It shouldn't be that hard for people to understand that Musk has enemies in the most wealthy and powerful industries on Earth in automobiles, oil, and aerospace, and as such, creating a negative impression of him through astroturfing on social media and forums is a given. While he and his companies have flaws, the negativity is vastly out of proportion, and most either have an agenda or are unwittingly parroting those that have an agenda.

And yet Musk has repeatedly overpromised and underdelivered on self-driving functionality for Tesla. He aims high and while Tesla has delivered spectacularly on the dream of a viable electric car, it's so far failed at the promise of a self-driving computerized chauffeur. But why would it? The two problem sets are wildly different, and there's no reason that success in one implies success for the other.

Likewise, SpaceX has done some amazing things so far for private launches and the promise of reusability. But that doesn't imply that they are going to be able to solve the challenges required to get people to Mars. That's a wildly different problem set.

Not sure what you are implying. Should companies only work on scaling problems they've already solved?

> selling Tesla like hot cakes

That would be great if they could make enough of them to deliver to the people who bought one.

I think what you mean is "make enough of them to deliver to people who paid $1000 to reserve a place in line"

> Being good at marketing is essential

This claim is dubious. That you can sell people space exploration by hyping it up.

It does not show in money, or people going to STEM field. It probably increases interest for scifi books or videos.

> I'm sometime very tired of the pessimist sentiment here.

You want to be inspired/entertained as a consumer. People who must be constantly emotionally propped and mentally supported are not the ones who are willing to go and work toward Mars.

Damn, of course I'm a consumer of space. I would not even be half that interested on how to actually go on Mars if it was not for Space X.

You know, research money is not coming from nowhere, you have to actually advertise what you're doing in order to get money. I even bet the the bigger the crowd is, the more money you can raise.

You know, if the public opinion is favorable to what you're doing, it get a lot easier to actually do it.

> It does not show in money, or people going to STEM field

Anecdotally, I know many a kid who has taken an interest in space and rocketry after watching a SpaceX launch.

What empirical data have you to show that there is no correlation between space awareness (whether by Musk or anyone else) and STEM enrollment?

> Anecdotally, I know many a kid who has taken an interest in space and rocketry

I was personally inspired to go to physics partially because of my love of sci-fi and all space related. That's completely orthogonal to the skeptical sentiment or lack of moon landings in my lifetime.

Real "space awarenes" comes with facts, not with hype. You can drive only so much motivation from outside.

Right but to be able to absorb facts you first need to be excited. Like all the efforts for more kids/blacks/women in STEM/programming don't start with "this is a variable, the program will crash if you add a boolean to a string" but instead start with flashy things like games or robots or large salaries to get them excited and interested first.

And the facts, as stated in this article, are that the Starship design has changed, which you seem to conflate with marketing. So which is it.

I was not discussing the article.

It's the frequent meta comments like dimillian above about "hate" and "negativity" that I find negative and harmful. They try to steer the tone of discussion to direction that the commentator feel more comfortable with.

Wanting protect feelings from getting hurt even in discussions related to technology and science are absurd.

'Say only positive things or the fragile Mars mission will collapse.'