Dont know how much of that has damaged itself post Trump. Seems like Tesla is losing a lot of top talent. Remains to be seen if SpaceX is falling off the wagon.
This is a common fallacy.
If you are truly an intelligent person, and you know what the right solution is, what you want to be is around people who work for you. You don't want to have to spend time convincing other people of your correctness, you want to be able to just tell everyone what to do in detail and have them do it without asking questions, preferably with ability to figure the minutia stuff on their own.
The "A" players team is basically people who see value in working 60 hour weeks. With enough ambition and motivation, stuff can definitely get gone, but its not the same as intelligence. Space X didn't win with reusable launch stage because of the smart people working on it, they won because Elon had money to throw at test over and over again, while almost scamming their supplies in not paying them until way past due. Trying something over and over doesn't take intelligence.
And now, everyone is working on the Starship. While its cool, its absolutely impractical. It would take 8 -20 launches to refuel it in orbit for an actual mission, and the engines are basically on the verge of blowing up when operating due to how precise the system has to be for that high of a pressure ratio.
Personally Im very close friends with someone that worked at Space X early enough to retire at 40 with $2mil+ after stock sale. A mechanical engineer. Yet, I have to help him fix problems with his bicycle of all things, because he can't figure out how a simple bearing interface works (he was tightening an axle that was clamping the frame instead of the bearing inner race due to a missing washer, and as a result his suspension pivot was getting stuck)
A good read on the Talent at Tesla https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/99sbwa/form...
When he does achieve it I imagine you will create a new post saying something like "he didn't achieved Starship because of the smart people working on it, but because he had the money to throw at test over and over again".
A mechanic for example can just memorize a bunch of procedures on how to service a car or a bike, and follow them. An engineer can memorize a bunch of advanced stuff like CAD and Stress analysis, and never really work with his hands.
So in this case, your statement would be correct. But both of these would just be average good, not exceptional, like SpaceX hiring makes it seem.
In general, as a mechanical engineer, your expertise is putting different materials together in certain shapes, matter states, and so on to make them do things. You may not know specifically how a bearing assembly works if you have never worked with it, but you should realize that a bearing is designed to provide rotational freedom to a part, and that mechanically, the thing that is connected to the inner part that rotates should be fully separate from the part that does not.
Regarding the tesla link its crazy to see that post crop up again. I remember reading it the day it was posted. I was one of the first people on /r/realtesla. I genuinely believed that they were toast in 2018. That sub has been proven wrong time and time again and now they have devolved into whatever absurdity as long as it is negative of Musk companies. That post has not aged well at all. Looking back, I suspect a lot of corners were cut when the company was running on fumes. The model 3 rollout was so bad that not even the shorts could have anticipated the nonsense they pulled(for example: the famous tent) but they managed to survive and improve significantly since the early model 3 days.
Like I said in my initial post whether there is still enough talent remaining post-Trump remains to be seen.
Funny take because I know multiple talented people who’ve worked SpaceX & Tesla who claim an extreme amount of bloat wrt earnestly negative-value employees in the engineering sectors. This was pre-2020 as well.
Is that why their rockets keep exploding?
The cost is also not fully "turnkey" - if you overwork your employees, fail to pay your suppliers, rely on subsidies, then of course you are going to reduce your cost.
And all of that happened before Musk fully lost his mind.
Efficiency wise from pure physics, they would have been better off developing something similar to Scaled Composites. Air breathing is way more efficient to get to altitude, then you do a High Altitude Orbit insertion, and then do your vertical landing. For stuff like Starlink Satellites that are rather small, you have to do more launches but the cost of launch goes down significantly.
They built the best vehicle that would work, today. Not some distant future of a possible way to get to space. An actual working way to get to space. Built on the backs of NASA engineers of the space coast of FL, Houston TX, CA, and AR. You can armchair architect another way, but they successfully built one. One that is reusable. Over and over and over and over again.
EU then followed. Then China. Then India (ordering could be wrong but). So it’s definitely something that works.
EDIT
Ok, EU doesn’t have a reusable rocket yet.
Im not debating the fact that they were able to put together a product. Im also not debating that it was successful. Nor am I debating that any average person can work on rockets, you do need some engineering knowledge.
Im just arguing that the reason they got there wasn't because they managed to hire the best of the best engineers that are smart in one area but fail to understand how much Musk is doing politically. My claim is that Space X hired enough average intelligence, but super driven people, which is why they managed to build Falcon 9 through act of throwing money at it, and as supporting evidence of this, Starship is currently blowing up despite their supposed "learnings".
However if your stuff keeps exploding after you have had quite a large number of those test events, something is amiss.
>Like the Falcon 9, once the correct inputs are developed, it will become as routine as "Hey Siri..."
TBD. Raptor engines are the equivalent of taking 2 liter inline 4 engine and putting on massive turbos to make it generate 1000 whp. Thats pretty much how you get the high pressure ratio.