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Comparing their rockets to "the punchline of a joke" is definitely bad mouthing, just factual badmouthing.

Despite that, I don't blame him. Being factual is what's important.

And of course it's ridiculous that engines like NK-33 are considered bad just because they sit in a hangar for some 40+ years :) . It's not milk, they aren't that easily spoiled. Elon just used this time reference to make the decision look good - for somebody who doesn't know better.

So factually he's right - but also misses the point. Here I should admit that Elon says more than he does - but he does quite a bit too, so kudos to his successes - Merlin-1D is a great engine.

> And of course it's ridiculous that engines like NK-33 are considered bad just because they sit in a hangar for some 40+ years

I took his comment to be more in the "that's your business model? buying and selling old Russian hardware?" vein. It's not that the hardware is bad, per se.

Although the hardware might be bad. I imagine they're looking into that...

It's not that they've been sitting in a hangar for decades so much as that we've gotten a lot better at building engines. Presumably modern designs have a lot lower catastrophic fault probability.

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