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Can you give me some examples of SpaceX innovations that disrupted the industry?

Here are some of my issues with SpaceX marketing:

  1) Cost to NASA/DoD seems to be similar to ULA.

  2) SpaceX continues to fly expandable boosters for missions above LEO and for heavier payloads. Reusable boosters have lower lift and range and require extensive refurbishment between missions. Upper stage is not reusable.

  3) SpaceX hasn't flown a single mission into deep space or Mars despite this being the stated goal of the company. In the same time, others have flown multiple rockets to Mars and to other planets. We have multiple rovers roaming the surface of Mars and satellites orbiting other planes all while SpaceX has contributed nothing to these efforts.

I personally see SpaceX contributions to the industry are mostly incremental:

  1) Booster reusability to LEO and for light payloads.

  3) Human rated capsule for space station resupply missions.

  3) High quality video content from launches.

  4) Increased interest in space exploration at the expense of unrealistic expectations in relation to cost and timelines.

It takes a lot of mental gymnastics to call booster reusability "incremental".

Depends on how much demand for those low orbit launches there is. A non-zero portion of those launches is Starlink, so basically in-house demand. Yes, I'd call that incremental. Which doesn't mean it is not impressive, because it is.

The main point so, IMHO, is that prices for comparable launches are not so much cheaper using SpaceX. Kind of like those Ryan Air 19.99 tickets. Sure, there are some, but on average the price difference is much smaller than people think.

Calling SpaceX SpaceRyanair seems unexpectedly accurate. O'Leary and Musk have a lot in common.

NASA's shuttle would have solved reusability in the 70s/80s, but a combination of DoD interference and severe funding cuts effectively crippled the project. This was politically fatal because it killed NASA's reputation as an effective manager of innovation. Which is why every project from the 90s onwards has been supported by slightly overwrought rapturous PR - to try to restore that reputation, because funding relies on it.

SpaceX has copied this.

So yes - SpaceX is incremental. A non-incremental company would be developing blue sky alternatives to chemical engines and/or looking for new propulsion physics. I can't see that happening without a government-run academic R&D program.

SpaceX naturally sets whatever price is just enough to grab the launches from the competition. This has nothing to do with technical achievement.

Care to elaborate?

Booster reusability is massive, and if starship flies that will be quite a bit beyond that.

They are charging not much less than ULA for some launches because they can, and to recoup R&D expanses. The cost per launch to them is much lower.

I do however agree that technologically it’s incremental. Look up the DC-X. NASA and Lockheed had flown VTVL test boosters before. Werner von Braun talked about them. Starship is basically what he wanted to evolve Saturn V into.

(Not at all belittling the achievements of SpaceX engineers. Space flight is truly brutally hard even if you are doing what’s been done before let alone innovating at all.)

But none of that went anywhere because by the 1990s you had a stolid conservative industry happy with expendable rockets and cost plus contracts. It didn’t move until a lunatic swaggered in and turned over the table.

Bureaucracies and stolid industries generally have to be kicked and beaten and dragged into the future. They are happy to cash checks, moo, and chew cud.

Same goes for EVs. Marketable EVs have been possible since the GM EV1. There was demand too; GM had to pry those prototypes away from people. But the car industry was set in its ways. It must go vroom vroom or it’s not a car, and then there is the huge oil industry with all its lobbyists and PR. Again it took an unhinged lunatic to say “fuck you all we are doing this” and basically shame the industry into moving by showing them up.

If Tesla fails it will be because Tesla succeeded. The big car companies are probably better at making cars and may outcompete Tesla once they actually decide to move.

The same personality willing to offend millions to bring trolls back to Twitter is the same sort of personality it apparently takes to whip conservative bureaucracies and industries into action.

The only other force I am aware of that can do it is government mandate, and that carries a more literal whip. That wasn’t going to happen for rockets or EVs due to regulatory capture and conflicts of interest.

Edit: I guess the other force is war, which is why war has tended to bring innovation. But I’ll take Elon Musk types with all their negative traits over war any day.

As a side note I suggest that the issue is one of operational fidelity.

They do it in a reasonable time frame for a fraction of the cost, aka, a bit of '1st era' commercialization of Space - still relatively government related, but mostly private though nowhere near consumer or even general industrial.

They're just making what was previously 'research' to be economically feasible.

You must have very high standards if you consider reducing costs by an order of magnitude "incremental".

> All the conquistador really has to do is gallop in and show what is possible.

Yes, gallop. To do so loudly and conspicuously.

Moribund industries are staffed by quiet competence that took decades to build. There are no quiet conquistadors. Even if their ideas are actually mediocre, riding in on a white horse and creating a spectacle is essential to the show.

The age of marketing uber-alles, social media 'reach' and personality cults has green-lighted armchair conquistadors who previously would have bided their time to reach maturity. It's no surprise that once they've shot their one-hit load, there's no sustainability or stamina behind it.

The iPhone was higher on the innovation scale in the sense it took competitors 5-10 years to catch up, and half never did.

> Elon Musk vs the space industry

The other billionaire funded disruptive space startup has proven themselves less competent than "old space". Jeff Bezos founded Blue Origin two years before SpaceX, and they've still accomplished a fat lot of nothing. Their most significant accomplishment to date is stalling ULA's Vulcan rocket for years, because they couldn't deliver engines on time. They still haven't been to orbit.

> All the conquistador really has to do is gallop in and show what is possible.

They were massively outnumbered, lost all their artillery and most of their horses. Nothing about what they did was easy, they only survived because they were better at politics than the Aztecs, and made many regional alliances. And because they got extremely lucky. It defies logic and all rational expectation that so many were able to escape Tenochtitlan with their lives. If not for their native allies, they surely never would have been heard from again.

> But when you get past that disruption phase the conquistadors often fall down.

Broken analogy. Despite their rocky start, the conquistadors would come to utterly dominated the native cultures (including their former allies.)

> Steve Jobs 2.0 (the return) vs ugly beige box PCs.

And we're all worse off for it. We, the aggregate computer consumers, have chosen a shiny prison instead of shabby freedom. Despite increased public awareness for environmental concerns, our computers have become increasingly less repairable. Apple's most significant innovation has been turning computers into fashion items that get replaced while still useful to avoid looking uncool.

> it remains to be seen if SpaceX will hold it together.

No more than the rest of the space industry, who are all still very far behind SpaceX. The whole thing may collapse if nerds ever figure out that Mars colonies aren't happening, but by all rights that realization should have come years ago.

> they only survived because they were better at politics than the Aztecs, and made many regional alliances. And because they got extremely lucky.

According to 1491, this myth is inaccurate. I believe Mann's argument is more along the likes of "if Genghis Khan came through Europe during the black plague, none of us would be speaking Romance languages".

I am also sure bringing a disease that wipes out 30-90+% of your enemy should not be considered luck.

I do believe the metaphor is apt, because it's a story of leaders who come in loud, destroy things, but are lauded as civilizers or advancers of humanity. We have no counterfactual for post-1491 in the Americas, but there are reasonable arguments that indigenous people were more advanced in a number of fields.