Or worse, pursuing something already proven not to work.
Some examples include discovering phosphorus, the identification of arsenic, antimony, and bismuth as elements rather than compounds, and the development of nitric acid, sulfuric acid, and hydrochloric acid. Alchemy ultimately evolved into modern chemistry.
I think the key is that thinking that something is a waste of time is the type of mentality that prevents individuals from pursuing their interests to the point where they actually make important discoveries or make great inventions.
If you put enough time and energy into anything you're bound to learn a lot and gain valuable insights at the very least.
Another example is when SpaceX was first experimenting with reusable self landing rockets. They were being actively mocked by Tory Bruno, who was the head of ULA (basically an anti-competitive shell-but-not-really-corp merger between Lockheed and Boeing), claiming essentially stuff along the lines of 'We've of course already thoroughly researched and experimented with these ideas years ago. The economics just don't work at all. Have fun learning we already did!'
Given that ULA made no efforts to compete with what SpaceX was doing it's likely that they did genuinely believe what they were saying. And that's a company with roots going all the way back to the Apollo program, with billions of dollars in revenue, and a massive number of aerospace engineers working for them. And the guy going against them was 'Silicon Valley guy with no aerospace experience who made some money selling a payment processing tool.' Yet somehow he knew better.
Similarly, ULA had no "proof" that this would be economically infeasible: Musk pioneered using agile ship-and-fail-fast for rocket development which mostly contradicted common knowledge that in projects like these your first attempt should be a success. Like with software, this actually sped things up and delivered better, cheaper results.
Had that one also been a failure, he wouldn't be running the US government and we'd all be talking about how obviously stupid reusable rockets were.
I'd also note that they were also late by 3 years or so: this did not produce miracles, it was just much cheaper and better in the end than what Boeing is still trying to do.
Still, I would be surprised if SpaceX did not greatly benefit from knowledge gained in Falcon 1 development when building their Falcon 9 rocket and then optimizing it for reusability — they started development of Falcon 9 while Falcon 1 was still operating.
To know that that an idea or approach is fundamentally stupid and unsalvageable requires a grasp of the world that humans may simply not have access to. It seems unthinkably rare to me.
(Having a wing, empennage and landing gear greatly increased the weight. The only thing that really needs to be returned from space are the astronauts.)
Solid boosters are more complex and so Saturn could not have launched on time if they tried them. So for Saturn with a (arbitrary) deadline not doing them was the right call. Don't confuse right call with best call though: we know on hindsight that Saturn launched on time, nobody knows what would have happened if they had used solid boosters.
The only real benefit of SRBs is cost. They're dirt cheap and provide a huge amount of bang for your buck. But complete reuse largely negates this benefit because reusing an expensive product is cheaper, in the longrun, than repeatedly disposing (or "reusing") a cheap product.
The cargo bay was sized for military spy satellites (imaging intelligence) such as the KH-11 series, which may have influenced the design of the Hubble Space Telescope. Everything else led on from that.
Without those military requirements, Shuttle would probably never have got funded.
I'm listening to "16 Sunsets", a podcast about Shuttle from the team that made the BBC World Service's "13 Minutes To The Moon" series. (At one point this was slated to be Season 3, but the BBC dropped out.) https://shows.acast.com/16-sunsets/episodes/the-dreamers covers some of the military interaction and funding issues.
It's also relevant that the Space Shuttle came as a tiny segment of what was originally envisioned as a far grander scheme (in large part by Werner von Braun) of complete space expansion and colonization. The Space Shuttle's origins are from the Space Transportation System [1], which was part of a goal to have humans on Mars by no later than 1983. Then Nixon decided to effectively cancel human space projects after we won the Space Race, and so progress in space stagnated for the next half century and we were left with vessels that had design and functionality that no longer had any real purpose.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Transportation_System
In any case Musk definitely didn't pioneer this in space.
Thanks for the funny incidents as well, and my empathy for the not so funny ones!
Luckily, you can run a lot higher risks (per mission) when going unmanned, and thus this becomes a purely economic decision there, almost devoid of the moral problems of manned spaceflight.
Manned spaceflight has mostly been a waste of money and resources in general.
Just send ten missions at the same time. No need to wait until you fail.
There's a fundamental problem with unmanned stuff - moving parts break. So for instance Curiosity's "drill" broke after 7 activations. It took 2 years of extensive work by a team full of scientists to create a work-around that's partially effective (which really begs a how many ... does it take to screw in a light bulb joke). A guy on the scene with a toolkit could have repaired it to perfection in a matter of minutes. And the reason I put drill in quotes is because it's more like a glorified scraper. It has a max depth of 6cm. We're rather literally not even scratching the surface of what Mars has to offer.
Another example of the same problem is in just getting to places. You can't move too fast for the exact same reasons, so Curiosity tends to move around at about 0.018 mph (0.03 km/h). So it takes it about 2.5 days to travel a mile. But of course that's extremely risky since you really need to make sure you don't bump into a pebble or head into a low value area, meaning you want human feedback with about a 40 minute round trip total latency on a low bandwidth connection - while accounting for normal working hours on Earth. So in practice Curiosity has traveled a total of just a bit more than 1 mile per year. I'm also leaving out the fact that the tires have also, as might be expected, broken. So it's contemporary traveling speed is going to be even slower.
Just imagine trying to explore Earth traveling around at 1 mile a year and once every few years (on average) being able to drill hopefully up to 6cm! And all of these things btw are bleeding edge relative to the past. The issue of moving parts break is just an unsolvable issue for now and for anytime in the foreseeable future.
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Beyond all of this, there are no "moral problems" in manned spaceflight. It's risky and will remain risky. If people want to pursue it, that's their choice. And manned spaceflight is extremely inspiring, and really demonstrates what man is capable of. Putting a man on the Moon inspired an entire generation to science and achievement. The same will be true with the first man on Mars. NASA tried to tap into this with their helicopter drone on Mars but people just don't really care about rovers, drones, and probes.
Sending a person there for a one way mission would probably give us more data than 100 probes. And I have a feeling that there are a lot of people willing to go on a such a mission.
Have a look at https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/20-breakthroughs-from-2... and keep in mind that those are those are already the highlights. The best they could come up with.
A space station on Mars would probably not provide much more than that so should be a low priority, but obviously the discoveries to be made on land trounce those to be made in space.
Hardening electronics research can be done without pesky humans getting in the way. No need for the ISS.
All the other examples you mentioned are quite circular: humans in space help us research problems we only have because we are putting humans in space.
A big cost with rovers is the R&D and one-off manufacturing of the rover itself. With humans you have the added cost of life support, but 0 cost in manufacturing and development. The early human missions will obviously be extremely expensive as we pack in all the supplies to start basic industry (large scale Sabatier Reactions [1] will be crucial), energy, long-term habitation, and so on.
But eventually all you're going to need to be paying for is food/life support/medicine/entertainment/etc, which will be relatively negligible.
I was talking about anything you can do without humans. Not just probes that stay in space.
> A big cost with rovers is the R&D and one-off manufacturing of the rover itself. With humans you have the added cost of life support, but 0 cost in manufacturing and development.
You could mass produce rovers.
The human life support is gonna be extremely expensive. So it's a bit silly to say that other than that, humans have 0 cost.
Rovers have the same '0 cost' component, from the humans remotely given them commands and guidance from earth.
The context of this of course is that they've sent the cost of rocket launches from ~$2 billion per launch during the Space Shuttle era, to $0.07 billion per launch today. And the goal of Starship is to chop another order of magnitude or two off that price. By contrast SLS (Boeing/NASA's "new" rocket) was estimated to end up costing around $4.1 billion per launch.
The non-Musk shareholders range from low-level SpaceX employees (equity compensation) through to Alphabet/Google, Fidelity, Founders Fund.
There are actually hundreds of investors. If you are ultra-wealthy, it isn't hard to invest in SpaceX. If you are the average person, they don't want to deal with you, the money you can bring to the table isn't worth the hassle–and the regulatory risk you represent is a lot higher
How much of their balance sheet is debt vs equity?
Eg in theory you could have lots and lots of (debt) investors and still only a single shareholder.
I believe it is almost all equity, not debt.
There is such a huge demand to invest in them, they are able to attract all the investment they need through equity. Given the choice between them, like most companies, they prefer equity over debt. Plus, they have other mechanisms to avoid excessive dilution of Elon Musk's voting control (non-voting stock, they give him more stock as equity compensation)
What do you mean by 'most companies'? Many companies use debt on their balance sheet just fine, and even prefer it. Banks, famously, have to be restrained from making their balance sheet almost all debt.
Ie investors would only put up with losing money (and keep putting up money), if they are fairly convinced that the long run looks pretty rosy.
Given that we know that SpaceX can tap enough capital, the uglier the present day cashflow, the rosier the future must look like (so that the investors still like them, which we know they do).
Amusingly enough Blue Origin then sued over losing, and also lost that. They were probably hoping for something similar to what happened with Commercial Crew (NASA's soliciting bids from companies to get astronauts to the ISS). There NASA also selected SpaceX, but Boeing whined to Congress and managed to get them to force NASA to not only also pick Boeing, but to pay Boeing's dramatically larger bid price.
SpaceX has since not only sent dozens of astronauts to the ISS without flaw, but is now also being scheduled to go rescue the two guinea pigs sent on Boeing hardware. They ended up stranded on the ISS for months after Boeing's craft was deemed too dangerous for them to return to Earth in.
To go to the moon ... in 2021 ... yet we just keep giving them more and more money.