This isn’t about exploration. It’s about profit. And there’s not an easy way to shine that.
The only way they start making meaningful profit from what they're doing is basically if the exact opposite scenario of what you're implying comes to pass - that space becomes so completely accessible and utilized that they win by scale. And that's the exact opposite of 'mega yachts.' This is explicitly about exploration, colonization, mining, and more. This is about actually opening space to the human race, beyond relying on multi billion dollar toy expeditions, for the first time ever.
Maybe a Corolla would be more relatable nowadays.
My auntie drove a Renault Le Car in the late 1980s. I remember riding in it as a kid thinking it was a "fun junker".
Sure, there are many people who work in the organisation that he built that help him achieve his vision, but none of that would have existed without him challenging the world to an impossible dream ("live on Mars!"). Without Elon Musk, the space industry would still have been focused on SLS-style projects: slow to develop and impossibly expensive, the domain of only one or two governments, and always at the mercy of the next administrations' priorities. Instead, if he succeeds, humanity will be transformed, from a species that barely dips its toes into space, to one that can finally begin to truly explore the solar system. It's as much the start of a new age as was the voyage of Columbus.
Giving Elon Musk credit for this is certainly not misplaced. Denying him that credit because you disagree with him politically (as another poster suggested)... I have no words for that, it's just so ridiculous. This is the pinnacle of human development right here, and you would deny it because the guy votes Republican? You know, like literally half the people in the country?
I have no opinion on Musk or the rest of your comment, but as a simple matter of factual data it's been two decades since US Republicans could claim a slight edge on US Democrats in the popular vote (percentage of entire voting population) and four decades since they had any significant support.
For a good while Republican voters have been less than half the country and were it not for the uneven weighting of geographic areas and a domination of party controlled gerrymandering oportunities they would have even less political success than they have seen.
That's just simple psephology fo you.
Here is some data going back to at least 1988: https://news.gallup.com/poll/388781/political-party-preferen...
I am stating that the US Republicans do not have the support of "half of the US"; either by half of total population, half of eligable voters, or half of registered voters.
US Independents should have stronger support but that's not really going to put much of a dent in what's iteratively evolved to become a two party bicameral political system thanks to the shortcomings of repeated "First past the post" voting.
What was a bright idea hundreds of years ago hasn't scaled well and converged to unrepresentative gerentopoly.
That certainly comes across as you suggesting that Democrats have broader support. Intentional or not, I found your comment misleading by not incorporating the substantial size of independents.
the US Census Bureau estimated that in 2020, 168.3 million people were registered to vote in 2020 .. that 54 million voting Republican falls well short of cracking half the registered voters, let alone eligible voters.
> it's been two decades since US Republicans could claim a slight edge on US Democrats in the popular vote (percentage of entire voting population)
This is false; the “percentage of entire voting population” that voted for Republicans in the House of Representatives in 2022 was not only a “slight edge” over the percentage voting for Democrats, but an outright majority.
The fact that Republicans won a majority of the popular vote for House seats also means that their control of the House is not, in fact, a product of “uneven weighting of geographic areas and a domination of party controlled gerrymandering oportunities” [sic] as you claim. If you apply the percentages of the popular vote to the number of seats in the House, you’d expect Republicans to control 220 seats and Democrats almost 208 seats. In actuality, the Republicans won 222 seats and the Democrats won 213, meaning both parties got “extra” seats (at the expense of independents and third parties) but the Democrats got more. Moreover, it’s not accurate to say the Republicans are unique in benefitting from the gerrymander. In Illinois, Republicans won 43% of the popular vote but less than 18% of the seats thanks to a Democratic gerrymander. Meanwhile in New York, the courts actually threw out an attempted Democratic gerrymander and as a result, the GOP gained three seats and the Dems lost four.
I looked only at Presidental elections which have the greatest turnout, these have rarely seen a 50% Republican showing in total active votes in recent decades.
Including the mid term elections we see even lower voter engagement which helps the Republican showing in active votes, sure.
However of all the people that could vote in the US (those eligable), or even of just those people that indicate they'd probably vote (registered), it's still the case that well short of half the country votes Republican.
That the same can be said of US Democrats (although they generally in recent decades have had the edge in total active votes) - but it still remains that well short of "hal the the country" supports the Republican platform - they don't have a popular mandate.
FWiW I'm an outsider of the US election system, it's a hot mess with multiple shortcomings that restrict franchise .. and the US Republicans appear to be more skilled at restricting access to democracy to particular demographics.
That said, I rank conspiracy theories on how many people would be involved in carrying it out, and the idea of a malicious voting machine system capable of having votes altered would take too many knowing participants at various levels of the tool chain.
I would welcome learning more or else implementing more "spot audits" of results in order to minimize the likelihood of any changing of votes.
The weakness in your ranking mechanism is you think you have an idea of the number of people needed. To paraphrase Feynman: You mustn’t fool yourself and you are the easiest one to fool.
My own heuristic is expect some fraud or error in every system. The more there is an incentive for fraud the more likely there is fraud. It need not be partisan: could be something like the postal worker hiding mail instead of delivering it. Not finding some minor level of fraud is like a “100% voted for Saddam” announcement—not likely true.
Starship happens because of
* the current state of manufacturing technology : we can automate a lot of operations that were done by hand in the 70's, we can iterate prototype much faster)
* a lot of essential hardware is now much cheaper, reducing the initial investment cost. Say a servo motor mass produced now vs. a servo motor in 70's made in tiny batches
* the market ie. there's a market to send many tons of hardware into orbit, money can flow into such projects
* it's now possible to test some rocketry ideas in your garage, it's not a closely garden anymore. The pool of very experienced rocketry engineers is increasing
That's not a very romantic point of view tho
NASA? China? India? Russian N1 rocket?
No, it didn't happen, in multiple cases without Musk, and with more funding.
You are delusional in your hate of Musk.
This is a meaningless statement. It would happen, but when? about now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now? You keep saying team effort. Do you think Blue Origin or Arianne Group have less talent than SpaceX? Why do they achieve much less?
> I don't believe in providential people, at all.
SpaceX almost went bankrupt in 2008. Without Musk gambling with his finance to rescue the company, SpaceX would have been a footnote in the space history. It wouldn't have survived long enough to have the NASA's money. The team that they’d built would have been spread to who knows what kind of companies.
> the current state of manufacturing technology : we can automate a lot of operations that were done by hand in the 70's, we can iterate prototype much faster)
So why did SLS take that long? Arianne 6? New Glenn? What about a plethora of small launchers that are still not yet widely available?
> a lot of essential hardware is now much cheaper, reducing the initial investment cost
Essential hardware is only a small part of a rocket program. Arianne 6 was supposed to be Europe's answer to Falcon 9, 50% cheaper than Arianne 5. Supposed to debut in 2020, it still has yet to launch. So it costs Europe tax payers est. 5b euros for a rocket that is technologically inferior to Falcon 9, lower cadence, yet more expensive to build and operate. - [1]
> the market ie. there's a market to send many tons of hardware into orbit, money can flow into such projects
That market didn't exist. Looks at the chart in this article about the number of objects (satellites) sent to space - [0]:
The number skyrocketed after 2016, once Falcon 9 has become established. SpaceX has enabled the market, not the other way around. SpaceX just launched 1,000 tonnes of payload in 2023, four times larger than the second place (China the country).
> it's now possible to test some rocketry ideas in your garage, it's not a closely garden anymore. The pool of very experienced rocketry engineers is increasing
SpaceX was built 20 years ago with nothing but a vision of Mars colony. There was no pool of experienced engineers readily available back then. They are now a powerhouse and they can hire whoever they want. The question is, why there hasn’t been another Starship?
[0] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-...
[1] - https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/oops-it-looks-like-the...
Well established fact that Musk is a figure head, and like any other other figurehead, they matter significantly less to the end result than the giant teams of engineers and supply chain managers do. Of course he is an intelligent, financially sound business man.
But it's very much a fact that the bit's you're romantically idealizing would exist without Elon Musk. Apple was not steve jobs. Ford was not Henry Ford. Toyota was not a single Toyoda.
Except there's many testimonies from engineers at his companies that attest the exact opposite.
As for your "facts": without Musk, there would be no SpaceX, no giant teams of engineers, and no supply chain managers. Same as without Steve Jobs (do you hate him so much that you can't even capitalize his name?): without him there would be no Apple, no Mac, no iPhone. You seem to believe that companies and products spring fully formed from the ground, that nobody has to take the initiative to create them. Giant teams of engineers and supply chain managers don't just decide to come together to spend years and millions (if not billions) of their own time and money to build a car, or a computer, or a rocket. Can you point to even a single example where such a thing happened?
How would the 'bits' have come to exist without Elon Musk? Who would have taken the initiative, who would have paid for it? If you're right, why is SpaceX the only game in town? Surely there are plenty of other engineers and supply chain managers that would be up for building the worlds largest reusable launcher in their own time, with their own money?
That transformation can be credited ENTIRELY to Elon Musk, and nobody else, and without him, it might never have happened, as neither governments, nor government contractors have any reason to not choose the well-trodden path, and to not pork-barrel the hell out of any project of this type. It took a person who had both a vision and a hell of a lot of money to make it happen, and there aren't so many of those around.
I've been following SpaceX's progress since 2005 on Kimbal's blogspot (yes that blogspot) updates [1]. Elon has always credited his team of engineers, ops and support staff.
You can doubt all you want. This is easily verified.
1. https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1512919230689148929
2.https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1099411086711746560
3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Mueller
4. https://youtu.be/aGOV5R7M1Js?t=1748
As expected, you can't produce sources to support your claims.
I also never claimed any sources, I'm just giving my impression of him, which is that he's a bullshitter. But I can list a couple of things we do know about him:
At Tesla, despite not being a founder of the company, he contractually established that he was allowed to call himself a founder. And then pushed the actual founders out.
Online, we see him pick stupid internet fights, and post irresponsible tweets that got him slapped for stock manipulation.
At Twitter, we've all seen his bizarre mismanagement, despite his original background in software development.
We've recently heard that the Cybertruck was a bad decision that he personally pushed through at Tesla.
So given all of that, of course it's still possible that his rocket engineering creds at SpaceX are real, but you really can't blame people for having some doubts about that.
I don't expect anyone employed at SpaceX to spill the beans, but there's plenty of anonymous rumours on the internet about his actual role:
https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/27rnwj/is_elon_pers...
> Elon is indeed very involved in the design. The way they explained it is they give him a list of options to choose from and he picks the one he likes. Usually, it's the one the lead engineer wants, but sometimes it isn't, and Elon gets what he wants.
That's reasonable enough for a CEO in a flat organisation, but it doesn't sound like he's doing the actual engineering, just picking from the options the engineers give him.
I've also seen a (claimed, not verified) SpaceX employee say that SpaceX has people who's job it is to keep Elon happy and feel involved, because a happy Elon gives them the freedom to make the right decisions.
He got this Tony Stark image in the media, and I think he's been leaning a bit too hard into it, and started to believe the image that he could do everything. And the history of Tesla shows that he's not above overstating his own role.
Don't get me wrong: I love much of what he's done at Tesla and SpaceX; EVs wouldn't be where they are now without him, and rocketry in the US might well be dead without SpaceX. But he certainly has his share of character flaws as well.
The tweet was a response to the same claims you're making, the parent tweet is clearly there. It seems that you don't even know who Tom Mueller is. I linked Tom's Wikipedia bio for context, maybe you should take the time to read it.
"Thomas John Mueller is an American aerospace engineer and rocket engine designer. He *was* a *founding* employee of SpaceX, an American aerospace manufacturer and space transportation services company headquartered in Hawthorne, California, and the founder and CEO of Impulse Space"
> I don't expect anyone employed at SpaceX to spill the beans, but there's plenty of anonymous rumours on the internet about his actual role:
Tom was already retired when he posted those tweets. So again, your claims are just patently false. Let's see...Your source is from an "anonymous rumour" and is more credible than a former/founding SpaceX employee? I have no words...
> At Tesla, despite not being a founder of the company, he contractually established that he was allowed to call himself a founder. And then pushed the actual founders out.
The Tesla Board of Directors did that, not Elon. But you knew that right? It's dishonest to attribute the success of the Tesla Roadster, Model S/X, and Model 3 ramp-up, as well as Tesla's current achievements, to Eberhard and Tarpenning.
> But he certainly has his share of character flaws as well.
Don't we all? Not a single person on this planet is flawless, and it's sanctimonious to think otherwise.
It is not clear how to navigate to the parent tweet. Take it up with the owner of the site, I guess.
I know who Tom Mueller is, and I've addressed why that doesn't make him impartial.
> Tom was already retired when he posted those tweets.
According to your Wikipedia link "he retired from SpaceX on November 30, 2020". One of those tweets is from 2019, so your claims are patently false.
> The Tesla Board of Directors did that, not Elon.
And who was the chairman of that board of directors? Please.
> It's dishonest to attribute the success of the Tesla Roadster, Model S/X, and Model 3 ramp-up, as well as Tesla's current achievements, to Eberhard and Tarpenning.
And I did nothing of the sort. I gave Musk credit for that. I'm only pointing out he wanted to be credited for something he wasn't.
Every source I know of agrees this is true.
Based on his Tweet history, he comes across as astoundingly immature, thin-skinned, and easily distracted.
He has: accused someone completely innocent of paedophilia for random reasons that are hard to fathom; denied that Covid was a problem; tweeted like a teenager about womens' boobs and limited math skills; lost at least 75% on his purchase of Twitter; suggested a literal dick measuring contest with Zuckerberg; claimed he was going to sell 10% of his Tesla stock to alleviate poverty and then awarded to it to a trust he owns; cynically hyped Dogecoin and (arguably) Tesla...
And so on.
I suppose someone like that might also be a genius rocket engineer. But if he is, it's quite a niche talent that doesn't seem to have transferred to his other projects.
I don't know why you'd think being good at a domain would transfer to other very different domains. There's no reason to think an amazing singer would be a good mathematician, why should a hardware production line maker have good taste in truck aesthetics?
Another profitable industry besides mining could be setting up nursing homes on the moon, where wealthy elderly folks could live fuller lives due to the reduced gravity. Yes, the idea of this only being available to the super-rich (at first) is nauseating to me too, but if it provides the source of funding to establish sustainable moon bases, that would be incredible, and other industries could follow afterwards, including e.g. new sports leagues such as low-gravity basketball and soccer.
Eventually, enough people would be living on the moon as helpers for the wealthy folks and athletes that eventually there would be so many working-class people on the moon that secondary and tertiary industries would spring up to provide products and services for the working-class people. Soon enough it would become profitable to farm crops on the moon (for lunar consumption), build products on the moon (for lunar consumption), and more.
We'd eventually get to the point where a lunar nation could have positive GDP and be economically self-sustaining. It would be a trade partner with the terrestrial nations, and be the first new nation to step beyond Earth. Generations of people will get married and be born there, and humanity would be a step closer to settling the cosmos.
That's what makes this all so stupefyingly difficult to even begin to try to predict what will happen. We're not going through the usual window of exclusivity. We're going from [nobody can afford this, except governments - and even then only for toy missions] to ['everybody' can afford this for anything], instantly. So there's no reason that e.g. a nursing home, or anything else, on the Moon would be restricted to the super wealthy, besides demand. Obviously these industries will be being built from the ground up, and demand will likely dramatically outpace supply for the foreseeable future. But that cost imbalance would not be because of fundamental costs.
Also you left out the most fun. Who isn't going to want to go have sex in space? Either with a partner or catching some Moon Poon at a brothel? That's going to be an industry that'll have people coming by the millions, and shouldn't really require that much to get the initial infrastructure erected.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competitio...
Wow, that's insane; as you said, I didn't even realize this leap is this vast! $5 for delivery of a bottle of water is barely more expensive than DoorDash or Postmates on Earth!!
If you launched a Starship with just a single bottle of water it'd become way more than $25,000. Similarly you could make your doordash/postmates bottle of water a lot more expensive if you moved it with a semi-trailer and a team of movers.
I don’t know what laws apply on the Moon, but thanks to ITAR, Starship probably won’t be able to launch from outside the United States, which means any actual moon travel is going to be governed by US and Florida and/or Texas law. Neither of those states have legal prostitution, and while I’m not a legal expert, I suspect knowingly ferrying prostitutes to the moon might be considered a form of human trafficking. They shut down Backpage for less.
A sad few with no remaining attachments to the rest of Earth might benefit from a reduced risk of hip fracture, but that hardly seems like a good economic basis for a Moon base.
That's what SR Hadden did in Contact ;) as always, Carl Sagan is still teaching us to this day
You’re depriving yourself of the opportunity to appreciate a once in a lifetime event because some news outlet told you you should dislike the guy who built it.
Given these circumstances, depending solely on NASA for space advancement or asteroid deflection may not be the most effective strategy. Those acquainted with federal programs can confirm these issues. Thus, your comment appears uninformed and overlooks the wider impact on American taxpayers.
It’s hard to believe you’re being objective if you think the SLS, costing over $2 billion per launch, is superior and not profit-driven, compared to Starship's estimated $40 million launch cost.
If he doesn't do it who is going to do that?
Surely NASA has has fifty years to do something like this (excepting the ISS which is).
> "billionaire’s mega yacht"
Billionaire hatred is a real thing. He will not be riding on this thing and likely never will be, so I'm not sure this is a great analogy.
What makes you say that? Musk has made it known he has a dream to "... die on Mars. Hopefully not at the point of impact."
Secondly, if you don't think NASA was about profit, you don't understand NASA. Who do you think built all the Apollo rockets? Private contractors working for profit.
Besides, what is wrong with profit? Profit is what makes things sustainable and allows reinvestment to continually improve.
The tech here is way beyond what governments have been able to do so far. It promises to be quite a show. Might blow up again, but they'll learn and build another one.
For the record, I find Musk to be a menace, but the team he put together at SpaceX is phenomenal.
Falcon 9 launch is $62m. NASA SLS launch is $1b.
That's 6% of the cost.
It's about lowering the barrier to launches by dramatically decreasing the cost.
I'll also note that NASA's funding for Starship was for a lunar lander, not a launch vehicle, and SpaceX was the cheapest of all the competitors despite developing a launch vehicle as well while the competitors were only developing a lander and planned to use an existing launch vehicle.
Ha. This rambling is entertaining but has little depth or vision.
These are not ‘valid reasons’ these are ‘arguably valid reasons made by cynical ramblers’ :)
Just look at the first footnote, the guy does not understand what is relevant comparison nowadays or how the programs he talks about work/ed.
What benefits are there to sending humans to Mars? What do we hope to accomplish that couldn't be done better by a barrage of super advanced robots? Even NASA can't articulate a good reason.
It is estimated to cost $1-1.5 trillion to send 9 people on Mars, and upwards of $2 trillion for a minimally staffed base on an uninhabitable planet. That's just for keeping humans alive there, not even for doing serious science. NASA's budget is $25-33 billion per year. We'd be blowing the next 50 years of space dollars to get cool videos instead of sending countless probes to every planet in the solar system.
My main point is, wouldn't it be better to focus that amount of money and effort on developing technologies that allow humans to live on Earth sustainably? Where is the cult-like public support for spending unlimited amounts of money on preventing mass extinction on Earth, the only habitable planet in our solar system?
https://youtu.be/6TqhcZsxrPA?si=oa3yw8ONxKgtWDru
Maybe after we accomplish that we could think about making Mars a sustainable and habitable planet too?
Well robots work very well, and if research is your only goal then those might be the best forever. But even those run into issues and can be very complex and expensive, see Mars Sample Return. When you scale systems up, it is possible that at some level redundancies and pre-planning for every contingency will get too expensive. So much that sending monkeys with duct tapes that can handle and fix all kinds of issues might be actually less expensive. Will we get to such scale with research only? Probably not.
But there are other goals, like space industry, and related mining, which require much bigger scale. And unless we want to declare all planets out there as a natural reserve with absolutely no Earth contamination possible (yea there's a treaty, we will see how long it survives), people will want go there.
And good luck trying to stop China from establishing Mars research base. Sure it might take them 40+ years, but I wouldn't bet on them not getting there. Or them adhering to any kinds of international treaty.
> It is estimated to cost $1-1.5 trillion to send 9 people on Mars, and upwards of $2 trillion for a minimally staffed base on an uninhabitable planet.
Random numbers pulled out of nowhere. Don't listen to such garbage. Even talking about "minimally staffed base" and it's costs is kinda silly when the main (and so far only) proposed system (Starship) for achieving that is still in its infancy. It might not hit its projected costs. It also might achieve them and then such cost estimates about Mars base will look as silly as IBM estimates of how many computers the world needs.
> My main point is, wouldn't it be better to focus that amount of money and effort on developing technologies that allow humans to live on Earth sustainably? Where is the cult-like public support for spending unlimited amounts of money on preventing mass extinction on Earth, the only habitable planet in our solar system?
You know that there are proposals like space based solar power, space mirrors in Sun-Earth L1, space industry utilizing resources from asteroids . . . Sure they are still mostly in the sci-fi stage. But some of them might turn into reality, and then many of our issues on earth will be solved merely as a side-effect. It's too early to talk about "better" spending, when related technologies are still not even close to being mature and stable. F9 landed not even 9 years ago!
> Maybe after we accomplish that we could think about making Mars a sustainable and habitable planet too?
Honestly that's just bad logic, don't you really see obvious arguments against? It's fine as an opinion, but trying to convince other people without strong arguments does not seem like it will have much chance.
EDIT: if you truly care about not wasting money on stupid stuff, argue for cancelling SLS. THAT is one big waste of money, regardless of whether Starship succeeds or not.
A billionaire's mega yacht is for his exclusive use. Starship is definitely not that. Starship's purpose has nothing to do with any personal transportation plans for Musk himself.