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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

A Musk vibe on a personal level, but whereas OceanGate was a small business seemingly quite directly run by Rush, SpaceX is a large business with plenty of people who know better.

However SpaceX have had certification for human spaceflight from the necessary agencies, have a strong safety record – comparable to competitors – and seemingly have a development process that is producing better hardware than Boeing at this point (as seen in the Dragon vs Starliner debacle). That's all radically different in approach to OceanGate.

While Musk and SpaceX in general sound like they're pushing the "move fast and break things" mantra I think they're more nuanced than that. It's more: move fast while things don't matter, so we can gather data and experience for when things do matter. This isn't much of a defence of Musk mind you, more of the team at SpaceX and the wider aerospace community.

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SpaceX seems to be doing everything right. Their safety and performance record speaks for itself. I also hear that Musk is mostly a figurehead for a very well-run company.

Tesla, however, is not doing everything right. Their self-driving and collision mitigation software is janky, causing deaths, and shoudln't be used on public roads until it is in a better state. Musk's insistence on using computer vision only reminds me a lot of Rush's stance on mixing materials. No one else agrees with either on this, and both made these decisions to save money.

Overall, however, Tesla cars are still pretty safe. The cars themselves are at the top of safety ratings. The hardware part of their cars from a safety perspective is a polar opposite of what Rush was doing. Their software is the weak point right now -- and probably not that far behind most car companies.

I am a big critic of Musk, but I don't think he'd ever have a company involved with such poor hardware design and engineering like Rush was. SpaceX does amazing work. Tesla can fix their software issues if they map their ambitions to reality better.

My comment is a bit all over the place, but Musk is ultimately a lot more experienced and responsbile than Rush.

I appreciate SpaceX's mission and purpose as much as anyone, but definitely they do not have a perfect track record either, with the recent environmental disaster accompanying the 4/20 launch. Somehow it was decided to launch on an underdeveloped platform which strew debris and dust far in excess of what could be considered "responsible engineering" considering what we've known since the Saturn V. Having said that, I'd ride in a SpaceX vehicle while I have yet to ride in a Tesla, and for many of the same reasons.

> the recent environmental disaster accompanying the 4/20 launch

"Environmental disaster"? A bit overdramatic, isn't it? The amount of "debris and dust" was absolutely minuscule compared to regular human activity in a developed country like the US.

We do try to confine those activities to industrial zones and not in and around protected environments, and we do try and mitigate the worst effects where we can. I personally thought their decision to launch without a proper launch pad was asinine before it happened, and my opinion was not changed for the better by the outcome.

The launch pad is as much in development as the vehicle itself, so it's not at all clear what is "a proper launch pad" for this vehicle. And even once it's clear what it is, I've even seen some estimates that building one on that site may take years for reasons of local geology. Meanwhile they need to perform launch tests, so I'm not sure what else than MVP they're supposed to use. Clearly waiting a few years is not an option in a chicken-and-egg situation.

> Somehow it was decided to launch on an underdeveloped platform which strew debris and dust

unless something comes out in discovery, they didn't know it was going to do that. and they had a reasonable basis for that belief, in the form of the static fire tests.

there are no whistleblowers popping up. i haven't even seen any youtubers popping up with "i told you so!" claims based on all of the footage that was available of the launch site beforehand.

> considering what we've known since the Saturn V.

the saturn V launch facility is an absolutely massive pile of earthworks; it's perfectly reasonable to try and engineer something smaller than that when you want to build a couple dozen of them.

You’re right that Tesla is in a different place, it’s why I didn’t mention them. I wonder if it’s to do with strong leadership from people like Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX (who seems amazing from everything I’ve seen) and perhaps a lack of that at Tesla allowing more muskiness to get through.

Tesla’s safety standards do seem to be high in tests, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is primarily because safety tests for cars are a well understood part of car marketing, rather than because Musk fundamentally believes Tesla should make the safest cars.

Musk certainly likes to talk about how safe Teslas are, so it's at least a marketing point. But he also drives Teslas himself, so he has a vested interest in them being safe. If you are the CEO of GM, you may exclusively drive Catalliacs and not care deeply about Chevy safety (beyond what the market demands, the market seems to demand more of safety from certain brands and segments than others).

Tesla's are also all unibodies, which are safer than body-on-frame. Body-on-frame is mostly used in legacy trucks and SUVs. The Big 3 sell a lot of body-on-frame trucks and SUVs because it is older, higher margin tech. You also need to do a lot of extra work to get to the same level of safety as a unibody.

Beyond that, EVs in general are safer because they have such a low center of gravity. The risk of a rollover in a Tesla is low.

>But he also drives Teslas himself, so he has a vested interest in them being safe

You say this in the comment section of an article about the death of a CEO in his own craft because he ignored safety warnings.

"Hoist by his own petard" isn't even a new saying.

When Musk starts ranting about not hiring 50 year old white guys but instead hiring younger people to encourage innovation, I'll be concerned about his logical reasoning capabilities. Thankfully he hasn't gone anywhere near that kind of batshit crazy rhetoric and photos of Tesla and SpaceX employees show a wide spread of folks.

It's not uncommon for rich guys to do things that are dangerous for others. They usually don't do dangerous things to themselves. In that sense, Rush was a true believer in his design.

> SpaceX is a large business with plenty of people who know better

Including the President and COO of SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell, an extremely qualified aerospace engineer who has run SpaceX for the past 15 years. She's been in the space industry since 1988, she knows what she's doing.

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