Comment by appplication

He's only dangerous if you operate a legal system that allows people to be dangerous. Elon Musk has never been the problem. As long as he's not breaking the law it's all good.

Billions of AI capex for a model that’s consistently forgettable and space computers, presumably data centers in space, are funding SpaceX?

Isn’t the opposite?

SpaceX has an extremely profitable launch program and a profitable Starlink. It’s a straightforward would be better off financially without X and X.ai.

The graveyards are full of blockchain companies who said something similar.

Depends a bit on how the AI stuff goes.

You should look at the S1 they filed with the SEC. All of their space related stuff including starlink shows a total possible market of 2 trillion, whereas they show AI as over 26 trillion. Basically almost all of their value is AI, not space related activities.

From by Tom Lehrer's "Wernher von Braun"[1],

Don't say that he's hypocritical

Say rather that he's apolitical

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun

1. https://youtu.be/QEJ9HrZq7Ro?t=14

Another interesting factoid about the V2 program is it accelerated the collapse of the Reich.

How can that be, you might ask?

The V2 program was an incredibly expensive program, and sucked up enormous resources. But the V2 proved to be an inconsequential weapon, and did very little damage, because its guidance system was primitive.

The V1, ironically, was effective. Not because it wreaked critical damage on Britain, but because it was cheap to build and deploy, and the British spent a great deal of resources trying to stop it.

It reminds me of the current drone warfare.

Hitler also demanded that it be used to attack London, blowing up civilian homes, when it would have been much more effective attacking the staging areas for D-Day.

Good info Walter, but I wasn't trying to get too deep.

Point is to not judge a book by its cover.

You've mentioned Dornberger's book to me in a previous conversation regarding Von Braun, and though I haven't yet had a chance to read it I just did some research on it.

From what I can tell it looks like like an amazing source for technical details of the V2 rocket but there are many problems with it that make it unsuitable for the kind of argument that you're attempting to make here.

First of all, the book wasn't written by Dornberger -- it was ghostwritten by a Nazi propagandist and aerospace enthusiast named Franz Ludwig Neher[0]. Neher is an interesting fellow, having been imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp for 18 months in the early 1930s and later enjoyed a career writing numerous Nazi propaganda biographies for 'Unsere Jagdflieger', a pulp booklet series issued on Hermann Göring's authority.

Looking at Neher's biography page on the German wikipedia we see that from 1951-1962 Neher was the press officer for the 'Gesellschaft für Weltraumforschung' or 'the German spaceflight society' in English, and even served for a time on its board. In 1952 Von Braun commissioned Neher to work on a Mars-project novel named 'Menschen zwischen den Planeten' which was published in 1953 apparently with poor reception by the public. Some reprints have a pretty cool looking cover though.[1]

I don't have time right now to dissect the actual claims made in V2 by Dornberger/Neher regarding von Braun but it's safe to say from everything I found that this is a very unreliable source for the argument that you're making as the man writing Dornberger's memoir was simultaneously the paid publicist of the German spaceflight lobby and von Braun's hired novelist.

Even in a first year history course essay assignment there's absolutely no way that this book would be considered an acceptable source to reference for non-technical details. Any instructor who was knowledgeable about the subject or who actually researched the sources would underline that passage in the essay with fat red lines and would scrawl the same kind of criticisms that I just made above in the margins in red pen. If your argument was the central thesis of the paper and this source was the evidentiary corner stone of that thesis you'd at best receive a C, but more likely a D grade.

In reciting this Werhner Von Braun apologia you have fallen for Nazi propaganda. Don't feel bad about it though -- we've all bought the big lie at one point or another. It's hard not to -- as the Nazis were pretty much the Wayne Gretzky of propaganda.

I'd like make this a teachable moment by introducing you to the concept of historiography[2] and one particularly important (and coincidentally German) author in the field: Leopold von Ranke.[3] It isn't always easy but proper analysis of sources is critical for making accurate claims and analysis of historical events.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Ludwig_Neher

[1] https://www.amazon.ca/Menschen-zwischen-den-Planeten/dp/3453...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_von_Ranke

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Von Braun used the Nazi war machine to make his rockets. Musk ran DOGE. They’re both political figures by their own choices.

Well, the Nazi party was banned permanently by the Allied powers on Oct 10, 1945, so technically every member still alive became an ex-Nazi at that point. Including the leaders later hanged in Nuremberg, and, of course, Wernher von Braun.

Of course some people say that once a Nazi, always a Nazi.

> nothing

Heh.

> telling his millions of followers that a rescue worker was a pedophile

Only after the rescue worker, on live TV, said to millions that Musk could stick his submarine up his ass.

> rescue worker

There were 100 divers in total 10,000 various workers. There were no heroes there.

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If he meant it to be a nazi salute, why did he do it in conjunction with saying "I give my heart to you"?

Currently on TV is a WW2 documentary narrated by Tom Hanks. It's pretty good, with significant coverage of nazis. I recommend watching it. I'm a bit of a history wonk, and have read extensively about WW2. I'm afraid I don't see any parallels between the nazis and Musk.

This whole comment chain is so baffling to me. HN is relatively intelligent, but we have people here seriously believing Musk did a Nazi salute on stage and that he's an actual Nazi. I don't know what to make of it.

I have to imagine it's motivated reasoning, because of the people who say it was a Nazi salute, approximately 100% of them already hated the guy. I've seen no one suddenly swayed. Fwiw I have no strong feelings about Musk either way, but to my eyes he is obviously not a Nazi.

So, there is little question about the type of gestures that Musk made, but I'm deeply curious about where it was directed.

Because we who read history all know that the "Nazi salute" or even the very American "Bellamy salute", and the Roman salutes before them, were directed to the leader, or a flag. And the Nazis in conjunction with saying "hail" to their leader. So far, so good?

But Musk was standing at a podium and looking out upon a crowd of people...voters...delegates... and he did not, in my view, try and face President Trump, or any leader standing at another podium, when he directed his salute outwards from the podium: outwards toward the crowd, opposite the camera angle.

So if Musk was not saluting President Trump: was he saluting a flag? Or the citizens? Because if he was saluting the citizens in this way, it gives a very, very different interpretation to the entire gesture, and if he was not saluting the president, or some leader, I do not see how this could be interpreted in the same way as the traditional salute of any type.

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and costs taxpayers billions compared to our working models 60 years ago. Great innovation

Aluminum alloy and carbon fiber, because both have high strength to weight ratios. Steel is denser, so its specific strength isn't as high. But it retains strength at both lower & higher temperatures, and it's much cheaper. It's also cheaper/quicker to modify a steel design, as welding is easier than aluminum (at least for low carbon steels used in Starship). And if the same structure were made of carbon fiber, it would likely have to be fabricated from scratch.

I think choosing steel has helped Starship, as it allowed the ship to survive reentry and land in the ocean despite heat shield failures. Had the ship been made of aluminum, I'm certain earlier missions would have broken up when the aluminum heated up and lost its strength.