prestonh

That Kool-Aid must be delicious

Most Americans for sure. It's totally reasonable that people are slow in expanding out of their comfort zones. 20 years ago eating raw fish was considered weird, now high school kids are doing it to impress their classmates.

And driving away would-be-allies by constantly referring to 'white people', which is not only a fallacy (we're not a homogeneous group) but incredibly hypocritical.

Obviously any discussion of the future of space will entail speculation since it's a volatile business by nature. But Shotwell recently stated that the savings of refurbishing a first stage over fabricating a new one was significantly over half, and the first stage itself comprises ~2/3 of the total hardware costs of an F9. It seems like that is a good starting place to estimate future savings, and other companies don't seem to have a competitive answer.

Aside from that, in my experience the anti-Musk is less rational than the pro-Musk group... We have a guy here that's started amazing companies that otherwise probably wouldn't exist. In the past year we saw the first orbital-class rocket landing on the Earth, a landing on an autonomous drone ship on the ocean, first launch and landing of a reused rocket first stage, and we heard about a private company's plans to send tourists around the moon, and eventually, settlers to Mars. Without SpaceX, none of that would be on the table right now. We'd still be waiting on NASA. I think the cult following is totally warranted.