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Comment by TomK32 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how the mood is at SpaceX. I mean, those engineers see how he unsafe the production workers at Telsa have to work, they see how shit he's treating everyone at Twitter and basically sinking it, how long before someone the mood turns sour and we see an outflow to the competition?

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The problem I see here is: what competition? There doesn't exactly seem to be any in the rocketry space. There's Boeing, but that place is a disaster right now. I guess ULA is still around, but they're not doing anything groundbreaking at all AFAICT, just using old rocket designs to launch some satellites. Where else can these people go?

Twitter people can go lots of places, both competing social networks, and also various other internet-related or software places. Tesla people can go to lots of different competing automakers. But I don't see anyplace nice for SpaceX people to go.

> what competition?

The list is actually pretty long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_private_spaceflight_co...

And that's not counting nation states.

Pencil pushing for pennies at Airbus/ArianeSpace is probably not that appealing.

Going to work for the Chinese or Russians? Well.. as long as you’re not planning to ever go back home.

There aren’t that many options for people who want to be a part of a team that actually accomplishes something significant.

You say that, but at least half a dozen of these companies in the linked wikipedia list, all western, launched rockets last year. And several more are on track to launch within the next. Rocketlab is a serious competitor with multiple spaceports, a rapid launch cadence, and reusability and next-generation launcher projects in the works. Blue Origin is supplying engines to ULA and seems almost ready to test New Glen. Firefly had a successful launch. Stoke is working on a resuability concept that's even more exciting than starship, and advancing steadily through testing flight capable hardware. The list goes on.

Rocketlab and others even have products which standardize the bus part of the sattellite or probe, so you just attach your science experiment or sensor.

I'm guessing the talent at SpaceX will leave and make their own company.

Plenty of of want-to-be competitors, but not so far with the amount of capital behind Musk. And space remains capital intensive, if not for hardware, then for people.

> what competition?

Shockley probably thought the same in early '57...

Not to mention his politics. I see space exploration as progress, which doesn't really mesh with conservative, backward politics.

There's some new competitors, like Stoke, Relativity, Blue Origin, bunch more I'm forgetting. This sort of diaspora of talent with experience is good to have, if there is capital

LOL, Blue Origin is not new btw. But new to launching orbital rockets

It's right around the corner. The evidence that Musk is actually really dumb is riiiiight around the corner. And will continue to be, for a very long time.

Yeah, he's a very stable genius. Just like his very stable genius buddy...

Outflow to where? Boeing? Russia?

People at twitter seem to be very happy, major features like community notes are being shipped and having a huge impact on the platform and the company is much healthier after he removed the employees that weren’t doing anything.

Community notes was designed and shipped before the takeover. It was called "birdwatch".

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