I mean, there would've been plenty of knowledgeable people in the relevant industries telling Musk why landing rockets and reusing them is not going to work, and why battery powered mass market electric vehicles is a pipe dream.
The way this should work is: Sometimes it works and a company is successful, and sometimes it doesn't and the company isn't successful.
Musk's apparent mode of operation is: if it works, my company is successful, and if it doesn't work, a lot of customers (or even would-be-customers) will take part of the hit and the company won't be that unsuccessful.
That's not how it should work.
- technically feasible
- economically not feasible due to limited number of launches
And weather or not i is econommically feasible for SpaceX is impossible to tell without their financials. It does seem so, that Starlink is increasing SpaceX launches.
There is truths to Tesla, but to be honest, Tesla was considerably close to running out of money some while ago. The art of Musk is to have Tesla seen as a tech company, and not as a car maker.
Frankly Delta Clipper was even more impressive given that it came from MDC who were by far the most conservative defense contractor. That sort of thing would have been more typical of Northrop.
(BTW, kids, if you ever want to see what a successful act of espionage looks like, look at this: it would look like Boeing shooting off its own foot and then the Pentagon shooting off its own foot in response, both in ways that "accidentally" benefit Russia and make us dependent on them for space access.)
I don't know what this says regarding the possibility of further success for SpaceX; they've moved to a less dense fuel in hopes that it'll allow them to have self pressurizing tankage. While SpaceX has had increadible success I find myself wishing there was a way of wedding Elon's money and drive with the people who built DC-X in hopes that they could maybe, MAYBE, get more than one or two flights out of each test vehicle.
IF you could get cheap RL-10's for the price that the DC-X project was buying them for in the 90's, I'd suggest using them, suitably modified to burn methane, _just_ as a braking/landing engine. [2]
(But that was way back in the 90's, when the MIC was still sometimes running assembly lines instead of building each single engine by hand).
(Oh, and I found a slightly better ref. on RL-10's: [3])
[1] https://yarchive.net/space/rocket/fuels/hydrogen_deltav.html
[2] https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=11020.0
As for electric cars, I believe the limiting factor was battery technology, which has improved in leaps and bounds in the past decade. Tesla wasn't the only company developing electric cars - Renault-Nissan Alliance achieved the sales milestone of 350,000 all-electric vehicles delivered globally in August 2016, ranking second was Tesla Motors with over 139,000 electric cars sold between 2008 and June 2016. It's also not clear that Musk founded Tesla, but I'm not clear on the history there.
Tesla do have the strongest branding in electric cars though, and I would attribute that to Musk's ability as a showman.
And the Shuttle itself was reusable, but that's sort of besides the point, as that's a space-plane, not a rocket used to bring things into orbit. Whether capsules or space-planes is a better concept for the spacecraft itself is a different discussion altogether.
The per kg cost to orbit of Falcon 9 launches is an order of magnitude less than it was for Space Shuttle, so credit should be given where credit is due.
To be fair, the Falcon 9 similarly discards its entire second stage.
I really wish they'd have boosted the Shuttle tank to stable orbit and used it for space stations.
One would make a pretty serviceable space station.
100+ would make one hell of a space station if you designed them to be strung together.
Some early NASA concepts: http://www.astronautix.com/s/stsexternaltankstation.html
If you're wondering about practicality, Skylab was a Saturn V tank. Unlike the external tank suggestions, Skylab was built on the ground and never had fuel in it. But it was basically the same structure as the Saturn's third stage. Like ISS, Skylab had some micrometeorite shielding outside of the main tank.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab
More recently, Nanoracks has looked at refurbishing ULA's Centaur upper stage into a habitat. Like the Shuttle, Centaur runs on a H2 + O2 cycle. Their plan is to lift an equipment kit onboard the Centaur. They'd cut a hole after the end of the mission and use on-orbit welding (not mature yet) to install all the floors/decks/airlocks.
Source: Someone from an established boring company they tried to buy their first boring machine from, until they decided on a cheaper much more outdated model, with which they encountered basically all the problems they were warned about.
I'm not sure it's fair to make this statement without acknowledging the times he's been successful doing precisely what that five minute conversation would have had him avoid.
For example: Tesla itself, SpaceX, and PayPal.
Bad example: Tesla almost went down the drain during the Model 3 ramp-up because they thought they knew better how to do large-scale car manufacturing than all the other large-scale car manufacturers. Turned out, they didn't, had to rethink and redesign many processes, and had to shift part of the production to hastily erected tents.
The point was not that the company would never have benefited from other lessons from the industry at any other point.
Before SpaceX, there was little to no competition in reusable, cost-efficient rockets. Before Tesla, there was little to no competition in attractive, high-end EVs. That's why they're successful. There was, however, a lot of competition in car mass manufacturing. It was arrogant and misguided of Tesla and Musk to ignore industry knowledge in highly competitive areas.
The lack of competition was itself a reflection of conventional wisdom in those industries, though, which is my point.
Tesla's competitive advantage was a willingness to cut corners. Other companies have been testing, developing production processes, building supply chains. You can bet there won't be a Bloomberg model 3 weekly production tracker for their cars since they'll make what they plan, which will actually happen when they say.
If you measure performance in 0-60 only, and pricing/efficiency in self reported/marketed EPA range (not actual real world range) then Tesla is definitely ahead.
What I meant is that they are selling a car at $38k that outperforms the competition on range, efficiency, safety, space, performance, tech, driving assists; it includes features like the panoramic roof that cost an arm and a leg as optionals on every other car. So clearly they are doing something different in their manufacturing.
_he_? Elon Musk didn't start the company.
And neither does anyone else, really, which is why the detail is mostly ignored in common discussion.
It's unusual an dated in the US but unexceptional in the UK.
"The UK Government or Parliament is not responsible for setting the "official spelling" of words."
DKVF = don't know very far?
I don't know what it is about this continually unlearned lesson of "Maybe just chat with someone who does the thing you're trying to replace for 5 minutes". Absolutely same thing with the boring company- 5 minutes with an expert would have saved them years of learning the lessons everyone already knew.