SpaceX's Starship Reaches Outer Space Before Intentional Detonation (cnn.com) 125
CNN reports
SpaceX made a second attempt to successfully launch Starship, the most powerful rocket ever constructed. The uncrewed rocket took off just after 7 a.m. CT (8 a.m. ET). The rocket took off as intended, making it roughly 8 minutes into flight before SpaceX confirmed it had to intentionally explode the Starship spacecraft as it flew over the ocean...
This mission comes after months of back-and-forth with federal regulators as SpaceX has awaited a launch license. The company is also grappling with pushback from environmentalists...
After separating from the Super Heavy rocket booster, the Starship spacecraft soared to an altitude of approximately 93 miles (150 kilometers) before SpaceX lost contact, according to a statement issued by the company. For context, the U.S. government considers 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth's surface the edge of outer space...
SpaceX is OK with rockets exploding in the early stages of development. That's because the company uses a completely different approach to rocket design than, say, NASA. The space agency focuses on building one rocket and strenuously designing and testing it on the ground before its first flight — taking years but all but guaranteeing success on the first launch. SpaceX, however, rapidly builds new prototypes and is willing to test them to their breaking point because there's usually a spare nearby. During a drive by the company's facilities on Friday — four Starship spacecraft and at least two Super Heavy boosters could be seen from public roadways.
CNN reminds readers that "so far in 2023 alone, the Falcon 9 has launched more than 70 spaceflights...
"Elon Musk described Starship as the vehicle that underpins SpaceX's founding purpose: sending humans to Mars for the first time. NASA has its own plans for the rocket."
This mission comes after months of back-and-forth with federal regulators as SpaceX has awaited a launch license. The company is also grappling with pushback from environmentalists...
After separating from the Super Heavy rocket booster, the Starship spacecraft soared to an altitude of approximately 93 miles (150 kilometers) before SpaceX lost contact, according to a statement issued by the company. For context, the U.S. government considers 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth's surface the edge of outer space...
SpaceX is OK with rockets exploding in the early stages of development. That's because the company uses a completely different approach to rocket design than, say, NASA. The space agency focuses on building one rocket and strenuously designing and testing it on the ground before its first flight — taking years but all but guaranteeing success on the first launch. SpaceX, however, rapidly builds new prototypes and is willing to test them to their breaking point because there's usually a spare nearby. During a drive by the company's facilities on Friday — four Starship spacecraft and at least two Super Heavy boosters could be seen from public roadways.
CNN reminds readers that "so far in 2023 alone, the Falcon 9 has launched more than 70 spaceflights...
"Elon Musk described Starship as the vehicle that underpins SpaceX's founding purpose: sending humans to Mars for the first time. NASA has its own plans for the rocket."
I call it a success (Score:5, Informative)
All the engines fired.
Booster separation successful.
It made it to space.
Self destruction detonation successful.
The launch pad is still in one piece.
So they fixed all the bugs from the previous test, and achieved some new milestones as well. Also they presumably collected a wealth of new data.
I call that a win!
Re:I call it a success (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed
But the headlines in the popular press still read "EXPLODES" and the Musk haters still spew their hate
I think the engineers and technicians did a great job
Re:I call it a success (Score:5, Interesting)
And that's why SpaceX has progressed so rapidly. If a NASA development project explodes, someone who mostly have undergrad degrees and are responsible to a bunch of people, more than 10% of whom don't have a high school diploma, read the headlines and decide whether the project should continue. If a SpaceX rocket explodes, a small and selected group of space nerds say "great, we got valuable data, how soon can we do this again?"
Besides, I think Musk likes it when people say mean things about him. I bet he was one of the original Slashdot trolls.
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The bigger problem for NASA is that congress (who hold the money) today won't put up with a test to failure type of mentality, especially when it's using some hardware that was engineered by legislation basically (aka, force to use shuttle hardware/vendors).
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Musk is using the "fail fast" approach: Instead of spending inordinate amounts of engineering figuring out what might go wrong and preventing it, just try it and see what actually breaks. Then you know what to fix.
Fail fast works after a fashion. You quickly zero in on the probable failure modes and solve them.
The problem is, there's not a lot of depth to the engineering. You find few of the unlikely failure modes this way. And you build no foundation for understanding what failure modes lie on the other si
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* wouldn't want.
Dang typo.
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and the Musk haters still spew their hate
And there's no reason not to. Musk didn't design this rocket, he was too busy destroying Twitter. SpaceX is amazing. Musk has shown to be quite a piece of shit the past few years. Both are independent things in this world.
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Well, it's a step forward, and if you keep making progress you will eventually get somewhere.
All the engines did fire, but it appears that engine failures on both the booster and the starship caused the loss of both. I think it's acceptable at this point because this is a completely new engine. But it's hard to judge exactly how much progress we've made to making this thing man-rateable.
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I think part of the issue is Musk's timeline pronouncements consistently turn out to be wildly wrong, yet his acolytes still keep believing and parroting any new claims he makes as if they were gospel. If he just kept his mouth shut, there wouldn't be nearly as much drama around any of his companies.
I mean, look at Starship. It's making steady progress, and it's likely to be a success... but it's certainly behind schedule. It certainly seems unlikely it'll reach the moon next year [space.com] (and obviously Musk's clai
Re: I call it a success (Score:4, Interesting)
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Well... that's the whole *point* of Elon Musk. If he has any value at all to society, it's to get investors to risk their money on game changing technology and then stick with it through the inevitable setbacks. He's not Tony Stark; he's not an engineer, he's someone for people who wouldn't respect actual engineers to believe in.
Wasn't the last failed launch (Score:2)
Re: Wasn't the last failed launch (Score:2)
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SpaceX says they lost data from second stage. So there are no lessons learned from that part.
Naive question, but... is there any kind of "black box" that they might be able to recover from the wreckage, in order to get some data?
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Unlikely that would survive re-entry, and if it did it would sink to the bottom of the ocean
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They probably still have data up to that point.
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A lot of things did work, and there is a good chance the failures can be corrected. IMHO the biggest untested parts are the performance of the 2nd stage reentry system, and the 1st stage flyback landing - both of which are required for this to be economically viable. Lik
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And how much delay due to the goverment agencies did they have scheduled.
Re: I call it a success (Score:5, Informative)
Performed much better than previous test. And the pad appears to have no damage, which was the biggest issue last time. It was a win.
Re: I call it a success (Score:5, Insightful)
Tough call on biggest win. Pad looking mostly intact is certainly huge. I am more please with what appeared to be all 33 engines on the booster staying lit the entire flight. I don't think they have even had a static fire with all 33 staying lit so far. Big jump in reliability.
And what appears to be solid self destructs will very much be up the FAA's list of wins. Should shorten this mishap review as compared with the previous. :)
Re: I call it a success (Score:5, Insightful)
I even wonder if they deliberately used the self-destruct to prove to the FAA that THAT particular issue was well-and-truly resolved.
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Why would they need to? Now they'd have to cover up a "deliberate" reason it blew up which would be an actual concern of the FAA.
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They blew it up using a FAA-mandated destruct package, called the Flight Termination System...
..."FTS" for short.
I didn't invent the initialism. I just remind people of what it is.
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Should have called it "Flight Failure System."
Then they could have said:
"And the rocket just detonated. FFS."
Stop with the negative waves? (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Outer space is easy, orbit is harder. In order to get into space, all you need to do is go ~100km or higher, straight up. In order to get into orbit though, you not only need to go 100km up (well, 80km for NASA), AND speed up by around 7 km/s. Starship did the prior, not the latter.
2. Sure, we've been launching rockets into space since like the '50s. However, this is not only a new rocket, it's the largest ever. You being sarcastic about this and putting down the achievement disregards that the first successful flight of anything is very much in the air. It's like a car company being happy that their new model line is a success - sure, everything in the car has been done before, but this is their take on it.
3. There's a massive difference between calling something "a win" and "greatest achievement since the wheel".
80km vs 100km (Score:2)
You noted that NASA uses 80km as the definition of space instead of the international 100km. NASA and the US Department of Defense used to disagree with NASA using 100km until 2005. While there are no stated reasons, I believe that the USA uses 80km, as it is more friendly for spy satellites. It's agreed that a country can fly satellites in space above another country, but can't fly in that country's airspace. Setting a lower ceiling for space gives the USA the ability to get a bit closer without violat
Re: 80km vs 100km (Score:2)
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You being sarcastic about this and putting down the achievement disregards that the first successful flight of anything is very much in the air.
You hope....
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*snerk*, that was an accidental funny, wasn't it?
And yes, it's certainly a "you hope" that there isn't unexpected lithobraking and such.
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In order to get to orbit, you need at least 120 km (any lower, and you'll reenter the atmosphere within one orbit, in practice nobody uses orbits below ~200 km) and 8 km/s.
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Remember, we're talking about the lower bounds of "being in space" and "being in orbit". I was just using figures I found on the internet.
such as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
They list 6.9-7.7 km/s for LEO. Which is a bit odd because you're going 7.9 km/s just being on the ground according to the chart... And yes, it's 200km up to start with. You'll certainly hit 100km on your way to 7-8km/s at 200 km up for a circular orbit.
It was pretty much an off the cuff statement where my point was that "in
Re:Stop with the negative waves? (Score:4, Interesting)
The biggest innovation here is that they took the old Soviet concept of lots of small rocket motors and made it work. The Soviets cancelled the project before it could be made to work, as even the US had lost interest in the Moon by then, and landing Soviets on it was no longer seen as terribly important.
Those Raptors are not so small. Only in comparison to the absolutely beastly size of Super Heavy and Starship could they have that appellation. In terms of thrust they are probably around the 4th most powerful liquid fueled engine to ever fly behind a couple Soviet/Russian beasts and the Saturn's famous F1s. Gets a bit fuzzy when some sources will quote the best thrust ever achieved on test stand, some the expected highest thrust during regular operations, some stick to the main production models, some the projected numbers from a planned next gen for an existing engine...is a mess. But yeah, the shuttle/SLS main engines are in the same ballpark. Ditto for Blue Origin's BE-4 when those actual liftoff. (and they are also behind some engines that never made it off test stands and a wide variety of solid fuel engines)
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A nice summary graphic/table: https://everydayastronaut.com/... [everydayastronaut.com]
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No. The biggest innovation is that they went all-in on rapidly re-usable. Something no other company was able to raise enough capital to make happen. Some companies had the right idea before SpaceX like Masten aerospace https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] and XCOR (tested methane engines back in the mid 2007 https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] ) but they couldn't get the investors.
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The biggest innovation here is that they took the old Soviet concept of lots of small rocket motors and made it work. The Soviets cancelled the project before it could be made to work, as even the US had lost interest in the Moon by then, and landing Soviets on it was no longer seen as terribly important.
That's certainly a big innovation, but biggest? I think it has competition.
1. full-flow [wikipedia.org] methane engine. While full-flow staged combustion has been done for a while, mating it with methane (methalox) as a fuel is very new.
2. Mass produced engines
3. 3D printed engine and craft parts
4. Easy reusability
Stuff as been done before, occasionally, but it's the combination that is makes the difference.
They probably couldn't have done this back in the 70s, without things like advanced computer simulations, bette
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It made it to orbit - unless you and the other fans re-defined "Outer space" Literally.
It did not make it to orbit.
Congratulations, Starship has done what others have been doing since the 1950's.
Who have been launching welded stainless steel hot staging rockets pushing seventeen million foot pounds of force via full flow methalox engines since the fifties. Or ever? Yes, humans have been putting things into orbit for seventy years, but there is awful lot of totally new, the most or never in this combination going on here.
Re: I call it a success (Score:1)
I have to say, watching you and backslashdot constantly try your hardest to poo on everything SpaceX does is entertaining. You guys constantly pretend to know what you're talking about but nobody has to dig even an inch to find out that you don't. Between you and your space BBs and Mr BS and his DC-X claims... Comic gold, like Dumb and Dumber.
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You can like a technology -- most of which was developed and conceived by not-ultra-right-wingers -- without liking the character of the person funding or even developing it further. I mean Saturn V exists because of the work of some outright Nazi Party members like Arthur Rudolph -- people who joined the party freely knowing what it was about. It doesn't mean I don't appreciate the rocket itself. I'm sure a lot of SpaceX employees joined when they thought Elon was a rational person or because they want to
Re: I call it a success (Score:2)
I do indeed...But let's just say that my ego doesn't scale that high, if you catch my drift.
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Congratulations, Starship has done what others have been doing since the 1950's.
You get a cookie. This is the greatest achievement since the wheel.
Congratulations, he's done more for space than you and me combined. Meanwhile, you're a dick about it.
The conspiracy nuts were right all along. (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re: The conspiracy nuts were right all along. (Score:4)
Cannot understate (Score:4, Interesting)
Cannot understate how big a achievement this is. Congrats to all the teams at SpaceX (regardless of how you think about a certain Elon Musk).
This is the largest rocker after Saturn V. Correction, this is the largest rocket ever, even bigger than Saturn V. It not only is taller (394 vs 363ft), it also has more cargo capacity (in final form). (Here is a more detailed comparison: https://www.bbc.com/news/scien... [bbc.com]).
And... almost all test parameters hit correctly. The thing was able to keep all engines running, skimmed the edge of the space (on purpose), stayed stable and in control for about 8 minutes. The future is only brighter from here.
It is good to see American engineers finally taking this seriously after a half a century of hiatus. Nicely done!
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It brings home how badly things went wrong after Apollo was cancelled. We regressed and took over 50 years to build something bigger.
It will be interesting to see if they can get it ready for Artemis in 2025/26. Needs to be man rated for landing on and taking off from the Moon by then.
Huh (Score:5, Insightful)
Different news vendors are saying different things. The version I read stated that SpaceX lost contact with the rocket and it was assumed to have self-destructed.
You'd think that there'd be a single narrative by SpaceX, but what we're left with is multiple accounts and a question of whether the destruction was indeed deliberate or whether that's a post-hoc cover story to avoid any repercussions.
Honestly, until I hear a clear explanation for the multiple versions, I'm not going to accept any of them as necessarily true. The rocket was lost after it reached space, but that's the only fact that seems to be indisputable.
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The flight termination system auto-detonates if pre-programmed conditions aren't met. It's pretty unlikely they lost contact with it since it was still in visual range. In a day or two Musk will tweet whatever it was that made the system unhappy.
Re:Huh (Score:4, Insightful)
It's pretty clear that the rocket self-destructed based on internal guidance showing that it was departing the allowed flight trajectory. This is required so that it can't spread debris outside of a predefined corridor. What we don't know, at least publicly, is why that happened. It could have been as simple as a sensor error or programming mistake making the flight termination system think it was off-course. It could have been something wrong with the engines. It could have detected that the rocket was in the process of exploding due to some catastrophic failure.
I expect SpaceX knows exactly what went wrong. Unfortunately for us, they're not in the habit of giving out lots of technical details on flight failures.
The good news is that it appears that any debris is going into the ocean where the FAA was expecting it in the event of a failure and the area around Starbase is all in good shape, so the review before the next launch license should be much simpler.
So the question we'll hopefully get answered in the next couple of weeks is when they think they'll be ready to try again, which means having adjusted the design based on all the data they've obtained. It seems that they need some work on the hot staging design to avoid destroying the booster, though it was impressive that it didn't blow up until after Starship was well clear of it. And they'll need to fix whatever they think failed in Starship.
Re: Huh (Score:2)
Useful Idiot (Score:2)
Musk does a lot of great things, but he definitely has some stupid ideas.
One is going to Mars before returning and setting bases on the moon.
Another is trying to get to Mars with chemical propulsion and not nuclear.
Re: Useful Idiot (Score:2)
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Give me half the money Musk has, and I'll show you what I do. Nerva was a good start.
https://nasa.fandom.com/wiki/N... [fandom.com]
"SpaceX is already developing other ways to power their ships to get to mars"
Are those other ways nuclear? I'd like to read about that then.
Look, we use nuclear for our submarines, our aircraft carriers, even Icebreakers because we acknowledged the limits of chemical propulsion. Starship looks to be a great vehicle, just don't send it to Mars. Chemical propulsion takes too long to get there.
NERVA [Re: Useful Idiot] (Score:2)
Give me half the money Musk has, and I'll show you what I do. Nerva was a good start.
https://nasa.fandom.com/wiki/N... [fandom.com]
Nerva was a good start, but it's really an in-space propulsion engine, not an earth-to-orbit engine. You still need a low-cost way to get stuff to orbit.
Will be very useful if we do go to Mars, though, and there is work being done to develop the technology: https://spectrum.ieee.org/nucl... [ieee.org]
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Getting to Mars is the easy part. Doing so without condemning the crew to a dozen possible deaths is that hard part. Starvation? Asphyxiation? Radiation? Boredom? I am not seeing a decent plan for how to keep a crew, let alone a colony, survive there, or to even have a point in being there. Part of what we stopped going to the moon is that after a few hundred pounds of moon rocks were collected (and once you beat the USSR there), it ceased to have significant real science value. The ISS has been pret
Wonder where the parts landed? (Score:2)
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Not the Pacific. The booster would certainly still be the Gulf of Mexico, and I think Starship, too, though that might be out in the Atlantic. I think the flight trajectory took it across the south Atlantic, over part of Africa, and then up across the Pacific until it almost hit Hawaii.
Re:Wonder where the parts landed? (Score:4, Informative)
The bits landed up in the sea north of Anguilla, there's video of it re-entering taken from Puerto Rico.
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The bits landed up in the sea north of Anguilla, there's video of it re-entering taken from Puerto Rico.
Here's a link to the details. [blogspot.com]
OK, It was terminated and scattered in the ocean (Score:2)
But do we know if any sharks were hit by the debris? Asking for a friend.
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Hitting sharks? Sharks are the least of Elon's problems [i.redd.it].
By this time ... (Score:2)
Even the dimmest star dispels the deepest void. (Score:2)
Now if Elon Musk could just manage himself a little better...
Completely different approach (Score:2)
That's because the company uses a completely different approach to rocket design than, say, NASA.
Yes. The OceanGate approach. Very sexy, but ultimately not something I'd trust.
Nobody's going to Mars (Score:2)
Musk used the Mars story from the start of all of this.
Videos of dad, mom and the kids holding hands in Elon City.
But it's not built to transport people. You can see that by the design of it.
It's a purpose-built Pez dispenser for Starlink deployment, and that's it.
That was always the intent, but "it's for my Starlink network" is a hard regulatory sell.
A Mars mission, should it ever exist, would be an interplanetary scale money hole for SpaceX.
Starlink is already making money today, plus other benefits.
Musk
Re:I nominate Elon for first explorer (Score:5, Insightful)
Uhh so edgy.
Don't get me wrong: I don't like Musk and I like what he says even less. But at least he's one billionaire who invests his fortune in technological advancement, and not stock market speculation.
That's so rare these days, that basically pushed Tesla and SpaceX decades ahead from competitors. That should tell you something on how inefficient our investments are.
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unlike Tesla which doesn't really appear to be a Musk start-up but something he leeched onto (hard to tell), space-x does appear something that he was key in getting off the ground, kudos for that.
Meanwhile if he could just shut the fuck up sometimes every body would be a lot happier. I guess the ability to think your opinion is always important about everything goes with the oversized ego territory. Bill Gates has a similar problem.
Damn good thing the engineers are in charge of space-x and not Musk.
Re:I nominate Elon for first explorer (Score:5, Insightful)
Because controlling people's speech and/or segmenting societies into mutually hating competitive groups has been so successful through the years. The latest method, via social media algorithms, is just the latest methodology. It's been going on for millenia and it's a great way to weaken resistance to authoritarian control.
Everyone getting a thick skin and realizing that people don't always agree with you would be a lot healthier. But i'm dreaming.
Re:I nominate Elon for first explorer (Score:5, Insightful)
unlike Tesla which doesn't really appear to be a Musk start-up but something he leeched onto (hard to tell), space-x does appear something that he was key in getting off the ground, kudos for that.
He didn't start Tesla, but it's fair to say it has rocketed to its current place in the automobile world under his leadership.
Meanwhile if he could just shut the fuck up sometimes every body would be a lot happier. I guess the ability to think your opinion is always important about everything goes with the oversized ego territory. Bill Gates has a similar problem.
Damn good thing the engineers are in charge of space-x and not Musk.
The coolest thing about social media is that we don't have to listen (nee "read") what people post. In this case, I blame the listeners for their... un-happiness.
Re: I nominate Elon for first explorer (Score:2)
That's not how you use the word "nee"
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You forgot the period at the end of your sentence.
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NI!
Re:I nominate Elon for first explorer (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know where people get this idea that Tesla was already some significant company that Musk just "took over".
Tesla was a shell company that had no engineers, no tech of its own and didn't even own the right to its own name. Eberhard was yet another rich guy (sold Nuvomedia to Gemstar), doing the exact same thing Musk was trying to do (license ACP tech and put it into a sports car - just a Elise instead of a Noble), the only main difference being that he put almost none of his own money in. Eberhard *did* continue running the company (Musk kept refusing the CEO role until the company had burned through three CEOs), and he ran it straight into the ground while hiding it from the board, with cars costing literally double to build what he was telling them it was costing. He was ultimately fired unanimously by the board, including even his own board appointee. It fell on Musk to save it and get it back on track (though not until after, as mentioned, it burned through two more CEOs).
That said.
I only bring this up to stop this unreasonable hero-worship of Eberhard that's started in the past couple years for literally no other reason than because Musk is hatable (if you want some early figures in the company to praise, look to Straubel (the company's first engineer), or Gage and Cocconi from ACP). Not to suggest that Musk is some sort of brilliant leader. Honestly, Tesla survived its early disaster more due to luck than anything else, landing a contract from Daimler to build a converted Smart ForTwo compliance car for them, *right* before Tesla would have gone bankrupt. That gave them enough runway to get Roadster costs back down and do early work on the Model S (which the DOE loan greatly accelerated).
If I had to credit anything to Musk, it's that he proved good at spotting things that were possible but very difficult and which had stagnated, but which "nerds really wanted to see happen". Then once a wave was made, the company would have its pick of engineering talent, people willing to work hard and put in long hours to turn it into reality. If there's any management aspects Musk should be credited for, it'd be - ironically for a micromanager - staying out of their way. That is to say, while he loves to take part in engineering decisions (for better or worse), the structure within companies like SpaceX and Tesla is very flat, discourages meetings with large numbers of people, encourages people to leave meetings where they're not being productive, encourages workers to "go over their bosses heads" if they think they're a barrier, encourages people in different divisions to interact, and take a very vertically-integrated attitude toward development for rapid turnaround.
But whatever benefit he brought to his companies early on, I fail to see it today. He's a turnoff to talent, with mainly the companies' missions and neat projects remaining the key attraction element, not him. He's a regulatory risk. He's a lawsuit risk. He drives off consumers. He's seemingly increasingly focused on diverting resources from his successful companies into new, sketchy ones which he wholly or near-wholly owns.
His day has passed.
Re: I nominate Elon for first explorer (Score:2)
You wish you had a history of successes like Musk does. The guy blows his money on one of the largest social media platforms because he can, but electronic banking, online payments, online p2p marketplaces, social media wouldnâ(TM)t exist the way we know it today without one of the companies he founded or invested heavily in.
Remember how card payments were done in the 90s before PayPal came along? Probably not, because you werenâ(TM)t even alive back then, but it sucked and the establishment banki
Please don't feed the trolls (Score:1)
Now to add some act
Re:Please don't feed the trolls (Score:4, Insightful)
Musk owns a considerable stake in Tesla and SpaceX. His decisions on how to run these companies is an investment of his money.
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I'm sure he has advisers, but he is the CEO. It's a bit far fetched to say he doesn't make major decisions. Where is this documentation?
I see his handlers only let him make bad decisio
What he has isn't advisors (Score:2)
So the story comes from a buddy of mine but I'm pretty sure it's accurate. He was working for a computer outfit doing support and he was working on a computer for one of the clients. Specifically he was working on the owner's computer. It wasn't an account he normally worked on so he went in and looked at it and found that none of the programs connected to the main databases. He took that to mean that that was an issue and said about fixing it.
Turns out the owner had had his computer
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Not really solid documentation.
So that previous story was not about Elon. Maybe you just need to avoid talking/thinking about Elon. Clearly you don't like him, and it looks to be biasing your perspective.
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To point out of the "obvious", the founders of the companies that Elon bought had little hand in bringing in the ROI during Elon's ownership. Elon (or his boards) must be doing something right, when they hire C-suite executives that end up running the companies, rather than Elon.
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That's basically all just made up though. It's well documented that Musk is involved in decisions for both companies. There are probably a few places where they have people to keep him out of the nitty-gritty details so the engineers can work, but it's silly to think he's not involved at all.
For paypal and all that he was basically lucked into being in the right place at the right time. Nothing exceptional, but I wouldn't pretend a Silicon Valley company cared about what some business man from South Afri
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That's not true (Score:2)
And for everyone furiously typing up that the initial seed Capital that let him claim those government contacts came from his own wallet I'll remind you that virtually all that money came from the government programs that made Tesla profitable.
That's not true. Falcon 1 made it to orbit in September 2008, which led to NASA awarding SpaceX a $1.6B contract in December 2008. Tesla's first significant subsidy was paid in 2010. Here's a list of Tesla's first 4 subsidies by date, you can see all of them in the link below. The Michigan 2007 property tax abatement (worth $650,000) was the only Tesla subsidy predating Falcon 1's successful flight.
https://subsidytracker.goodjob... [goodjobsfirst.org]
TESLA MOTORS INC
Michigan local 2007 undisclosed property tax
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The way the things are piled up, its more profitable to invent some absurd thing, sell it to some suckers and fool em into believing you're doing something until the impossible inevitably fail and you escape with the money.
Then put a mustache on and rinse and repeat, with the same suckers.
Re: I nominate Elon for first explorer (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
He can be the first they strap into the rocket and send him to Mars. It'd be one less rich idiot on this planet with an ego bigger than it. Trump would be my second suggestion. Full ride.
Only one of those guys is actually rich enough for a full ride -- all the way -- to Mars -- and I'm okay with that. :-)
Re: I nominate Elon for first explorer (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
I admire SpaceX's ambition to travel to and explore Mars, but I suspect their main function once they get there will be to provide us with a long, painful object lesson demonstrating all the reasons why mankind can't survive without the support of the biosphere we evolved in/for.
To put it another way, at best the Mars colony will always be 4-6 months away from extinction, dependent on fresh supplies from Earth. If Earth gets destroyed by a black hole (or climate change, or whatever), having people on Mars
Re: (Score:2)
at best the Mars colony will always be 4-6 months away from extinction, dependent on fresh supplies from Earth. If Earth gets destroyed by a black hole (or climate change, or whatever), having people on Mars just means mankind goes extinct several months later than it would have otherwise.
If a black hole would sneak up to swallow earth, time dillation would mean that everyone in the Mars colony would be long dead before anyone on earth even noticed.
Re: I nominate Elon for first explorer (Score:3)
Today, with current technology. Who knows what we will be able to do 50 years from now?
That's the whole point. You cannot simply arrive at your destination. You must travel there.
Re: (Score:2)
Who knows what we will be able to do 50 years from now?
Sure, given arbitrary amounts of time and capital, anything is possible. But setting up a viable permanent replacement for Earth's biosphere and resources on Mars, that won't require anything from Earth, ever? Seems unlikely; we aren't even able to do that on Earth [wikipedia.org]. And they won't have arbitrary amounts of time and capital; they'll need to demonstrate viability before society runs out of patience for throwing more money and lives at the project.
Anyway, I wish them luck, but I wouldn't bet on their succes
Re: (Score:2)
Biosphere 2 was highly successful (rather more than Biosphere 1, anyway):
... the closure experiments set world records in closed ecological systems, agricultural production, health improvements with the high nutrient and low caloric diet the crew followed, and insights into the self-organization of complex biomic systems and atmospheric dynamics. The second closure experiment achieved total food sufficiency and did not require injection of oxygen.
They didn't solve every problem, but they solved many, and learned a great deal. The project was eventually shut down for financial reasons, not technical.
Side note: It was shut down [vice.com] by Steve Bannon (yes, that Steve Bannon), who was brought in [motherjones.com] to control costs, but instead fired the managers and defamed the researchers (who later won a $600k lawsuit over it) then dissolved the managing company.
Re: (Score:2)
SpaceX is trying to make sure humanity can survive by getting us off this rock
Oh that's cute. You think common people will be leaving this rock.
Re: (Score:2)
Meh, it was just one of the aliens they've been breeding as slaves in Area 51 since Roswell.
Re: Conspiracy theory (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
LOL, wut? Who's the pilot on the Voyagers?
Re: (Score:2)
They would have live telemetry up to the point it decided to no longer exist - so there is not that much to gain from a black box.
In a case like this, it would need a heat shield to even get to the point of parachuting. It would have to be installed somewhere it can be ejected - so that means opening/ordinance to do that. It adds weight - and weight is money in space flight.
Overall, not enough of a gain to make it worth it. Airplanes have black boxes because we don't have a live stream of engineering tel