The writing has been on the wall for where rockets were going for ten years, policy makers absolutely have failed, but let's not pretend it's only Europe who have got it wrong.
Also, the negativity these sort of headlines bring to "tech" in Europe as a whole are also unhelpful. Europe is absolutely at the cutting edge of technology.
But yes, also that rover.
Seems that a lot of people want to see Elon destroyed over Twitter/politics. See the incredibly negative reaction to the Starship launch attempt compared to the much more positive reaction to previous test flights that ended with a boom.
And if they destroy our current best hope for the future of space exploration in the process of going after Elon, they don't care, it's 'a win for the environment', or acceptable collateral damage to take down an 'evil multibillionaire'
(Maybe Elon should even consider stepping away from SpaceX? - but then projects as ambitious/risky as Starship would likely be dropped)
You are rewriting history. The same fucking thing happens everytime a rocket explodes. The same reaction happened with the earlier test flights again.
Some dumb idiots in the media and twitter right bullshit. A few dumb politicans try to cash in and do a bunch of saber rattling in congress.
Same game over and over, it doesn't matter and doesn't change anything.
SpaceX or Musk will not be destroyed by this nonsense.
When I said 'reckless', I was referring more to the repeated WTFs in his handling of the twitter acquisition, including but not limited to the acquisition itself.
They wouldn't get to Mars, though. Starship needs the 'recklessness' of being prepared to fail rapidly, repeatedly, dramatically, and incredibly publicly, while learning from each failure.
So far they've managed to ensure that no humans have been injured during launch/landing failures (although the delayed flight termination of the recent launch was worrying, and should probably be more of a concern than the launch site damage)
Sure, now that he's pushed them to where they are with his vision. Would we even be talking about landable rockets today without his involvement?
SpaceX plows all its profits into this goal. (Its shareholders aren't getting any returns, not for a long time. The SpaceX investors are playing an extremely long game.) And if you constantly use all your profits to improve your capability, you have a huge long-term advantage over companies that exist to make a profit for their shareholders.
Falcon is not fully reusable, there's a hard cost floor from the need to throw away a second stage for every launch, and there's no reasonable prospect to avoid doing so. The idea is that Starship will beat Falcon on launch costs long term. SpaceX itself is chomping at the bit getting Starlink to launch on Starship instead of Falcon, because it will be cheaper.
Maybe its more accurate to say that Musk is simply good at leading technical companies?
> feverish loyalty amongst his followers
You mean his employees? Most of them don't seem feverish.
And if you mean people that are not his employees how does that have anything to do with SpaceX?
I'm sure you have source for that. And I'm sure she already did that when she was Head of Sales right?
And its funny how Tom Mueller, Hans Königsmann, Garrett Reisman and every other higher up in SpaceX talks about lots and lots direct interaction with Musk.
Funny how 'Liftoff' the book about SpaceX doesn't mention anything about that. And the author of this book is currently writing about the the Falcon 9 days, and I think that book will confirm the same thing again (and the author of those books interviewed literally 100s of current and former SpaceX people).
And again, pretty much every single person in leadership positions at SpaceX would disagree with you. But its great that you know so much more.
> to recognize what a shitty CEO he is
Ok, so how do you define a good CEO if not based on the company he leads are successful. Sure if its a short term success maybe you can point to other factors. Musk has been in his position longer then pretty much every other CEO in both the space and the car industry and both companies are absurdly successful.
Look, you personally dislike him and you don't like his style. But that is just irrelevant. By any actual objective measure Musk is one of the most successful CEOs in history. The results speak for themselves and its not even really debatable.
That you have to bring up individual practices that you dislike, shows that you can't actually point to any aggregate results to make your point.
> you only need to pay attention to the disaster that has been his Twitter acquisition
If you actually think that in a 30+ year career the only thing relevant is one acquisition then you are actually delusional. Any fair assessment takes into account a whole career and not one acquisition.
And in terms of Twitter, the results should be judged after 5-10 years and not the first year.
Its simple a restructuring that was always gone happen after a while and had nothing to do with 'Gwynne' taking over management from Musk or whatever spin Musk-Haters wanted to put on it.
Yeah he was somehow able to start both Tesla, a wildly successful paradigm shifting hard tech company, and then go on to start SpaceX, an even more paradigm shifting, wildly successful hard tech company that has absolutely blown out every single competitor on earth to the point of embarrassment.
What does it take for people to just accept that he’s a genius? Is that seriously so difficult? Clearly he’s doing something and it isn’t sales.
may not have that exactly right but hte point is Elon, at least in the early days of SpaceX, was definitely more than a salesman.
every time i touch grass while talking about elon people are always amazed with him, why is that?
If you mean "every time I am smoking a joint and talking about Elon" I guess I'm not surprised. If you mean "every time I go outside and talk to people about Elon" I definitely am. There are large parts of my (quite liberal) state where a Tesla gets a pretty negative reaction.
if he was such a bad person, why is he doing so much good in the world?
1. How much actual knowledge people have of Elon. Speaking from personal experience there is very much a "familiarity breeds contempt" thing going on here, and I suspect the same is true more generally. People exposed only to his early (positive) press will likely like him. People exposed only to his later (negative) press will likely hate him.
2. What part of Elon's portfolio they care most about. No matter how a space nerd feels about Elon they are going to have some positive vibes about SpaceX. Even people at competitors felt their hearts flutter when they saw the first double F9 landing, or first saw Starlink high in the night sky. But people who love cars... not so much. Plenty of folks who would sooner key a Tesla than own one, and will tell you so to your face.
I also think that while lots of liberals are annoyed at Elon, the bulk of the hate comes from conservatives. Hard to erase a decade-long lead in pissing people off.
and for the cars, teslas are selling quite well, its the only profitable ev according to recent business report apparently.
thanks i didn't realize
By 'all-in' you mean make a few statements on twitter about his opinion? Because that is very different definition for 'all-in' then I have. Going 'all-in' would be to try to get elected president or some dumb shit like that.
I think we are living in different realities, which is the new normal I suppose. You missed one company he has recently purchased. You know, the one that is 100% political in nature? Jeez, just imagine the space telescopes or moon bases he could have invested in, but instead we got Twitter allowing self-described Nazis back on the platform. What a tragic waste of Musk's resources, both mental and financial.
What I meant by "all-in" was jumping headlong into the hyper-partisan political fray - and loudly choosing a side!
Musk 2021: Elon Musk said he prefers to stay out of politics [0]
Musk 2022: Elon Musk says he’ll vote Republican, bashes Democrats [1]
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/09/elon-musk-tesla-spacex-spend...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/18/elon-musk-says-hell-vote-rep...
I believe Musk fought buying Twitter would be both good politically and he could lead the company more successfully. Hence he wanted to get out of it when it was clear that it was a huge as shares dropped.
> Musk 2022: Elon Musk says he’ll vote Republican, bashes Democrats [1]
I'm not disagreeing that Musk go more political, but calling it 'all-in' is LITERALLY wrong.
All-in would be doing politics as his primary occupation.
He's not running for office, but he's inserted himself part of the larger political narrative.
He is not doing a TV show on Fox News 5 days a weak, he isn't running for president.
He occasionally tweets something that is political or runs arguable runs Twitter in a political (not sure if its possible to run Twitter in a politically neutral way).
His actual job that he spends 95% of his time on is running SpaceX and Tesla, just like before he bought Twitter.
Ah, you're the "semantic guy". In this case it did mean exactly what I thought it meant, but not what you wanted it to mean. So I'll speak (nay, write) in literal terms instead of common parlance:
Elon Musk has used his more widely visible platform as the CEO of Twitter to advance authoritarian agenda, support and endorse authoritarian leaders (in the US and outside of it), make hate speech easier, make journalism harder, make knowledge generation harder by restricting access to data, and basically mock progressives exclusively. He's also endorsed conspiracy theories, and what I like most: he's adjusted the algorithm to ensure you see more content from himself and the people's he's "blessed".
> make journalism harder
Quite the opposite, as far as I can see.
- Banned journalists (among others he didn't care for)
- Discrediting journalism accounts with "state sponsored media" labels
- Require journalism organizations to pay to provide they are an actual source (I doubt they were targeted in the checkmark fiasco, but they were impacted)
- Elevating his own platform into your feed where posts half-truths and elevates authoritarian right-wing talking points and conspiracies. Speaking of...
- Publicly espousing conspiracy theories about globalists that need reining in (hear the dog whistle?)
- Literally mocking journalists
- Auto-replying to legitimate inquiries with a poop emoji
- Selectively using right-wing voices for his politically-laden "Twitter Files" disclosure
- Providing near-zero pushback to requests for content removal from authoritarian governments
But sure, see what you want to see. And before you turn around and tell me I'm doing the same, my opinion on Elon was positive as he was buying Twitter. I've observed him, I've read what he was to say. Either I never knew him (more likely) or buying Twitter has changed him substantially.
Edit: that’s not to say you need to treat these people as heroes - I’m reflexively suspicious of that because human nature will always be what it is, but I applaud their ability to give the finger to convention, that’s all.
It’s like you all forgot we just spent three years calling anyone who disagreed on an untested therapeutic that doesn’t even work a racist.
Please be more specific because I have no idea what you're referring to.
[1] https://twitter.com/davidzweig/status/1607382645603704834
While much of Rocket Lab’s team is still based in New Zealand, they are now a US-based company and their Neutron reusable medium-lift rocket will be built in the US and launch from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) in Virginia.
As far as I know they do not have any plans to launch reusable rockets from New Zealand.
Its latitude is really not optimal for anything other than polar orbits and it’s too far from any potential customers which would increase the cost considerably.
Not only do they have plans to, they have already launched multiple commercial missions on their Electron rocket from NZ!
> "Its latitude is really not optimal for anything other than polar orbits"
I don't think latitude is the major reason. Rocket Lab's Ahuriri Point launch site is at about 39.2 deg S, not that much different to the Wallops Island, Virginia site at 37.8 deg N. Baikonur Cosmodrome, by comparison, is at 46 deg N!
> "it’s too far from any potential customers which would increase the cost considerably."
Yeah, this is the real issue.
And the distance doesn't really matter much. Its not that expensive.
The reason to go the the US, is US military launch more then anything else.
This has to be said over and over again. RocketLab is an US company.
And RocketLab large Neutron rocket will launch from the US and will be built in the US.
> Europe is absolutely at the cutting edge of technology.
Not in rocket technology.
Stop injecting nationalistic cheerleading into places it's not necessary.
Yes I know. But that is literally irrelevant.
> New Zealand headquarters
No its not.
The US is where their head quarters is, its where their engine production is, and lots of other subsystems too, it where much of its sat division is, its where they are developing the Neutron rocket. One if its two launch pads is in the US.
RocketLab is an American company that builds some structures in New Zealand and has a launch pad there.
I don't know why its so fucking hard for people to operate Wikipedia.
I am not saying this to discredit RocketLab, its a simple statement of fact.
Lolwut!?
Which technology? Certainly not space tech. Certainly not AI. To what, then, are you referring?
Top 10 most innovate countries: Europe takes 7 positions, including #1.
Machines for manufacturing: Europe. Machines to produce semiconductors: Europe. Healthtech (Siemens, Philips): Europe. Food tech and agriculture (Foodvalley): Europe. Water management, port management: Europe. Aviation: Europe.
Your world is built on leading Europe tech. Admittedly, the software isn't. Which is easy to tell because software is in a shit state.
Cutting edge of technology is industry creating or industry changing technologies. The US has dominated these since the 80s, but arguably even before that with railways, and after all the atom bomb was invented by immigrants in the US.
The web, social media, smartphones.
And now space industries and generative AI.
And why is this?
Lots of network effects, but also places like the EU have it completely backwards in terms of policy. Policy doesn’t create innovation. It might support it, but real innovation comes from freedom and letting innovative people roam free. The US government is doing it best to stop this but still hasn’t managed it luckily.
I just don’t see how europe is at the cutting edge of anything, any companies they lead their field are downstream of leading US industries.
I don’t know if it’s possible to recreate what the US does. Probably not. But what EU bureaucrats try and do basically fails every time.
Europe does have a lot of midtier industrial companies that do world-tier work. This includes Defense, Air transport (Airbus), Automotive, Pharmaceutical (BioNTech RNA vaccine coming from EU work) and I'm sure many other sectors.
With COTS NASA switched to contracting out for launch capacity without defining how it must be achieved. This allowed SpaceX the freedom to engineer their rockets as they saw fit.
What technology? Do you have any examples, especially enough to make such a broad statement?
https://www.asml.com/en/products/euv-lithography-systems/twi...
Unless that technology is launch vehicles, in which case they'll whinge and whine and eventually contract someone else to do it for them and pretend they have a competent space program.
I'd also like to remind that the reusability isn't limited to the SpaceX style VTVL. There are also potentially promising things like VTHL flyback boosters, but they are untested and nobody is currently positioned to throw money away to test smart solutions hypothesized in 60s, because the margins for the failure are non-existent in the industry.
Similarly, the only other company that has even tried to make a proven launch vehicle reusable is Rocketlab. So suggesting that others are struggling, when they either haven't even tried yet or are still working on getting to orbit, is ridiculous.
On top of that, the argument that reusability doesn't work for others for any reasons other than policy also doesn't really fit. Launch prices for all other rockets are higher, even the ones developed to better compete with F9 are only in the ballpark of its launch price and completely uncompetitive on launch cost and cadence.
I was referring to the original plan for the Falcon 9 to be fully reusable, which didn't work out for the second stage.
> others ... either haven't even tried yet or are still working on getting to orbit
That's exactly my point, though. They either didn't figure out how to make it work economically in their particular case, or spent too many years building a working system with a slow methodology. Sure, reusing the hardware provides clear benefits and everybody understands that, but only if you can pull it off and make the ends meet. Evidently not everybody can do that, even in the US where they have the same policy as others. So clearly the policy is not the only differentiator.
For non-US companies this is especially true - besides the good policy, you have to have the infra (supply chain closeness and quick turnarounds, quick transportation network which is a special pain point for Russian cosmodromes and the issue for French Guiana or any potential sea launch systems as well), good location (east-facing shore close to the equator with good trajectory options - Russia and Europe don't have that), access to the markets (Russia is cut off and China doesn't have the proper access to the global launch market). Russian launchers in particular also have different cost breakdown traditionally (expensive compact upper stages; that's why the IRDT mission was trying to return the upper stage in 2001-2004 to explore the reusability possibility; AFAIR the experiment partially succeeded, but they still weren't able to make the ends meet with that).
In fact, the only other country which has more or less everything in place for the SpaceX-style floating platform landing reusability (you can't compete in VTVL by only having the landing pad flyback) is Japan, but they're too heavily invested into "cheap" LH2 on the country level to make a mental switch to the reusable systems.
They never really tried. Second stage re-usability was in some of the very, very early animation videos, long before they were developing anything.
Then very quickly they said it wasn't really worth it.
The thought about bringing development back and did some more work on it for a while but quickly dropped the idea again.
So they didn't really try, they investigated the idea and dropped. Saying they failed suggest they were seriously trying it spending lots of money and then not being able to do it.
> Evidently not everybody can do that, even in the US where they have the same policy as others. So clearly the policy is not the only differentiator.
SpaceX is just first, the US has 4-5 other major rocket company working seriously on largish rockets (and may smaller ones). Europe has a few tiny rocket companies that are very questionable. Japan, India have nothing. China has some interesting private companies but they are far behind the US, and their state technology is also not comparable to SpaceX.
> In fact, the only other country which has more or less everything in place for the SpaceX-style floating platform landing reusability
Europe has everything needed in terms of infrastructure and supply chain. And so does China.
Policy makers made it happen in the states through what they funded.
And doing it in a decade or two is actually fine. Tech will stabilize by then and there will be more skilled people to hire. Why the rush ?
> Michael Griffin. Griffin later estimated that SpaceX was around 85% funded by the federal government, mostly through his NASA awards, with the remaining 15% funding split between Elon Musk and other private investors. He felt the amount of government funding was "excessive in his view" compared with what he originally envisioned for the commercial space program.
From SpaceX's Wikipedia page. The Falcon 1 which was expandable, nothing special and cost ~$100 million was privately funded, the rest relied on very generous subsidies. (Regardless of Musk's posturing and outright lies)
On the contrary, outlandish and expensive (like aerospace) moonshot bets with uncertain financial benefits often happen due to government help, even in times of "unlimited money" which are far from the norm. For starters, Tesla and SpaceX both only happened due to US government subsidies; Airbus, the by far best civilian airplane manufacturer today, only exists because of European government pressure and funding. Bombardier only managed to design the C-series with Canadian government funds. All recent developments in renewables were off the back of massive subsidies for their adoption.
Nothing special just the first privately funded rocket to make it to orbit. The first new rocket engine developed in the US for decades.
> (Regardless of Musk's posturing and outright lies)
Musk has always acknowledged and publicly called out for the COTS contracts as being incredibly important and even saving SpaceX.
> For starters, Tesla and SpaceX both only happened due to US government subsidies
Both of those are wrong. Tesla was almost 10 years in before they received a public loan, and the accepted it because it was a slightly better deal then they could have gotten privately but they had other funding options.
SpaceX Falcon 1 didn't happen because of the government. The governments contract did accelerate the Falcon 9 project however.
That would be Pegasus in 1990, though.
> The first new rocket engine developed in the US for decades.
There were plenty of engines developed in the US in that timeframe. Merlin in particular was a "spiritual successor" of the Fastrac, and Kestrel was implemented by the former Beal Aerospace engineers who worked on BA-2 before being hired by SpaceX.
Fair point.
> There were plenty of engines developed in the US in that timeframe.
Engines that actually flew or at least fully finished development. As far as I know there are none.
(It's launched from underneath an airplane.)
Spacex didn’t get money handed to them (unlike the corn and oil industries). It got orders to complete certain tasks that NASA thought it might do better than itself. Boeing and many others got these types of orders too. It explains nothing about why spacex succeeded.
This “Elon did spacex thanks to government” is a serious misrepresentation of what happened, and if it was true, why is the government funded EU space program struggling so much?
According to the WTO, those are overgenerous and the same as subsidies (check Airbus' cases against Boeing for illegal subsidies).
> It explains nothing about why spacex succeeded
Indeed, just money (even government money) is not sufficient. Never said it was, only that it is a flat out lie to say only private funding can innovate and that SpaceX/Tesla did it all on their own and Musk is a self-made man/billionaire.
Interesting that you have to point to Boeing because no such case exists for SpaceX.
And all of those contracts for SpaceX were cheaper then what Arianespace could have offered, or any US competitor.
You are just parating lies that ArianeGroup has been spouting for a decade because they have no technical way to compete. Its literally just false propaganda.
The reality is ArianeGroup has and had subsidies far, far, far larger then what SpaceX had. The total cost of the original Falcon 9 was maybe 400M and maybe 300M of that was part of the governments program to get private supply for ISS (that the Europeans handed over to the US and SpaceX to do because they couldn't do it cheaply).
In comparison Ariane 6 is costing the government 4 billion $ minimum, likely more.
If anybody has grounds to complain with the WTO its SpaceX.
SpaceX offers payloads to space at an order of magnitude lower price than its competitors.
Infinity times cheaper in the case of the CRS contract, where the competitor has to date delivered 0 kg of human mass to space
Also being in a position of 'up-and-comer' you definitely don't want to stay behind
But that being said, being reusable is great, but not a "be all, end all" objective. Sure, it can make launches cheaper, but not even Falcon 9 is reusable if they need to get to higher orbits (I believe the last F9H launch was fully expended)
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/option-...
The government is paying half. And that only for the specialized Moon Lander version. And it requires SpaceX to do a whole lot of things to.
Government pay nothing for the infrastructure SpaceX developed, for the Raptor engine they have developed over the last decade and so on.
This 80% number is complete nonsense.
If you want to make grand statements, at least do a minimal amount of research.
Edit: And in case you are talking about Falcon 9 the claim is even more wrong.
[Citation needed]
The only support NASA has given SpaceX for Starship is the HLS contract[1]. And that is a firm, fixed-price milestone based contract. NASA doesn't pay for any failures there.
---
1. Technically not true - there is a very minor fuel transfer demonstration contract. But that, too, only pays out on success.
It is nice that there are other players around this space (Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, etc...), but all of them are currently aiming at much smaller payloads (than Falcon 9), or sub-orbital payloads. Those are different spaces.
Of SpaceX's future competitors, almost all of them are aiming at larger payloads than Falcon 9.
* Vulcan: larger or smaller depending on how many SRBs
* New Glenn: larger
* Terran R: larger
* Neutron: smaller
However, reduction of taxes and government intervention is a common talking point in internal politics. All things considered, the US has done a better job than, let's say, Europe and Asia in keeping the government out of economic affairs. No sane American libertarian would say, though, that the government has been successful at being "lean with minimum taxes", however it's doing better than most other major countries.
Having lived abroad and personally knowing many people living across the world, I can say that keeping taxes "low-ish" and the market "free-ish" is rarely a topic of conversation in the mainstream political debate outside the US.
It's true that in europe lower taxes are not a topic. Nobody really expects to pay less taxes. They expect better services and guarantees.
Let's not pretend any administration got it right.
Just like the french administration had nothing to do with Pasteur creating the vaccine against rabies, the German administration has nothing to do Gutenberg creating the press and italian administration has nothing to do with Salvatore Sanfilippo creating redis.
At best, administrations from the past may be somewhat credited to foster an environment favorable for something like this to happen.
And even that is a stretch, given most administrations don't design anything, but rather react politically to whatever is the current situation.
Imagine a scenario where you start a company that solves a really difficult problem --taking years of hard work-- and then a VC who provided funding takes credit for the effort. Even worse, the news organizations give the VC credit for the results. That's what politicians do.
I feel that's a very important distinction. It's like taking credit for cooking a meal at a restaurant just because you paid for it.
The other side of it is what politicians do when things go wrong: They blame the people doing the work. Well, if they take credit for the success they should be equally liable for all failure. That, of course, will never happen.
Same thing with the economy. When things get better, they did it. When things are bad, the prior administration was at fault. They all do this, regardless of which political party they might align with. You know, just like three year old kids.
Well allowing and encouraging commercial space missions to unlock private sector was politically challenging and a huge win; not something you’d see in many other jurisdictions
That is exactly what they did and lots of politicians tried to prevent it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Orbital_Transportat...
We need something similar in the EU... and we definitely need less France in the EU.
Recently I learned that the opposition to the idea was so harsh that an FBI investigation lasting 4 years was even kicked off based on a theory about how Obama, Musk and NASA's deputy admin Lori Garver were conspiring with foreign powers to destroy the US space program.
Rocket Lab couldn’t even get enough funding in New Zealand, which is why they had to relocate to the USA.
[Edit not sure what it's got to do with Jacinda though..]