA failed at it for 60 years.
From sratch? I don't think so. DOS was bought from Tim Patterson. Microsoft BASIC ran on a computer created by others. Microsoft didn't invent BASIC. Neither did Apple. Apple didn't invent the 6502. The Apple 1 was built from off-the-shelf parts available to anyone.
Being a genius does not require being a success at everything. In fact, most successful people fail quite a lot. The difference between successful people and unsuccessful ones is the successful ones:
1. are not dissuaded by failure
2. learn from their mistakes and failures
3. try again and again
The unsuccessful ones "learn" from their failure by not trying again. Or they quit before they start.
Of course all the early people, Shotwell, Mueller, Königsmann, Bazza were all really important. Shotwell by now being the the most important.
But there really is no question that Musk deserves by far the most credit.
>And, uh, I’ve seen that hurt us before, I’ve seen that fail, but I’ve also seen— where nobody thought it would work— it was the right decision. It was the harder way to do it, but in the end, it was the right thing. One of the things that we did with the Merlin 1D was; he kept complaining— I talked earlier about how expensive the engine was. [inaudible] [I said,] “[the] only way is to get rid of all these valves. Because that’s what’s really driving the complexity and cost.” And how can you do that? And I said, “Well, on smaller engines, we’d go face-shutoff, but nobody’s done it on a really large engine. It’ll be really difficult.” And he said, “We need to do face-shutoff. Explain how that works?” So I drew it up, did some, you know, sketches, and said “here’s what we’d do,” and he said “That’s what we need to do.” And I advised him against it; I said it’s going to be too hard to do, and it’s not going to save that much. But he made the decision that we were going to do face-shutoff.
>So we went and developed that engine; and it was hard. We blew up a lot of hardware. And we tried probably tried a hundred different combinations to make it work; but we made it work. I still have the original sketch I did; I think it was— what was it, Christmas 2011, when I did that sketch? And it’s changed quite a bit from that original sketch, but it was pretty scary for me, knowing how that hardware worked, but by going face-shutoff, we got rid of the main valves, we got rid of the sequencing computer; basically, you spin the pumps and pressure comes up, the pressure opens the main injector, lets the oxygen go first, and then the fuel comes in. So all you gotta time is the ignitor fluid. So if you have the ignitor fluid going, it’ll light, and it’s not going to hard start. That got rid of the problem we had where you have two valves; the oxygen valve and the fuel valve. The oxygen valve is very cold and very stiff; it doesn’t want to move. And it’s the one you want open first. If you relieve the fuel, it’s what’s called a hard start. In fact, we have an old saying that says, “[inaudible][When you start a rocket engine, a thousand things could happen, and only one of those is good]“, and by having sequencing correctly, you can get rid of about 900 of those bad things, we made these engine very reliable, got rid of a lot of mass, and got rid of a lot of costs. And it was the right thing to do.
>And now we have the lowest-cost, most reliable engines in the world. And it was basically because of that decision, to go to do that. So that’s one of the examples of Elon just really pushing— he always says we need to push to the limits of physics. Like, an example I’ll give is, on the car factory; you know, a car moves through a typical factory, like a Toyota or a Chevy factory; a car is moving at you know, inches per second. It’s like, much less than walking speed. And his thoughts are that the machinery, the robots that are building the car should move as fast as they can. They should be moving so fast you can’t see them. That’s why you can’t have people in there, because they’d get crushed; people move too slow. That’s the way he thinks. “So, what are the physical limits of how fast you can make a car?” He looks at videos of like, coke cans being made, and things like that, where you can’t even see them; it’s just a blur. And, you know, the puck of aluminum, cut it up, deep-draw, fill it with coke, you put the lid on, you put the lid on it; it’s just like going down the assembly line so fast you can’t even see it. And Elon wants to do that with cars.
People often claim SpaceX was just Musk's show rather than a team effort where Mueller and Shotwell at least were just as important and probably more people besides. And he's had his share of bad ideas. But at the same time the sort of restless perfectionism he tries to get people to have in their engineering is a net force for good, similar to what Steve Jobs did with design at Apple.
Any other exec would have pulled the plug. For example, in 2017 Blue Origin blew up an engine and test stand. Bezos freaked out, fired the CEO and brought in an oldspace stooge who has basically killed the company.
It's when things get tough that you find out what leaders are made of. SpaceX and Tesla have gone through some really tough times.
> insufferable megalomaniac
Nah. He's arrogant, to be sure, but nobody would attempt SpaceX or Tesla without being arrogant. It's a feature, not a bug.
> I don't think his goals at twitter are long term profitability or a healthier American society/democracy
Do you really think he spent $44B on Twitter to lose money on purpose?
To the last point: Yes, I think he could. When you have $150,000,000,000, even losing $149,000,000,000 would leave you with $1,000,000,000, which is hundreds and hundreds of times the lifetime net worth of most Americans.
Meaning yes, I can completely imagine someone with his money spending a lot of money to have major influence over how the world communicates. Bloomberg spent a billion dollars of his own money trying to be president and he's still quite rich.
The Clintons made around $100 million for being President. The Clinton Foundation is worth $300m, and is largely used to fund the Clintons. Obama is worth $70 million. Trump initially viewed his run for office as publicity stunt for his businesses. He was obviously surprised that he won.
Being President is very, very lucrative.
> FWIW Tesla literally did exist before he was involved
I know. And without Musk nobody would have ever heard of it.
[1] https://www.clintonfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11...
Shotwell runs certain parts of the business day to day. Elon heads up new projects whereas daily operations goes to Shotwell, which makes sense given her position of Chief Operating Officer. For example, by her own words, she has little involvement in the Starship project, or didn't as of early 2021 when asked about it.
Business is about improving the quality of life of the consumer.
Musk never went directly at that, he always involved himself in industries whose main customer is Government, or that would not exist without Government.
Apple, Microsoft, Google, Walmart, JPM...those are real businesses, which would thrive even if Govt. expense were to plummet at 5% of GDP (actually they'd do much better).
If Govt. expense were to plummet at 5% of GDP all the functional companies which Musk has would go belly up, not to mention the scam ones such as the NeuraLink and Boring.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing. The hybrid contractor/govt model has many upsides. SpaceX deserves a lot of credit for what they've done, but that context is important when gushing about when big gambles pay off. Those risks may never occur in a different paradigm.
Commentators and pundits were fooled by GPS , Sat-TV and Internet and are extrapolating loads of quality of life which would come from space if only could be cheaper to send stuff up there.
The world is increasingly urbanised. Fiber and 5G for telecomms will always be cheaper in an urban setting compared with sat-internet.
Space is already paying for itself.
If SpaceX had failed to do the human launch, the cost would have been on SpaceX. As it is right now on Boeing.
This is not how govt launches work. The payload (which is sometimes worth more than the rocket) is self-insured, meaning SpaceX is not responsible for eating that cost if it's lost. They are paid for the service (i.e., the ride) but have little to no cost regarding the cargo on govt launches.
Whatever method or rocket design the govenrment uses this is always an issue. Just flying on a government provided rocket doesn't change that cargo is at risk of being lost because it is not insured. In this case the risk to the tax payer is always at risk, it has nothing to do with SpaceX as such or the method of rocket procurement.
But the way the contracting model has been changed, the fact is, if SpaceX had not performed on their development and test campaign, they would have been stuck with the cost of most of that. Just as Being likely had to eat 600M+ because of their delays.
So in terms of developing capabilities for the government to use, this was an incredibly low risk and cost effective one.
Yes, but this is somewhat missing the forest for the trees. The larger point is that relatively untested tech is going to be more expensive to insure because there is greater uncertainty. This makes it less economically viable until it proves itself to be reliable. Can a commercial company forego that and take on greater risk? Of course, but they aren't likely to because they are more risk-adverse for a variety of reasons. But because the govt is self-insured, the economic risk considerations related to that becomes a moot point. Meaning, the govt is in a unique position to take on risk to help an upstart like SpaceX. Note that 100% of Falcon Heavy contracts are govt (military/NASA).
>Just as Being likely had to eat 600M+ because of their delays.
But this is a different point. They are being penalized for contractual delays. This has the potential to increase risk because it incentivizes rushed development. We saw this with CST-100. The only reason it came to light is because the mission did not go as planned, and as a result NASA started to trigger additional oversight (which slows down development).
This is part of why the CCP can move faster than NASA. They don't have to build to the same requirements as an in-house NASA build. To an extent, all NASA cares about is the ride. That works well as long as things go as planned. As soon as they don't, NASA will start doing engaging more oversight. This has already happened with SpaceX, too. When some unfavorable things came to light, NASA wanted more govt in-person inspections/audits.
What we are seeing is actually the commercial company are far more willing to risk these things the governments.
Companies like Astra (not that I think they are good) almost celebrates blowing up rockets.
> Note that 100% of Falcon Heavy contracts are govt (military/NASA).
This is true but Falcon Heavy was developed on spec. DoD didn't pay for its development unlike for almost all other rockets the military uses or used historically.
> This has the potential to increase risk because it incentivizes rushed development. We saw this with CST-100. The only reason it came to light is because the mission did not go as planned, and as a result NASA started to trigger additional oversight (which slows down development).
Yes but it rewards those that do development well and punishes those that don't. Of course oversight and verification is still a function government has to provide for the goods they buy.
> This is part of why the CCP can move faster than NASA. They don't have to build to the same requirements as an in-house NASA build.
CCP is learning the same lessens that NASA has. They have constantly rockets blowing up. They will have to also establish internal requirements that they follow.
And honesty, in terms of rocket development there isn't much evidence that China is better or faster from what I can see. We also don't know how much China is spending on these things.
> As soon as they don't, NASA will start doing engaging more oversight. This has already happened with SpaceX, too. When some unfavorable things came to light, NASA wanted more govt in-person inspections/audits.
Sure they will check everything and want to know about potential problems. The intensive structure however is still aliened better. The functions of the different parts are aligned better. NASA can tell contracts to change some process and have done so before but that doesn't imply automatically that these contracts will then drop in efficiency to the point NASA would have been at.
NASA own efforts like Ares 1 were so catastrophic that basically convinced large parts of NASA to not try that again. And NASA had a huge amount of success with the new model.
>What we are seeing is actually the commercial company are far more willing to risk these things the governments.
My personal opinion is that that NASA (less so the military) are risk-adverse in terms of political risk. When there's little political risk, they are quite fine blowing stuff up to learn.
One thing that I've noticed is that commercial companies tend to take an engineering perspective and NASA tends to take a more fundamental science perspective. For example, when SpaceX had COPV issues, they were fine to just change the design and move on without understanding the root failure mechanism. NASA funded their own studies to try and understand what was going on. This is the direction I'd like to see the hybrid model continue.
I do think that contract changes can risk efficiency drops, though. Right now, CCP doesn't have to show a lot of their work. This may mean that their "efficiency" is a product of process gaps, rather than better processes. The CST-100 software validation was a prime example. It was a definite process gap that allowed them to get to launch quicker. If they were lucky and didn't run into issues, NASA would be none the wiser.
Tesla: Climate change political trend
SpaceX: Defense/National Pride political trend
Organic exports, investments and consumption would not be benefiting such companies, the big winners would be the real bona fide and non-political companies I already mentioned: Apple, Microsoft, Exxon, JPM, Google, Amazon, Walmart.
Meaning the stuff that people use daily as opposed to only reading about it in the tech and the financial press as aspirational goals after billions of dollars in subsidies and govt. contracts
If it's not DoD then it's military stuff from allies or Turkey, if it's not that then it's Starlink.
In any event the point still stands. This company only exists in the financial press and the tech press. Regular people aren't using SpaceX nor they ever will considering how the world is increasingly urbanised so sat-tv and sat-internet are dead on arrival matched against fiber and 5G. The only exception is maybe the yacht crowd but they aren't regular people.
Yes, you're plainly wrong. All Starlink customers may point to why.
The point doesn't seem to stand?
Also, at 100+Mbps, this is the first generation of the technology. Is it feasible that they hit 1Gpbs by end of decade? I wouldn't rule out the possibility.
Hell would freeze over before Musk would even dream about making a philantropic service for poor people, because that's what you are describing. The poorest of the poorest in the next 50 years will be the last 10-20% who for whatever reason remains stuck in the badlands as opposed to moving to the urbanized world
Starlink satellites spend a lot of time flying over Africa. And if it's priced at $110/month it will not see a lot of use. So for a very low marginal cost he can provide a very valuable service. Therefore I wouldn't be surprised if somebody talks him into giving it away for the next cause du jour, especially if its structured so he only gives away the service (low marginal cost) and not the terminals (high marginal cost).
DirecTV and Dish Network alone have over 30 million U.S. customers combined. Keep in mind Starlink has been engineered for portability unlike DirecTV and Dish. More than 11 million families own an RV. And 12 million own registered boats. How many own second homes? Starlink takes 2 minutes to setup and 2 minutes to tear down.
Back to residential service though. There are tens of millions of households that are limited by old copper lines that were never filled in or cable extensions that were never dug. Or if the cable does exist, it's still at slower speeds and certainly not gigabit. Relying on mobile isn't a great option as most services today still throttle speeds down to 600 kbps when exceeding 15GB a month (which is nothing these days).
But worldwide, including in all the BRICS countries and the global south that rapidly growing in GDP and global importance is about 2-3 billion people with varying levels of spotty, congested, unreliable internet. These communities are probably lucky if they have 4G in many cases. That market is worth hundreds of billions over the next few decades, even when adjusting for purchasing power. Easily.
And your assumptions about relative competitiveness vs the highest quality residential speeds (which are only largely available to people in dense urban cores) are perhaps one upgrade away from being achieved. They already solved the hardest problem with regards to satellite communication: latency. It will be interesting to see how far they can push the bandwidth at scale over the years.
Microsoft as made gigantic amount of money selling to government. So do large banks. GM and Ford have much larger better organized departments selling to the government. Amazon has huge contracts with DoD as well.
> Microsoft as made gigantic amount of money selling to government
Microsoft , you mean the company almost dissolved by the DOJ? I will retract my statements on Tesla being propped by cronysm when Govt. produces even 1/100th of scrutiny endured by Microsoft. Who am I kidding? It will never happen...for the DOJ to go after a company it needs to have market share of 70% and upwards, whereas despite billions of dollars in subsidies and credits Tesla can't even make it to 1% of yearly global new car sales.
1% in 20 years. Ladies and gentlemen the backbone of the global industrial economy. Not. However that's how the cult leader...ehm I mean the CEO advertises it to the world.
Great dominance in the Financial press, tech press and gossip press though. And surprisingly even on HN and reddit people have fallen for the scam.
> It's a company selling subsidised go-karts to rich people in California and New York due to the out-of-touch worries of neurotic politicians in D.C. , Glasgow, Davos and Paris.
Wow tell us how you really feel, you must feel so superior. Of course its just unsubstantiated nonsense.
So lets go threw some actual facts.
Most vehicles Tesla sells are pretty close to avg new sale car price. So I guess you can call everybody that buys a new rich if you want but Tesla is not really spacial or unique in terms of selling to rich people.
In terms of your 1%, they actually are more then 1%. 78 million are sold globally, Tesla this year will close to 1.5 million cars. Can you do the math? (And you can also do the numbers 12 month rolling if you don't want to include Q4 of this year). But don't let facts stop your rant.
And if you want to look at it in terms of profit, Tesla is way larger fraction of the automotive market then that.
And of course as far as your comment about how the press, the reality is Tesla profits this Quarter were higher then Ford and GM combined, close in profit to Toyota while having much better debt position and selling far fewer cars and models. And of course while still growing at incredible rates. Maybe just maybe that is why the financial press focuses on them more then many other companies.
Go and search some historically comparable companies in terms of revenue and profit growth and tell me how Tesla is doing badly.
> 1% in 20 years. Ladies and gentlemen the backbone of the global industrial economy. Not. However that's how the cult leader...ehm I mean the CEO advertises it to the world.
Have you actually done literally any research on the topic ever? Tesla is one of the faster growing manufacturing companies in history and doing that while also interdicting a product that had not existed to any series degree in the market before.
And Elon never said that Tesla is the 'backbone of global industrial economy' that just seems like something you made up. Please provide a source.
> whereas despite billions of dollars in subsidies and credits
In terms of subsidies Tesla got the same type of tax abatement's literally every large industrial player gets when making large. So if VW, Toyota or whoever had built a Gigafactory in Nevada they could have gotten the same kind of deal.
This is just a reality of the way the system works. It doesn't give Tesla some magical advantage that they can exploit against other companies. Its just how the economy works, you can like it or hate it, but as a reason why Tesla is successful its absurdly terrible argument. And its also not cash they can just spend, its just a reduced expenditure over the next 20 years.
So the idea that because of those subsidies Tesla got some competitive advantage is nonsense.
Another thing people mention is the tax credits program. This is a program that only applied to 250k cars and again was available 10 years after Tesla was funded. Again this provides no competitive advantage to Tesla, ever car company could take advantage of that. And GM and other companies used these credits too. So again to claim that Tesla success can be explained by this mostly falls flat.
The next and favorite thing people bring up is fuel credits. Fuel credits are system to reward companies that do good in terms of following regulations and punishes companies that are bad. This is not money from the government, this is money from car companies that pollute more then they are should. Again, these are the universal rules of the market. This rule was not designed for Tesla or with any intention of promoting Tesla. These are just the laws the car market operates under.
We can have a discussion if fuel credits are the best policy tools for government to use. But fundamentally are you gone disagree with the concept that governments should have fuel standards give intensives to companies to do the right thing? Outside of climate crisis, local pollution alone make this a sensible policy.
These fuel credits did net Tesla a few billion but do yourself a favor and go look threw Tesla financial history, you can exclude fuel credits income from its whole history. Then do some graphs on Tesla financials and their growth and margin curves. Then add the fuel credits, then compare the graphes.
Anybody that claims that Tesla is only successful because of government action is just deluding themselves. Everybody who actually studied the financials of Tesla had figured out by 2014 that while Credits were nice little revenue boost, those that focused on credit were missing the woods because of the trees.
> And surprisingly even on HN and reddit people have fallen for the scam.
The scam of a company making 3+ billion $ a quarter at 15% operating margin. Yeah what a scam you must feel so smart.
Show me somewhere, anywhere, where someone of any relevance says Musk is a "failure".
What people actually say is that he's not the uber-genius, gods-gift-to-humanity that he and his super supporters extoll.
Here's one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33390278
As for gods-gift-to-humanity, there are very, very, very few people who have contributed to humanity like he has.
People aren't pissing on him when he's right, they are pissing on him when he's wildly, wildly wrong, because he can't stay in his lane. Pedo guy submarine cave rescue is a great example of that. Covid will go away by April 2020 was another. Full Self-driving Tesla robotaxi that makes you money while you sleep in 201? is a third...
However that argument alone doesn’t support the posts conclusion: “he's simply a highly privileged technocrat who has quite successfully failed upwards his entire career”
Imagine how suffocating life would be for him if he endeavored to live up to the expectations of his detractors.
He would never start a company without being certain of success.
He’d be super nice to the diver (who told Elon to stick a submarine up his ass).
He’d never speculate about anything or discuss his vision for the future, because imperfect foresight makes people mad!
…and the haters would still hate. Happily for Elon, he seems content to be himself and deal with the silly complaints.
Pulling a publicity stunt while people's lives were literally on a deadline was not helpful, and only served to distract the professionals involved in the rescue.
Throwing a tantrum and calling the diver a paedophile when they declined (on the basis that the submarine would not be able to fit into the caves and thus would be unfit for purpose, assuming it could even be built before the trapped group were killed by the monsoon) was a spectacularly awful move. And that's just one of the many fiascos he's been involved in.
Elon may be a successful businessman but he is also a disaster of a human being and has thoroughly earned any "haters" he may possess.
So was everyone who offered to help the trapped kids presumed to be a self-serving asshole for doing so, or only Elon?
> Throwing a tantrum and calling the diver a paedophile when they declined (on the basis that the submarine would not be able to fit into the caves and thus would be unfit for purpose, assuming it could even be built before the trapped group were killed by the monsoon) was a spectacularly awful move.
But the diver didn't just decline. He declined and told Elon to stick the submarine up his ass on national television. In that context, Elon's reply is childish, sure, but you'll have to explain what makes it "spectacularly awful" and/or a "fiasco".
> Elon may be a successful businessman but he is also a disaster of a human being
Help me to understand the standard by which I can judge whether someone is a "disaster of a human being". Is one bad tweet sufficient? Or one bad tweet and one bad prediction regarding future tech? How many judgmental internet posts would be required to hit the standard? I'm genuinely curious.
From the abrupt change in discourse about Elon in the last couple years, I assume most are judging him by his politics he recently started expressing.
I'm sure the offers of help from experienced cave divers, folk who could help with logistical support, etc. were appreciated. Even the SpaceX engineers and supplies Elon sent were probably appreciated (I could not find anything about them actually being used, although I did not search extensively).
A techbro CEO throwing out half-baked whimsical bullshit ideas for social media attention, not so much. Not to mention personally injecting himself into the situation, touring the rescue site, and otherwise getting in the way of the rescue workers.
>In that context, Elon's reply is childish, sure, but you'll have to explain what makes it "spectacularly awful" and/or a "fiasco".
Falsely accusing someone of being a paedophile is not just childish, if taken seriously it can completely derail a person's life, get them fired from their job, turn them into a social pariah, and even result in them being assaulted or killed by vigilantes. Thankfully no one took Elon seriously.
Even if the diver was impolite when calling Elon out on the submarine thing, it was a completely disproportionate escalation.
>Help me to understand the standard by which I can judge whether someone is a "disaster of a human being".
Making such judgements can be complex. But attempting to socially destroy a person who is literally risking their life [1] to rescue children from certain death because they were mildly rude when rebuking them for being an attention-seeking twit is about as clear a signal as you can get.
[1] and that was not a hypothetical risk, two of the other divers involved died either directly during or later as a result of injuries sustained during the rescue.
Elon/SpaceX's offer to help _was_ in fact appreciated by the lead diver.
Private Joker: I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir.
Disingenuous, bad-faith half-truths are the most you will get out of the anti-Musk crowd.
It is simply too fashionable; and any iota of defense will get you labeled a boot-licking puppet.
It is just raw, distillable jealousy, combined with the new social paradigm of "this man is uber-bad and the single point of all problems" that long-Trump-Derangement-Syndrome has left ingrained into the thoughtless, NPC-eqsue masses.
Elon Musk is no worse than any other billionaire, and by many objective counts, the best yet for humanity.
You will be forgotten, he won't - and that pisses most off at a mammalian level.
Your link brings us to a 3-day old comment which argues SolarCity failed (which, yeah, nobody disagrees there) and that Musk "failed upwards" and is not a "tech deity". This is not claiming Musk is overall a "fraud and failure."
It’s totally legitimate for you to think that Musk is the target of unfair criticism, particularly around the influence he’s had on his businesses’ obvious successes. But you don’t have to build a straw man to make this argument. Virtually nobody would describe Musk as a failure - but they will argue frequently that he’s an arrogant narcissist, or that his success is unjustified. There’s plenty of criticism like that out there—justified and not—and it’s weird to make stuff up to get all “lol u mad bro” about.
Sometimes I think that the fact that he looks so superhuman sort of proves that wealth is not a meritocracy. If it were, Musk would be an average billionaire at best.
Also there's extra incentive to tear down anyone with multiple successes, as they're a constant reminder that success isn't all due to luck.
this is the crux of it.
If he isn't just lucky, than that pushes one's own perils from misfortune to the realm of a lack of self-actualization and agency.
Hard work makes you much more lucky, and that oxymoron is a hard pill for the "unfortunate" masses to swallow.
No one wants to admit to not working hard; they want to push the responsibility to (mis)fortune.
(The space shuttle had to be essentially rebuilt after every mission, the boosters were thrown away, the concept was a dead-end from the start.)
E.g., NASA cannot build a major program with an assembly line mentality. The need to spread their work out across multiple constituencies to ensure continued support. Ever wonder why major NASA centers are in key political states like Florida, California, Texas, and Ohio?
Also, when they lose govt payloads, the govt (i.e. taxpayers) shoulder most of the risk because they are self-insured. That means SpaceX gets to take bigger risks because they don't have to pay for them through the typical privatized mechanisms of risk mitigation like insurance.
>Downvote; go learn.
You might benefit from learning a bit from the HN Guidelines regarding discourse.
Yes, I might :) . Just went with existing practice, not with guidelines. Will try to do better next time :) .
> Except Musk himself has said they were hours away from bankruptcy before NASA's contract had come through after that fourth launch.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. I think you're proving my point - your "Unless you're Musk, who gets the taxpayers to fund his risk. What's the saying? It's socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor?" says that Musk didn't risk his own money developing Falcon-1, and almost lost.
Remember Falcon-5? That was SpaceX approach to relatively slowly conquering the market in case NASA won't give them contracts. But NASA did, and Falcon-5 went to history, and Falcon-9 got full steam ahead.
> Also, when they lose govt payloads, the govt (i.e. taxpayers) shoulder most of the risk because they are self-insured. That means SpaceX gets to take bigger risks because they don't have to pay for them through the typical privatized mechanisms of risk mitigation like insurance.
SpaceX happily serves commercial customers. And commercial customers are happily served by SpaceX. And US government wants its own share of cheap and reliable - comparatively - launches, so SpaceX gets their orders too. Will you say anybody dealing with US government rides on the backs of taxpayers?
Do you understand that you're wrong with your socialism and capitalism?
I have no qualms with the hybrid govt/contractor approach. I've said elsewhere on this thread that I think both sides can benefit from it. But, to a certain extent, I'm saying that limits Musk's claims to great business acumen, at least outside of relying on large govt contracts. To a certain extent, many on this thread have said that constitutes a type of grift. A grift that requires taxpayer money. I'm playing a little loose with the socialism definition, for sure, but that's what I mean in the larger point.
To that point, there would be no SpaceX without govt funding. One of the reasons they now have commercial customers is because the NASA contracts allowed them to get better to a point where private customers saw them as a viable option. If they didn't have that opportunity with NASA, I don't think they'd have private customers. For one, they likely wouldn't have enough early private customers to be economically viable. And two, those early flights would be much more expensive because they were unproven and that uncertainty makes insuring those flights much more expensive if not impossible. To that extent, a viable SpaceX business model is completely predicated on government contracts and not on private sector capitalism. The govt split the CCP contract to try and spread risk across multiple vendors and essentially fund an upstart in the hope that it pays off.
It's paying off so far, so I'm not saying that's all bad. But it does make their model divorced from a purely capitalistic endeavor. I'm not saying Musk had no skin in the game, but I am saying he had almost nil chance of winning that game without taxpayer support. Other people on this thread have pointed out how that distinction matters when comparing to better examples of business leaders.
>Will you say anybody dealing with US government rides on the backs of taxpayers?
I would say if the business model is only viable with government contracts and is particularly viable because it forces taxpayers to shoulder the early risk, yes. If your business only works by being propped up by the govt, it's a bastardized form of socialism. I'm glad SpaceX is able to move away from that, but let's not revise history to ignore those early facts because they don't fit our preferred narrative of Musk being a clever paragon of capitalism.
The simplest way of framing it is saying, "If they required taxpayer money in order to become/remain viable, it's a form of socialist intervention." I would put a lot of other companies in that list, from automotive to finance, so I'm not just picking on SpaceX.
> there would be no SpaceX without govt funding
Strictly speaking, historically things evolved one particular way, and we don't know exactly what would happen if something have changed in the past. Here you state your opinion, and I'd say yes, SpaceX used US govt money, but that doesn't mean they couldn't grow without them. They already had an orbital launch on private money - a significant achievement by itself - and there were plans to grow without NASA, which - in my opinion - were reasonable. So I'm skeptical about their guaranteed death without support from US govt money.
> But it does make their model divorced from a purely capitalistic endeavor.
Maybe you mean some rather theoretical, simple pure market model. In reality US govt supports growing industries - Internet is an example - so this is at least rather traditional.
> I am saying he had almost nil chance of winning that game without taxpayer support
This is an opinion. Here is what I know: there is a community, called alt-space (from a Usenet section), or New Space, which basically talked about what SpaceX was doing about a decade before SpaceX. It was a matter of time who'd get this done successfully first. An example of this New Space approach would be Northrop Grumman Lunal Lander Challenge, where John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace showed a lot of impressive technology, and which was eventually won by Masten Space - all of that with reusable rocket technology, landing under power, years before SpaceX made first stages of Falcon-9 reusable. Because of this I think that Elon's stated approach of developing more modest, but cheaper rockets - like Falcon-5 (while continuing flying Falcon-1) - or partnering with Virgin Galactic on droppable launcher - relying only on private market could actually work.
> but I am saying he had almost nil chance of winning that game without taxpayer support.
Beal Aerospace "folded" a few years before SpaceX; now people have doubt if he did the right thing, given that his technology was perhaps even cheaper than SpaceX. NASA also learned a lesson from Beal closing the doors, and was more careful to the next entrant. The final result, by today, is rather good, by popular opinion, I would say - NASA got a good launch supplier, SpaceX got a good anchor customer, so US govt would likely lose if it didn't support SpaceX, and relying on that support was a good approach. Yet even without that support there is no guarantee SpaceX wouldn't succeed; there are some arguments for that.
> if the business model is only viable with government contracts and is particularly viable because it forces taxpayers to shoulder the early risk, yes.
SpaceX brought significant savings to US govt, so that risk - from US point of view - was rather justified. Remember, US govt can't work with only zero-risk schemes, and in such a complex area as space access it has to tolerate some risk, even with existing providers.
> If your business only works by being propped up by the govt
There is no proof that SpaceX couldn't work without govt help. Also govt help brought taxpayers savings - in exchange for some risk, which is not obviously comparable to existing non-zero risk elsewhere.
> it's a bastardized form of socialism.
I doubt many on HN will agree with you.
> but let's not revise history to ignore those early facts
I want to emphasize - if the history would repeat, those choices made would better be repeated. Even if SpaceX lost, US govt would be better keeping betting on new companies for the launch services, because alternatives are likely worse. In this sense SpaceX is a lucky opportunity for US.
> because they don't fit our preferred narrative of Musk being a clever paragon of capitalism.
For long time rocket startups assumed one of their customers - perhaps biggest, or the only one - would be US govt, because the US govt doesn't historically have that much of a choice. If we'd have many SpaceX-es, then, yes, a new company could worry that they could not be chosen by US govt for contracts, because their competitors are that much better - but even now it's not the case. In this sense, because Musk knew all too well US govt will need his resources he doesn't stop being "a clever paragon of capitalism".
> The simplest way of framing it is saying, "If they required taxpayer money in order to become/remain viable, it's a form of socialist intervention." I would put a lot of other companies in that list, from automotive to finance, so I'm not just picking on SpaceX.
Since this is how things work, I wouldn't even argue. I'd just say that's how things work. If you wish they'd better work differently, you'll have to provide arguments why that different way will actually be better.
>This is an opinion.
>There is no proof that SpaceX couldn't work without govt help.
These are all refuted by Musk's own words. He literally said NASA bailed him out when they were so close to failure he thought he might have a mental breakdown. The irony is that your push against that seems to be your own opinion, that goes against his. I am also aware of the previous work with similar ideas, including others that you didn't mention. Yes, the ideas existed. However, there wasn't the right climate or the right timing to execute it. Hell, govt essentially subsidizing flight goes back to the Wright brothers competing for military contracts. In a sense, that's what changed the pursuit from hobbyists to professionals. I give all the credit to Musk for capitalizing on that when the timing was right. But that is conflating good business timing that secures govt support with being a good capitalist businessman, irrespective of govt support.
As to whether the govt is better off, I agree. I've already said that much in this discussion and elsewhere on the thread. But the same applies to when the govt bailed out GM to save a major manufacturing supply chain, or bailing out the financial sector during the housing crises. This feels very much like a strawman. I'm simply pointing out they benefit from a form of socialized risk; I'm not saying the effects of socialist policies are inherently bad.
So, to your statement about this is just how things work, I generally agree there as well. What I disagree on is when people pretend it's not so in order to justify a fairy tale of capitalistic virtue. I don't think it's wrong for the govt to support businesses like this; if you recall, my original post was simply refuting the framing of the problem as a false dichotomy between NASA and SpaceX while failing to recognize that the differences are actually part of the intent, not the result of some boondoggle.
I do think you may have had a knee-jerk reaction to my initial comment, which is understandable given the amount of Elon hate. Maybe if you re-read it with a critical eye and some emotional distance, you'll interpret it differently. It seems like the only part we really disagree on is the viability of SpaceX without govt support early. Sure, maybe there's a chance they would have still succeeded, but given Musk's own words on the matter, I highly doubt it. And I'm pretty happy they've done well.
We disagree in interpretation of Musk's words - indeed, I never heard him saying that he would certainly close SpaceX if NASA funding wouldn't materialize.
That’s because the fourth launch succeeded, reportedly due to engineers changing a single line of code to fix a problem from the third attempt. The success helped SpaceX land a commercial contract with NASA valued at roughly $1.6 billion, extending the young company a lifeline."[1]
“NASA called and told us we won a $1.5 billion contract,” Musk can be heard saying in the clip. “I couldn't even hold the phone. I just blurted out, 'I love you guys!’" Pelley asks in the clip, "They saved you," Yeah, they did,” Musk is heard saying. He describes that he had “virtually no money, a fourth failure would have been absolutely game over. Done.” [2]
Musk deserves credit for avoiding that 4th failure, but that's not the same as saying the business was viable without govt support. That's where I think you're initial response is off the mark. To your earlier points, though, I think this is where the hybrid model excels. The govt, due to it's size, can take on a disproportionate risk to help nascent companies/technologies. But let's not lose sight of the fact that many of these success stories are predicated on socializing that risk to the taxpayer early on.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/30/elon-musk-warning-not-first-...
[2] https://www.republicworld.com/technology-news/science/nasa-2...
You can't seem to understand that NASA offer is not the same as closing the company without it. While NASA offer was nice, I never heard Musk saying certainly that without that offer - after Falcon-1 flew successfully - SpaceX would close.
Government takes risk just like commercial companies take risk. Nothing unusial here. Taking such risk means that some ventures will fail, but overall it will get better than without taking risk.
>Government takes risk just like commercial companies take risk.
Incorrect. Govt payloads are self-insured. This is essentially saying "We have such deep pockets that it doesn't matter if we lose the payload, it won't hurt us financially." I don't know many private organizations with that risk threshold. This is partly why the early govt contract is so important. It allows SpaceX to get enough experience while being funded by a customer that isn't risk-adverse. This buys them time to improve to a point where commercial payloads can be insured without being cost-prohibitive. Again to my original point, this means the govt shoulders a disproportionate amount of risk.
I guess when the CEO says "Yep, they saved us. Without that contract, we'd be done because we were out of money" and that isn't clear enough, you've transitioned to fanboy-dom. Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a hurdle.
This could be argued about :) as e.g. NASA beat Soviets in the Moon Race by behaving central-planning, while Soviets tried to grow local market competition (Korolyov, Chelomey, Yangel).
But his success isn't all due to skill, either. Someone with the same brain and no seed money from Daddy would have been far less successful.
> "We were very wealthy. We had so much money at times we couldn’t even close our safe,” [said Elon's father] adding that one person would have to hold the money in place with another closing the door. “And then there’d still be all these notes sticking out and we’d sort of pull them out and put them in our pockets.”
> More background: I arrived in North America at 17 w $2000, a backpack & a suitcase full of books. Paid my own way thru college. Dropped out of Stanford Eng/Phys grad school w $110k in college debt.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211064937004589056
> We started Zip2 with ~$2k from me plus my overclocked home-built PC, ~$5k from my bro & ~$8k from Greg Kouri (such a good guy — he is greatly missed).
> My Dad provided 10% of a ~$200k angel funding round much later, but by then risk was reduced & round would’ve happened anyway.
Edit: For example, while he did work on a farm to pay for college that farm was owned by his Mom's cousin. Working for family is generally a significant advantage.
Edit2: Having a wealthy childhood has enduring benefits even if the money doesn't last. For example, it significantly increased his chance of having access to a computer at age 12, which probably had an enduring impact on his coding skills.
I'm not saying that means he didn't work hard and isn't smart. I am saying that it's telling he thinks that kind of thing didn't also contribute.
I don't see why you think that this is what he thinks? It's certainly not what I think. What he is doing is answering persistent claims going too far the other way; that his success is only because of seed money from his father.
Or, as you say seemingly somewhat derogatory, "daddy". Their relationship wasn't always that great as far as I understand it, but I don't know the details.
1. If someone has wealthy family members this tends to benefit them, and they tend not to realize it.
2. Growing up wealthy didn't guarantee Musk's success, but it made it easier than it would have been if he grew up poorer. This happens in ways that are hard for someone like him to realize. For example, he might not realize that if he'd grown up worrying about money there's a significant chance his brain would have noticably changed in a way that made it harder for him to function.
> His success isn't all due to luck, he has genuine skills. ... But his success isn't all due to skill, either.
Remember "Field of Dreams"? "Build it and they will come?" That's typical hollywood bullshit advice. You've got to proactively market something, i.e. make your own luck.
Apparently you don't. Costner's character heard a voice saying, "Build it and he will come", referring to his father. So you took this as personal advice, albeit "bullsh!t" advice. More power to you ...
Or you know - maybe he is that amazing, I doubt it, but Trump did invent the MRNA vaccines all by himself as well, so...
Here he thanks Tom Mueller: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1333544636137283586
Here he thanks some Tesla club members: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211836235762880512
Here he thanks NASA for all the support over the years, "without which this would not have happened": https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1219127317957615617
Here he says that "Gwynne is the best": https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1538400836669296640
That's just a random collection I found with a couple of quick google searches.
If you have actually watched for example the starbase tours with Elon, it's difficult to claim that he isn't "involved": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw
Sidenote, all but a few of his twitter mentions of Shotwell are responses to mentions of her and it seems like he's injecting himself into the discussion.
So there must be some difference between them on this point.
There just doesn't seem to be a correlation between success in some narrow domain like engineering, business, art, or music and being a good human being in general.
I also wonder if there's a causative factor. When someone becomes super successful they tend to get surrounded by people telling them what a genius they are. That can definitely distort someone's self image. Could you stay balanced if millions of people compared you to a comic book superhero for years and loads of people did whatever you said because you had tons of money? Now throw in tons of stress and quite possibly a good helping of loneliness due to the difficulty all this creates with forming real deep relationships with others.
I don't see any particular correlation with being a bad human, either. Look hard enough at anyone and you'll find feet of clay.
Success in their domains greatly outshine the clay.
And Tesla is a famously consumer-hostile company. We don't need more success like that. SpaceX is a much better example, and a lot of that can be attributed to how well he delegated leadership to someone competent.
Now he's waded into one of the most difficult lines of business and we'll find out in the next couple of years whether he's just been lucky and well-funded, or if he really is a business genius.
> Tesla is a famously consumer-hostile company.
It seems to me that being a technology company in addition to being a car company, Tesla's buyers are more likely than other brands' buyers to complain on the internet. And every supposed journalist knows that a Tesla hit piece will garner clicks.
Initially, Consumer Reports seemed to really like Tesla. But much more recently, they have not generally rated Tesla comparable to other cars. They only have one model (the Model 3) that even scored average.
One of their issues is that they like to move fast in their designs. Changing sensors, suppliers, components etc. means it's really hard to nail reliability and quality. As the saying goes...move fast and, well...break things.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/17/cars/tesla-consumer-reports-d...
In any case, by consumer hostile I mean: Tesla will turn features off on your car if it believes you are not entitled to them. Sometimes years later. They may cut your battery range significantly because it presents a fire risk, without ever 1) asking, 2) compensating you, or 2) fixing the battery. They may turn off the radar you bought with your car. They take liberties with the OTA updates that warn me away from wanting to buy another Tesla. Fortunately the competition in the EV space has gotten really good in the last couple years and is accelerating.
The Tesla owners I know are all happy with their Teslas.
> whether he's just been lucky
Being successful once might be luck. Being successful twice looks like business acumen. Being successful 3 times is business genius.
Bill Gates was successful 3 times, so was Steve Jobs.
Being successful in three unrelated industries: paypal, rockets and cars, is very very unusual. The number of successful new car manufacturers from scratch in the last 100 years or so is about zero (Delorean, Tucker, Bricklin, etc.) which makes Tesla all the more impressive.
> Now he's waded into one of the most difficult lines of business
Harder than car manufacturing or making rockets? Twitter is nothing compared to that.
It's a good thing the natural laws of Newtonian physics also covers content moderation. /s
I was happy enough. I won't buy another. There's another data point for you.
But putting aside anecdotes, I'm talking about things we know Tesla has done. Like taking away battery capacity (with no compensation) for existing owners in order to reduce liability risk for the company. Or how about deciding to take away features from individual customers because they've determined that customer should never have had the feature? Something that costs Tesla nothing but is a great big middle finger to their customers.
Anyone who buys a Tesla knowing their record of screwing over their own customers is foolish.
> Harder than car manufacturing or making rockets? Twitter is nothing compared to that.
It's worse. Much worse. With sufficient cash I can go hire an incredible amount of expertise building both cars and rockets. Rocketry in particular is an engineering problem. Twitter is a human nature problem. Good luck with that. And especially Elon, who has questionable social skills to begin with.
Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are pretty good arguments against this.
Take a look at the growing graveyard of failed small launch startups. Sure, rockets are mostly just engineering these days, but it is still very difficult engineering.
SpaceX was the also first to reuse an orbital rocket booster. They have now done so 150 times. It's hard to understate how big of a deal this is, to not throw away your rocket every time you launch it. And they are on the cusp of a fully reusable rocket with Starship.
Elon Musk is an arrogant asshole, at the least. But you are really downplaying the accomplishments of SpaceX.
Those are tiny examples that only applied to a really small number of users. Hardly some grand plans of fraud.
More relevant things would be FSD not being transferable, at least while its in Beta. That is actually user hostile.
How regularly? Examples aside from "pedo guy"? Which I think all, including himself, would agree was a punch down.
I mean, is there any direction besides down that it is possible for Elon to punch?
He was punching up plenty. He has always been combative and would respond 2x to each perceived insult. He sued DoD and NASA. He went after the large car companies. He went after Bezos when Bezos was pretending BlueOrigin is even remotely in the same league as SpaceX.
But at this point, there is not many place to punch but down.
I'm also not a fan of twitter thing and its certainty a part of his character that is not flattering.
Elon recently 'punched up' against Hillary Clinton (only using the word 'punch' because of context here; actually it was a gentle questioning of a propagandistic line she was trying to push). I've also seen him lightly mock Joe Biden.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587894226695884800
It's darned good marketing. Simple and effective.
SpaceX build one engine per day while the competition is building one every 91 days. They're landing and re-using rockets every single week. They're taking humans into space.
Tesla build cars that have won basically every award there is. They're are basically the safest cars on the road. They outsell other EVs enormously.
There is no marketing it any of that, it's simply all facts.
I'd almost be inclined to suspect that Musk says (privately, to his closest confidants) that he's had very few successes and a great many failures.
Now, on the other hand, if one wanted to say that his public persona is often that of a pompous windbag, I'd be hard-pressed to disagree, though I'd hasten to add that (unfortunate as it might be) one almost has to be a pompous windbag in public to get far in business in contemporary culture. We live in the Era of Outrage, after all; "number of people pissed off" might as well be currency.
I was there when Bill Gates would attract similar hate. Jeff Bezos is only lucky that there isn't much of public facing information on Bezos, like Bezos speeches or Bezos is not known to routinely give out success advice on commonly accessible media.
Elon Musk is a highly successful immigrant entrepreneur, built several companies, some of them happen to be some of the hardest businesses ever to win in. Has a very powerful social media presence, he announces his intentions often, which many feel are impossible, but he wins nevertheless. He also is also very good in social culture scene too, which many people find cool. He is what most people want to be, but can't for various (at times valid)reasons.
Being a counter thesis to your (at times valid)excuses is bound to attract some resentment and hate.
SpaceX is following a "fully reusable" strategy, I am not even sure if the BFR booster has an expendable option, Starship may be expendable but it is clearly not the configuration they are pushing for. And yet, SpaceX is producing these engines as if they were consumables.
We only need so many launches, especially super heavy rocket launches before we run out of payload. And if they build as many rockets as they have engines for, where are they going to store them? What about the launch pads? Etc...
I am not criticizing SpaceX strategy, I know that Musk is a fan of assembly lines, for a lot of good reasons, so maybe they are just making so many engines just because they can, or so that they can blow them up later during testing (another SpaceX hallmark), but I am curious about their medium term strategy (i.e. after Starship is operational but before crazy projects like Mars settlements).
In the short term, they need hundreds of full stage rockets, and in the medium term, thousands. That's tens of thousands of engines needed in the next ~10 years. I don't think 1/day is fast enough and I'm sure they will increase that rate as soon as possible.
Also for testing, SpaceX doesn't want to be afraid of blowing up rockets and losing engines, so the first few hundred engines will likely not be reused.
Going to space in the 1960s made sense from the perspective of scientific advancement, and let's be honest, showing off. Now, we realize that the world has serious problems - but the people with influence are decidedly un-serious and so would rather continue to show off instead of fixing the mess they helped to create.
Depends on what exactly are you mining and whether it is possible to make fuel out there. And with launch cost falling drastically I expect to see this in my lifetime.
Now, it's important to note that there are some wonderful research insights that could be gleaned by landing things on Mars, and also perhaps by using martian resources to launch things further away from Earth. None of these require 1000 rockets landing on Mars though.
Human history is progress and this is progress.
“As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, the Whale
> And why is it the pro space people who need to stay on earth and save it, what about everyone else?
If we limit "pro-space people" to the billionaires sucking up all the oxygen in the room with their dick-waving, the "why do they need to save it" is obvious - they have the money to make a positive difference. Failing that though, if Papa Musk wants to blast himself off to Mars and die of radiation sickness, he's welcome to do so.
Money does not magically fix people however much you want to believe that.
But I guess you made my point for me… your argument has nothing to do about actually fixing anything, it’s entirely about optics.
That's tremendously valuable, because it's off planet and out of our gravity well, so we can launch much bigger rockets (measured in interplanetary payload capacity) than we can from earth (though the moon itself may be better, depending on what we can get there).
If you want to do science, then I wager it is better to do more of the work on Earth and head straight for your destination, avoiding the Mars gravity well entirely.
The world is and will always be a mess. That’s the nature of human being, we have different ideas, priorities, mindset. We can’t stop progress in an area just to fix some other areas. Besides, it is baffling that space is always singled out when it comes to fixing earth’s issues. Why not says, divert all resources of the video gaming industry to fixing climate; stopping all sporting competition, especially professional ones, for the same goal? That’s of course straw man and unrealistic argument, but space skeptics repeat the same argument on every single space discussion.
Elon has said that his motivation is to make humanity a multi planetary species thereby lowering the risk of extinction (asteroid impact, nuclear war, pandemic, biological warfare, catastrophic climate change, what have you).
Personally, I suspect he might just be doing it because he's nerdy and likes the idea.
For all of us who may not agree with his motives, the technological innovation required to make such a project a reality will benefit all of us anyway; so, for my part, I hope that SpaceX/EM succeed in their goals.
None of those will leave the Earth even a millionth as inhospitable to life as Mars already is - so this motivation makes no logical sense.
Not to mention, with anything resembling current technology, any Mars colony will be highly dependent on Earth for a good few hundred years - there is no way to bootstrap a fully functioning high tech economy any quicker than that, and life on Mars would depend critically on the highest of high-tech (there is no way to live on Mars without computers, for example - so you would need to be able to build, supply and man advanced chip fabs on Mars before you could have a self-sufficient colony).
It also can't be forgotten that there is no proof that a human population can survive on Mars at all, given our current technology. For example, we have no way of knowing yet if humans could successfully reproduce and bear children healthy enough to reproduce themselves in such a low-G environment. We may require genetic engineering to actually be able to live on Mars (or at least human settlements might require huge centrifuges of some kind simulating high-G, which is way beyond our current abilities to do on a planet, or at least increases the costs thousand-fold).
Not to mention, there are good reasons why the ancient Egyptians did not start work on a rocket program, even though they did want to fly.
> there are good reasons why the ancient Egyptians did not start work on a rocket program.
They didn’t have the required knowledge to do so. The rocket equation, after all, was only established a hundred years ago.
Also, computers are useful even if we didn't think of the Internet. 1000 space ships on their way to Mars are not very useful if we can't actually live on Mars.
If you need both thrust & efficiency, a large number of ion thrusters is often a good option.
Put another way, we might one day look at Starship as a big rig semi truck (though the ISP of Raptor is actually really good while a big rig's is very much not). The fuel efficiency isn't really that important.
I think (or hope at least) we're far away from being able to really see how much space access is going to change if Starship actually pulls off what they're trying.
You’d use your whole manufacturing capacity then to do 90 missions a year.
Why do you believe this is true? It's entirely possible that there's a massive amount of unmet demand that's only economically feasible at lower price points that SpaceX is beginning to unlock with reusability and economies of scale.
Even SpaceX themselves is a huge customer with Starlink. An extremely low cost of launch not only means that you can put drastically more satellites up, but you can put them in lower orbit where they will have a shorter lifespan, because they decay orbit and burn up exponentially faster, mitigating the risk of Kessler Syndrome. You can also iterate the satellites much faster as technology advances and waste less time making sure that the satellite is 'perfect' because you only have one shot at launching a JWST after 20 years of work.
On that note, why is one Hubble or JWST enough? We probably need hundreds if not thousands of them if we want a sufficient observation coverage to be fully away of all extraterrestrial (asteroids and commets) threats that might be coming our way.
The Starship is about changing the approach, not applying state of the art to a changed parameter. Currently there is a limit. After Starship is offered on the market, that limit may significantly change, as its main reason to exist is the high price of the launch services.
> All those payloads cost serious money
Right, but if you, say, are going to send off-the shelf - or, ok, almost off-the-shelf :) - Caterpillar to the Moon, the payload cost suddenly drops. This is exaggerration, of course, but the idea is that payloads may become much - orders of magnitude - cheaper to produce.
Today. Space telescopes are much more expensive than their Earth-bound cousins. In a large part because you can't afford failure. With cheap launches you'll send much cheaper telescopes, which will still do the same science - and they are cheaper because they are not made not to fail with very high probability.
Starships bringing fuel up is a stop-gap.
Yes, this one shot mentality is extremely expensive and limiting.
Blast those probes out there in quantity, and iteratively fix them.
Do you have the same attitudes towards helmets whether you're walking on the street or riding a motorcycle? I'm assuming not, because you understand they are different risk profiles.
When risk profiles differ, so do the mitigation strategies. One of the ways spaceflight manages different risk profiles is by implementing a risk-based approach. For example, NASA classifies their software risk based on probability and severity. When risk is high, they leverage more requirements and more oversight as a way of mitigating the risk to an acceptable level.
What you seem to be insinuating is we should be willing to accept more risk. While I agree in principle, the hard part is getting stakeholders (from astronauts to contractors, administrators, politicians, and taxpayers) to agree. They get a say, too.
Each booster uses about 33 Raptors, and each Starship uses 6. I assume the boosters can be reused between launches to some extend. So they might not need 100 boosters.
But you'll need more than 100 ships active; I assume they wouldn't launch 100/year, but rather 200 every 2 years (due to the 26 month launch windows to Mars). Not sure about the return windows and strategy.
That's at least 200 ships (1200 engines) you need active at any given time + boosters + refueling vessels (Each launch will require 6-9 refuels in orbit).
Additionally, there is the whole Earth-to-Earth transport idea (i.e. New York to Tokyo in 50 minutes).
Payload will not run out, demand is there (Starlink, military etc.)
If you're only able to make 4 a year (as does Rocketdyne, as mentioned in the article) then your ability to respond to failures during testing is abysmal at best. Also your ability to optimize and improve, simplify, harden, etc the manufacturing process and drive costs down also sucks.
Slow iteration for testing and enhancing rocket engines has been the bane of the industry since inception.
Things move fast until something bad happens; then layers and layers of oversight are added to avoid bad things happening again. Years go by without bad things happening and people begin to wonder why we need so much oversight so they begin to peel them back. Rinse and repeat.
In that context, a major mishap is a very big risk to SpaceX because it can erode their efficiency. One of the advantages of the CCP approach is that there is much less oversight, so things can move quicker. I'm not so sure NASA will be okay with that if they lose an astronaut.
A lot of the stuff SpaceX has been able to do is down to automated systems. Maybe we would have had rockets that could land in the late 80’s if that turf war had gone the other way.
I don't think anyone's expecting anyone else to actually abide by all those space-related treaties if there's another Great Powers war. Which, this century, means only one pairing: the US and China.
More surveillance, satellite kill vehicles with perhaps a little plausible deniability, dark, redundant GPS and comm sats, maybe some new, secret constellations at novel orbital heights for when all that debris gets spread around the lower orbits and screws everything up... maybe not actual space-based ground-targeting or anti-ICBM weapons, but then again, countries do cheat on treaties.
But maybe I'll be surprised and military launches will remain about the same while StarLink competitors and elementary school students launching cubesats will eat up all that new, cheaper capacity.
She pulled 9Gs out of Khazakstan just so she could see you on Christmas day.
And she has to cruise back in the Morning!
Talk about rocket lag
You can't jump from Mayfair, London to Manhattan with this system, at which point any flight time improvement becomes negligible.
All the check-in gets handled on shore, then a fifteen minute ride out to the platform on a high speed ferry, 20 minutes to onboard, then 30 minutes to any other offshore platform in the world, followed by a 20 minute offboarding, and another fifteen minute ferry ride.
The actual travel time would be less than the time you're expected to wait in the airport prior to boarding an international flight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SR.N4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSC_Francisco
Maybe a future revival of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-effect_vehicle ?
Or some shiny airtaxi vtol running on renewables, electricity, handwavium?
(still sounds handwavy and not very realistic, though)
Think of British East India Company, except the scope is way more than anything we can imagine.
If you are a super power, a project like this is something you must absolutely consider.
The explicit goal, as has been stated several times by SpaceX leadership in the past, is for Starship to eventually cannabalize Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches. They've said they'll keep launching them as long as there is demand for them, but there will be more and more incentive for companies/governments to stop buying Falcon 9 launches. Already SpaceX sells some launch contracts for "arbitrary vehicle" launches where SpaceX can elect to launch the spacecraft on Starship instead of Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy if SpaceX so wishes.
So not only are you getting ~90x as many engines/year you are also getting a similar amount of thrust but at half the weight, likely meaning considerably mission mass / vehicle when configured for like for like thrust.
rs-25 vacuum thrust = 512,000 lbs, sea level = 418,00 lbs
raptor2 thrust = 510,000 lbs
It's not clear if that's sea level or vacuum for raptor2 but i would assume sea level since it came from a test stand and raptor2 hasn't flown in a vacuum yet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Raptor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-25
However that isn't the most important factor, it's that the thrust/weight ratio is so much better.
Here is a really good overview of what sets it apart: https://everydayastronaut.com/raptor-engine/
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceLaunchSystem/comments/pbk4am/t...
> more like 4 years for ONE
That is disingenuous. The message you pointed to says "4-4.5 years from when we order material" which is comparing the manufacturing of an assembled item with the full length of the supply chain.
This is bad, because a sole supplier of viable orbital rocketry is almost as bad as only nation-states having the capability.
Hopefully, someone steps up to the plate. My guess is that Russia and/or China both have "black" programs to copy and replicate SpaceX's technology...
Completely agree.
> They won't recover for decades from the tech embargoes that started in 2014 and are very extensive now.
I hope they'll change approaches rather soon, 180 degrees, and will start digging out. It will still take time.
Putin never saw the space industry as anything but a profit center he can squeeze to fund other stuff, once SpaceX made it hard to compete they just gave up.
Well, it's still way better than none having the capability IMHO, so kudos for SpaceX to make it possible! One of those cases where being technologically brilliant gives you a big competitive advantage IMHO.
Veritasium did a video on their rocket: https://youtu.be/kz165f1g8-E
0. https://www.uthsc.edu/its/business-productivity-solutions/le...
Recommended podcast episodes about Deming: https://smallbatches.fm/search?query=deming
One thing I've noticed that the owners' or CEO's personality tends to permeate throughout the organization, for better or worse.
[0]: https://thedriven.io/2021/01/12/the-factory-is-the-product-m...
Can't argue with SpaceX, though - an engine a day is an insane pace.
Talk to an actual industrial engineer and they can tell you how laughably bad some of Tesla's manufacturing practices. You're never going to catch up to Toyota or Honda in pure speed or quality.
But Tesla has figured out a ton of clever ways to cut corners (mostly by having a customer base that accepts a very tiny static lineup of car models) and have gone all out on economies of scale.
> "What's driving Mr Terashi's effort is the EV's faster-than-anticipated takeoff and rapid-fire adoptions of cutting-edge innovations by Tesla and others," one of the people said.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/exclus...
Go and actually watch the disassembly and analysis done by Munro engineers. They do detailed analysis and costing. And Tesla is routinely doing things nobody else is doing that is highly effective.
Their use of aluminum casting is industry leading. Their electronics are industry leading by a wide margin. They are great at working with large glass panels. Their battery packs are industry leading. Their heating-cooling loop is fantastic. I could go on.
Just go and look a Tesla looks under the frunk and then look at how a VW ID.4 looks.
That doesn't mean they are the best at everything. Their suspensions are not as good. Their fit and finish is not as good. Again, there is more one could mention.
To just flat say that Tesla it worse at manufacturing the their competition is simply not true. If it were true they could never achieve anywhere close the margin they got. And this margin is achieved with pure EV, something most companies barley make profit on.
Tesla is also amazing at iteration. They are iterating faster then Toyota. In 2017 Model 3 had a lot of issues, if you look at Model 3 in 2021 the internals are very different.
> But Tesla has figured out a ton of clever ways to cut corners (mostly by having a customer base that accepts a very tiny static lineup of car models)
A the old 'all their costumers are idiots' defense that can't be backed up by anything substantial.
> and have gone all out on economies of scale.
They are pretty small car company still in terms of volume. And centralizing and vertically integrating production is a valid and effective industrial practice.
They had better margin then the competition while having 1/2 or less production on a architecture so just saying 'economics of scale' is just nonsense.
> They are iterating faster then Toyota. In 2017 Model 3 had a lot of issues, if you look at Model 3 in 2021 the internals are very different.
To put it in perspective in these 4 years, Toyota iterated for every single model year across 14 different model. And on top of that released all new platforms for the Yaris, the Camry, the Rav4, the Corolla, the Land Cruiser, the Tundra, and the Avalon.
This actually undermines your point to a certain extent. Tesla is great at iterating but that often comes at a cost to quality. It is very hard to manage reliability when parts and suppliers are constantly churning.
"Older models typically fare better in reliability, as companies tend to make tweaks and redesigns to solve known problems, while sticking with the same parts and suppliers.
But Tesla deviates from this approach, Fisher explained. “At almost random times during the year Tesla will switch major components, suppliers or sensors and other units. The more you change, the greater the chances you’re going to have some problems.” [1]
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/18/consumer-reports-2021-auto-r...
"5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs." - Edwards Deming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming
This does make version and revision management and service harder, but that you can manage with software and its worth the cost.
However, what you say is partially true, its not all positive. If you endlessly make the same car with very little change you can also hit very high quality and reliability. That is why sometimes cars like Jeep look good in quality rankings.
Overall however, I think there is good reason for iteratively interdicting changes.
>"but that you can manage with software"
This is a take that seems accurate on it's surface but belies a lot of additional problems. Leaning on software for improving reliability can be a dangerous path. It's tempting because it's cheap and easy to iterate on. Software doesn't wear out like mechanical components. But software makes reliability pretty tough when you constantly iterate because it tends to fail at interfaces. Not only do the number of these interfaces tend to grow exponentially, they are notoriously difficult to test fully. Nancy Leveson has some good articles that demonstrate this distinction.
A automotive example from my own experience is a comparison with mechanical vs. electrical robots used in the stamping process of body panels. Plant managers like electrical retrofits because they held the promise of being much cheaper to build and modify. But they needed near-constant tweaking of the control system. The number of interfaces causes a lot more failure modes and impacts the reliability. By contrast, a mechanical system is, by it's nature, constrained by mechanical linkages. Once the mechanical system is tuned and working, it works for a long time. Gradually the parts wear, but they tend to be much easier to predict and troubleshoot.
Since this thread is about aerospace, you can see where software failure caused catastrophic failures by lulling engineers into complacency about how software can enhance reliability. From Ariane V, to Falcon, to CST-100 all have examples of how software did not fulfill its promises to increase reliability and often it does the opposite. Don't confuse the ability to move a design change faster with an inherent ability to make things more reliable.
What I mean by 'manage with software' is that each car has an exact description of what hardware is in it. Meaning what revision of every part. Tesla has some advantage because they manage the process end to end, knowing exactly what vehicle was sold to what costumer and the control the service center and write the diagnostic software so the service center should know exactly what car they are working on and what potential problems each revision of the software has.
In the 70s when Deming advocated for this such extensive version tracking would likely be much harder.
The software management issue I was talking about was a different animal. Take the Ariane V; the idea was the could iterate faster if they leveraged software reuse. Since it was previously verified software, they didn't think it needed much testing. But the new rocket design exceeded the assumptions in the previous iteration and the vehicle was lost. There's a lot of instances where software allows you to iterate faster, but you have to very careful about the baked in assumptions.
But that brings ups up a specific example of where Tesla has struggled. They used to keep HUGE backstocks of excess inventory (I believe they have since tamed this) which is a classic manufacturing mistake. So if you have any production mistakes or improvements in the part, you have to scrap or just cycle through the entire inventory until the improvements show up in the car.
This is why Just-In-Time is such an important concept in manufacturing. You can iterate constantly. Meanwhile, Tesla would crank out huge batches of identical fenders and doors and mirrors to maximise efficiency (economies of scale) but then struggle with part fits and panel gaps.
Tesla has since dealt with a lot of this when they went through their production hell period. But a lot of what they had to do was re-learn things like Lean Manufacturing and JIT.
Yes Tesla had to re-learn a lot about manufacturing. They certainty didn't start out being good. But by now they are doing pretty well.
Just 5 years ago, they had 10k cars per quarter.
You need to look at rate of change of improvement. Or, we can check back on Tesla 40 years from now.
Are you comparing the rate of change of improvement of Tesla to Toyota during their first 5 years?
For comparison, if Toyota was as efficient as Tesla they would've posted 2022 Q3 profits of ~$24 billion, not $3.1B. Tesla achieved $3.9B from only 344k cars. Operational efficiency is their leverage.
Cars sold (2022 Q3)
Toyota: 2.6M (+5% y/y) Tesla: 344K (+42% y/y)
Operating profit excl. FX impact Toyota: $3.1B (-38% y/y) Tesla: $3.9B (+97% y/y)
They have a different business model than OEMs, this is not apples-to-apples. OEMs act as wholesalers.
Besides the fact that you're talking about the efficiency of a company that literally produces 10x the number of cars. Let's see what happens to Tesla if they ever reach that scale.
>Toyota: 2.6M (+5% y/y) Tesla: 344K (+42% y/y)
Base rate fallacy. Why not use absolute numbers of cars, rather than percentage increase? It would tell a different story, wouldn't it?
10x higher production should in itself bring a lot in terms of economies of scale. Generally, the more you make of something, the cheaper one unit is to make.
So Tesla's position is certainly more impressive in this comparison.
I'm not even saying they don't have great manufacturing practices objectively - if you compare them to a lot of other industries they absolutely do. But auto manufacturing has always been the cutting edge of manufacturing tech and they simply are not at the top of that highly competitive field yet.
I'm curious, because sometimes exceptional supplier expectations come from a customer not really knowing what they need, so they ask for the world.
In doing something as simple as making their own seats, they were able to also improve the safety. They've put sensors directly in the seats to reprogram airbag deploy sequences, in software, on the fly. They know if there is a child sitting on the very edge of the seat vs an adult laying down across the seat and have the airbags fire differently based on this knowledge. Recently[2], they stepped this up a notch and are in the process of using millimeter wave radars to confirm this. They're industry leading in this regard and previously just used pressure sensors plus the cabin camera above the rearview mirror.
In short, Tesla is not perfect, but they are trying to rethink the problems from first principals. In doing this, they are coming up with very novel approaches that are actually big improvements over the entire industry. In other areas (fit and finish) they're towards the middle of the pack when compared against peer auto manufacturers.
[1] https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-patent-refrigerant-seat-temp...
[2] https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-driver-monitoring-system-fcc...
One of the ultimate "business metric" for auto manufacturers is the gross margin aka "how much profit does the company make as a percentage of the cost of the vehicle"
Before Tesla, Toyota[1] generally held the crown as the highest with just under 18% over the past five years. Ford[2] averages around 14%. Tesla[3], is industry leading with an average of 20.61%. GM[4] has always sort of been a laggard with the average at 11.26%. The German manufacturers, known for their efficiency, also do very well with VW[5] at 18.75% (this includes Porsche, which significantly tips the scales upwards for Volkswagen) and Mercedes[6] at 19.66%.
So Tesla makes approximately 6% more profit per vehicle sold at the low end (GM) and almost exactly 1% more than Mercedes on the higher end. Mercedes has ~173,000 employees and (per your own comment) Tesla has ~110,000 employees. So doing "less with more" is a pretty nice way to say they're more efficient, is it not?
[1] https://ycharts.com/companies/TM/gross_profit_margin
[2] https://ycharts.com/companies/F/gross_profit_margin
[3] https://ycharts.com/companies/TSLA/gross_profit_margin
[4] https://ycharts.com/companies/GM/gross_profit_margin
[5] https://ycharts.com/companies/VWAPY/gross_profit_margin
[6] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/02/tesla-tsla-q3-2022-vehicle-d...
https://everydayastronaut.com/spacex-raptor-engine-compariso...
It's because SpaceX and Tesla are the clear leaders in opposing the de-industrialization trend in the hyper-financialized American economy. It's so incredibly stupid and short-sighted to move manufacturing and the associated technological R&D outside the United States, as it results in the loss of critically important technological skills. Follow that route and you end up with financial institutions desperately trying to retain control of technology via intellectual property lawsuits targeting countries with their factories in China, which as history has shown, will alway be a losing battle.
Rolling back the financialization of the American economy, and re-introducing industrial activities at scale, is the only way the country will avoid devolving into a dystopian Third World system of wealthy enclaves with large capital holdings (protected by private security armies) surrounded by miles and miles of festering slums.
Twitter banning the discussion of preferences was a bridge too far with the role it plays geopolitically.
The biggest threat is really a matter of time management. He is now spreading his time really really thin across some of his companies.
Most of the people who are on that bandwagon would place their favorite celebrity on a higher pedestal than EM. Which is to say the way we rank people and go after people seems off. It's easier to stay on people's "good side" when you're not doing anything different.
As far as I can tell, the people who "smear" Musk don't do so because of his companies, it's because they oppose his ideas and how much influence he has to implement them. Whatever you think of Musk, it's a little scary that someone can just buy the megaphone that is Twitter and disseminate whatever information you wish.
And also, no. Many people I know are barely aware of him. Tesla is more famous than Elon Musk, who is more famous than SpaceX.
But it doesn't seem like there's any fundamental tension in assessing that in some domains he has done good/useful work and in other domains he's acting like an idiot. It needn't be the case that he's either an all-around genius or an all-around fraud/charlatan/megalomaniac/whatever.
Now, by how much you can change the delta on value creation with some specialized knowledge is part of the risk/unknown that Elon seems to understand.
Sad to see his comment turn gray and magically disappear because his opinion is “unworthy”.
How long does it take to cook dinner? Well, depends on whats in the fridge, does it count going to the grocery, who grew the food?
Each one could take five years to build for all the title says.
Inventory->Hardware->Raptor2 -= 33;If it manages to "land" successfully just above the water, then they'll go for landings back at the pad.
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-elon-musk-starship-orbital-...
(Although I guess you could refly the same tanker a few times)
If you were really going to Mars you would need all the Starships you could get, even operations around the Earth and cislunar space could keep a substantial fleet busy if the cost per pound is low enough to encourage new applications. You will also need to replace engines at some rate.
A full stack Starship right now needs 39 engines (33 for Super Heavy, 6 for Starship). SpaceX will definitely lose some to testing (and indeed last I checked they are 100% going to lose all the initial ones, because they're going to do a mock-landing over the ocean before attempting a real landing, so even if it goes perfectly all those are going into the salt water). Once they have SH being recovered, ideally starting launch 2, that will cut the burn rate big time but they'll still probably take a bit to start successfully recovering SS. That's entirely expected and acceptable for MVP and as a worst case for HLS (because Lunar Starship and such aren't coming back to Earth at all, that's Orion's job). SpaceX runs hardware rich, so they will need hundreds just for testing.
Long term though they want 1000+ Starships for Mars and other efforts. There will still be expended Starship profiles, and reuse doesn't mean that cadence won't require having more raw vehicles. Fueling orbital depots quickly requires lots of vehicles and trips, and boil off particularly early on means just depending on a few isn't ideal (and that's assuming they have reuse working by then, if they have to just eat the refueling as expended to meet their contract obviously they'll need more). With the current design that's tens of thousands of engines, so at current production they'd be hitting the right numbers in about 22 years which seems in the ballpark of when such an effort might actually get going.
At any rate mass production is very important for their plans and how they operate. It's let them iterate very quickly, iron out more kinks, be much more aggressive about testing which in turn feeds back into doing each better, and pushes down the cost per engine dramatically. If you go to the Ars comments first page you'll see pictures comparing Raptor 1 and Raptor 2 and can just visually see the massive simplification (though note it's a little bit unfair because Raptor 1 was much more heavily instrumented, but there is far more stuff removed/improved then just that).
Are they going to pick them up or let them sink?
Though their launch payloads are often classified, that they're launching DOD payloads isn't classified and given the contracts that are public as reasonable proxies for the ones that aren't, there's simply no chance the DOD's manifest is SpaceX's biggest in terms of launches or dollars.
NASA, for example, launches on SpaceX way more often than DOD. You can easily count the launches yourself by reviewing SpaceX's historical manifest on Wikipedia. I think there have been 6 or 7 DOD launches in the last three years while there have been 15 or 16 NASA launches in the same time period. Some DOD launches are a bit more lucrative than some NASA launches, but the inverse is also true.
You might go on to assert that SpaceX has other DOD projects like its Starlink/missile tracking and E2E cargo (and potentially troop) delivery (and even money for Raptor dev and other smaller programs like the long ago DARPA investment in Falcon 1) but it's clear from various reporting that those are tiny investments compared to a year or three's worth of orbital launches.
Yes, the USG is SpaceX's biggest customer. No, the DOD is not SpaceX's biggest USG customer. That title, for now, belongs squarely to NASA.
You can see, clearly, far more launches for DOD umbrella agencies than for NASA.
Historically, von Braun had to use 70% ethanol - i.e., diluted with water - to avoid V2 engines burning through. So, loss of efficiency. It took quite some efforts to e.g. Glushko with Liliput to switch to kerosene (and cylindrical chamber and flat injector head) - the result was R-7 engines. Some decades of improvements - for example, V2 uses hydrogen peroxide to drive turbopumps, modern engines all use main components, which at least simplifies the engine overall, the closed cycles don't have separate exhaust after turbine, turbopumps are much more efficient (geometry in 1940-s wasn't too good from fluid dynamic point of view, turbine vanes didn't use that high temperature gas, losing in efficiency - here some material development work is important), and others. Raptor has an order of magnitude higher thrust.
A lot more complexity, I'd say.
And that's before we get into insane complexities of a full flow combustion cycle vs the open cycle of the V2's engine.
Definitely a lot more complex.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-9_Desna
So, it might be considered, I guess. Even though Starship looks rather from another era...
2. They mostly don't get government grants, they get government contracts. Do you call it a grant when the Forest Service buys an F-150 from Ford?
The government had decades to try this strategy and couldn’t figure it out.
Drastically more wealth concentration has existed in humanity's past, but they weren't building reusable rockets because of it.
Also, SpaceX in particular was founded and started advancing this technology well before Musk at least was anywhere close to such extreme wealth. You might be putting the cart before the horse.
(Opposed to government contracts which were traditionally cost-plus, meaning the cost reduction would actually decrease profits.)
Who exactly do you think built the Saturn V?