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Comment by BeefySwain | Hacker News Reader

I understand your sentiment, but honestly at this point probably you should hope that Elon stays focused on culture wars, Xitter, and Tesla and leaves SpaceX alone.

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SpaceX is where Elon spends the plurality of his time, and where he is having the most direct involvement /impact.

I don’t agree with some of Elon’s political takes, but I also don’t get especially freaked out or triggered by people who hold opinions I don’t agree with. And I’m not so stupid as to think that my opinion is better than someone else’s because I me and not them.

Seriously, this is the correct take. None of the “Elon success stories” were his alone.

That's a tautological statement. No man is an army.

Yeah if he focuses too much on SpaceX you get things like him launching a Tesla roadster into space.

I agree with Buzz Aldrin that the exploration is better left outside corporate hands.

You do realise that when other space agencies have launched test rockets, they’ve loaded the cargo bay up with stuff like lumps of concrete? Launching the Roadster instead of a lump of concrete was entirely harmless fun.

As a partial representative of humanity (and Starlink customer) speaking, I'd rather we shoot the brick of concrete into space and avoid giving aliens poor impressions about the cars we build. That's just my opinion though, I've always been adverse to mass-market masturbation.

If the aliens are smart enough, they'd realise that the vehicle is clearly someone's unwanted garbage, which is pretty much exactly the case.

The original Roadster is the vehicle which Musk had the least technical involvement with, and which was severely laden with technical debt courtesy of Eberhard and Tarpenning. (Most crucially, the pointless and arguably counter-productive use of the Lotus shell.) This technical debt nearly sank Tesla from the start, which would have basically turned US$100 million of Musk's money into ash. I'm not surprised that Elon had no love for it and was happy to see it flung into space... and maybe explode.

The Lotus chassis may be counter-productive from a business standpoint, but it was also a beautiful and even poetic choice, representing a storied automotive legacy. Having one in space seems far better to me than almost any other lump they could have opted for.

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