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Comment by philistine | Hacker News Reader

> Other companies should have reusable boosters soon

You're way too optimistic. Starship will deliver commercial payloads, with SpaceX phasing out Falcon 9 outside of ISS launches, before anyone has a reusable Falcon 9 equivalent.

It pains me to say this, but SpaceX is in a class all its own.

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New Glenn finally has flight hardware undergoing pre-flight testing. I think they're pretty likely to manage to fly in early/mid 2025, and they do aim to recover the booster in their first try.

The Chinese could have a reusable booster before then. One of their companies is doing 10 km hop tests.

SpaceX couldn’t manage the first Falcon 9 landing until 2015. The first Falcon 9 reuse wasn’t until 2018, so 3 years to achieve reusability. The Chinese prototype hasn’t yet succeeded at sub-orbital landing. I wouldn’t be surprise if it’d take them longer than 3 years to have a reusable rocket. Starship would have been routine at that time.

Blue Origin plans to launch New Glenn in a month, with landing planned. They are a wild card.

I’m not saying they stole the plans through industrial espionage, I’m just wiggling my eyebrows suggestively while glancing in the direction of the suspiciously similar looking booster.

Is this the same company that had their booster fly into the air when they were trying to static fire test it?

They must have forgotten to steal the plans for the hold down clamps.

Well, that kinda shows a potentially another speed "advantage" - less paperwork and reduced safety requirements.

I promise you the fancy technology is in the electronics, software, and implementation, and not the fact that the cylinder with legs looks like another cylinder with legs

It’s a literal clone of starship, down to the flaps and grid fins.

Chinese startups have historically been the only ones to be able to move as fast as Musk. One very underrated ability of Tesla is they can develop new products in 2-3 years from conception to market. The only other car companies to do it at scale is BYD, Nio and Xpeng. The company he is talking about is probably LandSpace. They got from conception to hop test in what seems to be 5, maybe 4 years. SpaceX took 7.

I think China has about 5 companies working on reusable launch and it is part of a national government strategy. People can argue about the timeline but it is inevitable.

Why does it pain you? Musk's SpaceX has produced several enormous advancements in space technology.

SpaceX is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, private technology company in history.

I think it pains some of us to say it because of the person Musk has turned out to be, which is the opposite direction I think many of us were hoping his character development would take him.

What terrible thing has Musk done?

Supported Trump.

The Democrats have a sad history of denigrating Musk, which is likely why he changed from being a Democrat to a Republican.

You don’t spend that kind of money and risk alienating your entire customer base (and future workforce!) just because of a slight.

Musk is getting something from Trump: most likely protection from some legal issue.

It was more than a slight. Biden pointedly ignored Tesla when conducting an EV summit and handing out subsidies. Then there was the FCC fiasco where the FCC snubbed Starlink.

What subsidies did Tesla not get?

> Then there was the FCC fiasco where the FCC snubbed Starlink.

You mean that time that the FCC removed Starlink from the broadband problem when they couldn't deliver the speeds that they had committed to, as defined very explicitly in the program?

Musk has never, no matter what he claims, ever a progressive democrat. He would be at best, someone who believed in the liberalization of certain drug policies. His economic beliefs have always been max pro business (aka, hands off, anti labor). He solidly fits under libertarian like the rest of the tech billionaires. Republicans, if it weren't partly driven by Christian fundamentalists, would be libertarian. The conservative GOP party of the 70's hasn't existed in decades.

I think that is only part of it. Musk gave an interview where he talked about how the woke medical establishment trans'd one of his kids. They falsely told him to do the transition or his child's death was a near certainty. European countries are now restricting this "treatment" for children. The US has been slow to follow. There is a lot of money and political pressure from the left to keep the medical intervention industry alive.

Are you aware of what you're doing: you're removing agency from that person who transitioned. They're abundantly public about how their transition was appreciated and needed. Do you ultimately care more about the feelings of your own dad over yours?

A few things that I (as someone who doesn't follow Twitter) have heard about from anecdotes and from the news about why people dislike him:

- He called some guy who worked for him a pedo for no reason, which he was sued over

- Took over Twitter and promoted right wing tweets to everybody, unbanned far right accounts and sued critics who said he did so

- Started promoting far right ideas, like when he retweeted "Interesting" to some tweet of a 4chan post saying that high-status, high-testosterone males are the only ones who can think freely and should be the only ones who can vote

- Took the side of the right-wing rioters who attacked mosques in the UK, saying civil war is inevitable

- Just seems to insult companies for little reason - advertisers who leave him, and Apple

There has been kind of a slow back and forth. Some people who liked him were miffed about the pedo thing, but they didn't hate him. But he has just kept doing things that some people hate.

> Took the side of the right-wing rioters who attacked mosques in the UK, saying civil war is inevitable

Leave out the part where the riots were started because someone with an immigrant background killed a bunch of kids at a Taylor Swift concert and police were withholding the identity. Along with your other 'anecdotes', can you make your political position any more transparent?

I see I accidentally came off implying that I'm disaffected and take no sides - most of the time, right wing politics seems abhorrent to me. Those are the main things I remember because left-wing spaces tend to hate him, and I dislike him because of those things, but no more than CEOs of companies like Nestle, which has engaged in things like slavery and child trafficking.

> because someone with an immigrant background killed a bunch of kids at a Taylor Swift concert and police were withholding the identity.

It might be somewhat justified if they burnt the house down of the murderer, or those who assisted him. They didn't - they burnt down houses, shops, and mosques, because they wrongly assumed the guy was Muslim and decided that was just cause to target any Muslim. His identity was hidden because he was a minor at the time of the attack.

Yeah, he's like a cross between Henry Ford and Werner Von Braun...

and coincidentally he makes cars and rockets too!

Wildly incorrect. New Glenn is already here.

No it isn't. It might be soon in some early way: "the first launch is expected to take place no earlier than November 2024", "The booster for the flight is named So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance, alluding to the difficulty of landing a reusable booster on the first attempt." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Glenn

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