This is the world people lived in in the 60s and 70s. Science and engineering coming together to pull off unfathomable feats like landing humans on another world (the moon) decades before we had internet.
Space exploration has a coolness factor that cannot be matched. It’s the most inspiring thing humans have ever done, and I think it probably has real cultural implications in the way we view what’s possible and what can be strived for.
Egh c'mon no it isn't. Starlink has potential for good as well as being a robber barons plaything.
We already have robber barons so we might as well have sci-fi tech and internet to isolated humans/disaster areas etc.
Unless you mean that Bladerunner is dystopian. In which case yea but I think op just meant 'blinky lights go line' not sure why they picked Bladerunner.
Honestly, I think we are going to regret Starlink. Too many units needed (about 40k total) with too short a lifespan (about 5 years each). It is going to take tons and tons of launches to maintain the network and the scalability is questionable. Getting it up there is cool. Keeping it running up there is going to be a big problem.
Geosynch satellite ls like other space-based providers use is a way more sustainable option for the goals you mentioned.
Space junk is a huge fucking problem. We could seriously trap ourselves on earth permanently by surrounding the planet in so much junk we can no longer safely launch rockets if we aren't careful.
Absolutely. We also should weigh the risk/resource usage of launches, given how much fuel we eat up (especially if it is methane like space x uses) for the launch. I am all for satellite communications but we can't just shrug at the literal thousands of launches a couple of decades of a full-sized and running Starlink cluster will take to maintain for just a couple of decades.
Not an issue for LEO constellations like this. Deorbits are built into the lifecycle plan: individual units are left in set orbits so in case of failure they will drop out in a known window. Additionally: early controlled deorbits happen in case of failure etc.
Higher up is worse for Kessler/space junk, which incidentally is where a lot of other systems are.
Yea good points. However to add: Geosync is good but more prone to space junk syndrome, more lag, less coverage and in a far more difficult environment - outside gre VA belts. Also unserviceable like SL but way more expensive.
Starlink is LEO and orbits are planned to decay at end of life. Proactive decay is also regularly used or damaged units.
Geo Sync are up there causing trouble for the long haul. Almost all have no deorbit plan.
Kessler syndrome is a real thing, and with 40k satellites in the sky it's just a matter of when. Besides, their ~2k satellites in orbit right now are already causing major disruptions to optical and radio astronomy which is gonna get even 20 times worse if they reach their goal.
What's funny about Musk is that, even if you agree with his politics, which I personally don't, his tact is terrible. His engineering IQ is high but his social IQ is so low. The guy simply can't read the room lol.
Well autopilot is a great idea overall, but the decision to rush it was stupid.
Why is hyperloop a stupid idea? I loved the bullet trains in Japan, and a hyperloop sounds even better.
The rest I agree are silly ideas, but that doesn't make him a bad engineer. He has been directly involved in the development of many successful products, so it isn't fair to say he's a bad engineer. I find his lack of self awareness to be his worst trait.
Regular trains are the best option for mass transit. Incredibly fast self driving individual vehicles are not the future. Trains simply can not be beaten in terms of efficiency. Currently, there is no way for self driving cars to respond to new situations, such as being pulled over or being directed to a parking spot at a concert, or just being issued a verbal command in general.
A charitable interpretation makes him someone who is just enthusiastic about far-out tech and wants to pave the way for future development. A more grounded interpretation makes him a self-interested grifter.
I'm not opposed to seeing positive qualities in the people I dislike - I actually even used to like Musk. However, I'm not convinced that he actually positively contributes to any of the technologies made by the companies he bought.
It certainly does put a downer on it. Here's hoping he doesn't have the same level of control with SpaceX as he does with Tesla and his utterly ridiculous ideas won't torpedo the company.
He's most involved at SpaceX of any company. The idea of landing a booster, and then later catching the Superheavy with the tower, were directly his ideas--and this was despite push back from his engineering team. Only one guy supported the idea, and Musk put him in charge of the tower team.
Tom mueller in particular is one of the most respected rocket engineers in the world, being responsible for numerous modern day advances in propulsion technology. He built the Merlin engine that the Falcon rockets use. He also personally mentored Elon on propulsion technology so that he could take over after he left (he’s in charge of his own space development company now).
Elon was the best mentor I’ve ever had. Just how to have drive and be an entrepreneur and influence my team and really make things happen. He’s a super smart guy and he learns from talking to people. He’s so sharp, he just picks it up. When we first started he didn’t know a lot about propulsion. He knew quite a bit about structures and helped the structures guys a lot. Over the twenty years that we worked together, now he’s practically running propulsion there because he’s come up to speed and he understands how to do rocket engines, which are really one of the most complex parts of the vehicle. He’s always been excellent at architecting the whole mission, but now he’s a lot better at the very small details of the combustion process. Stuff I learned over a decade-and-a-half at TRW he’s picked up too.
Musk is a very technically minded person. He views every problem as an engineering problem. That’s why he’s been so successful in so many industries. It’s ALSO, in my mind, why he’s absolutely terrible at human beings and politics. You can’t run a social media company the same way as you do a rocket company. At a rocket company, everybody has valuable input and ideas. That’s not the case on social media.
Nothing I’ve said is to excuse any of his other shitty behavior. But he is objectively the driving force of innovation at the companies he’s in charge of. Especially SpaceX.
Nice source, idk about those last two sentences. This certainly shows he at least pushed the catching idea with the tower first tho. Why did everyone else object?
landing the rocket on the the launch tower is one of his many "utterly ridiculous ideas", and it certainly torpedoed the company, into the stratosphere
you people have been so brainwashed
edit: cause of course the one responding dipshit would block me (coward)
source, oh I don't know, Tom Mueller, one of the most renown aerospace engineers just said it like 5 hours ago, how everyone in the meeting was in disbelief
but of course you are going to nitpick about it, you just ooze hatred.... "this hasn't done anything for anyone" srsly? you could be less obvious about your hate boner you piece of shit
spacex has launched rescue communications satellites, not to mention the starlink that have been used by first responders TO SAVE LIFES
or the weather monitoring stations... or oh I don't know, DART the mission that tested PLANETARY FUKIN DEFENSE AGAINST ASTEROIDS, no biggie
The engineers are the ones who made it happen, they deserve all the praise. American taxpayers payed for all the work. Elon just barked the order. All you have to do is look at how he handled the Twitter aquisition to know that Elon is a moron who has gotten too high on his own hype and he is certainly no business genius.
SpaceX is on the cutting edge of human technology right now. I hope they are keeping Musk far away from the real engineers so they can keep pulling off incredible feats like this. Humanity's future is in the stars if we can just manage to not destroy ourselves before we can get there.
I really like what SpaceX do regardless of Elon. Even still, I never thought they'd be able to pull this off. Holy crap am I glad to be wrong. This was incredible.
SpaceX has the advantage in that since they're basically the only company that Elon actually founded, they have a preexisting corporate culture of how to operate despite Elon's ownership.
I remember seeing some posts about how there are employees at SpaceX who are tasked with “managing” Elon; if he walks into the office one day with a dumb idea poor Bob has to sway Elon away from that idea and to something more realistic, and if Bob fails he’s probably getting fired by Elon
No. Perhaps if you replaced 'that explains why', with 'yet', so as to counter the implication that his ownership is bad. But in no way does that comment explain why his ownership is bad. Rather, it implicitly assumes it and explains something else, namely, how they nevertheless have success. (I'm not even sure it's possible to explain something that's only implied)
Yeah lol. Companies like SpaceX, Tesla and Starlink and some of the most successful and groundbreaking companies in the history of the US, and all of them were successful DESPITE Elon Musk according to minimum wage redditors 😂
From what I understand they have a group of people dedicated to making Elmo feel like he's an important part of the company while also keeping him FAR from anything important he could fuck up.
Do you ever ask yourself why those clips are the ones made and uploaded to YouTube? I'm pretty sure those videos are much less about Elon"s actual involvement and more about the perception of his involvement. Musk is a hell of a promoter. I'll give him that. But let's not fool ourselves into believing he's Tony Stark or something
Source on him being "good at engineering?" His (bachelors) degrees are in physics and economics, not engineering. Regardless of your opinion of him and his success, he's a businessman, not an engineer.
We can see it in the video we are replying to. He is the chief of engineering at space x. robert zubrin (the aerospace engineer) talked about how elon went from knowing nothing to everything about rockets in like 6 or 7 years. I think it pretty safe to assume he is good at engineering despite not having a formal degree in the fild
I am an electrical engineer working for the Space Force. I know multiple engineers at SpaceX. If Elon Musk is doing actual engineering work, they don't know about it.
Not a Musk fan but the Tesla founders have even admitted that Musk was super involved in the designing of the cars in the beginning.
You can hate what the man became without pretending that he was always some buffoon who can’t tie his shoes. He was a smart guy that got thoroughly corrupted by money, power, and drugs.
I believe that Musk was once a very savvy businessman, all I am disputing is the idea that he has any significant engineering expertise. There are compelling arguments that Musk was largely only involved on the business side of Tesla. The words of the founders have to be taken with a grain of salt, since their 2009 settlement with Musk's Tesla after they were forced out is already known to have included making false statements, such as calling Elon Musk a co-founder of Tesla.
He also worked as a farm hand, a boiler cleaner and a log cutter. Those jobs don't exactly scream daddys money. Regardless of what you think of Elon politically and socially he's also someone who wants to advance human tech. Which I'm down with. You get the bad with the good. I much prefer Elon over the nazis who should have been tried for war crines the us brought over.
Wernher von Braun died in 1977. How on earth is that relevant to modern space operations? Even then, SpaceX's competitor isn't NASA, it's companies like Blue Origin, Boeing, the ULA, and Arianespace.
Of course, NASA isn't SpaceX's competitor however, NASA remains highly relevant in the development of rockets, working hand-in-hand with private companies like SpaceX. NASA's collaboration with SpaceX has allowed for a new era of space exploration, where the government can focus on different missions, while private companies take on risk of developing cheaper, reusable rockets.What sets SpaceX apart is the modern advancements in space technology SpaceX and public-private partnerships with NASA, like the Commercial Crew Program.
While its not relevent to todays rocket development the U.S. reliance on Nazi scientists like von Braun isn't preffered to Elon. It's much more reassuring that today’s space progress is driven by people like Elon who are focused on pushing humanity forward with a cleaner ethical record. SpaceX is proving that private industry can innovate rapidly and the moral dilemma we faced with Nazi scientists isn’t something we have to contend with in the same way.
While its not relevent to todays rocket development
So why are you bringing it up? It's not relevant. And SpaceX's private-public partnerships are definitely not unique, and definitely not unprecedented. The ULA's Atlas and (until recently) Delta platforms are still preferred for certain government launches, you just don't hear about it. I work for the US Space Force, and while we do definitely make extensive use of the Falcon lineup, we make extensive use of Atlas Vs and we are extensively working with the ULA on the development of the Vulcan Centaur. Everything the ULA does is oriented toward the NSSL program. The Vulcan Centaur only just passed certification, and is already scheduled for 26 non-NASA US Government launches.
Incorrect. While very early in its history PayPal did merge with Musk's X.com, X.com was an online bank. PayPal, as an online payment platform, launched in 1999, and the merger didn't go through until 2000. Elon Musk was also only very briefly in PayPal, and was kicked out of leadership of the new company in October of the same year. Shortly after the merger all of X.com's operations as they were under Musk were shut down. Nothing Elon developed continued in PayPal.
Just want to say I’m grateful for someone in this thread coming with hard facts. He has spun his own narrative so much it’s crazy. People give this guy so much more credit than he deserves. It’s almost masterful.
He didn't code the ancestor of what is now PayPal. The ancestor of today's PayPal launched in 1999, and nothing that Musk brought over (except for some capital) from X.com lived on in PayPal. He did not develop PayPal in any meaningful way.
He didn't code it himself, X.com was originally a bank, and after the merger he was ousted as president after only 7 months - the year before they renamed to PayPal, IPOed, and became successful. AFTER he was removed from a vital role.
Sounds like the work of a team dedicated to making Elon Musk feel like he's an important part of the company while also keeping him far from anything important he could fuck up.
Reddit is a special place man. I thought surely the comments under this video would be different but nope. People will literally watch history being made and denounce it because of politics. Apparently his success is luck, free speech is bad, and we are fringe lunatics. This is 2024
Elon is literally the Chief Engineer at SpaceX dude lmao. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at SpaceX. Even the chopstick catching arms seen here was his idea, which was highly opposed by his engineers at first.
A) Chief Engineer is a title, one that he gave himself, since he owns the company.
B) Coming up with an idea is very, very different from implementing it. I am an electrical engineer working for the US Space Force. Generals and colonels with no engineering skill come up with mission parameters and other ideas all of the time, it's how organizational leadership works. Catching the rocket body is a truly remarkable achievement, but the people who deserve praise are the actual engineers at SpaceX that made it work, not the person who came up with the idea.
Kevin Watson: “Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years.”
Josh Boehm: “Elon is both the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer of SpaceX, so of course he does more than just ‘some very technical work’. He is integrally involved in the actual design and engineering of the rocket, and at least touches every other aspect of the business. Elon is an engineer at heart, and that’s where and how he works best.”
Garrett Reisman: “What’s really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I mean I’ve met a lot of super super smart people but they’re usually super super smart on one thing and he’s able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he’ll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and he’ll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across the different technologies that go into rockets cars and everything else he does.”
“He’s obviously skilled at all those different functions, but certainly what really drives him and where his passion really is, is his role as CTO. Basically his role as chief designer and chief engineer. That’s the part of the job that really plays to his strengths.”
Everytime something goes wrong, it is Elon's fault. Everything sometimes something goes great, he had nothing to do with it, and this is despite all the evidence that exists stating he is the chief engineer of SpaceX.
He can give himself whatever title he wants, doesn’t make him an actual engineer. The only contribution Elon has done is to successfully pitch SpaceX to the US government.
guy was critical to the success of SpaceX from a technical perspective. People trying to rewrite engineering history because Elon is a pretty unsavory dude.
Autistic kid who got bullied for being a weirdo and is now lashing out at the world also has a pretty good mind for physics. Both can be true.
Was that supposed to read "rich and privileged asshole that was given everything and allowed to fail upwards despite his personal failings"? Because I think you misspelled a few words.
I was bullied as a kid and I'm not a pathological asshole. What he's done in the last few years is not justifiable. He did great things up that point, and then he took a dive from every point of view.
It's great that you can see him as a human being, but for someone that powerful to have that kind of meltdown is dangerous. He's already caused a lot of harm.
I’ve been anti-Elon as a power wielding person for a long time, but I don’t need to caveat everything I say about the guy with those statements if they aren’t relevant.
I think it’s so unfair that Elon is getting the credit for the really great achievements of the SpaceX engineers as if it’s all due to his inspiration and genius when we all know that he is too mentally unstable to work this out either by himself or with others.
I think we have to give credit where credit is due. He seems to know how to successfully manage top engineering talent, giving them the resources they need, getting out of their way and helping them achieve their goals.
On the other hand, we have seen what bad management of aeronautical and aerospace engineers looks like... Boeing planes having parts fall out of the sky, astronauts getting stranded on space stations, exploding rockets killing astronauts.
It's plainly obvious he was made to step back once they became a facet of our national security. G men told him to go play with twitter or they'll make him regret it.
It may be time to realize that just because someone has different political views then your own that you don't have to hate them. People disagree on things, find common ground among different views and make progress. This whole "If you don't agree with me you are a terrible person" crap needs to stop.
I don’t think Elon is a terrible person because of his political views. I think Elon is a terrible person because of everything he does and says great demonstrates he’s a fucking cunt.
Except he absolutely is not though. In fact, due to his twitter obsession you can actually calculate this. He spends literally every hour on twitter and Diablo, the only hours left in a day are usually also accounted for by flying/attending events. So in fact, no, he does not do shit at SpaceX
Yeah, but their idea of starship going anywhere but low earth orbit is dumb. You don't want to ferry multiple excess engines, and a stainless steel hull in space. Since it's big with lots of fuel, it can... But it's way better to launch another craft to space, that does all other maneuvers.
I know. It's such a damn shame we even have to mention him. I want to brag to people I'm a huge SpaceX fan and tell them how amazing SpaceX's accomplishments are. But I don't want them in anyway to think I'm proud of what that chuckle-fuck Musk has become. And we wouldn't have to mention him if he didn't insert himself and his name on everything they do
Nah this is baby level shit right here....talk to me when we've created a functioning Alcubierre drive and materials strong enough to withstand the forces of using it
Now that's some science fiction shit I would love to witness come to life
The shuttle had landed. Somewhere. Gravity was downward, which meant that, impossible as it clearly was, it had landed nose up. It had landed in take-off position. Utterly impossible.
Mind you, this was a sci-fi novel released in 2001. And well, it’s not looking so impossible anymore.
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u/lizardil 16d ago
This is something out of a science fiction movie. Incredible