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Comment by evandale | Hacker News Reader

The haters don't want to admit space flight is really really hard and Elon, excuse my language, fucking nailed it.

Richard Branson is a billionaire who tried to do spaceflight long before Elon and Virgin Galactic hasn't launched anything useful (before SpaceX) as far as I know. If someone thinks a suborbital flight is impressive I highly recommend them to play KSP and find out how easy that is compared to getting into orbit.

edit: they have reached orbit; I stopped following Virgin after it became clear they can't do the job https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LauncherOne

So many people want to erroneously believe Elon is some child with the mental capacity of a 3 year old with access to billions of dollars because they don't want to like him or give him credit for anything.

It takes more than a pile of money to run a successful space program and how nobody can see that by now is beyond me.

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> So many people want to erroneously believe Elon is some child with the mental capacity of a 3 year old with access to billions of dollars because they don't want to like him or give him credit for anything.

I think the contrast between Musk's SpaceX and Twitter experiences is largely down to whether the organization grew up around Musk. SpaceX has an immune system built up for the nutty stuff, from Gwynne Shotwell on down. Twitter got thrown into the deep end with zero staff powerful enough or with the experience to do the post-idea cleanup work.

It's a huge mistake to say "Elon had nothing to do with SpaceX's success". It's also a huge mistake to say "SpaceX's success means Musk's Twitter plans are good".

I think saying that SpaceX is somehow "containing" the nutty stuff in a way that Twitter is not isn't all that accurate.

SpaceX does tons of nutty stuff, some of it turns out to be good, and that's how they have their 10+ year technology lead on most of the world. In the early days this was stuff like using shears to roughly trim an engine bell in the field.

Nowadays it's stuff like attempting to catch rockets with giant arms to avoid putting landing legs on them, stacking satellites held together with a simple bar and just spinning to release, replacing the concrete underneath the launch pad with a giant water cooled steel plate to deal with the effect of the engine exhaust and so on.

SpaceX as an organization encourages some amount of nutty creativity since, especially in aerospace, a lot of dumb sounding but potentially good ideas tend to get shot down because the old guys are used to doing things a certain way.

There's a vast spectrum of nuttiness available. I don't think you see SpaceX successful without the Gwynne Shotwell sort of characters involved; I think Twitter lacks such a role.

Ah yes, I agree on that. I think even Elon kind of admitted how she was important for that.

IIRC when FH had turned out to be harder than expected and not really all that useful due to F9's increased performance, Elon had wanted to cancel it, but Gwynne insisted that it stay because they had already sold it to customers and dropping projects like that would be bad for business.

After watching him operate Twitter, it seems that he's not a good businessman or technical contributor. What he says about programming and his approach to engineering speaks of unearned confidence, and he uses the same tone to talk about aeronautical engineering, leading me to believe he doesn't know what he's talking about.

From the outside, it would seem that he's just good at PR, for his companies and for himself. Despite promoting homophobia, anti-vax, anti-labor garbage, he still manages to be the topic of conversation across the political and cultural spectrum. He's good at staying in the news cycle, even if it involves lighting tens of billions of dollars of brand equity on fire and using a since letter unmodified from a common font as a logo.

You are mixing up Virigin Galactic and Virgin Orbit. One is suborbital tourism, the other is sat launch. VO is bankroupt. VG has raised so much money from clueless investors that they are not quite bankroupt yet.

My only point was it takes more than a billionaire with a dream to create a space program. VG is a complete failure from a getting into space perspective, I don't care how much money investors have given to them. They don't have anything unique or worth mentioning.

How Branson shuffles money around between VG and VO is irrelevant if the goal is getting into space and the name of the company matters even less.

Technically what Virgin Galactic has is very unique. It's uniquely suited to killing people even moreso than the Space Shuttle.

It's insane that they insist on and advertise being manually controlled by humans as a selling point.

It's quite sad to see the public perception of spaceflight getting ruined by making sure that everybody's first association upon hearing the name of the most awesome rocket company is "Spacetwitter".

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