Comment by fourseventy
12 hours ago
His point is that everyone said landing and reusing rockets was impossible and made fun of Elon and SpaceX for years for attempting it.
12 hours ago
His point is that everyone said landing and reusing rockets was impossible and made fun of Elon and SpaceX for years for attempting it.
The difference is that it was mostly clueless people like Thunderf00t who said it was impossible, who nobody took seriously. I don’t remember that basically all relevant experts claimed it was near impossible with current technology. That’s the situation now.
There’s also fairly clear distinction with how insane Elons plan has become since the first plans he laid for Tesla and SpaceX and the plans he has now. He has clearly become a megalomaniac.
Funnily enough, some of the things people said about Tesla is coming true, because Elon simply got bored of making cars. It’s now plausible that Tesla may die as a car company which I would not have imagined a few years ago. They’re arguably not even winning the self driving and robotics race.
> landing and reusing rockets
Currently SpaceX have managed to land the booster only, not the rocket itself, if you are thinking about Starship. And reusability of said rocket is also missing (collecting blown up pieces from the bottom of the ocean doesn't count!).
No, people made fun of Elon for years because he kept attempting it unsafely, skirting regulations and rules, and failing repeatedly in very public ways.
The idea itself was proven by NASA with the DC-X but the project was canceled due to funding. Now instead of having NASA run it we SpaceX pay more than we'd ever have paid NASA for the same thing.
DC-X test flight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE7XJ5HYQW4
It's awesome that Falcon 9 exists and it is great technology but this guy really isn't the one anyone should want in charge of it.
>Now instead of having NASA run it we SpaceX pay more than we'd ever have paid NASA for the same thing.
This doesn’t pass the smell test given that the cost of launch with spacex is lower than it ever was under ULA.
NASA has never been about cheap launches, just novel technology. Look at the costs of Saturn and SLS to see what happens when they do launch.
He also said he could save the us a trillion dollars per year with DOGE, and basically just caused a lot data exfiltration and killed hundreds of thousands of people, without saving any money at all
Elon Musk killed hundreds of thousands of people?
Yes. Mostly kids, because of the DOGE ransacking of USAID
https://healthpolicy-watch.news/the-human-cost-one-year-afte...