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Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

> I don't know why this topic polarizes people to such an extreme degree.

Because some people are so rabidly anti-Elon that they would rather nail the feet of the human race to the ground than allow that "bad man" to succeed at taking us to the stars.

There were several people here on HN screeching that a few lumps of concrete strewn on a beach is an ecological disaster of unfathomable proportions.

Don't forget about the astronomers complaining about the global internet being provided by Starlink affecting their precious telescopes, while ignoring the minor detail that Starship will be able to launch a JWST-sized telescope weekly if they want to get above the atmosphere.

We can't have the future because it slightly inconveniences the present and ruffles the feathers of developers fired from Twitter.

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> would rather nail the feet of the human race to the ground than allow that "bad man" to succeed at taking us to the stars.

This type of false equivalence and extreme hyperbole is why it polarizes people. The preferred terms of the conversation are so insane as to invite that specific outcome.

> affecting their precious telescopes

You also seem to feel entitled to adopt the position of a rank bully. Where does this entitlement come from? While reflecting on that, you might find a more charitable and honest answer as to the sources of polarization on this topic.

> We can't have the future because it slightly inconveniences the present and ruffles the feathers of developers fired from Twitter.

We'll have the future with or without Space X. This type of angry hype and blind argumentation simply underscore the above points.

Meaningful progress in space exploration and rocketry, prior to SpaceX, was negligible. There was no real motivation to try to lower prices, let alone meaningfully advance technologies, for aerospace companies headed by MBAs and motivated exclusively by profit, all with a defacto monopoly in launches. And there's every reason to think that without SpaceX we would still be on that trajectory.

As for the future... SpaceX has certainly inspired a large number of companies looking to try to emulate it success, but none have really managed to achieve anything comparable to increasingly dated SpaceX tech at this point, let alone where SpaceX is taking us with technologies like the Starship. So with this I think there's also a reasonable fear that without SpaceX we'd relapse back into the past since 1972, in terms of space progress - which is to say near zero.

One really cannot overstate the impact that SpaceX has had on space in the past, is continuing to have on space in the present, and will almost certainly continue to have in the future. That people want SpaceX to fail, and imperil all of this, just because they don't like somebody they don't even know, is such a terrible reflection on the state and motivations of society today.

Space exploration, sending vehicles to asteroids and meteors, Mars...., did just fine without SpaceX. Maybe SpaceX made the launches for those a tad cheaper, but launch costs are far from the most important cost factor for those missions.

Which leaves rockertry. Reusable rockets are quite an achievement, sure. So far the real world impact is limited to satellite internet, which is not available globally yet.

Starship still has to be launched successfully to count as rocketry advancement.

Launch costs are absolutely an important factor that makes everything space-related extremely expensive. When it costs $1B to launch something, you have to make damn sure you're not launching a dud. That, in turn, makes building the thing even more expensive because you need triple and quadruple redundancies on everything, and everything needs to be tested a bazillion times.

When a launch is "only" $50M, you can get away with much fewer redundancies, less testing making the thing you launch much cheaper.

And yeah, the first large-scale change we've seen from it is vastly better / cheaper satellite internet, but there will be others. Axiom space is a good example; a private company sending astronauts on missions.

There's also the issue that the cheaper something gets, the more potential it has for uses that simply didn't exist before. Take airflight. Imagine planes/flights were about 2 orders of magnitude more expensive than they are today. So many things we take for granted in society would simply no longer exist. Air shipping - gone, trans-Atlantic vacations - gone (or spend a month both ways on a ship), even military air forces would probably no longer exist - kind of weird when a new jet starts costing in the ballpark of an aircraft carrier.

Try to imagine society without affordable airflight. It'd be so different that it's literally difficult to even begin to imagine all of the implications. And the same thing will be true of affordable spaceflight, but to a far greater scale. One of the most simplistic and "boring" examples of this would be material scarcity - gone. There are asteroids idling around, in reachable distance, with metals and other elements amounting to trillions of dollars on value. Of course the first mega-load coming back will completely crash the market, but that's entirely the point. What we view as scarce no longer will be, thanks simply to lowering the cost of spaceflight. Get it low enough and you could even conceivably create a world where various highly polluting industries could simply be off-planeted, with the resultant products being shipped back.

And I'm actively avoiding anything remotely sci-fi. These are the boring, almost certain things, and they alone already are making the future look utterly alien, based on nothing but cheaper spaceflight.

Try to take yourself back to 1960. No human has ever once been in orbit. In fact it was only 3 years ago that we put the first object into orbit. Over the next 2 years we'd finally put a man in orbit. 7 years later we'd be walking on the Moon. A year later - 1970, we had the first spacecraft soft-land on another planet. And the planet it landed on was Venus! [1] The voyager probes would be launched in 1977, and eventually make their way outside the solar system after doing a pinball effect of gravity assists around the solar system.

Where do you see society in 50 years?

That state-of-the-art is still sending rovers to Mars and hoping to achieve a fly-by of the Moon is nothing short of a complete and catastrophic failure in space. People often blame the money, that's not it. The Apollo program, in 2022 dollars, cost about $16 billion a year - starting from absolutely 0 knowledge. NASA's had at least that level of annual funding for the past 60 years. The thing, these great futures we all imagine don't create themselves. Without people, the sort of people who rarely emerge in a society, pushing humanity forward in any given direction, the future isn't going to be any better than the present, and there's every reason to think it may even be worse.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera_7

>>We'll have the future with or without Space X. This type of angry hype and blind argumentation simply underscore the above points.

It's not hype. The progress made by SpaceX is demonstrable and profound.

Do you want the future of permanent settles on other celestial bodies in 200 years, or within our lifetimes? Because the latter will almost certainly require SpaceX achieving its long-term goals.

The grievances raised against both Musk and SpaceX are petty next to what humanity stands to gain if SpaceX is successful.

Totally true that their progress is demonstrable and profound. It's just that the GP did such a dismal job expressing it. That's where the "angry hype" and "blind argumentation" bit came from.

Do you have to put "bad man" in quotes? It's possible to respect his achievements without lionizing the person

He's legit terrible as a person, someone who spends a significant amount of his time dedicated to trolling is not someone we should look up to

He is absolutely not a terrible person. Trolling overly sensitive and authoritarian political-establishment followers doesn't make someone "terrible".

He acts out his irrational fears and amplifying it because of his wealth and social media.

But he gets a special pass from his little cult for being homophobic and having racist overtones.

He has never said anything homophobic or racist, but the left-wing cult does label anyone who doesn't subscribe to all of their ideological tenets as such.

A person trolling is a person with dark humor. I like persons with dark humor. These persons tend to be warm and humane as well. Dark humor comes from experiencing life kicking you in the guts early enough, so that you can start to joke about it. It's all a joke, but make the best out of it.

Dark humor and trolling are a false equivalence; while both are symptoms of coping mechanisms, dark humor alone doesn't inflict damage. Trolling does, by actively wasting the attention of other people. That's it. There is nothing romantic about it.

Anyone who doesn't value the attention of their fellow humans is either underdeveloped or evil.

One man's biting social commentary is another man's trolling.

> A person trolling is a person with dark humor.

Trolling is maximizing for being obnoxious

Dark humor is great, being obnoxious is not

The difference between dark humor and trolling is that trolling punches down. I still enjoy some dark humor but my taste for trolling has massively decreased since I grew out of being an angsty self-hating teenage boy who thought misanthropy made me smarter.

Yeah, no, trolls don't tend to be warm and humane. Trolling is the opposite of that actually. And it usually stems from cowardice because sincerity makes you vulnerable and that takes courage.

Nope, that's just you redefining dark-humor/trolling in accordance with a left-wing preoccupation—which is to defend less powerful groups and attack more powerful ones.

He's a narcissist who also happens to be a right wing extremist though. And even if it was all a joke, through his position he has a huge influence on politics and a lot of people and it would be extremely irresponsible to make such jokes.

However, no matter how much I dislike the person I do appreciate the achievements at PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX in which he took part.

His trolling is directed at the ideological extremism you exhibit, where you smear anyone who criticizes the left-wing establishment's positions as a "right wing extremist".

This intolerance to dissent was responsible for billions of innocent people being imprisoned in their homes during the COVID pandemic

So sharing right wing fake news articles about Paul pelosi or defending white supremacists running amok doesn't count as right wing extremist anymore? I must've taken the wrong turn somewhere in the past.

No one is perfect nor should be expected to be. By being allowed to share the link, people were able to correct him, and he and the general public, became more knowledgeable as a result.

People being free to share wrong ideas has social value.

And no, sharing a false or premature report is not extremism. Demanding censorship is.

I mean, he deleted the tweet after it was shown that the article it shared was without merit. What else do you want?

> Because some people are so rabidly anti-Elon that they would rather nail the feet of the human race to the ground than allow that "bad man" to succeed at taking us to the stars.

There are good reasons people are anti-Elon, and I don't need to list them here now. Technological advancement is nice, and it can be a good thing that one "eccentric" billionaire puts a lot of money into this. But there are consequences, and it's good that there are people who are critical of this. It's ok that people like Musk are scrutinized. In my opinion, there's way more room for scrutinity by mainstream media instead of them instead of sucking up every word he says.

Anti-Musk people seldom list the reasons why they're anti-Musk because they are not reasonable reasons and they know it.

And yes it is okay for Musk to be criticized. Putting billionaires up on a pedestal is almost as annoying as vilifying them for being successful.

Is launch capacity the thing that holds back more space-based telescopes, and are those telescopes going to have the same availability to researchers as terrestrial ones?

If either answer is no, then the brag about capacity isn’t really relevant.

> Is launch capacity the thing that holds back more space-based telescopes

Everything holds back more space-based telescopes - launch capacity, manufacturing capacity, research ideas. But the cheaper launching becomes, the more funding can be devoted to other parts (although something like Amdahl's law will apply), and may even trigger a virtuous cycle where cheaper launches mean you can get away with more standardised, less hardened hardware, which in is then lighter and can be launched more easily, and...

> are those telescopes going to have the same availability to researchers as terrestrial ones?

No, of course not, space telescopes are massively oversubscribed and difficult for even superstar researchers to get time on. That's exactly why we want to launch more of them.

Right so basically “we’ll maybe have more space telescopes someday” is not actually relevant to “you are effectively destroying terrestrial telescopes today.”

You managed to get exactly the opposite conclusion from what the parent said. This exchange should be on the wikipedia page for "confirmation bias". Funny af, honestly.

Just for fun: what exactly could the parent have said to change your mind? Because if the answer is "nothing", then you're a rock.

Sure: SpaceX projects are putting up more space-based telescope capacity than they’re removing from terrestrial capacity, with either no variation or a good variation in the types of capacity (i.e. wavelengths).

It’s actually super straightforward.

The response seems “opposite” what was said because if you read between the lines, the whole comment was about hypothetical future improvements to the cost dynamics.

But... cost dynamics are about future movements. And SpaceX is an infrastructure company.

It's perfectly fair to say that constructing a road to a remote community will mean better ... everything ... for that community, but you're blaming them for not also building a hospital and a school at the same time as the road.

I mean, yeah, technically it's possible that we lose current capacity and we never get enough space capacity to make up for it but if you argue for this particular outcome, I think it's rather improbable. The parent made a very good point: cheaper and better lift to orbit means better ... everything. It would mean you have cost and capacity improvements for the whole chain, and yet nobody bothers to use this for JWST successors. That's a very thin line of probability you'd be arguing for.

No, it’s more like while building a road, they tore down a rudimentary hospital and school and told people “don’t worry, the road will hopefully make it cheaper to build a new, better hospital and school some day!”

And no, the condition doesn’t need to be that nobody bothers to use it, it’s that it doesn’t get used at such a scale on a timeframe people care about to replace the infrastructure it destroyed.

Yes? I mean, imagining a hospital in a place without a road, it must be a pretty rough place. Having a road allows for ambulances, drives to a regional center and so on. I'd take the trade. And "tore down" is a bit of an exageration.

When you can design space telescopes to be heavier, and they don't cost as much to launch, then you can design them cheaper. If one fails then you can more easily replace it. Initial designs of the James Webb began in 1996 and it didn't launch until 2021 and cost $10 billion. If they could use more off the shelf parts and didn't have so many design constraints it would have been quicker and cheaper.

None of which is relevant to astronomers who depend on terrestrial telescopes to do their work today, so it’s not really a meaningful response to their complaints.

It's relevant because they wouldn't be relying on terrestrial telescopes in the first place if they had access to space telescopes.

Why do they not have access to space telescopes? because they are currently extremely expensive to build and launch. Cheaper launches could also indirectly make the build cost a lot cheaper. It would allow them to iterate the design and send more units of the same models/design and reduce the design/research cost per unit.

> Cheaper launches could also indirectly make the build cost a lot cheaper.

This seems very handwavy. It appears space telescopes are actually more expensive because space telescopes are really expensive, not because it’s hard to move them to space.

Yes better/cheaper launches would reduce the risk, but that risk is 100% baked into the design and cost of the launch. There’s nothing the payload can do to mitigate the risk of the rocket failing, so there’s no reason to think x% of the telescope’s cost is actually due to the risk of the launch itself.

When you tell a team of scientist that budget only allows for a single launch in the next three decades, the cost of that telescope will inevitably be higher because they will want to optimize it and put as many instruments as possible. They will try to get as much science per kg as possible and verify a million times that nothing could ever fail. If deep space payload was a "cheap" commodity and the team designing the JWST were told they get to send 15 units instead of one, it would have been a much different situation.

Why would they only have a single launch for the next three decades?

They could take 10% of the JWST budget (not including launch) and buy back 6+ launches. Seems to me launches are not super relevant.

I'm so sick of people acting like Starlink is the end of terrestrial telescopes. Fucking insane. Actually inform yourself. A very low number of terrestrial telescope sometimes lose a slight amount of information. Terrestrial astronomy is fine and will continue to be fine.

How would you recommend informing oneself? From all the searching I’ve done and the conversations I’ve had, it’s basically: space agencies and astronomy groups are saying this project (and similar) will end up destroying billions of dollars of equipment, discourage further investment, create a ton of space debris, etc etc, then on the other side mostly people who get emotional about defending every Musk project and make arguments like “that’s okay because we’ll hopefully put up space telescopes in the future that will somehow satisfy the same demand for telescope time.”

I am not an expert at all but that at first blush that seems like bullshit. I’m 100% open to sources of info I should check out on this though.

Edit: FWIW another more believable argument than hypothetical future capacity satisfying the same demand would be “global internet is more important than terrestrial astronomy.” Not quite ready to say I agree with it but it seems very compelling!

There are presentations about this from astronomers and SpaceX. Where they present their issues and SpaceX presents what they doing about it. These are public and can be found. I don't remember where but they were youtube videos for different conferences. I can try to find a video when I have more time.

I have not heard a single one claim that it will 'destroying billions of dollars of equipment'. And most don't want to stop further space craft.

What they do call for is regulation about these things in general. SpaceX is basically doing them a favor by modifying their sats, there is no legal obligation.

Here’s a single $680MM observatory that looks pretty pissed and is struggling to figure out how they’ll deal with it. Granted probably won’t drive the value to zero, but it probably will devalue the project quite substantially, from my read.

https://www.lsst.org/content/lsst-statement-regarding-increa...

And I’m not arguing for stopping further spacecraft either.

“Hey they don’t even legally need to mitigate their externalities!” is usually a good sign of “things that need regulation.”

As I said, I was not arguing about regulation being bad. My point was its completely false to say that earth based astronomy is over. A minority of telescopes are not effected or slightly effected. But even small effects now will grow if you imagine sats going exponential.

The very broad survey orient visible telescopes are most effected of course.

Regulation both for visibility and for debris is warranted. But getting their by streaming 'earth astronomy is over and Kessler syndrome' is pretty counter-productive. If we can get away from that kind of language maybe we can actually make reasonable progress on these questions.

Unfortunately I can not find the series of lectures from astronomers and SpaceX. That had really go information. But there is an active working group somewhere that is meeting regularly that can probably be found somewhere.

I don’t think I (or anyone I’ve seen in this thread) has said “earth astronomy is over” or anything similar.

They’ve said: this incurs a huge negative externality on the astronomy community.

The response was: it doesn’t matter because Starship will send up space telescopes at some point hopefully (TBD how long it’ll take, if ever, for them to reach the same availability as extant terrestrial telescopes)

That is the counterproductive response.

It would, however, be foolish to assume that Starlink will be the only constellation of low orbit satellites.

Absolutely launch capacity is holding back more space-based telescopes. More telescopes means more availability to researchers.

Compare the cost of the payload and the launch vehicle. Those aren't even comparable.

Worst case estimate for a single Ariane 5: 200 million €.

Average launch cost for Space X: 50 million € (poorly researched I know)

The cost of the James Webb space telescope?

50 worst case Ariane 5 launches or 200 Space X launches.

I don't think the launch vehicle matters here.

A big part of the high cost of the project is that they know they only get one and they want to get the most bang per kg of payload.

Most of the cost was research, development and testing of new technologies. Building 10x JWST would not cost 10x what we paid for a single telescope. A single launch also means everything has to be perfect, there is no prototype in space, no second try and no learning from mistakes.

The project would also probably have made drastically different design and management decisions if they knew in advance they were sending >5 units instead of one.

Wouldn’t most of that cost be baked into the launch rather than the payload though?

Great way to approach the problem. As someone else mentioned, cheaper launches might adjust the overall risk/cost dynamics in the long run but yeah, this data point makes that seem like a stretch.

Sure, in the same way that Ferrari doubling its production means more people can get their kids to school conveniently.

Isn't Starship the cheap option for orbital launch?

But the whole point is if you ruin thousands of terrestrial telescopes used (successfully) by thousands of researchers, and in exchange you get a promise of one day maybe having tons of orbital telescopes, you aren’t really addressing the concern.

Come on, you are arguing in such bad faith its ridiculous. Everyone knows space based telescopes are orders of magnitude better, and will be better for research than thousands of earth based telescopes.

Even the researches, unless very selfish, should know that ideally you want many more very powerful space based telescopes if you actually want to do research and not just marvel at the stars from your patio.

We obviously want larger launch capacity in the long run. It's not even a question. Falcon 9 is already the most successful rocket ever on almost all stats of usefulness, why shouldn't we have at least SOME faith that spacex will be able to build starship and use it?

> Everyone knows space based telescopes are orders of magnitude better, and will be better for research than thousands of earth based telescopes

Real terrestrial telescopes are better than hypothetical space-based ones.

And I didn’t say we don’t want more capacity nor that Falcon 9 isn’t the most successful rocket ever, nor that I don’t have faith in SpaceX’s ability to create Starship, nor that Starship won’t eventually add space-based telescopes.

I said that none of that actually addresses the current concerns of people who currently need to do their work, as GP implied their complaints are totally irrelevant because “someday we’ll launch more.”

It's a steam-liner in an age of sailing galleons, hopefully it will make an orbital ring (analogous to budget airlines) affordable.

In this case, Starship is really more akin to a bus than a sports car

I don't think I understand the analogy.

Adding capacity at the tippy top of the market, while destroying capacity at the much larger middle/bottom of the market, is very unlikely to be net positive.

Gotcha, a couple points:

- Starlink interferes with terrestrial telescopy much less than the baseline issues such as weather, atmosphere, etc.

- SpaceX has already done great work in ameliorating these issues anyway with better non-reflective coatings and design.

- Telescopes in space are orders of magnitude more useful than terrestrial ones, so it would not be a surprising net positive at all.

- Even if the previous point weren't true, telescopes are not really equivalent to taking kids to school. One is a necessity, the other is a nice to have. The truth is that most of the low-hanging astronomical fruit that can be gleaned from the "middle/bottom of the market" has already been picked anyway. Almost all new/significant astronomical discoveries/research are happening with space-based telescopes for exactly this reason. People aren't unraveling the secrets of the universe with a telescope in their backyard anymore.

- This entire situation has really nothing to do with Starship being a good thing. You can argue that Starlink is a net negative (for all the above reasons this seems hard to justify in practice), but that argument is orthogonal to whether or not Starship is good. This isn't really your fault because the parent comment is the one that initially conflated the two, but I felt this point should be made.

These seem like good points! I personally don’t have a super strong idea of how destructive Starlink is, so totally open to the idea that “the astronomers don’t know what they’re talking about.” Just that’s a very different argument than “astronomers should shut up because some day we hope to put up telescopes they’ll probably never be able to use,” which is basically GP’s argument.

In any case the degree of interference thing isn’t too comforting since I would assume these issues are additive to one another.

Thank you for the good counterpoints! Would love to hear an astronomer’s take on whether the terrestrial-hanging-fruit has been picked, so to speak. It would not surprise me for sure.

You could probably do a swarm type of telescope. I thought the limiting factor with JWST was expertise.

Polarization is characterized by people being driven to opposite extremes. That fact that you explain it exclusively in reference to just one of the extremes tells me you occupy the other.

Non-polarization is a thing. So is circular.

Staying put is also polarizing.

I think this is only complicated because people aren’t able to hold competing thoughts in their heads.

There was a man who was massively effective in getting multiple once-in—a-generation revolutionary companies of the ground by sheer grind and lots of luck (yes..both). We should thank that man of yore.

But that man is now a convenient stooge for the right wing and a pointless edgelord whiling away his money on pointless projects.

Both of these can be true. It’s okay.

Here’s to hoping Tesla, SpaceX and all his other world changing companies succeed inspite of him and let him cement his complicated legacy.

Go Starship Super Heavy!!

PS: Shoutout to Gwynne Shotwell for being a massively effective administrator for this incredible rocketship of a company.

> Shoutout to Gwynne Shotwell

She’s the low key (on this forum anyway) hero of human space flight in this decade. Absolute unit.

Unfortunately, many times people who do great things turn out to be awful people, or have some really problematic views. Henry Ford revolutionized automobile manufacturing with the assembly line, for instance, but was also infamous for being horribly racist and anti-Semitic. Thomas Edison invented or helped facilitate the invention of many things (useful lightbulb with carbon filament, movie projector, etc.), but was generally known as having a lousy personality and suing everyone for IP stuff, resulting in the movie industry moving to California to get away from him.

Can you imagine what things would have been like in Ford's time if he had the internet and Twitter to spread his views?

There's another duality of thought: I want SpaceX and Tesla to succeed. Regardless of my feelings about him, I acknowledge that Elon was instrumental in sparking the shift to EVs. Also, that having a dictator with a vision can allow companies to do audacious things that would normally die in committees (like reusable rockets, etc...)

That said, I have nothing but contempt for the man and am petty enough to have schadenfreude in any of his personal comeuppance.

I have enjoyed watching a new launch provider emerge, EVs become a real thing, and him being forced to buy Twitter.

Watching him be forced to buy Twitter was kinda funny at the time, but it's turned into a huge disappointment. I was really hoping to see the whole site completely implode, and then go out of business, and it hasn't happened yet. The world would be better off without Twitter (now "X"... ugh).

Give it time -- it needs advertisers to survive and they appear to be fleeing.

I believe in "free speech" but also think that absolutism in that regard is horseshit.

Radio telescopes often are much larger than JWST and/or are interferometric arrays, which in either case remain impractical to deploy to orbit.

They should be building those things on the far side of the Moon instead. Radio telescopes suffer from interference from terrestrial radio sources, which is why they locate them in the middle of nowhere, West Virginia, but even that doesn't fully isolate them. Putting them on the far side of the Moon would (at least for a while) completely eliminate problems with terrestrial interference, plus give humanity a good reason to back to the Moon and build some serious infrastructure there, and perhaps also distract us from fighting with each other so much. It would also give many engineers something much more important and useful to work on than ad-ware.

Ah yes, the classic engineering solution of "just put it on the far side of the moon". Easy!

Landing the Apollo missions on the moon wasn't easy at all, but led to huge improvements in technology. The same can be true here.

Well safety comes first - this let's try it in production and see if it works for software - so a portion of youtube barfs - nobody harmed except missing their favourite cat vidoes.

The same with the FDA - we don't want a repeat of Thalidomide babies do we ???.

Oh those silly ground-based astronomers. Just give 'em a JWST so they stop yapping! Maybe you should tag along with the next Starship so I don't have to read garbage comments like this anymore.

> Don't forget about the astronomers complaining about the global internet being provided by Starlink affecting their precious telescopes, while ignoring the minor detail that Starship will be able to launch a JWST-sized telescope weekly if they want to get above the atmosphere.

Here comes elon zealot just copy and pasting empty claims and ignoring the actual facts we have. The lack of accountability is just staggering. And the only defense is a cave man ad hominem - oh they are just butt hurt anti-elons.

Elon Musk has a long list of bogus claims, outright lies and now currently on trail for fraud. His shtick is to make semi-revolutionary clam in X years, and before people start asking about that claim in near future he is making new claims about something completely new.

Thats why people are calling him out on his BS claims. So lets have a look:

The re-usability claims are all bogus, a make believe at best. For one, Starship is basically an early prototype rocket. Two, falcon 5 - a much simpler design - has current re-usability window at one month (as far as i remember). How do you go into weekly launches...

Empty claims of Elon Musk that they will work out the kinks are akin to Elisabeth Holmes claims. Or self driving tesla Next Year(tm), or underground tunnels, or hypelink, or amazing AI robot buttler all next year (tm).

Not to mention pretty strong evidence for Kessler Syndrome is already happening. And polluting orbit with starlinks are not helping.

global internet being provided by Starlink - you mean a toy for rich. Right? Cuz even tough it somewhat affordable now, for starlink to actually make money need and will cost way more.

Tesla has replaced two million gasoline cars with electric cars, and given its current growth rate, and Musk's long standing plan to release progressively more affordable cars, this number will likely be massively larger in a few years.

Beyond Tesla's own sales, its success has sparked massive investment by other carmakers to push their electric vehicle manufacturing timetables forward. All told, Tesla has had a massive impact in pushing the world to replace gasoline vehicles with electric ones.

SpaceX, for its part, is responsible for reducing the cost of launching material to orbit ten fold, with another 100 fold reduction possible with StarShip. The spike at the end of this graph is almost solely due to SpaceX:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-...

Whatever is motivating this narrative you've adopted about Musk, it isn't the pursuit of truth.

> than allow that "bad man" to succeed at taking us to the stars

lmao, we managed to fuck up our very own perfect planet in 200 years of industrial revolution and the plan is to go transform a dead rock into earth

Elon or others I'll still find it stupid, this isn't minecraft

> We can't have the future because it slightly inconveniences the present

It's more like the present is (more than) slightly inconveniencing our future, and ego maniacs like Musk are a big part of the problem

lmao, it was never "the plan to" fix Earth. Nobody ever claimed it's going to be "transformed to Earth" anytime soon, too.

It's the plan to protect humanity (as in the genus) from extinction level events such as asteroids, mega-volcano eruptions or global wars. As a nice side effect, the technologies developed to transform Mars would be the same technologies that would help fix Earth.

> It's the plan to protect humanity (as in the genus) from extinction level events such as asteroids, mega-volcano eruptions or global wars.

That's a nice thought but it's 100% sci-fi, we can't act as if A will cause B because neither A nor B are certain. What if this race for survival is exactly the thing that will cause our end ?

> the technologies developed to transform Mars would be the same technologies that would help fix Earth.

Except it's literally the opposite... we need a lot of co2 on mars to make it habitable

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/mars-terraforming-not-poss...

> That's a nice thought but it's 100% sci-fi, we can't act as if A will cause B because neither A nor B are certain.

Sorry but I don't follow. We need to act because it's a real possibility, even though it's uncertain.

> What if this race for survival is exactly the thing that will cause our end ?

... "we can't act as if A will cause B because neither A nor B are certain."

Why would it cause our end?

> Except it's literally the opposite... we need a lot of co2 on mars to make it habitable

Sure, but that's not the only thing you need to do there. You also need to make fuel - out of CO2 that's already there.

>> I don't know why this topic polarizes people to such an extreme degree.

> Because some people are so rabidly anti-Elon

You know, polarization takes at least two poles. If some people are rabidly anti-Elon, so some people are rabidly pro-Elon.

> Don't forget about the astronomers complaining about the global internet being provided by Starlink

They do not complain about the global internet. They have nothing against the global internet per se. They complain about satellites. There are no fundamental physical laws stating that the global internet comes with littering the sky with thousands of bright satellites. They can be less bright at least, or probably one can use some military expertise on making flying objects undetectable by any means. Then come costs/benefits analysis and the question becomes too difficult for an armchair experts to grasp. So they instead prefer to construct a strawman they feel comfortable to fight.

When you allow yourself to use such a rhetoric devices, you shouldn't be surprised when the other side becomes polarized. They reciprocate and then you feel the right or even an obligation to throw some more shit into your discussion, and then you have no chance for a meaningful discussion.

> We can't have the future because it slightly inconveniences the present and ruffles the feathers of developers fired from Twitter.

Or because he constantly stomps on experienced engineers with stupid ideas and puts the whole thing at risk. Literally EVERYONE said the cement base was a stupid idea and yet Elon had to trump his own experts.

Every time he forces his idiotic ideas on his engineers he puts the future of the whole business at risk. At least he’s been so distracted by the Twitter debacle the adults have been able to make decisions without having to cater to his ego and make him think the idea was his.

I can literally watch SpaceX fire rockets into space 3-4x a month from my backyard.

Name one other company, person, or even a country that can and is willing to do that. There are none. As long as SpaceX can and no one else can, the future of SpaceX is on a pretty sound footing in my opinion.

China.

https://www.rocketlaunch.live/?pastOnly=1&filter=china

Close, but still not matching the frequency of SpaceX

https://www.rocketlaunch.live/?pastOnly=1&filter=spacex

I'm all in favour of SpaceX having an engine-rich development cycle that gets things done faster and cheaper than anyone else, this doesn't mean Musk is doing everything right.

I'm sad about the interference that Starlink causes to ground based astronomy, this doesn't mean Musk is ignoring those issues.

And I value government agencies making sure that business interests are balanced against democratic will of the people, that doesn't mean they're funded at the right level for a rapidly growing industry.

Rocketlab is doing this at about half the rate.

No it’s not, it’s not even making 1 per month.

Not even close, and doing it with a tiny 100kg rocket isn't even remotely the same thing anyway.

Not to mention it does not even have a reusable booster (yet) and unfortunately there seem to be still some reliability issues as well.

You sound like you don't know anything about what actually happened or the SpaceX engineering process in general.

SpaceX knew that the concrete wasn't the final solution, it was always temporary, they had already started building the steel water cooled plate before the first test flight. Based on the data they had available from the series of static fire tests leading up to the test they thought the concrete would ablate and survive one test flight before they took the downtime to replace it. Do you have any evidence to support your assertion that Elon overruled all the SpaceX engineers on the timing of when to install the steel water cooled plate or are you Literally making things up?

Learning more by moving quickly and taking calculated risks is clearly the better approach, as evidenced by the current dominance of the Falcon 9 and SN 25 and booster 9 sitting on a repaired OLM and being scheduled to make another orbital attempt in less than 2 weeks.

> Do you have any evidence to support your assertion that Elon overruled all the SpaceX engineers on the timing of when to install the steel water cooled plate or are you Literally making things up?

Unfortunately, #LiterallyMakingThingsUp seems to be a trend these days.

> Learning more by moving quickly and taking calculated risks is clearly the better approach,

I think most people agree that it's better for SpaceX business, but some don't agree that it's worthwhile for our society with what happens if failed. It's like Tesla's "FSD Beta" situation.

Bizarre that the most accurate take here is greyed out. Absolutely correct.

You're only being downvoted because of your accuracy.

> Or because he constantly stomps on experienced engineers with stupid ideas and puts the whole thing at risk. Literally EVERYONE said the cement base was a stupid idea and yet Elon had to trump his own experts.

Wouldn't that be called working from first principles? Proving it doesn't work can be quicker in the long run than over-designing something based on what you think won't work.

That is why I hate people working from first principle so much: The intentionally ignore decades and centuries of knowledge and experience in fields they don't understand and refuse to accept the fact the resulting failure is their fault. They are very, very quick to claim success so everytime they get lucky and their hairebrained ideas work (mostly only once).

Cybertruck is a "pickup truck"-ish thing designed from first principles.

Iterative implementation works very well for many kinds of software development projects. When an iteration involves 200 tanker trucks carrying fuel and oxidizer and dozens of rocket engines and results in destroying launch infrastructure and dumping debris into wetlands and inhabited areas, one might conclude "iteration" has made the jump from sound engineering principle to management fad dogma.

You don’t need to work from first principles to understand that the most powerful (by far) rocket built would obliterate whatever concrete you use without an appropriate water deluge system and/or flame trench.

And now they have to repair the launchsite, which they already did. And add water deluge, which they already did.

The upside was they got lots of data to improve the next rocket, which they already did. It's ready to go again, just waiting for FAA approval.

The FAA approval is delayed exactly because of the water deluge system: https://twitter.com/BCCarCounters/status/1717561704689668377

> The upside was they got lots of data to improve the next rocket,

Or they could have done that the first time with a flame trench and a water deluge system that prevented the energy of the rockets from damaging the rockets dooming the first stage and making concrete rain on the neighboring wildlife reserve.

Elon could have verified that hypothesis with a full static fire test AND be able to see the damage to both rockets and pad from an actual launch without destroying a rocket.

This is why SpaceX grew from the start with an immune system to prevent Elon from ruining too much stuff.

Is your argument that SpaceX has succeeded despite Elon, not in large part due to Elon?

SpaceX and Tesla both enjoyed most success despite Musk's continual rank incompetence by isolating him as the figurehead money guy while puffing his ego letting him cosplay a rocket scientist/tech expert for the press. At both companies he's got handlers to limit and manage the damage he causes. At Twitter he had no handlers and his rank incompetence is on full display, as it was in the PayPal days when he was rightly fired for incompetence.

He assembled a team and they learned to use him in the roles he fits best - getting attention and investment money. He is not a brilliant aerospace engineer.

I believe he’s better observed in Twitter, which is a company that didn’t develop an immune system to deal with him.

https://twitter.com/drphiltill/status/1710096996604723273?s=...

It seems that while the explosion would have been avoided with a deluge or flame trench, it could have also likely just been mitigated with a thicker concrete pad or a vent system.

> Literally EVERYONE said the cement base was a stupid idea and yet Elon had to trump his own experts.

Even Elon said this. It was a gamble, it didn’t pay off.

And those gambles make Elon a bad engineer, if one at all.

No, a bad engineer is one that takes no risks ever and end up doing nothing of consequence. His risk taking is the sole reason SpaceX exists.

You never did any real engineering work, did you? Because there is risk taking, or rather risk management with engineering decisison always being trade offs and such, and taking ahort cuts, cutting corners and taking uncalculated risks in hopes of being lucky. Topped by ignoring advice from others.

I think at the same time there are 100 decisions he made that have paid off. Of course agree this one didn’t and of course hope he learned from it.

falcon and all of spacex is based on ignoring advice from others, especially “industry experts”. It’s called first principles reasoning.

>falcon and all of spacex is based on ignoring advice from others, especially “industry experts”

Not in the least. SpaceX hires a lot of rocket scientists who are industry experts. They're more agile than the entrenched players since Boeing/Lockheed legacy space programs weren't efficient but SpaceX has relied upon expert consultation and expert advice from folks in the industry to build their rockets. I don't see them as building from first principles at all, they're building on what's come before standing on the shoulders of the rocket engineers who've come before.

Bold claim against the chief engineer of the most advanced rocketry company on Earth.

> Literally EVERYONE said the cement base was a stupid idea and yet Elon had to trump his own experts.

Do you have more information on this? My quick googling turned up nothing.

This submission was flagged on HN but it was pointed out.

> In addition to the siting and sizing of the pad, SpaceX does not have a flame trench, nor do they have a water deluge system used to suppress heat and sound energy from any launches, as the Army Corps of Engineering permitting required to add these civil engineering systems is itself a multi-year process.

> No large rocket complex on the planet: not in Russia, nor China, and certainly not in the US, exists that doesn’t contain one or both of these energy suppression systems.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35590279

https://blog.esghound.com/p/spacexs-texas-rocket-is-going-to

Boca Chica now has a better launch pad with a flame deflector and a water deluge system.[1] They really needed that. The first version just fired the entire output of the booster at a flat concrete slab, which destroyed the pad, sending chunks of concrete into the ocean and around the area.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYRJn3uvw3M

SpaceX said it was more a question of timing. That the water system would take too long and they were hoping to test before it was fit. The first test involved a subset of all the engines so they hoped the concrete would survive.

Thag make round rock. He call “wheel”. Thag idiot. No need round rock wheel thing in cave.

Sometimes you do something against conventional wisdom, and people call you a genius. Sometimes it doesn’t pay off.

I am assuming that you are employed, rather than an employer.

Yes and he has often overruled his engineers and was right. Taking calculated risk to shorten development is reasonable. Even if you don't get it always right.

> Literally EVERYONE said the cement base was a stupid idea

They expected it to break but be ok for one launch. Its a reasonable risk to launch sooner.

> Every time he forces his idiotic ideas on his engineers he puts the future of the whole business at risk.

And yet the he has lead the business for 20+ years and the company has been getting more and more and more successful. I guess that just happens by magic.

> At least he’s been so distracted by the Twitter debacle the adults have been able to make decisions

When SpaceX does good its because Musk wasn't there, when it does bad its because of Musk. Classic.

I wonder why Musk is always thrown into the ring with SpaceX, when its entire operation is mostly done by Gwynne Shotwell.

Because anybody that is actually informed about SpaceX knows that the 'Musk isn't involved, its all Shotwell' is a line that Musk-haters have been using for 10+ years now.

Of course everybody who leaves SpaceX tells a different story. Journalists and others who observe SpaceX tell a different story.

Musk has literally been the leader since the company had 5 people, and he always had control of the companies direction. Shotwell is one important part of the team. But she was recruited by Musk and promoted by Musk into the position she now has.

People also used to say 'Musk has nothing to do with engines its all Tom Mueller' of course then Tom Mueller responded saying that was false. And of course once Mueller left, SpaceX is still doing great things with engines.

So the reason why 'Musk is always throwing into the ring with SpaceX' is simply because its the truth and all Anti-Musk Twitter warriors are not actually informed about the topic they simply have to discredited Musk whenever they can. Often they don't even care about spaceflight, they care about being against Musk.

Because Elon is the product lead (and founder and owner), Shotwell does the business development.

Product is way more interesting in this case than BD, considering it's the most badass rockets ever made. But feel free to praise Shotwell too, that's great too.

You really think Elon is anymore than Product Lead / Chief Engineer in title?

Plenty of people with first-hand knowledge and/or their own independently earned reputations have attested to Musk being deeply knowledgeable and deeply involved in engineering at SpaceX. The evidence of his worthiness of the title is so plentiful that — absence some better information not in the public domain — casual doubt is wholly unjustified.

Of course as soon one says this, someone else will misconstrue this as some ridiculous claim that Musk is a singular genius responsible for inventing everything. This is of course silly. He's only one human with a limited schedule. There are surely thousands of things happening every day at SpaceX which he has zero involvement in.

As we often say in computing: ideas are easy, execution is everything. But the biggest successes of SpaceX weren't just about having ideas, they were about having the gumption to fund them, and an ability to recruit the best people so that execution is possible. In fields like rocketry, one might instead say ideas are easy, identifying when an idea should have a billion dollars thrown at it is hard, and execution is damn fucking hard.

Yes. Please read any of the official comments about him by people who have worked with him, or just answers on Quora, or read the new biography. Or watch his actual comments and behavior on everyday astronaut interviews.

If 4 of those data points don’t convince you, you obviously don’t want to be convinced even in the slightest

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