Re:Boeing has now lost $1.1B on Starliner, with no crew flig...
by ceejayoz on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @04:31PM
(#36884522)
There's a vast spectrum of nuttiness available. I don't think you see SpaceX successful without the Gwynne Shotwell sort of characters involved; I think Twitter lacks such a role.
Re:Boeing has now lost $1.1B on Starliner, with no crew flig...
by dotnet00 on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @05:10PM
(#36885074)
Ah yes, I agree on that. I think even Elon kind of admitted how she was important for that.
IIRC when FH had turned out to be harder than expected and not really all that useful due to F9's increased performance, Elon had wanted to cancel it, but Gwynne insisted that it stay because they had already sold it to customers and dropping projects like that would be bad for business.
Re:Boeing has now lost $1.1B on Starliner, with no crew flig...
by JumpCrisscross on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @08:56PM
(#36887418)
I think Elon's personality, when pressed agains the hard boundaries of physics, can do and motivate wonders. Twitter is his first software play in years, and consumer-ish media-ish squishy play ever. It makes some sense that the personality that thrives with hardware falls to bits around software, where the pushback doesn't come in the form of an explosion but subtle hints and conspiracy.
SpaceX does tons of nutty stuff, some of it turns out to be good, and that's how they have their 10+ year technology lead on most of the world. In the early days this was stuff like using shears to roughly trim an engine bell in the field.
Nowadays it's stuff like attempting to catch rockets with giant arms to avoid putting landing legs on them, stacking satellites held together with a simple bar and just spinning to release, replacing the concrete underneath the launch pad with a giant water cooled steel plate to deal with the effect of the engine exhaust and so on.
SpaceX as an organization encourages some amount of nutty creativity since, especially in aerospace, a lot of dumb sounding but potentially good ideas tend to get shot down because the old guys are used to doing things a certain way.