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I reiterate, they’re really coming out of the woodwork today.
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I wonder if this post somehow got a boost on Xwitter today. Might explain why our new friends are showing up.
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If Elon hadn’t brought Twitter then history probably would have shown him in a good light.
Telsa - I doubt it will be around for the long term other than as a subsidiary of another brand but it will be remembered for kickstarting the EV revolution. Yes I know, there were other EV’s before Telsa but they managed to make it mainstream even if their products are having quality control issues.
SpaceX - Competition is not even close. Every other rocket company (so far) still throws away the entire rocket on every launch, Falcon 9 is able to reuse the same boosters over and over again, 150 landings, and for a sizable reduction in cost of launch. Now they are attempting to make a fully reusable rocket, it would be foolish to think they won’t achieve it, though it will take longer than Elon predicts.
Other businesses that he has seem like failed bets - Boring Company, Neuralink.
Buying Twitter has let the mask slip though and shown what the man underneath is really like and it is a person that we do not want to be influencing society.
Bye Elon, time for you to exit the stage.
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I guessed Reddit, but yeah.
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I think the shine was starting to come off before this. The whole thing with the cave rescue “mini-sub”, promising to make ventilators and just shipping second-hand CPAP machines… There was an increasing pile of evidence that he wasn’t the cool electric cars and rockets and space colonisation guy. Really what he needed was to do what most billionaires do and hide behind a public identity cultivated by slick PR people to make him look smart and generous and philanthropic as opposed to the reality that they’re all self-centred and venal, but he decided he wanted to be Tony Stark and failed miserably.
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Also his incredibly stupid decisions were all out there to be seen, his incompetent decision-making processes happening in real time in public. Previously he had been successful at mythologizing himself, with the media as active participants and teams of people to protect him from his own instincts and help craft his public persona; now it was just Elon, unfiltered. The crumbling of the myth seemed to make the media willing to not just give up on promulgating the myth but actually start admitting to all the various problems that had been there all along.
Yeah, the myth could only keep going for so long - the cracks kept building up and eventually it was going to come apart completely, even if Twitter didn’t exist to allow him to show his whole ass. (That there’s such a huge gap between his “genius industrialist, real-life Tony Stark” image and the reality just made it all the more inevitable. The myth was only perpetuated so long as the media actively went along with it.)
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Let’s not forget Hyperloop!!!
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So ground breaking! Much WOW! He’s gonna revolutionize transit!!! /s
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Wow, a blast from the past. It’s been a long time since one of Musk’s (sorry, Mr. Musk’s) fanbois dared to show up here to explain to us poor benighted folk what this modern-day Galt’s 5D chess game was.
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they started making a profit this year, so we’ll see. the internets say before first stage reusability falcon was 61 million per launch, and today it’s something like 67 million. ( it’s still quite spendy to reuse a rocket because it takes time and money to refurbish. their goal is what, twenty launches per booster? )
and as for starship, it still needs to make it to orbit…
it’s cool they’re doing so much, for sure. meanwhile, he’s over at twitter posting racist memes. 
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Not sure about “foolish”. My understanding is that second-stage recovery is an order of magnitude trickier (read “more expensive”) than first-stage recovery. It might be achievable, but the economic benefits aren’t as clear-cut as first-stage re-use.
Yes, that does seem to happen a lot.
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oh, you mean the future of transportation (another one) that had just one purpose?
Happy to have this confirmed: the goal of Hyperloop was to get California’s high-speed rail canceled. Musk and the Kochs, both trying to halt a transition away from automobiles.
mother. fucker!
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[Mumbles something about a… Space Shuttle?]
Solving the technical problems is one thing.
Having a reusable system that is economically viable (especially for a private company that won’t accept subsidiarihihihis, sorry, just a little joke) is quite another. Reusable only works with a high launch cadence, i.e. launching a lot of rockets all the time. And there just isn’t the market for that.
How much stuff actually needs to be launched per year?
At this point Starlink conveniently makes sure that Space-X has a lot to put into orbit, but a) creating your own demand is a bit of a workaround and b) how sustainable is this in the long run? (The long run being the point where Starlink has enough revenue to actually pay bills, not just move money around within the same conglomerate. Or, to put it in another way, when Space-X theoretically has to compete with other companies for the Starlink launches. Yeah, right, that’s gonna happen.)
To make the Shuttle’s numbers even remotely “work” the assumption was at least one launch per week. The reality was around four launches a year or so on average.
And let’s not just look at the $/kg to (whichever) orbit price tag, that’s never the full truth and pretty meaningless if you don’t have all the numbers that went into it. To put it in a needlessly exaggerated way, if you launch one cubesat per year with a heavy lifter it doesn’t matter whether any part of it is reusable or not. The price goes up faster than the rocket.
Technically viable concepts for all kinds of rockets (including super heavy lifters that would dwarf the Saturn V) have been and are being proposed/developed all the time. Private ventures outside the established military-industrial-political complex go back to the 1970ies. And yet…
Either there is a market in the form of a continuous demand that can be planned for or there isn’t.
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Look at me, making arguments based on economics…
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