Just curious: Have you ever visited a castle or a gothic cathedral or the pyramids or a Frank Lloyd Wright building?

To be fair, castles and the pyramids were also government projects.

On the other hand, those things predate the distinction between the state and the leader, so in a way they were also the whim of some wealthy elite.

The ancient Egyptians had a fairly sophisticated state with a permanent bureaucracy. That’s how they had the capacity to organize the construction of the pyramids in the first place.

Yes but if the Pharaoh decided he wanted a golden chariot made out of the state treasury, would someone complain that's the state's gold, not the Pharaoh's gold?

To me it’s the opposite, one mans dream to initiate and achieve space travel is much more romantic than a government space programs which is more about nation building.

That's not one man dream, it's a team of engineers and managers funded by a rich guy who likes what they can do. Some serious backing from the US government is part of it with research work, contracts and grants. The dream is collective

He loves to pretend it's one man's dream, though.

Video and audio evidence says otherwise. Unless you can produce sources where Elon claims sole credit for SpaceX milestones.

I've been following SpaceX's progress since 2005 on Kimbal's blogspot (yes that blogspot) updates [1]. Elon has always credited his team of engineers, ops and support staff.

[1] https://kwajrockets.blogspot.com

But also himself. He suggests he taught himself rocket science and that he's personally involved in designing these rockets and cars. I have some doubts about that, although his influence on Starship and the Cybertruck seems to be larger than on previous models.

> He suggests he taught himself rocket science and that he's personally involved in designing these rockets and cars. I have some doubts about that.

You can doubt all you want. This is easily verified.

1. https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1512919230689148929

2.https://twitter.com/lrocket/status/1099411086711746560

3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Mueller

4. https://youtu.be/aGOV5R7M1Js?t=1748

As expected, you can't produce sources to support your claims.

A tweet without any context doesn't exactly prove much. No idea who is wrong about what there.

I also never claimed any sources, I'm just giving my impression of him, which is that he's a bullshitter. But I can list a couple of things we do know about him:

At Tesla, despite not being a founder of the company, he contractually established that he was allowed to call himself a founder. And then pushed the actual founders out.

Online, we see him pick stupid internet fights, and post irresponsible tweets that got him slapped for stock manipulation.

At Twitter, we've all seen his bizarre mismanagement, despite his original background in software development.

We've recently heard that the Cybertruck was a bad decision that he personally pushed through at Tesla.

So given all of that, of course it's still possible that his rocket engineering creds at SpaceX are real, but you really can't blame people for having some doubts about that.

I don't expect anyone employed at SpaceX to spill the beans, but there's plenty of anonymous rumours on the internet about his actual role:

https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/27rnwj/is_elon_pers...

> Elon is indeed very involved in the design. The way they explained it is they give him a list of options to choose from and he picks the one he likes. Usually, it's the one the lead engineer wants, but sometimes it isn't, and Elon gets what he wants.

That's reasonable enough for a CEO in a flat organisation, but it doesn't sound like he's doing the actual engineering, just picking from the options the engineers give him.

I've also seen a (claimed, not verified) SpaceX employee say that SpaceX has people who's job it is to keep Elon happy and feel involved, because a happy Elon gives them the freedom to make the right decisions.

He got this Tony Stark image in the media, and I think he's been leaning a bit too hard into it, and started to believe the image that he could do everything. And the history of Tesla shows that he's not above overstating his own role.

Don't get me wrong: I love much of what he's done at Tesla and SpaceX; EVs wouldn't be where they are now without him, and rocketry in the US might well be dead without SpaceX. But he certainly has his share of character flaws as well.

The fact that you don't even know who Tom Mueller is, tells me all I need to know. I linked Tom's Wikipedia bio for context, maybe you should take the time to read it.

"Thomas John Mueller is an American aerospace engineer and rocket engine designer. He *was* a *founding* employee of SpaceX, an American aerospace manufacturer and space transportation services company headquartered in Hawthorne, California, and the founder and CEO of Impulse Space"

> I don't expect anyone employed at SpaceX to spill the beans, but there's plenty of anonymous rumours on the internet about his actual role:

Tom was already retired when he posted those tweets. So again, your claims are just patently false. Let's see...Your source is from an "anonymous rumour" and is more credible than a founding SpaceX employee? I have no words...

> At Tesla, despite not being a founder of the company, he contractually established that he was allowed to call himself a founder. And then pushed the actual founders out.

The Tesla Board did that, not Elon. But you knew that right? It's dishonest to attribute the success of the Tesla Roadster, Model S/X, and Model 3 ramp-up, as well as Tesla's current achievements, to Eberhard and Tarpenning.

> But he certainly has his share of character flaws as well.

Don't we all? Not a single person on this planet is flawless, and it's sanctimonious to think otherwise.

> the parent tweet is clearly there

It is not clear how to navigate to the parent tweet. Take it up with the owner of the site, I guess.

I know who Tom Mueller is, and I've addressed why that doesn't make him impartial.

> Tom was already retired when he posted those tweets.

According to your Wikipedia link "he retired from SpaceX on November 30, 2020". One of those tweets is from 2019, so your claims are patently false.

> The Tesla Board of Directors did that, not Elon.

And who was the chairman of that board of directors? Please.

> It's dishonest to attribute the success of the Tesla Roadster, Model S/X, and Model 3 ramp-up, as well as Tesla's current achievements, to Eberhard and Tarpenning.

And I did nothing of the sort. I gave Musk credit for that. I'm only pointing out he wanted to be credited for something he wasn't.

We need a term for "culture war adjacency bias".

> He suggests he taught himself rocket science and that he's personally involved in designing these rockets and cars

Every source I know of agrees this is true.

It's hard to understand how SpaceX can be such a success while Cybertruck and Twitter are such a shit show. (Let's ignore Hyperloop because he admitted that was always an anti-rail spoiler.)

Based on his Tweet history, he comes across as astoundingly immature, thin-skinned, and easily distracted.

He has: accused someone completely innocent of paedophilia for random reasons that are hard to fathom; denied that Covid was a problem; tweeted like a teenager about womens' boobs and limited math skills; lost at least 75% on his purchase of Twitter; suggested a literal dick measuring contest with Zuckerberg; claimed he was going to sell 10% of his Tesla stock to alleviate poverty and then awarded to it to a trust he owns; cynically hyped Dogecoin and (arguably) Tesla...

And so on.

I suppose someone like that might also be a genius rocket engineer. But if he is, it's quite a niche talent that doesn't seem to have transferred to his other projects.

His speciality seems to be leading companies that solve tangible measurable hardware problems like "cheaply launch orbital rockets" and "make commercially viable long range fast electric car" (making cheap underground car tunnels is impossible so it doesnt really matter how good a hardware guy he is).

I don't know why you'd think being good at a domain would transfer to other very different domains. There's no reason to think an amazing singer would be a good mathematician, why should a hardware production line maker have good taste in truck aesthetics?

I'm really tired of this claim. Every single time its made its entirely a figment of the writer's imagination, because there is no quote you can find of Elon attributing the success to himself. In fact when people attribute SpaceX's success to him in interviews he almost universally immediately deflects that praise to the people at SpaceX. I've seen that personally in numerous interviews over the last decade and a half I've been following SpaceX.

Would any of it have happened without Elon Musk?

Sure, there are many people who work in the organisation that he built that help him achieve his vision, but none of that would have existed without him challenging the world to an impossible dream ("live on Mars!"). Without Elon Musk, the space industry would still have been focused on SLS-style projects: slow to develop and impossibly expensive, the domain of only one or two governments, and always at the mercy of the next administrations' priorities. Instead, if he succeeds, humanity will be transformed, from a species that barely dips its toes into space, to one that can finally begin to truly explore the solar system. It's as much the start of a new age as was the voyage of Columbus.

Giving Elon Musk credit for this is certainly not misplaced. Denying him that credit because you disagree with him politically (as another poster suggested)... I have no words for that, it's just so ridiculous. This is the pinnacle of human development right here, and you would deny it because the guy votes Republican? You know, like literally half the people in the country?

> You know, like literally half the people in the country?

I have no opinion on Musk or the rest of your comment, but as a simple matter of factual data it's been two decades since US Republicans could claim a slight edge on US Democrats in the popular vote (percentage of entire voting population) and four decades since they had any significant support.

For a good while Republican voters have been less than half the country and were it not for the uneven weighting of geographic areas and a domination of party controlled gerrymandering oportunities they would have even less political success than they have seen.

That's just simple psephology fo you.

In 2022, the nationwide popular vote for the House of Representatives was 54,506,136 for Republicans and 51,477,313 for Democrats. By percentage the Republicans won 50.6% of the vote and Democrats won 47.8%.

Leaving aside the non primary year figures you dug up;

the US Census Bureau estimated that in 2020, 168.3 million people were registered to vote in 2020 .. that 54 million voting Republican falls well short of cracking half the registered voters, let alone eligible voters.

I’m addressing the standard you originally set in your comment:

> it's been two decades since US Republicans could claim a slight edge on US Democrats in the popular vote (percentage of entire voting population)

This is false; the “percentage of entire voting population” that voted for Republicans in the House of Representatives in 2022 was not only a “slight edge” over the percentage voting for Democrats, but an outright majority.

The fact that Republicans won a majority of the popular vote for House seats also means that their control of the House is not, in fact, a product of “uneven weighting of geographic areas and a domination of party controlled gerrymandering oportunities” [sic] as you claim. If you apply the percentages of the popular vote to the number of seats in the House, you’d expect Republicans to control 220 seats and Democrats almost 208 seats. In actuality, the Republicans won 222 seats and the Democrats won 213, meaning both parties got “extra” seats (at the expense of independents and third parties) but the Democrats got more. Moreover, it’s not accurate to say the Republicans are unique in benefitting from the gerrymander. In Illinois, Republicans won 43% of the popular vote but less than 18% of the seats thanks to a Democratic gerrymander. Meanwhile in New York, the courts actually threw out an attempted Democratic gerrymander and as a result, the GOP gained three seats and the Dems lost four.

The original comment that I addressed was (paraphrased) "Republican voters are half the country".

I looked only at Presidental elections which have the greatest turnout, these have rarely seen a 50% Republican showing in total active votes in recent decades.

Including the mid term elections we see even lower voter engagement which helps the Republican showing in active votes, sure.

However of all the people that could vote in the US (those eligable), or even of just those people that indicate they'd probably vote (registered), it's still the case that well short of half the country votes Republican.

That the same can be said of US Democrats (although they generally in recent decades have had the edge in total active votes) - but it still remains that well short of "hal the the country" supports the Republican platform - they don't have a popular mandate.

I need a double-shot of copium, stat!

well if you have single-day voting and hand counts they could easily win almost all states and whatever you call the popular vote wins.

So, .. only if the system is gamed to favour the affluent that can take a day off and have well serviced voting areas then?

FWiW I'm an outsider of the US election system, it's a hot mess with multiple shortcomings that restrict franchise .. and the US Republicans appear to be more skilled at restricting access to democracy to particular demographics.

That's genuinely a horrible argument and there is no redeeming quality about single day voting. And you're implying electronic machines are being hacked, a claim for which you have no evidence.

It is interesting to think about which systems are untrusted until verified truthful, and which systems are trusted until verified false.

https://xkcd.com/2030/

The only thing that makes me doubt electronic voting is the relative lack of distributed counting and thus audit-ability.

That said, I rank conspiracy theories on how many people would be involved in carrying it out, and the idea of a malicious voting machine system capable of having votes altered would take too many knowing participants at various levels of the tool chain.

I would welcome learning more or else implementing more "spot audits" of results in order to minimize the likelihood of any changing of votes.

How many people do you think it took for VW to produce fake engine emission results?

The weakness in your ranking mechanism is you think you have an idea of the number of people needed. To paraphrase Feynman: You mustn’t fool yourself and you are the easiest one to fool.

My own heuristic is expect some fraud or error in every system. The more there is an incentive for fraud the more likely there is fraud. It need not be partisan: could be something like the postal worker hiding mail instead of delivering it. Not finding some minor level of fraud is like a “100% voted for Saddam” announcement—not likely true.

This response seems to be spinning a narrative that Democrats have a significantly broader support in the US than Republicans, but I think that is somewhat misleading. Independents have stronger support than either of the major parties.

Here is some data going back to at least 1988: https://news.gallup.com/poll/388781/political-party-preferen...

I am in no way suggesting that US Democrats have broader support.

I am stating that the US Republicans do not have the support of "half of the US"; either by half of total population, half of eligable voters, or half of registered voters.

US Independents should have stronger support but that's not really going to put much of a dent in what's iteratively evolved to become a two party bicameral political system thanks to the shortcomings of repeated "First past the post" voting.

What was a bright idea hundreds of years ago hasn't scaled well and converged to unrepresentative gerentopoly.

> but as a simple matter of factual data it's been two decades since US Republicans could claim a slight edge on US Democrats in the popular vote (percentage of entire voting population) and four decades since they had any significant support.

That certainly comes across as you suggesting that Democrats have broader support. Intentional or not, I found your comment misleading by not incorporating the substantial size of independents.

This is missing the point so badly that I don't know where to begin. The point was that Elon Musk's political views are neither extremist, nor rare: they are shared by roughly half of the people in the US. To take that statement and try to refute it on the basis that it is not exactly half of the voting population, but merely a rough approximation, is either a sign of incredibly ill will, or a very bad case of autism.

I believe it would have happened, with or without Musk. Credit where credit is due, SpaceX seems to be a very well managed operation. I don't believe in providential people, at all. I don't know why my political beliefs are mentioned, I am not even American, I am French living in France.

Starship happens because of

* the current state of manufacturing technology : we can automate a lot of operations that were done by hand in the 70's, we can iterate prototype much faster)

* a lot of essential hardware is now much cheaper, reducing the initial investment cost. Say a servo motor mass produced now vs. a servo motor in 70's made in tiny batches

* the market ie. there's a market to send many tons of hardware into orbit, money can flow into such projects

* it's now possible to test some rocketry ideas in your garage, it's not a closely garden anymore. The pool of very experienced rocketry engineers is increasing

That's not a very romantic point of view tho

Like it happened with... Blue Origin? Ariane Space? Electron?

NASA? China? India? Russian N1 rocket?

No, it didn't happen, in multiple cases without Musk, and with more funding.

You are delusional in your hate of Musk.

I say he is not a providential man, that it's a team effort, and that it's in line with current industrial needs and capacity. That is not an expression of hate, I think.

I'm no Musk fanboy but I think even if you have the technological capability and demand you still need someone to actually do it. I think if it wasn't Musk it would be someone similarly crazy.

> I believe it would have happened, with or without Musk.

This is a meaningless statement. It would happen, but when? about now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now? You keep saying team effort. Do you think Blue Origin or Arianne Group have less talent than SpaceX? Why do they achieve much less?

> I don't believe in providential people, at all.

SpaceX almost went bankrupt in 2008. Without Musk gambling with his finance to rescue the company, SpaceX would have been a footnote in the space history. It wouldn't have survived long enough to have the NASA's money. The team that they’d built would have been spread to who knows what kind of companies.

> the current state of manufacturing technology : we can automate a lot of operations that were done by hand in the 70's, we can iterate prototype much faster)

So why did SLS take that long? Arianne 6? New Glenn? What about a plethora of small launchers that are still not yet widely available?

> a lot of essential hardware is now much cheaper, reducing the initial investment cost

Essential hardware is only a small part of a rocket program. Arianne 6 was supposed to be Europe's answer to Falcon 9, 50% cheaper than Arianne 5. Supposed to debut in 2020, it still has yet to launch. So it costs Europe tax payers est. 5b euros for a rocket that is technologically inferior to Falcon 9, lower cadence, yet more expensive to build and operate. - [1]

> the market ie. there's a market to send many tons of hardware into orbit, money can flow into such projects

That market didn't exist. Looks at the chart in this article about the number of objects (satellites) sent to space - [0]:

The number skyrocketed after 2016, once Falcon 9 has become established. SpaceX has enabled the market, not the other way around. SpaceX just launched 1,000 tonnes of payload in 2023, four times larger than the second place (China the country).

> it's now possible to test some rocketry ideas in your garage, it's not a closely garden anymore. The pool of very experienced rocketry engineers is increasing

SpaceX was built 20 years ago with nothing but a vision of Mars colony. There was no pool of experienced engineers readily available back then. They are now a powerhouse and they can hire whoever they want. The question is, why there hasn’t been another Starship?

[0] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-...

[1] - https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/oops-it-looks-like-the...

Why bring politics into this? You're pushing your own prejudices and opinions on a topic that doesn't need it to make "sides", at your own detriment.

Well established fact that Musk is a figure head, and like any other other figurehead, they matter significantly less to the end result than the giant teams of engineers and supply chain managers do. Of course he is an intelligent, financially sound business man.

But it's very much a fact that the bit's you're romantically idealizing would exist without Elon Musk. Apple was not steve jobs. Ford was not Henry Ford. Toyota was not a single Toyoda.

Did you, by any chance, miss all the political anti-Musk rhetoric in this thread? Why are you singling me out, and not telling all those other people to leave politics out of it?

As for your "facts": without Musk, there would be no SpaceX, no giant teams of engineers, and no supply chain managers. Same as without Steve Jobs (do you hate him so much that you can't even capitalize his name?): without him there would be no Apple, no Mac, no iPhone. You seem to believe that companies and products spring fully formed from the ground, that nobody has to take the initiative to create them. Giant teams of engineers and supply chain managers don't just decide to come together to spend years and millions (if not billions) of their own time and money to build a car, or a computer, or a rocket. Can you point to even a single example where such a thing happened?

How would the 'bits' have come to exist without Elon Musk? Who would have taken the initiative, who would have paid for it? If you're right, why is SpaceX the only game in town? Surely there are plenty of other engineers and supply chain managers that would be up for building the worlds largest reusable launcher in their own time, with their own money?

I believe there may have been some rocket projects back in the 60s that worked quite well without him. Or anyone like him.

That's not what we were talking about, and you know it. Elon Musk transformed the space industry with his cheap, reusable launchers, something that nobody before him has done, that was in fact considered to be impossible since launchers were widely considered to be multi-billion dollar, one-shot vehicles.

That transformation can be credited ENTIRELY to Elon Musk, and nobody else, and without him, it might never have happened, as neither governments, nor government contractors have any reason to not choose the well-trodden path, and to not pork-barrel the hell out of any project of this type. It took a person who had both a vision and a hell of a lot of money to make it happen, and there aren't so many of those around.

> Well established fact that Musk is a figure head

Except there's many testimonies from engineers at his companies that attest the exact opposite.

Musk's title is chief engineer, he has stated many times in interviews, and has been corroborated by other spacex engineers, that all engineering decisions go through him.

Nations are the societies we live in, so collective action is pretty neat in my book.

How is launching a rocket with the hopes that we can go to Mars not exploration?

If he doesn't do it who is going to do that?

Surely NASA has has fifty years to do something like this (excepting the ISS which is).

> "billionaire’s mega yacht"

Billionaire hatred is a real thing. He will not be riding on this thing and likely never will be, so I'm not sure this is a great analogy.

>He will not be riding on this thing and likely never will be

What makes you say that? Musk has made it known he has a dream to "... die on Mars. Hopefully not at the point of impact."

Making space-based human habitation profitable is the only way we will ever reach the scale of millions of people living & working in space. It's ludicrous to imagine that we would ever send more than a few explorers to space if each person's time there is unprofitable, meaning literally losing money.

If you're interested in exciting hard sci-fi about mining the asteroids and the moon, check out Daniel Suarez's compelling novel Delta-V and its recent sequel Critical Mass.

Another profitable industry besides mining could be setting up nursing homes on the moon, where wealthy elderly folks could live fuller lives due to the reduced gravity. Yes, the idea of this only being available to the super-rich (at first) is nauseating to me too, but if it provides the source of funding to establish sustainable moon bases, that would be incredible, and other industries could follow afterwards, including e.g. new sports leagues such as low-gravity basketball and soccer.

Eventually, enough people would be living on the moon as helpers for the wealthy folks and athletes that eventually there would be so many working-class people on the moon that secondary and tertiary industries would spring up to provide products and services for the working-class people. Soon enough it would become profitable to farm crops on the moon (for lunar consumption), build products on the moon (for lunar consumption), and more.

We'd eventually get to the point where a lunar nation could have positive GDP and be economically self-sustaining. It would be a trade partner with the terrestrial nations, and be the first new nation to step beyond Earth. Generations of people will get married and be born there, and humanity would be a step closer to settling the cosmos.

I don't think people realize the scale of what Starship stands to achieve here. This is not an incremental leap forward, this is revolutionary. Sending a 16oz bottle of water up to space on the Space Shuttle cost around $25,000. [1] Falcon Heavy brought that down to $700. Starship stands to bring that price down to as low as $5!

That's what makes this all so stupefyingly difficult to even begin to try to predict what will happen. We're not going through the usual window of exclusivity. We're going from [nobody can afford this, except governments - and even then only for toy missions] to ['everybody' can afford this for anything], instantly. So there's no reason that e.g. a nursing home, or anything else, on the Moon would be restricted to the super wealthy, besides demand. Obviously these industries will be being built from the ground up, and demand will likely dramatically outpace supply for the foreseeable future. But that cost imbalance would not be because of fundamental costs.

Also you left out the most fun. Who isn't going to want to go have sex in space? Either with a partner or catching some Moon Poon at a brothel? That's going to be an industry that'll have people coming by the millions, and shouldn't really require that much to get the initial infrastructure erected.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competitio...

> Sending a 16oz bottle of water up to space on the Space Shuttle cost around $25,000. [1] Falcon Heavy brought that down to $700. Starship stands to bring that price down to as low as $5!

Wow, that's insane; as you said, I didn't even realize this leap is this vast! $5 for delivery of a bottle of water is barely more expensive than DoorDash or Postmates on Earth!!

Well that's because you're paying a person and a motor vehicle's worth of fuel just to move a bottle of water. If you filled your vehicle full of water, and upgraded to a semi-trailer full of water, then its a lot less than $5 for a bottle of water.

If you launched a Starship with just a single bottle of water it'd become way more than $25,000. Similarly you could make your doordash/postmates bottle of water a lot more expensive if you moved it with a semi-trailer and a team of movers.

> catching some Moon Poon at a brothel [is] going to be an industry that'll have people coming by the millions

I don’t know what laws apply on the Moon, but thanks to ITAR, Starship probably won’t be able to launch from outside the United States, which means any actual moon travel is going to be governed by US and Florida and/or Texas law. Neither of those states have legal prostitution, and while I’m not a legal expert, I suspect knowingly ferrying prostitutes to the moon might be considered a form of human trafficking. They shut down Backpage for less.

Would it not be reasonable under ITAR to launch from other ITAR regulated countries, such as Japan (JAXA) or France (French Guiana/ESA)?

France and Japan also have laws against prostitution and sex trafficking. Japan seems to have more loopholes than France but probably not enough to fly prostitutes to the moon.

Once we are able to send a Starship to Psyche 16, and start building new Starships, humanity is in for a huge leap. And this isn't even unrealistic - it could be that in 5 - 10 years the next major rush for humanity is to establish a permanent industrial presence on Psyche 16 and start making things...

Why would that be your first idea? Why not something simpler like building a moon orbiter with an aluminium and liquid oxygen hybrid engine? The goal is to find the hydrogen on the moon, which is far more valuable than some asteroid.

Meh. Gaining accesses to the resources available on Psyche 16 would be absolutely a civilization-changing event if we were able to harness them somehow. Imagine if gold was more common to the human species than aluminum?

A launch costing (150 tons have roughly 300000 bottles) 1.5 million USD is insanely cheap and that obviously includes some profit ...

The fuel alone for the rocket costs $1M. $1.5M does not include profit.

> Another profitable industry besides mining could be setting up nursing homes on the moon, where wealthy elderly folks could live fuller lives due to the reduced gravity.

That's what SR Hadden did in Contact ;) as always, Carl Sagan is still teaching us to this day

This is the most advanced rocket ever built, far superior to anything any government has ever created. It’s a technological marvel and represents progress for the entire species.

You’re depriving yourself of the opportunity to appreciate a once in a lifetime event because some news outlet told you you should dislike the guy who built it.

No, because I profoundly dislike this species-thinking anthropic suprematism in a world that we take as ours without any critical thinking. And now this goes beyond the world. It’s a long-termist wet dream that requires one very simple assumption: that Musk’s billions are better spent on gigantic male energy space penises than in making this actual earth a better place. And if you’re disassociating this venture from the violent narcissistic and inadequate man who’s founding it, well it says a lot about your values too.

Isn’t SpaceX where a lot of his billions came from?

"Violent"?

Yes, his language, attitude, and retributive actions (firing, doxxing, reposting hate content) are absolutely framable as violent.

Ah,I'd forgotten about the recent orwellian trend to redefine heavily loaded words to have extra meanings that cover things you dislike.

On a related note, could you please stop your violent behavior? It makes me feel very unsafe and leads to genocide.

"anything I disagree with is hateful violence"

Come on, you are doing more harm than good by watering down what those words mean.

saying words != violence

firing someone != violence

retweeting something != violence

Tesla is making the world a better place by pushing EV adoption around the world. Have you done anything better for the world today, yet alone for its future? Starlink is pretty neat as well, he could fail going to Mars and all that and he still would be remembered for what he has done for the world today.

Wow, this comment comes straight from the Musk-simping manual. It has it all:

- unsubstantiated claim of how Musk efforts are a net positive for society (based on what metrics and what science, exactly?) - ad hominem against the commenter asking aggressively “what have you done to make the world a better place”. Btw the answer to that is: I am a vegetarian since 20 years and I take loving care of my immediate human-connections. - closes it off by giving for granted that Mars exploration is, for some other unsubstantiated reason, a net positive for society.

You people scare me.

I have great internet connectivity because of Starlink, before that was available we were treated like garbage by traditional internet companies and we had basically no options. Now my family can enjoy the awesome benefits of the internet: Youtube, gaming, help with school. It's a direct positive for me and my entire community, and I personally appreciate it all the time. I'm not simping, it's just awesome.

You forgot Dogecoin.

This statement reflects a worldview that sounds deeply unpleasant. You might consider therapy, logging off, the gym etc.

If SpaceX wanted profit, all they need to do is team up with Lockheed/Boeing, jack their prices up 100x fold and start waiting for that sweet taxpayer dollar to come rolling in. Getting prices as low as Starship is going to achieve is not a straight forward path to profit. It's like taking an industry dominated by Geo Metros being sold for high end sportscar prices, and then introducing a car that runs like a high end sports car and selling it for Geo Metro prices.

The only way they start making meaningful profit from what they're doing is basically if the exact opposite scenario of what you're implying comes to pass - that space becomes so completely accessible and utilized that they win by scale. And that's the exact opposite of 'mega yachts.' This is explicitly about exploration, colonization, mining, and more. This is about actually opening space to the human race, beyond relying on multi billion dollar toy expeditions, for the first time ever.

lol I don’t know if anyone knows what a Geo Metro is anymore, but I agree with your analogy :)

Maybe a Corolla would be more relatable nowadays.

Hat tip to Geo Metro! A real pile of junk from the 1990s.

My auntie drove a Renault Le Car in the late 1980s. I remember riding in it as a kid thinking it was a "fun junker".

Geo Metro was my first car, I still have fond memories of the freedom it afforded me.

Perhaps because this is the creation from the hard work of thousands of gifted and committed people. When SpaceX started I can assure you there was no billionaire involved. Just a guy with a few million he was willing to invest to make space travel a reality for many more people.

Secondly, if you don't think NASA was about profit, you don't understand NASA. Who do you think built all the Apollo rockets? Private contractors working for profit.

Besides, what is wrong with profit? Profit is what makes things sustainable and allows reinvestment to continually improve.

The tech here is way beyond what governments have been able to do so far. It promises to be quite a show. Might blow up again, but they'll learn and build another one.

For the record, I find Musk to be a menace, but the team he put together at SpaceX is phenomenal.

Starship is funded by NASA and built by a for-profit corporation, like SLS is and like the Space Shuttle was. The difference between SpaceX and the contractors that built the Shuttle and SLS is that those contractors kept their CEOs' names out of the news, and gouged like crazy.

That's not true. Starship was funded and started independently of NASA. NASA is just the first customer that is paying to develop a Moon-landing version of Starship that will be used for its Moon landing mission.

Starship has partial funding from NASA, but its only "after delivery" funding. SpaceX has explicitly talked about how they've needed to raise additional private funding to support Starship development because they're developing it simultaneously with Starlink.

I'll also note that NASA's funding for Starship was for a lunar lander, not a launch vehicle, and SpaceX was the cheapest of all the competitors despite developing a launch vehicle as well while the competitors were only developing a lander and planned to use an existing launch vehicle.

This is not comparable to a mega yacht, because it will offer space cargo services to the public.

The only comment giving a reasonable take instead of kool aid drinking and Musk simping, and it gets downvoted. What happened to critical thinking?

We are thinking critically, about how asinine that comment is.

This is much more about exploration than whatever technologically obsolete moribund project NASA is able to push through porkbarrelling process at the expense of a dozen more worthy ones.

Incumbents like Lockheed, Boeing, and ULA often face problems such as fraud, waste, and fund misappropriation. Additionally, NASA's progress is hindered by bureaucracy and red tape.

Given these circumstances, depending solely on NASA for space advancement or asteroid deflection may not be the most effective strategy. Those acquainted with federal programs can confirm these issues. Thus, your comment appears uninformed and overlooks the wider impact on American taxpayers.

It’s hard to believe you’re being objective if you think the SLS, costing over $2 billion per launch, is superior and not profit-driven, compared to Starship's estimated $40 million launch cost.

I appreciate the cynicism but I feel that ultimately this is how a capitalist civilization does most things.

Going to Mars isn't exploration enough for you huh? What kind of stupid take is this.

There are many valid reasons why sending humans to Mars (at this time) would be bad for science, bad for Mars, and bad for space exploration. https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm

“The technology program required to close this gap would be remarkably circular, with no benefits outside the field of applied zero gravity zookeeping. The web of Rube Goldberg devices that recycles floating animal waste on the space station has already cost twice its weight in gold[49] and there is little appetite for it here on Earth, where plants do a better job for free.”

Ha. This rambling is entertaining but has little depth or vision.

These are not ‘valid reasons’ these are ‘arguably valid reasons made by cynical ramblers’ :)

That's a terrible rant, not really a good argument about Mars exploration by humans. It's sad such poor articles are liked by HN, shows how poor understanding of spaceflight is common here.

Just look at the first footnote, the guy does not understand what is relevant comparison nowadays or how the programs he talks about work/ed.

I'm curious to hear the counter perspective because I used to be extremely pro-Mars and recently some discussions by that article's author on HN have convinced me otherwise.

What benefits are there to sending humans to Mars? What do we hope to accomplish that couldn't be done better by a barrage of super advanced robots? Even NASA can't articulate a good reason.

It is estimated to cost $1-1.5 trillion to send 9 people on Mars, and upwards of $2 trillion for a minimally staffed base on an uninhabitable planet. That's just for keeping humans alive there, not even for doing serious science. NASA's budget is $25-33 billion per year. We'd be blowing the next 50 years of space dollars to get cool videos instead of sending countless probes to every planet in the solar system.

My main point is, wouldn't it be better to focus that amount of money and effort on developing technologies that allow humans to live on Earth sustainably? Where is the cult-like public support for spending unlimited amounts of money on preventing mass extinction on Earth, the only habitable planet in our solar system?

https://youtu.be/6TqhcZsxrPA?si=oa3yw8ONxKgtWDru

Maybe after we accomplish that we could think about making Mars a sustainable and habitable planet too?

> What benefits are there to sending humans to Mars? What do we hope to accomplish that couldn't be done better by a barrage of super advanced robots?

Well robots work very well, and if research is your only goal then those might be the best forever. But even those run into issues and can be very complex and expensive, see Mars Sample Return. When you scale systems up, it is possible that at some level redundancies and pre-planning for every contingency will get too expensive. So much that sending monkeys with duct tapes that can handle and fix all kinds of issues might be actually less expensive. Will we get to such scale with research only? Probably not.

But there are other goals, like space industry, and related mining, which require much bigger scale. And unless we want to declare all planets out there as a natural reserve with absolutely no Earth contamination possible (yea there's a treaty, we will see how long it survives), people will want go there.

And good luck trying to stop China from establishing Mars research base. Sure it might take them 40+ years, but I wouldn't bet on them not getting there. Or them adhering to any kinds of international treaty.

> It is estimated to cost $1-1.5 trillion to send 9 people on Mars, and upwards of $2 trillion for a minimally staffed base on an uninhabitable planet.

Random numbers pulled out of nowhere. Don't listen to such garbage. Even talking about "minimally staffed base" and it's costs is kinda silly when the main (and so far only) proposed system (Starship) for achieving that is still in its infancy. It might not hit its projected costs. It also might achieve them and then such cost estimates about Mars base will look as silly as IBM estimates of how many computers the world needs.

> My main point is, wouldn't it be better to focus that amount of money and effort on developing technologies that allow humans to live on Earth sustainably? Where is the cult-like public support for spending unlimited amounts of money on preventing mass extinction on Earth, the only habitable planet in our solar system?

You know that there are proposals like space based solar power, space mirrors in Sun-Earth L1, space industry utilizing resources from asteroids . . . Sure they are still mostly in the sci-fi stage. But some of them might turn into reality, and then many of our issues on earth will be solved merely as a side-effect. It's too early to talk about "better" spending, when related technologies are still not even close to being mature and stable. F9 landed not even 9 years ago!

> Maybe after we accomplish that we could think about making Mars a sustainable and habitable planet too?

Honestly that's just bad logic, don't you really see obvious arguments against? It's fine as an opinion, but trying to convince other people without strong arguments does not seem like it will have much chance.

EDIT: if you truly care about not wasting money on stupid stuff, argue for cancelling SLS. THAT is one big waste of money, regardless of whether Starship succeeds or not.

Thanks, I needed some inspiration! I agree there was twisted logic in my last post that you helped unwind.

How is it not about exploration? And how is it about profit? Who do you think benefits most from having cheaper access to space? Society as a whole benefits way more than old musky.

A billionaire's mega yacht is for his exclusive use. Starship is definitely not that. Starship's purpose has nothing to do with any personal transportation plans for Musk himself.

> It's about profit.

Falcon 9 launch is $62m. NASA SLS launch is $1b.

That's 6% of the cost.

It's about lowering the barrier to launches by dramatically decreasing the cost.