Comment by acdha
1 day ago
An engineers isn’t going to say “EVs will never work” or “reusable rockets are impossible”. They’d say things like “we’re really going to need to minimize weight and try to build better batteries to hit that range goal” or “it’s going to require a lot of money to do the R&D for reusable boosters, you need to land a NASA contract so we can afford dozens of tests”. Engineers express tradeoffs far more than absolutes.
Musk has enthusiasm, yes, but he’s let his luck at PayPal and successfully buying Tesla from the original founders go to his head. Nobody is right all of the time, and no serious project goes perfectly according to the original vision without adjustments. There’s nothing wrong with the idea of an electric truck — companies with better engineering culture are making great ones — but the Cybertruck failed exactly the way everyone who isn’t a superfan expected: it’s designed in a way which guarantees high costs and it just doesn’t deliver corresponding benefits for most people. Diving into the culture wars against a large chunk of potential Tesla buyers was a bad idea but even if he hadn’t, there just aren’t that many people who have that kind of money to spend and the ones who do usually won’t accept so many limitations and flaws.
That’s a little bit revisionist. I don’t like Musk much either but to be fair:
- no one in the established “expert” car companies thought that mainstream EVs were feasible. Sure, there may have been individuals, but it didn’t make it into corporate strategy or product delivery. The Model S plus the Supercharger network changed the face of the car industry.
- none of the clever brains spending billions in NASA, ULA, ArianeSpace, et al made a reusable commercial rocket a reality. They had an infinite head start vs. SpaceX and failed to innovate. Even now, having their lunch money regularly stolen by SpaceX, where is the reusable competition?
> no one in the established “expert” car companies thought that mainstream EVs were feasible
No executive in the established "expert" car companies had any reason to rock the boat. Establishing EVs as a credible alternative to ICEs required a build-out of charging infrastructure that none of them were willing to commit to. But non-established companies had no such risk, and the emerging companies in China would have developed no less quickly even if Tesla never existed.
> none of the clever brains spending billions in NASA, ULA, ArianeSpace, et al made a reusable commercial rocket a reality
All of them would have told you that there's nothing impossible about a reusable rocket, only that their customers were happily served by their current offerings. Without Starlink, there would be no commercial demand that would make up for the cost of R&D.
> But non-established companies had no such risk, and the emerging companies in China would have developed no less quickly even if Tesla never existe
Yes. And in fact, Tesla existed before Musk, who merely invested in the company and then rewrote the history to make him a “founder”.
Fast forward 20 years, and now we have musk shills calling people “revisionists” when they just state facts.
1 reply →
Yes. Musk and his colleagues revolutionised two technical and entrenched industries. You make it sound like this wasn't a difficult proposition.
> Without Starlink, there would be no commercial demand that would make up for the cost of R&D.
Not sure about this analysis.
a) SpaceX developed the Falcon 9 relatively cheaply - ~$300m to it simply being a viable launch platform (i.e. without reuse, Dragon, etc.)
b) NASA contributed to some of the costs.
c) SpaceX was already offering launch services cheaper than their competition before perfecting reuse or conceiving of Starlink.
Therefore it's likely that they'd have had a positive (albeit lower) business case and made back R%D costs over time, simply by offering launch services and capturing a majority of the market thanks to their lower prices. Reusability lowered their launch costs, when it came. Starlink was an answer to the question of how to capitalise on all of the cheap surplus launch capacity they'd made available.
[dead]
The clever brains at JPL worked on self landing rockets before they went to spacex. Your tax dollars at work.
https://www.alphaxiv.org/@lars-blackmore
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Blackmore
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=xZvK9z0AAAAJ&hl=en
Indeed. That was why I deliberately wrote "made a reusable commercial rocket a reality".
It's not just high costs, its high costs that are only there to appease one man. The stainless steel sheets don't provide features that the average consumer even considers and has more than a few drawbacks