hehe, thats right (me, 3 weeks ago):
very decent and strangly realistic little indie-movie with a very good cast and premise. and as it happen to be, the film is currently availible in full on the tube (with an almost equally impressive flyover over europe):
full movie still there (blocked in some countrys, though)
Docking wonāt take place until tomorrow morning. Itās a 24-hour-ish process of catching up to the station after launch.
in the rush I think now I heard that but did not put two and two
together
thanks for reminding me thoughā¦ 
43:30-43:45 is still strangely prescient
Well, we are stuck in a 2nd rate 80ies revival right now.
Yep. It points up how very different the two challenges are:
SpaceX was born of the realization that one could easily produce a simple no-frills orbital launcher āno need for any magic cutting-edge breakthrough tech, just a basic old-fangled kerolox gas-generator ā for about half the price of the incumbent suppliers.
Thatās because the incumbent suppliers were large defense contractors, operating government-supported pork-barrel jobs programs on cost-plus contracts. The higher the costs, the higher the profits, and congressional support is won by spreading the wealth around.
This is not a recipe for efficiency.
So itās an easy target: simply applying modern, efficient mass-manufacturing tech, with vertical integration keeping everything in-house as much as possible, can easily produce launchers at half the incumbentsā prices ā and with fat margins, too.
Now, what Elon really wanted was an order-of-magnitude drop in launch costs, and he decided that reusability was the fastest and most likely path to that goal.
So he piggybacked a āland the rocket on a bargeā test program onto the early commercial launches. (MUCH cheaper than paying for his own test launches. 
)
But the key was that the F9, even as an expendable, was half the price of its closest competitor.
He went looking for inexpensive orbital launchers and couldnāt find any - which is when he realized that ~āThis isnāt an obstacle ā itās an underserved market!ā~
ā
Cars, OTOH, are hard. Theyāre a well-developed, highly competitive market, with incumbents churning out highly complex mass-manufactured objects in a huge range of types, sizes, colors, and trims, all on razor-thin margins.
Any startup car company would be a dicey bet.
And heās not just starting a car company - heās starting an electric car company, which requires both heavy tech innovation in the car itself AND a huge infrastructural investment in building out a charger network, not to mention a sales-and-service network that doesnāt rely on franchised dealers.
So itās no surprise that Teslaās still scraping by, barely keeping its head above water. The fact that it has succeeded as well as it has impresses me tremendously.
(And Iām still pretty sanguine about its future chances, in part because thereās a lot more to Tesla than just cars ā a fact that frequently eludes more superficial analyses.)
But, yeah, really - making profitable cars is a LOT harder than making profitable rockets.
Incidentally, this is also why Apple will never build a car.
Develop technology to sell to makers and users of cars? Yes.
Exactly. (-:
A lot of credit for that must go to Gwynne Shotwell. Putting her in charge of actually running SpaceX was one of the best moves Musk has made.
What an appropriate name for a space company president/COO!
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