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Boeing made the x-37, which is autonomously roving around space, and landing on its own.

Musk pointed a rocket at the sky and pressed play. In terms of difficulty, boosting a car into an extended orbit is trivial. Manoeuvring a "space plane" to intersect multiple satellites, grab them and return to earth, that is orders of magnitude harder.

Ford make cheap cars world wide at volume, and pioneered the production line.

as for point one, like me, he was in the right place at the right time. I am rich because I joined the right start up and got bought out. yeah I worked hard, but not anywhere near hard enough to justify the money I got.

The same with musk.



> as for point one, like me, he was in the right place at the right time.

Let me rephrase:

SpaceX was valued at less than one billion dollars when they launched the first Falcon 9 to orbit.

The total money raised in the investment rounds only exceeded $1 billion in 2015, after 13 launches.

Total raised from investors only exceeded $2 billion, enough to be called “billions” plural, in Jan 2019, which is just before SpaceX got Starhopper off the ground.

https://craft.co/spacex/funding-rounds

In comparison, the per-launch cost of the SLS is estimated to be “over $2 billion”, plus dev cost, and an Orion capsule would be extra.

SpaceX didn’t need billions to achieve impressive things, just for ridiculous things like “enable the colonisation of Mars”.




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