Gwynne Shotwell, not Musk, runs Space-X. She is very good at it. She really is a rocket scientist.
Musk put good people in charge of some of these companies, Gwynne Shotwell is a great example, but his sphere if influence is big enough that the collateral damage could be significant.
For whom? There isn't another ship. (Literally. Ariane has nothing, ULA is on its deathbed, Blue Origin might do something in the 2030s and nobody is moving from Hawthorne to Xi'an.)
SpaceX remains a jewel of American industry and technological achievement. If you're an ambitious aerospace engineer, SpaceX is the only place where you'll see your cutting-edge work launched.
Similar to how Tesla showed that EVs could be nice and kickstarted the legacy automakers to get on this too.
These are all smallsat launchers. I have worked with a few of their teams and have mad respect for their work. But between launch cadence, fundraising and mission profile, they’re not comparable to SpaceX.
> Similar to how Tesla showed that EVs could be nice and kickstarted the legacy automakers
SpaceX has a global commanding position and domestic political advantage Tesla has never enjoyed. It’s fair to say it has a monopoly in commercial launch outside niche operations, e.g. dedicated smallsat.
> domestic political advantage Tesla has never enjoyed
Agreed, but I think SpaceX showed that reuse could be done before Musk got any political influence (and went off the rails...).
Meanwhile, plenty of people still work in industries such as oil+gas, tobacco, gambling, military tech, etc. No hate, no threats, business as usual.
Profitability, vehicle autonomy, market share etc weren’t really the reasons why the company was founded.
Sort of. China has done more for this mission than Tesla, certainly Musk, at this point.
At this point, no not going to happen. The money sucks given how much you work, no work/life balance. These people already sacrificed their personal lives to get the company to this point. No other company is getting to Mars first. If you are an Olympic class engineer, would you really just walk away from getting to be a part of history? I guess unless you are at the top of your field you are not going to feel the same as these guys.
Regarding engineers burning out, given that Tesla and SpaceX are some of the most desired companies for new Engineering grads Musk will have a continual supply of engineers to grind down to dust as the old ones become useless to him.
We need competitors to Musk, preferably nicer, that can attract the best of the best. I guess in order to fight a psychopath you need tendencies of being a psychopath yourself?
A Supreme Court ruling that NDAs and non-disparagement agreements violate the first amendment, however, that might help.
Catching up to SpaceX is something even us Europeans haven't accomplished.
All of them?
Musk founded SpaceX. He hasn't been a chief engineer in anything but title for a long time. To the extent he deserves respect, it's in giving its team the insulation he's denied Twitter and the American people.
SpaceX employees online say he was heavily involved in engineering, as chief designer; but even imagining he did not, just allowing those crazy ideas to actually happen has incredible merit.
This will go down in history as the most shameful descent into madness of the 21st century. I sincerely hope he gets hospitalized for his drug addiction or whatever is going on, allowing others to take back command of these companies before they run into the ground.
His fate may not be all the different from Howard Hughes. A wealthy and influential figure from not so long ago who lost his mind towards the end.
One of my favorite insights applies:
Power doesn't corrupt; it reveals.
-- Robert CaroMerlin and Falcon 9, yes. Methane for Raptor, yes, but the integrated design and certainly Starship are not Musk. (Chopsticks, yes.)
Now, it's true enough that he didn't literally _build_ these things. He is the CEO. Steve Jobs didn't build the iPhone.
But these programs are very obviously shaped by Musk to a large degree.
What are you basing this on? It was carbon fibre or steel. SpaceX tried carbon. The bake was too inconsistent, so they went with steel. This was the stated and obvious design path since Falcon Heavy’s design trajectory plateaued.
The obvious choice that everyone uses is aluminum, or various alloys, like aluminum-lithium.
Certainly he's more useful to organizations when he goes in with the approach of listening to engineers' ideas to build stuff than when he goes in with the approach of gutting the organization in revenge for things he's taken exception to.
SpaceX also wasn't very big in the early years, and the CTOs and chief engineers of the space launch startups I know absolutely do involve themselves in the low level technical work. I don't imagine Elon did much of that even when he did make a point of interviewing every new hire and sitting in on meetings about low level purchasing decisions.
Musk was heavily involved in the engineering efforts at SpaceX. NASA struggled to keep up with his continual and extremely detailed stream of questions regarding engineering choices, with an obsessive and relentless focus on blueprints.
The list of engineering achievements and innovations (often unorthodox) is too long to list in a comment, but I highly recommend the book The Space Barons by Christian Davenport [0]. It's a fantastic read.