It's crazy to me that while we've been fantasizing about lunar bases, Mars settlements, asteroid mining and colony ships, now, 60+ years after our "space" era started, we still haven't figured out how to get a single person to low Earth orbit and back in a safe and cost efficient way. We all need a collective reality check on our spacefaring hopes.
We stopped doing serious space development after Apollo and lost a ton of institutional knowledge between then and when SpaceX started picking up where they left off.
Documentation and old drawings, often lacking implementation details, can only take you so far
There's no big secret, if we do a thing a lot we will be able to do it consistently and reliably. Boeing has not done a lot of spacecraft design and manufacturing recently. They've spent a bunch of "time" on it, but haven't actually produced much.
Fortunately other companies, besides just SpaceX, are building lots of spacecraft.
> We stopped doing serious space development after Apollo and lost a ton of institutional knowledge between then and when SpaceX started picking up where they left off.
Yup. This is part of why I really love watching For All Mankind. I love the idea of an alternate history where the space race effectively never ended. In that universe, in 1974 they were farther along than we are today.
(Yes, I know, it's fictional, and even had the space race never ended in real life, the rate of progress would probably not have been as fast as it is in the show. But I can dream...)
> Boeing has not done a lot of spacecraft design and manufacturing recently. They've spent a bunch of "time" on it, but haven't actually produced much.
And, arguably, the Boeing doing spacecraft stuff today is not the same Boeing that did spacecraft stuff decades ago, from a management and organizational culture standpoint.
> Fortunately other companies, besides just SpaceX, are building lots of spacecraft.
I wouldn't say they do too much though.
In USA we have 1) Dragon - an overall good, rather conventional, rather modest in capabilities design. We also have 2) Lockheed's Orion, a rather capable, but quite, quite expensive design. 3) We also have Starliner, and I hope Boeing will at least try to support it, or better make it reliable enough; it's also rather modest, but much better than nothing. 4) We also have Dream Chaser... not quite have yet, and it's in cargo version for now, but still there's hope it will carry humans one day and will be successful. Better than many other designs, and of course not perfect. 5) We have Starship... maybe it will carry humans earlier than Dream Chaser, but that's still at least years away. It's a rather unique design, true. But quite unproven at the moment.
So... the best overall at the moment is still Dragon, and the best candidate to replace it is years away - I'd hope that would be Dream Chaser, though won't bet on it.
Overall... not too much I'd say. Just imagine yourself in place of those several companies which are building orbital stations today. What they're going to use?.. Do you see the problem?
There are lots of spacecraft being built, they just aren't all human rated at the moment. I should mention that I'm including first stages here too because my point is that we have to build the stuff to work the organizational muscles so that we can build more similar stuff which is better performing later.
Rocket lab is launching electron a bunch, working on Neutron which will be a falcon 9 competitor, and is building spacecraft for their customers (e.g. they built some Martian orbiters that should get launched later this year).
Intuitive machines, the folks who built the most recent US lunar lander.
Blue origin is not exactly speedy, but they do fly their rockets semi-regularly now and New Glenn is supposed to fly later this year.
Northrup has a human-rated rocket that flies periodically.
And of course there's ULA.
And those are just the successful ones.
There's also:
Astra
ABL
Firefly
Relativity
Sierra Space
And probably some more that I'm not aware of.
That's a pretty long list of places that are working on these problems and paying American engineers to work on and think about these problems.
We also have X-37 the military space plane, although that’s for the military.
X-33 was a thing, Venturestar by Lockheed. It seemed tantalising in close, a few mishaps and it was cancelled, but surely that would have been worth picking and taking that bit further.
Most of the companies with actual money behind their space station proposals seem to intend to use the IDSS, so theoretically they'd be able to take either of the commercial crew spacecraft. Besides that, iirc one proposal is basically a "basic" cylinder which relies on a docked Dragon to support it. Starship is in an interesting spot because in a sense it's a station in itself. Starship deployable stations currently have the problem that the payload bay opening mechanism and volume aren't set in stone yet.
> Most of the companies with actual money behind their space station proposals seem to intend to use the IDSS, so theoretically they'd be able to take either of the commercial crew spacecraft.
Right, but to be practical, those commercial crew spacecrafts should exist in sufficient numbers to ensure the orbital stations are supplied, preferably without exorbitant price tags, which an insufficient supply could result in.
Agreed, so far, SpaceX seems to be fine with building more Dragons, I had been assuming they were just refitting the 3 they built initially for the free-flying missions, but turns out they have 5 in service at the moment. Boeing seems to have decided to stop at 2 Starliners, and of course too early to say about fleet size for Dreamchaser.
"Not as successful as was originally hoped" is quite an understatement. The program missed all of its economical and operational targets (reliability, cost per kg in orbit, launch frequency) by a factor of one hundred. It was supposed to usher in a new era of scientific, commercial and civilian spaceflight, and competing programs were cancelled and deprioritized because they were about to be obsoleted by this amazing new reusable space lauch system. What it ended up being, instead, was an epic exercise in space budget whoring, which continues to this day with the Artemis program that insists on "reusing" Space Shuttle derived hardware for that exact reason.
Sure, if you define "successful" in the most cynical way possible. I don't disagree with you at all that many projects (even many non-space-related) are just jobs programs masquerading as "progress" or "research" or whatever.
But so what? I don't care about that measure of "success". I care about reliable, reusable, cost-efficient space launches, and all the technological and scientific advances that can bring. By those measures, the space shuttle was a disaster of a failure. That's what we care about.
It explored an idea that ended up being a dead end. But we only know it in hindsight. Decisions need to be judged given the information available at the time. Was there a consensus that shuttle was a bad design at the time? Was it obvious that it will be the case?
Obviously it was not known from the beginning that it would be a dead end. However, engineers have this blind spot for keeping track of bigger-picture objectives, as opposed to technical specifications. If you set out to build a lawn mower, and end up with a rubber duck, this will be deemed a failure. But if you do build the lawn mower, all is good. Even if it costs a million dollars, and all the lawns in the country remain unmowed (except for a handful of government properties). So long as someone is paying for continued development, where's the problem?
In other words, a lot of such government-backed projects utterly fail in their objectives, not so much due to lack of prophetic foresight, but due to inability to re-evaluate when it becomes clear that the previously chosen approach can no longer lead to the envisioned outcome. ITER is another fine example of this.
The first space shuttle prototype (Enterprise) started construction in 1974. The first shuttle launched in 1981. To the best of my knowledge, there were no major upgrades to the design over its career, save avionics. So even though the space shuttle was “serious space development,” it’s been a long time since a new human rated vehicle has been designed.
Yes, also there's a world of difference between a single extremely hard to repeat mission whose only purpose was to win the race to the Moon at any cost for reasons that had more to do with politics than engineering (not to dismiss the huge engineering accomplishments, my point should be clear) and something whose plan is to send stuff in orbit every week and potentially people every month with the goal to do the same on the Moon very soon and Mars in less than a couple decades.
The great accomplishment today isn't reaching a higher orbit than in the 60s, but doing the same every damn month, with significant cargo capabilities, and safely. One can't build a Moon base by sending up there a bag of screws every six months.
What do you mean a "single mission", Apollo put astronauts on the moon 6 times and orbited it another 2 times.
You learn to do things better by doing it repeatedly. The best way to build up to weekly launches is to do it more and more and more often, which is exactly what SpaceX has done.
Stopping the funding that NASA was getting at the time is the reason we lost those institutional muscles and stopped building them up.
> What do you mean a "single mission", Apollo put astronauts on the moon 6 times and orbited it another 2 times.
Possible bad wording on my part. I meant that the cost was hardly sustainable in a long run, so that once it was clear that the US had won the race to the Moon, the lack of significant incentives doomed the project because of high cost compared to the return. Back then there was no or very little interest in placing commercial satellites in orbit and nobody cared about Mars. The shuttle was different as it served as a lab and carrier to put satellites in orbit, and more importantly (replying also to avar here) disasters aside one would still have the shuttle returning after each launch, while every single Saturn V had to be rebuilt. I believe the move to a reusable carrier was obligatory to make short term launches feasible economically, which is what the Shuttle started and now SpaceX is continuing.
I don't buy that the cost was unsustainable. All that money being spent was going directly into the American economy and was stimulating technological development all over the country.
The story that NASA was too expensive during Apollo sounds like political spin to me.
Apollo's single mission was "get to the moon", which it performed admirably more than once. Skylab was an attempt at a secondary mission; others were canceled in early planning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V#Post-Apollo_proposal).
IMO the shuttle program did a decent job of preserving American human-spaceflight know-how, especially when measured against what it was feasible to accomplish at the time.
The true problem is that the US government stopped funding space in a serious way and so NASA did not continue pushing the envelope at the rate they did before. We've had some pretty great robotic missions in that time though.
No, the true problem was that the Shuttle program was just a terrible idea. Alternatives (like economical expendable launchers, or even just evolving Saturn) would have been much better.
The shuttle program had several problems, but perhaps the biggest was something of a "design by committee" issue. Too many interested parties wanted it to do too many things, making it somewhere between bad and mediocre at all of them, to say nothing of the costs.
To build reliable, economical rockets and spacecraft (at least those burdened with the task of escaping Earth's gravity well), you need to be able to intensely specialize and streamline them to the greatest degree possible, with what complexity remains pulling its own weight several times over. They need to be really good at one thing, with any other use cases coming as a bonus.
That's not even the root cause. The need for so many parties came from the need for a large enough market to justify the program. And the need for a large market came from the large cost of developing the launcher. And that came from the top down decision for reusability combined with overall inefficiency of the NASA-industry development system. And that is sourced back to Congress viewing NASA and space spending primarily as a pork delivery vehicle, not as an effort intended to achieve real results as economically as possible.
It took SpaceX to slash costs, accelerate development, and choose an approach that really made engineering success to push partial reusability over the finish line. SpaceX was not subject to the perverse incentives under which NASA is forced to operate.
Given that SpaceX is about to launch four people on what is more-or-less a joyride (Polaris Dawn), it's really only the government and boeing that seem to be having problems.
The problem isn't government meddling, but the government creating perverse incentives. Boeing has an extremely strong relationship with the government, which means they get sent endless billions of dollars with quality being only a distant concern. Because it's not like Congress cares about space - NASA is just seen as a convenient jobs/pork medium. So long as money gets redirected to the right people, they're happy. And so maintaining this relationship, and milking it for all it's worth, becomes much more profitable and reliable than trying to compete, innovate, and bring down prices. On the contrary, high prices and long development times just drive even more profit. Most of their contracts have been cost plus where the government pays for all costs and then gives them a fat chunk of profit on top. Even the fixed price contracts tend to end up getting 'adjusted' over time.
Any company solely motivated by profit would probably be destroyed in this system, because the incentives created do not reward competence.
Whether it's in the public or in the private sector, the real problem is a lack of competent leadership. At some point we started respecting the person with the most profitable hustle more than the person showing actual competence and integrity.
Right, the public-sector government becomes afraid to take risks for political reasons. On the other hand, the publicly traded private sector over-optimizes for shareholder value, putting the cart of gold before the horse; Boeing.
SpaceX remains a private company solely focused on their mission undeterred by outside influence which allows engineers the space to do what they do best.
There’s a difference and anything that’s truly critical to our lives or human livelihood should consider delisting. Once shareholders demand your company to stray from excellence and quality in the name of raising the bottom line, it’s time to give it a hard look.
As a (very) small shareholder in SpaceX, I can tell you, it's Elon (and Gwynne's) game, full stop. I would be very surprised to learn an investor has even a tiny bit of influence at SpaceX.
SpaceX exists because of that government's significant funding of the company and the prescient decision to award multiple (fixed-price!) Commercial Cargo/Crew contracts.
It is undeniable that NASA/NROL/USAF contracts and support benefited spaceX especially early on .
However their commercial launch business is still considerably larger than what US gov gives them and always has been , it is possible and quite likely they would have existed as a successful commercial space launch company without government contracts , albeit smaller and perhaps slower to reach many milestones .
I can also argue reasonably that many things US government wants is not useful (or simply restricted) for other customers and building those features were and are a distraction.
No different for a startup to have a very large customer who has all sorts of customization needs that no other customer will focusing on that can kill the company as ULA and Boeing space are feeling today.
SpaceX is successful because they don’t need government support not because of it, they can build starship without waiting for a nasa mission and not even using VC money but just money from their revenues .
"“I messed up the first three launches. The first three launches failed. And fortunately the fourth launch, which was, that was the last money that we had for Falcon 1. That fourth launch worked. Or it would have been — that would have been it for SpaceX. But fate liked us that day. So, the fourth launch worked,” says Musk."
Flights one, two, and three all involved government funding (Air Force and DARPA payloads).
"Even though SpaceX finally has achieved a successful orbital flight, Musk only has $30 million left and was unable to support both SpaceX and Tesla for two months. Contrary to popular belief, Falcon 1's flight 4 did not directly lead to more customer contracts. Through 2008, SpaceX launch manifest at the time only consisted of RazakSAT. Rather, it was NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services and subsequent Commercial Resupply Services contracts that provided SpaceX much-needed fund to save it from bankruptcy."
Don't forget SpaceX was the first private company which achieved orbit without external money, and did that for awfully less money than e.g. Air Force thought possible.
Thanks for the links. I can't find in the article how much DARPA gave SpaceX, in dollars, and the second link talks about payment for the launch, not the grant.
The mission carried a $6.7 million price tag covered by the U.S. Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
How big share of about AFAIK $90 millions spent on Falcon-1 program was from SpaceX investor(s) and how big was from external sources? In other words, how material was that external funding?
I think it stands to reason that if they were nearly bankrupt after flight floor, having to self-fund flights one, two, and three would have definitely bankrupted them.
I think they had money to make up to 4 flights. Looks like they got some money even before the flight 4, but not sure how much compared to their own expenses.
> SpaceX exists because of that government's significant funding of the company and the prescient decision to award multiple (fixed-price!) Commercial Cargo/Crew contracts.
This was the claim of OP I replied to, Are we not moving the goal posts here? Government support for early stage startups is absolutely not what OP claimed
DARPA AND USAF funding is important and also available to many companies before and since, the size of them is however not significant in comparison to what it takes to run a rocket company or even R&D.
> Contrary to popular belief, Falcon 1's flight 4 did not directly lead to more customer contracts ...
> Even Musk doesn't make that claim.
In the alternate reality where Falcon 4 succeeded but there were no COTS and CRS , would SpaceX have survived? Yes I think so, Musk would not have been able to keep it funded personally yes, but it is hard to see the first private rocket company with a functional rocket not being able to raise any money from investors at all.
We can of course argue how much Musk loosing partial control would have affected the trajectory of the company, quite possible they won't be where they are today without singular focus he was able to drive in the company, who is to say ? but they would likely be still here. It is also possible that Musk is talented and effective enough even with constraints external investors would have been still able to achieve the same kind of things, keep in mind SpaceX does have lot of external investors and raised outside money heavily in the last 15 years including a $1Billion from Google in 2015, Musk has been able to operate with that so not that far fetched.
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Nobody is denying that US Gov has been instrumental in the success of SpaceX and rocketry in general. After all even with zero government support, SpaceX would still need the rich talent pool US Gov developed and allowed to work in the private sector to build a rocket at all.
The point is how much the revenue from Government launches helps/helped not how they has helped at all. US Gov is a large customer but not so large that loosing those contracts would make the TAM impossibly small, there is enough business outside to make it viable business not just attractive but viable nonetheless.
So, two flights to the Moon - ~$4B. SpaceX already spent around that on the developments in Boca Chica, each flight - expendable - is estimated at $0.1B, we already had 4 and they are surely more costly. We still have to have 2 HLS to fly and 20-30 Starship flights to refuel them, and that's the lower bound in expenses.
Big chunk, likely. But definitely not nearly all the money.
That's an interesting cost-based criticism of Starship. I hope you are wrong and SpaceX can actually do this profitably, otherwise its potential will be much reduced.
The development is what already being spent... Each flight, after development is complete, will be reusable - that's the plan - and will cost less than $0.1B == 100 millions dollars, if total per-Starship expenses are divided into the total number of that Starship flights. Yes, I hope the eventual costs per flight would be lower, the point is the cost of the program is surely way more than $4B.
and the government should continue to fund private enterprise for innovation.
much of the billions for a charger network for EVs has made <10 chargers, they could have provided that to Tesla. similarly the EV tax credits provided to private companies has fueled EV proliferation
> Just looking at the $5 billion program dedicated to building charging stations along major highways, Nigro said updated data from 10 states shows the government’s share of building each port is $150,000, on average. That works out to more than 30,000 ports and as many as 7,500 stations, assuming each has four ports (Nigro said the station number will likely be lower, since many stations will have more ports). Even more charging stations and ports can be built with the other $2.5 billion.
> The charger thing is misleading. The money hasn't been spent yet
Not certain if that is any better. If an organization can't execute, it can't execute. It doesn't matter if it is some frankenstein of Boeing prime contractor and Rocketjet subcontractor or Federal and States.
Sure, and if we’re still at ten completed charging stations in a few years, I’m happy to criticize.
I think that’s unlikely.
Phase one is “submit your plans”. Phase two is “we review, approve, and fund your plans”. I’m not surprised these have taken a while to coordinate across 50 state governments.
2030 for 500K chargers is just separate political goal, it isn't connected to the $7.5B allocated by the bill.
The bill allocates $7.5B over 5 years. He said most will be coming online 2027+ but seemed to admit that the expectation was for more to be online by now. While I agree the "9 stations for $7.5B" there are reasonable concerns here that the money will be well-spent. I can't even find anything on how much has been actually allocated to far and how many chargers are expected.
> 2030 for 500K chargers is just separate political goal, it isn't connected to the $7.5B allocated by the bill.
Yes, it is. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/05/congress-ev-charger... "Biden signed the bipartisan infrastructure package into law in 2021 with $7.5 billion specifically directed toward EV chargers, with an eye toward achieving his goal of building 500,000 chargers in the United States by 2030."
> The bill allocates $7.5B over 5 years.
Yes, to hand out to the states. Who then get to spend it on projects. Allocation is the start of the project, not the end.
"FHWA must distribute the NEVI Program Formula Program funds made available each fiscal year (FY) through FY 2026, so that each state receives an amount equal to the state FHWA funding formula determined by 23 U.S. Code 104. To receive funding, states must submit plans to the FHWA and the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation for review and public posting annually, describing how the state intends to distribute NEVI funds. The FHWA announced approval of all initial state plans on September 27, 2022, and FY2024 plans were approved in 2023."
You'll find me fairly unconvinced by a letter from Republican House Representatives to Biden. (You probably would find a letter from Democratic reps to Trump similarly useless as evidence.)
Turning Elon Musk into the richest person on earth was a US government project on the same kind of scale as the TVA and Apollo program. It’s actually kinda funny when you think about it.
This is reductive, in the extreme, to the point of being incorrect. SpaceX had to sue to win its first contracts, Tesla was actively cut out of Biden administration EV programs and awards. Whatever success they've had, they have absolutely earned.
the command of critical projects Elon has is unnatural. He builds his massive projects with no permits or regulatory approvals;
see:
- the massive supercomputer in Memphis, no power power approval from TVA and did do an EIA. The city council never new about the project.
- Starship and Starbase, no lauch approval
- Tesla FSD, no regulatory approval
-Starlink version 2 upgrade, the competition is still fight. Again, no approval
and many more.. all this projects a massive like really massive.. True Elon is a government project.
It'll include the first commercial space walk ever. Calling that a joy-ride either trivializes an epic accomplishment or correctly describes a joy-ride of the gods. Helios' daily commute, but faster.
Pretty much this. Polaris Dawn is happening because Jared Isaacman wanted it to. And my point is that SpaceX has gotten the price down to the point where he was able to afford multiple trips.
The government (NASA with their commercial space effort) is the reason there's a SpaceX and a dragon to be available as backup. The government seems to be doing alright here.
OceanGate launched three people on a joyride to the bottom of the ocean and the sub imploded.
Rich people being willing to spend buckets of money on an experience is not evidence that it is "safe" or "cost effective", it's just evidence that there are people in the world with more money than they know what to do with.
Jet set was a thing in 50/60s Jet travel was viewed as a play thing for the extremely rich . Even today there is staggering 80% of the world population who have never flown in airplane ever in their life[1].
From the perspective of that 80% they can say airplanes are "just evidence that there are people in the world with more money than they know what to do with".
It takes a long long time for transportation to become affordable. What SpaceX has done so far is just make it a bit cheaper to make it possible for civilians to be able to even pay any money and do this. No innovation will be ever enough, that doesn't mean we demean it.
I'm not demeaning anything, I'm just pointing out that OP's argument makes no sense. There may be other evidence that SpaceX is safe and cost effective, but rich people paying them to go to space is not it.
You seem to be unaware that the Soyuz system has been safely moving people back and forth to LEO for decades. SpaceX has been doing it since 2020. This failure should only be taken as a comment on Boeing's broken engineering processes and incompetent management. It says nothing about our society's spacefaring capabilities.
This is an absurd statement. There are currently three operational spacecraft that have been safely and reliably ferrying people back and forth from LEO for years now: Soyuz, Dragon, and Shenzhou. This is a test flight for a fourth spacecraft.
We get people to and from low earth orbit safely and (relative to the 60’s) cost efficiently all the time. One failure isn’t an indictment of the whole industry, any more than one broken down car negates how much better cars are today than in the past.
And it wasn't even a real failure; they contractually have to provide something like a 1 in 200 chance of failure or better, and in the state the vehicle is in they haven't or can't prove that they're meeting that safety margin, so NASA is choosing to go with an option that does have that safety margin. That's it. If they were to come down in it anyways there's still likely a 1% or less chance of failure.
I agree. It reminds me that it is now 6,000+ years (at least) since our agricultural era started, and we still haven't figured out how to provide a decend meal every day for all the children on our spaceship Earth.
> we still haven't figured out how to provide a decend meal every day for all the children on our spaceship Earth.
We produce more than enough food to feed every person on Earth and then a few billion more in the future. We simply choose not to. It isn't a technological or logistical issue, but cultural and political.
Yes indeed. It shows the importance of cultural and political issues in everything. And not least in space flight. See the motivation behind the Apollo programme in the past or who might be part of the next Crew-9 mission in the current situation.
And that a brand new company offers the only U.S.-based method for doing so, when NASA and these other companies have been at this since roughly World War II!
It's embarrassing for the legacy space industry.
Not to downplay the legacy space industry's amazing achievements like some armchair general (literally typing this from my couch...)
But, I'm shocked at how badly SpaceX is beating the incumbents.
This is like the difference between electrical engineering and software engineering. It’s just so more expensive to create and test anything in EE so development cycles are much longer. Compare that to software engineering where people are trying and making new paradigms like every week.
Space engineering is wildly more expensive so development and progress cycles are even longer.
The same goes for secure and bug free software development (while the cost of errors in software rise all the time)
Looking at transportation, noise and air pollution or medicine as other examples: We are still just really bad at most things, if you consider how little fantasy is required to find major fault in our important systems.
Space flight is not even that, just really exposed.
I fully agree. Personally I don't think we'll ever have an extended manned presence anywhere farther away than the Moon. We might visit Mars in the next century, maybe, but a colony surviving there is pure fantasy.
It's been 63 years ago since the first human visited the orbit around earth. Since then, development and research happens faster and faster. We now even have commercial companies who are developing space crafts for humans.
I don't think we've seen even the beginning of how things will unfold. Just 100 years will render a huge difference from today, and today we're already doing things that were unthinkable ~20 years ago (like reusable rockets).
Commercial space flight will become mainstream as soon as it becomes viable to profit from it. Probably via asteroid or moon mining. At that point motivation to be in space will hit its peak. Let's not forget why humans went to orbit and the moon in the first place.
Just a couple hundred years ago, Settlers who risked their lives and spent several months on cutting edge technology (aka wooden sail
boats) to find “new” land would like to have a word.
It's also a bit poetic in that it took 30-60 days to sail from Europe to the New World. When Mars is aligned with Earth, the travel time will be similar. For example, New Horizons was able to reach Mars in 39 days.
Am I missing something? New Horizons didn’t go to Mars, right?
According to this, it also crossed the orbit of mars 78 days after launch, and at that point, it was closer to earth than mars:
I'm with you. Unfortunately. The older I get, the more I realise just how hard, far and pointless existing beyond the Earth's atmosphere will be, for the most part.
Certainly the next few hundred years. There's just no real point. Ten thousand years hence, who knows?
I'm absolutely rapt following SpaceX's journey, but then when I mentally scale that up to 'something useful' for localspace living (eg. a useful percentage of current daily aviation volume), I realise how utterly unsustainable it fundamentally is.
The older I get, the less of a Paradox Fermi's idle thought becomes. Sadly.
Given how much future is left (a whole lot), I don't really understand why some people seem so confident that humanity is just going to stay on Earth forever. Are you assuming industrial civilization will collapse? It's certainly possible, but I don't think it's a given.
People have been waiting for that like forever. It may happen, it may not. I spoke to multiple SpaceX employees post Musk twitter and they are as committed as ever with an insane amount of dedication to the cause...so if he does not lose his top talent, the likelihood of screwups like what you are describing seem small.
He’s our generation’s Howard Hughes. One Ket trip away from becoming a recluse, shuffling around with kleenex boxes for slippers muttering about being unclean and denouncing conspiracies against him.
This was literally debunked by nasa but I’m so glad HN is so captured by anti musk narratives it’s impossible to post anything good about him with getting downvoted.
I'm all for holding him accountable to his outlandishly unrealistic claims, but he and the entire SpaceX team are wholly responsible for the biggest advancements and innovations in space explorations since the space race. Credit where credit is due.
People thought the Wright Brothers were crazy, too.
Innovators are often dismissed as having outlandish, unrealistic claims. And then they succeed.
And, frankly, how are you going to hold him "accountable"? It's his and his investors' money he's spending. They know what they signed up for.
P.S. I own a bit of Tesla and SpaceX stock. It could go to zero, and I'm still happy to have a "piece" of what Musk is accomplishing.
The only thing I'm mad about is I owned some Twitter stock, but when Musk bought it I was cashed out against my desires. Though I do understand Musk wanting to run Twitter as he saw fit rather than having to listen to activist shareholders.
Musk is one of, it not the, greatest entrepreneur in American history.
> The only thing I'm mad about is I owned some Twitter stock, but when Musk bought it I was cashed out against my desires.
You got lucky. Twitter's revenue is down 80% since it went private, and your shares would correspondingly be worth a tiny fraction of what they were originally worth if you still owned them. Musk has succeeded with other companies but his Twitter acquisition has been a total failure. He simply doesn't understand how to run a social networking company.
The point is, the stock would likely be down at least 5X, so if you wanted to be a long-term investor, you could take the cash that was forcefully cashed out and re-buy in now and get over 5X the share of the company. Selling high and re-buying in low is a very good strategy if you can actually do it, and you have the opportunity to do it!
But you certainly don't want to be the bagholder who held it when it was high (the price Elon was willing to pay for it) and then rode it all the way down to the bottom when it cratered.
I've held many of bags. Some of them all the way to a smoking hole in the ground. But several of the bags turned out to be winners that far outstripped the losses.
I prefer to invest in the management of a company, rather than the financials. I'm willing to see them through the bad times if I believe they're on the right track. I've been a patient investor of Intel since the 90s. But a couple months ago, I finally gave up and sold it. It pained me a great deal to do so, but Intel just seems to have lost its mojo.
Sure, my Twitter stock may have tanked under Musk. But I am willing to be patient with him.
Let's say I invest in 10 stocks, and hold, hold, hold. 3 of them go to zero. 3 do modestly ok. 3 do well. 1 goes up a hundred fold. The other 9 are irrelevant.
I do not know how well X is doing as a business, but Musk buying Twitter has certainly helped to wrest it out of the hands of the left and to shift the Overton window. It could well be that to Musk, the political impact is well worth billions of dollars.
I'm curious, how does one buy stock in SpaceX? Is this opportunity only available for wealthy individuals or people who can put down 6-7 figures towards it?
What happens is some big investors buy chunks of stock, and then resell it on a secondary market. So my shares are claims on the big investor's shares, not mine. There's usually a non-trivial minimum, and a hefty fee.
Biggest advancements ? Give me a break. Voyagers, Hubble, ISS, James Webb, upcoming Europa mission - SpaceX has nothing on that level of sophistication and cooperation between dozens of countries. I'm very much fond of SpaceX, but giving Elon too much credit does not feel right .
Biggest advancements in launch technology would surely be correct. Scientific research isn’t in their domain and should never be. There’s just too much political influence there.
What is SpaceX doing that the Apollo project (or the Soviets, for that matter) wasn't doing 50 years ago. Re-usable booster stages is all I can really think of.
Beyond the cost aspect that other commenters have referred to, they're evolving tech. They're the first ones to have a working full-flow staged combustion cycle rocket engine (the Raptor, currently used in the Starship prototypes), something the Soviets tried before and failed. Their Dragon capsule was also a gigantic technological leap relative to the admittedly tried-and-true Soyuz, and it also looks far more comfortable for astronauts than the Soyuz does.
SpaceX is also doing right now what Apollo and the Soviets are not doing right now. That's very important, because they are using modern materials and manufacturing techniques and developing new concepts. If SpaceX (and soon their competitors, hopefully) manage to keep themselves in business (and they might, because of the profit motive, which is enduring, rather than national pride, which comes and goes), there's a fair chance our species might bootstrap its way out of the ancestral gravity well this time around.
Profit has not been the goal. If profit is the goal, one'd start another eyeball catching internet application. As the joke goes, the way to make a small fortune in space, is to start with a big fortune. SpaceX is the exception, not the norm. It worked only because of the unwavering, perhaps maniacal drive of one man. The man being hated on all over the place here that shall not be named.
I'd suspect the space industry will slow down drastically again if somehow that man stops putting space as a priority (or at least one of his priorities). Currently I don't think there's any one or company that is able to push the envelope AND still turn an operational profit at the same time. Even Starship program is not. Making it work is the exception, not some inevitable norm as others are making it as. Aka - "just because of government money".
Space is a perfect example that this isn't true. It kept going up and up with NASA/Boeing. The Space Shuttle ended up costing, in total, $2.2 billion per launch! [1] The SLS, if it ever finishes, was expected to cost more than $2 billion per launch [2], and that's before we went into inflation land. Add the inflation and the fact that expected costs tend to be dwarfed by real costs, and it's easy to see it going for $3+ billion per launch.
By contrast a Falcon 9 costs $0.07 billion per launch. And the entire goal of the Starship is to send that cost down another order of magnitude. Without significant competition + price sensitive market, the only way costs come down is if you have an ideologically motivated player. And it's fortunate that we have exactly that with SpaceX.
The overwhelming majority of SpaceX's revenue has been government contracting. That is starting to diversify in the last 2-3 years with more truly private launches and with Starlink, but that's relatively new, and even so government is a very, very large share of revenue.
Many were. I'm not saying this is terrible-- these programs cost too much for private entities to bear all the risk, and most of the programs that SpaceX has gotten funding from have been well-run programs.
COTS paid for vehicle development for Falcon-9 and Dragon; CRS paid for flights. COTS was a pretty well-managed program with a lot of clear milestones for funding release.
The troubled Artemis program has paid for a whole lot of Starship development and demonstration. It's questionable how well Starship actually meets Artemis needs, so this is more troubling.
And, of course, the government has bought early flights with no guarantee of success, including just to fly masses/demosats. DARPA/NASA/ORS paid for the first 3 Falcon I failures.
OK granted. NASA and legacy aerospace contractors were milking a cash cow and never thought they would face a new competitor.
But I was more thinking of fundamental capabilites. We (USA and USSR) have had crewed low-orbit space stations since the 1970s and have been sending astronauts to and from them since then. We sent probes to Mars and Venus and other planets in the 1970s. The Voyagers were launched in 1977. The stuff we're capable of doing today has not really advanced.
You can be great at one phase of your life. Motivating people, working 20 hours a day, sleeping in the office. Probably Tesla would have gone under without Elon pushing, motivating, and showing his investment (meaning of time and energy).
It doesn't mean you are a statesman, a scholar, or all knowing. About anything.
It also doesn't mean that you can solve every problem you encounter in life with that kind of behavour.
Tesla as a company is an impressive accomplishment. Elon does sound crazy, however.
I recommend reading a biography of Musk and the creation of Tesla. It's abundantly clear neither would exist without Musk. Anyone would want to be called such a "sad loser"!
There are lots of nice people in the world who don't do anything much for us. People like Musk, on the other hand, create this world we can enjoy. Consequences matter more than motivations.
And what exactly have you accomplished in your life that has bettered others' lives?
Don't get me wrong it's perfectly fine to criticize someone on specific things - however, you are just blanket calling someone you don't know a sad loser... honestly says more about you than him.
oh bugger all, and I'm content with that. I don't think he is though. he just doesn't seem okay. if I were that filthy rich, I'd pay somebody to make sure I'm not coming across as a lunatic, I wouldn't joke about buying a blog and then panic when I can't pull out of the contract. i wouldn't tell advertisers to go fuck themselves and then sue them for not advertising on my blog.
I follow Musk on twitter. I usually get a chuckle from his tweets. It's nice to see a major figure speak his mind rather than the careful pablum filtered through a PR department and read off a teleprompter.
I don't think he has said anything outright. But he has endorsed (coded) antisemitic tweets, he has directly espoused transphobia, and his companies have lost a few lawsuits alleging racist working conditions.
I don't think he himself is racist, but he seems to enjoy hanging out with a lot of racists, and he gives me vibes that he thinks anti-racism is more of a problem than racism.
It is true that Musk endorsed a post which said that Jewish communities have been endorsing anti-white hatred.
There is no doubt that one can easily find many individual Jews, and even groups of Jews, who have endorsed anti-white hatred. However, Jews are prominent in all parts of the political spectrum due probably mainly to their high average level of intellectual ability, so basically anyone could find prominent Jews among their political opponents no matter what sort of politics one has. Some of the most prominent figures who are generally considered far-right in today's Western Overton window, and most definitely are not anti-white, are Jewish. For example, David Horowitz, Curtis Yarvin, Costin Alamariu, and many others. Then there is Israel, which in some ways is far-right by modern US standards, and is a place where I imagine the majority of the population both consider themselves white and are not anti-white in the slightest, rather the opposite. The idea that entire broad communities of Jews promote anti-white hatred is not supportable by reality as far as I can tell.
I forgot about that endorsement of his. You make a good point. I am not sure that his endorsement was just a case of misunderstanding on his part rather than revealing a deeper racist sentiment. It could go either way. It is possible that he was just sloppy and interpreted "Jewish communities" to mean "certain groups of Jews", which is what he tried to say when he backtracked from his endorsement later, and it is also possible that he actually dislikes Jewish people in general. But I agree that it is not unlikely that he has at least some underlying anti-Jewish sentiment.
Funnily, I notice that many people who have anti-Jewish sentiment misunderstand what is typically happening when individual Jews express anti-white sentiment. Usually what is happening in such cases is that the person considers himself both white and Jewish, so when he expresses anti-white sentiment it is not as a Jewish person hating on whites, it is actually as a self-hating white hating on whites. I would not be surprised if Jewish whites in the US are more likely to express anti-white sentiment than non-Jewish whites are, since Jewish people in the US tend to be leftist and being a self-hating white person is a very common characteristic of leftist whites, but that does not mean that communities of Jews are anti-white unless you use the word "communities" in a rather non-standard way.
As far as transphobia goes, I am not so sure. Musk seems to be a bad father to his trans child, but I cannot think off the top of my head of any transphobic things that he has said, unless you think that it is transphobic to not consider a trans woman a woman. Which I do not consider transphobic at all. But I might not be aware of some of his statements.
We have to have a collective look at what 1st-world governments, the media, and most "ordinary" people have been focusing on since the late 60's.
The world is not mobilizing towards these big "civilization advancing" goals, we're all just faffing about solving the next tiny little thing infront of our faces. That plus we're breeding mediocrity and not promoting excellence through meritocracy. This is purely cultural, and it's right infront of us every day to see and participate in (or not).
Since then 500 million people or more have been taken out of poverty. They are competing with you for resources. That's why what was going on in the US in the 50s is no longer possible.
Wouldn't you wonder why then that it seems, at least according to you, society have went backwards and not forward in this time frame?
"We have to have a collective look at what 1st-world governments, the media, and most "ordinary" people have been focusing on since the late 60's." still applies. Fixing the everyday problem is part of the problem-set to get to the "civilization advancing" goals.
I'm 100% with you about fixing fundamental societal problems first. But we still have to ask why we can't do that anymore with a single breadwinner in a household.
After the super-basics like hunger, homelessness and violent crime, the next item on the list should be this problem of the value of a human's labor (As to how, I'll leave open for discussion). I believe it's been going down since the 1950's because we've transitioned away from manual labor and onto more "knowledge based" labor, of which most people are not keeping up. And of no fault of their own necessarily. We're simultaneously not assisting them with schooling and training, but we're also trying to insulate them from the negative effects of their falling-behind by not promoting a meritocracy.
All fair points. If we could even get an honest dialogue of this issue in the mainstream maybe we could start fixing it. At this point all I hear from politicians are catchphrases and an insane amount of effort has to be undertaken just to get breadcrumbs. I saw this when Bernie Sanders lost the primary, he and his people worked to push the Biden white house to adopt some policies to help working families...it took a lot of effort and we got some tiny wins but with those wins, the elites got hoards of goodies as well.
Most economies are not meritocratic and/or capitalist but mixed economies where the state direct good % of gdp towards political goals. in these societies the ones who makes real money are in proximity of the "printing press", usually finance, banking, real estate and generally incumbent megacorps; all actors that can take full advantage of low interest rates & stimulus programs that end up inflating assets (cantillon effect) further devaluing the value of labour. We need real meritocracy and capitalistic competition to put back power int the hand of labour.
But the 50s were a big historical anomaly that should not be taken as benchmark due to a lot of factors, first of all being an overheated economy, the only country with serious industrial capacity post WW2
You are explaining a symptom of the problem. Solve the underlying problem. If humans are to become a space faring civilization and all the other things this cannot be an insurmountable problem.
>But the 50s were a big historical anomaly that should not be taken as benchmark due to a lot of factors, first of all being an overheated economy, the only country with serious industrial capacity post WW2
Why is it that society should be expected to solve these extremely difficult problems to go into space and to do all these other sci-fi things but when it comes to the standards of living that humans were once capable of, its "oh what you had were a big historical anomaly that should not be taken as benchmark due to a lot of factors".
I'm sorry but I don't buy it. If you want the magic of the future that you see in the comic books get the fundamentals right first!
investing on cutting edge tech has historically been more beneficial to society in large than similar (tiny) amounts in welfare projects. Increasing workers productivity also makes similar levels of taxation less burdensome. lets say you need 10k a year per capita to finance welfare for everyone. if gross income doubles, tax burden halves.
