They are inventing a little, but the basics of rocket flight are now well understood. You can get a university (probably post grad) course on it. And nothing that they are doing is all that revolutionary, definitely not compared to what Apollo did (going from airplanes and ballistic missiles to orbital space flight and then Moon missions).
Consider that even reusable self-landings boosters were being worked on in the 90s, before funding was cut off. And for expandable rockets, virtually all rockets designed and launched in the last few decades have successfully accomplished their first ever flight, launching some kind of payload to orbit.
- "And for expandable rockets, virtually all rockets designed and launched in the last few decades have successfully accomplished their first ever flight,"
That doesn't resonate as true to me.
The first Ariane 5 flight blew up [0]. That Europe's current heavy-lift workhorse with 112 successful launches (including JWST), but the first one blew up.
The first PSLV blew up [1]. That's India's current workhorse with 58 successes, but flight #1 was not successful. Their GSLV did not reach its correct orbit on its first flight either [2], though it didn't blow up.
The first Delta IV Heavy did not blow up, but it failed to reach its correct orbit [3]. That was US' largest launch vehicle for most of the 21st century.
The first Long March 5 failed to reach its correct orbit, and the second one blew up [4]. That's China's current heavy-lift launch vehicle, since 2016.
South Korea's first orbital rocket RUD'd both its first flights, in 2009 and 2010 [5].
Japan's newest orbital rocket was launched in 2023, and that blew up [6].
Rocket Labs' Electron has a current >90% success rate, but the first one blew up [7].
You're right that I exaggerated, sorry about that.
Still, many of these are more successful than Starship:
The first GSLV was still able to deploy a satellite, just in a lower orbit than intended.
The first Delta IV had the same problem, satellite deployed, but in a lower orbit than planned.
The first Long March 5 is classed as a full success on Wikipedia, I couldn't find info there about a failure (the second one did blow up).
The Rocket Labs' Electron did get destroyed. However it was later found that nothing at all was wrong with the vehicle, it was a failure in the ground software, and an identical vehicle successfully carried out its mission 7 months later.
In contrast, the first two Starships blew up completely due to engine issues, and no Starship has deployed even a test payload of some kind to orbit. In fact, until today, none even carried a payload of any kind, they have all been flying empty.
> Still, many of these are more successful than Starship:
Your definition of success doesn't leave room for anomalies. Your mindset seems to be "if you try and it's doesn't turn out perfectly, it's a failure" -- which results in spending tons of time and money iterating behind closed doors (or even worse, trying to model/calculate the whole thing without many test runs), and only unveiling the result when it's "perfect". This approach costs more time and money, and more embarrassment if/when the product fails in public. It also doesn't build a culture of learning a lot from anomalies.
Meanwhile, SpaceX doesn't care about iterating, testing, and failing in public. So they skip all the costly effort of trying too hard not to fail, setting expectations that they get it right the first time, and not learning as much from anomalies.
Anomalies, properly understood, are opportunities to learn and improve -- and never something to be ashamed of. The only true "failures" are to give up because it's too hard, to stop learning from the data that anomalies provide, or to never try in the first place because you're too afraid of anomalies.
Compare how much money each company spent before the first/second/etc flight. The ENTIRE program has so far cost less than one set of SLS engines - that they took from older rockets without changes.
They have explicitly and publicly chosen to rapidly iterate without spending billions to make sure the first try goes well - it's simply different culture. The first Starship wasn't even something you could actually call a rocket, it was a water tower with a bunch of rocket engines.
They wanted data about the engines and got them - mission 100% accomplished, that's not a failure in any way except for media shock value because "wow such boom". Come on, you call yourself an engineer? Do you not try your software or hardware before 100% completion? You don't have CI with integration and e2e tests? There's no other way to do this cheaply and quickly, you have to try.
Call me when any other company achieves what Falcon9 did, then we can discuss issues of SpaceX engineering culture and how others are better. But they are not, few test flights are not interesting, what's interesting is that they are 10 years ahead of everybody else and offer by far the cheapest and by orders of magnitude most reliable orbital lift service.
Others should stop waiting 10 years before the first flight and accept some risk, the world would be much better by now.
- "The first Long March 5 is classed as a full success on Wikipedia, I couldn't find info there about a failure (the second one did blow up)."
The Wikipedia entry describes it as "suboptimal but workable initial orbit", which I interpret as a partial failure (coming from a military entity that's universally opaque about its failings). They're not inclined for language like "partial failure" that we get out of transparent countries—contrast that first Delta IV-H, which also reached a "workable" orbit—just not the intended one.
- "However it was later found that nothing at all was wrong with the vehicle, it was a failure in the ground software, and an identical vehicle successfully carried out its mission 7 months later."
Also true of the Ariane 5 explosion: that was a software bug (unhandled integer overflow) in the flight control unit. The important part isn't whether it's hardware or software, but whether they got it right or not, before launch.
Didn't expect it to disintegrate completely. At least they figured out what happened. Well, one step at a time. But that means no orbital flight for next couple of missions.
Yeah, 2 failures is par for OldSpace. NewSpace usually does much worse, though SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Rocket Lab's Electron managed to get the traditional par.
TBF: that wasn't an unsuccessful launch attempt, but a failure to not launch. Which affirms parent in that they seem to have work out all the kinks out during development.
What other person started a rocket company from scratch and got them landing? Of course I want to hear everything he says. Yes, he's crazy - seems to be a requirement if you want to do such stuff. Doesn't mean I will ignore it. I can think for myself, it's not like I take everything at face value.
All that to say, perhaps other people don't prioritize values like you do. The technical excellence that companies repeatedly achieved under Musk is incredible.
> What other person started a rocket company from scratch and got them landing?
I'd rather listen to Lars Blackmore (the engineer who is largely responsible for SpaceX powered descent). Or Gwynne Shotwell who actually oversees the business day-to-day. I'm really not interested in what the money guy has to say, especially since he is primarily interested in cultivating his public image-- how can you trust anything he says? The dude pays people to play a videogame for him 24/7 so he can pretend he is the best player in the world. That's not a metaphor -- he actually does that.
Sure, I'm not saying Musk is the only person who has interesting things to say about it. You're absolutely correct about these other people and I listen to them too.
But you're not giving Musk enough credit. All engineers and other professionals told him that landing rockets is bullshit, and what is interesting here is that he went and made it happen anyways.
I'm not talking just about the engineering, everything is interesting here - the project management, the hiring, the investments, the business side... Musk has a lot of input and influence in all of these, he was the one who decided and paid for it.
> All engineers and other professionals told him that landing rockets is bullshit
You literally responded to a guy citing Lars Blackmore, who is the engineer that designed their landing algorithm--which was developed at NASA's JPL lab (before SpaceX existed).
Musk bet on landing rockets _because_ engineers told him that it was possible.
The Air Force was studying RTLS as part of the ARES (Affordable REsponsive Spacelift) program in 2005 (Which was the result of 1992/1994-era discussions on "spacecast 2020"):
And I don't see any rocket actually coming back with an orbital payload? Where's the demonstrator? Like that quiet supersonic thing Lockheed is demonstrating.
Even Lars didn't deliver at the first attempt. So it's not like it was something available off the shelf. Like some cryptography library you include in your code.
> All engineers and other professionals told him that landing rockets is bullshit
Every company has some kind of mythology where someone says "you'll never make it in this town!". The reality is that uncrewed propulsive landing was technologically feasible since the soviets landed a rover on the moon. NASA propulsively landed a rover on Mars back in 2011.
Like I said, listening to billionaires is probably interesting if your goal is "acquire boatloads of money". But we already know how to do that.
1. Appear confident
2. Lie
3. Have no morals or ethics
4. Prioritize the pursuit of power above all else
Sorry but no, this is absolutely not what happened. I am watching it closely ever since SpaceX was founded in 2002. There is an incredible gap between the tech demo you're speaking about, and actually landing a heavy orbital rocket, and then doing it 100 times in a row without a hiccup.
Mars is completely off topic, as they didn't land the booster there. We had Space Shuttle before and it didn't say much about landing rocket boosters.
> There is an incredible gap between the tech demo you're speaking about,
Didn't Apollo 11 land on the moon using a rocket, then take off from the moon again, back in the 1960s?
Not exactly a tech demo. And the Apollo missions had the additional challenges of being crewed, and targeting an atmosphere and gravity they couldn't reproduce on earth for test purposes.
The SpaceX stuff is neat though, compared to the defence industry clowns they're competing with.
Apollo 11 had a three stage rocket and every stage was discarded. SpaceX is obviously not the first company to land something - but landing a rocket booster that just performed an orbital lift is the interesting and extremely hard thing to do. The payload can be entirely designed to land - but the booster has many other constraints (payload weight and its desired velocity and trajectory being some of them).
To do what Apollo 11 did without discarding the boosters you also need orbital refueling and probably rapid turnaround (or a huge inventory of boosters), which SpaceX plans to develop next. Awesome stuff.
You know, this bit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module that descended to the moon, landed, some guys walked out and grabbed some moon rocks, then they took off again and made it back to earth.
That's a rocket-propelled space vehicle gently landing tail first, and ready for immediately reuse.
Given that it clearly had been done, I doubt anyone who knew what they were talking about was telling Musk it couldn't be done.
I don't know how to put this if you don't see the difference yourself by now, but that's not an orbital rocket that could lift anything from Earth nor land back there. One huge problem is hypersonic aerodynamics, something you absolutely don't care about on the Moon. The payload weight can be much greater due to tiny gravity. Google "tyranny of the rocket equation".
Okay, that is one down. You've got to get through literally all the rest of the engineers and professionals. At some point, you'll hit the engineers at NASA that were working on this problem before SpaceX existed.
Well I heard it myself from practically anybody up until 2015. I even attended quite a lot of conference talks on this topic... I'm sure it's not hard to find it online, famously a NASA director (I think?) did so.
You're saying every engineer and every person with any other type of profession you've ever spoken with, said that it was impossible to land a rocket? I feel like plenty of professionals don't even have an opinion on the matter.
Even if that's true, there's still every engineer and every other professional in the world you haven't spoken with. To take an example, I'm an engineer, I didn't say it. That disproves the claim.
If we wanted to be more accurate, we could say that less than 0.00001% of all engineers and professionals told elmu that it was impossible to land a rocket.
That seems less impressive than saying 100%, doesn't it? But hey, this is hacker news, not a math exam, and 100% is pretty much < 0.00001%, lol.
> Sorry but no, this is absolutely not what happened
What didn't happen? I didn't provide you a narrative, I gave 2 examples of uncrewed propulsive landing which literally happened.
> There is an incredible gap between the tech demo you're speaking about, and actually landing a heavy orbital rocket, and then doing it 100 times in a row without a hiccup.
I agree. Now please point to me which part of the self-landing booster Elon built.
I told you what didn't happen - the situation wasn't as clear as you say. Everybody in the space industry was absolutely sure he is totally crazy and it's impossible to do with an entire first/second stage rocket booster.
He built the company that built the booster, which to me is at least as interesting as building the booster itself.
It's not just about money - Bezos has much more money available than SpaceX had in 2002-2015, and yet his rockets still don't land.
Actually, Blue Origin beat SpaceX to land a booster. The difference is that BO landed New Shepard, which can barely bump a manned capsule over the Karman line, whereas SpaceX is landing an orbital-class booster, which is a much more difficult proposition.
I do agree though that SpaceX has used their money much more efficiently and moved a lot faster in general than BO.
He doesn’t do that. People who don’t like him claim that he does without any basis to it, and you’re perpetuating this hyperbole by claiming it as fact when the very thing you linked doesn’t even go that far.
Musk sucks, attack him for valid reasons like racism instead of some made up bullshit about cheating at video games.
He literally does do that. Top-level players of the game have called him out for it. They have tracked his time with an API. It is actually mathematically impossible to be at his level in POE-- you would have to be a top-tier player and play nonstop for 20+ hrs a day.
People who like Musk aren't going to care that he is racist, they will argue about what actually constitutes as racism (erm pushes up glasses --actually have u read the bell curve???).
Having definitive proof of him paying others to play videogames for him is an example of how he just lies about everything. If he lies about videogames what else does he lie about?
Where does he lie about a video game? Maybe he has someone boost his level. Did he say it's not true? Just doing that can have many reasons - maybe he likes a shiny number there, wants a bigger challenge, more fun because of higher level and more items or whatever.
Just playing on an account that I didn't level up myself is not lying. I know that some competitive amateur players think it's the end of the world but no, nobody cares.
He stated on Joe Rogan he was one of the best Diablo players in the world (top 20 or thereabouts). The only way to do that is to grind the game with long hours, because it gets exponentially more difficult to level up. I don't remember exactly how many hours of playtime he'd need to achieve the level he was at, but it was excessive. Something like 14+ hours a day.
Then he recently live streamed his Path of Exile 2 account. It was one of the highest leveled accounts in the world. Similar to Diablo, that's not possible without grinding the game for many hours. However, it was clear from the stream that Musk barely understood how to play the game. He was having trouble just finding things in the UI.
The point is: he paid someone (or multiple people) for a leveled up account. Then he publicly claimed to be one of the top players in the world.
It's both shocking and revealing that he's willing to put forth such a blatant lie, for something that matters so little (a video game).
Thank you, if he really said that he is one of the best players, that would be a lie. I don't think just streaming a leveled up account is a lie, though.
Why do you talk about hours per day? Does it matter if you play less hours per day, but more days?
> Why do you talk about hours per day? Does it matter if you play less hours per day, but more days?
Because the only way to level up your character is to grind through a dungeon. You'll get experience for doing so. Every time you level up your character, it takes exponentially more experience to hit the next level.
I don't remember the exact number of hours per day that are required to hit the levels his characters are at, but it's in excess of 14+ hours/day.
Combine that with the evidence from his live streaming that he doesn't actually know how to play these games, and it's clear that he can't have achieved the character levels he has on his own.
To be clear, I don't think anyone really cares that he's paying for a leveled up account. What people care about is that he's taking credit for achieving the high level on his own, when that's obviously not true.
Q: Why would a person with $300 billion feel the need to lie about being good at a video game?
A: Likely because deception has become habitual/reflexive for them.
The point is Elon lies about the most trivial things where it's easy to show he's lying. Elon is a habitual liar. His continual lying is starting to hurt business.
When will Tesla FSD be fully functional? Why would you believe anything Elon has to say on the matter since he's a habitual liar?
Elon faked the Optimus robot demo. Which has called into question the entirety of the Robotaxi reveal.
Tesla's new DumpsterTruck doesn't have many of the capabilities he promised years ago.
Maybe you don't care that people habitually lie to you, even about the most trivial of things, but I care. It tells me a lot about a person's honor and integrity, or in Elon's case, his utter and complete lack of those virtues.
I don't care about a video game but this exposé has a lot more damning examples of Musk lying through his teeth to get where he is, totally recommend the read (and the related links in the article): https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-musk-fro...
Right, but you replied to the parent, not yourself, and the parent didn't call him "crazy", they simply pointed out that he is hostile to workers (he is).
It's sad that people can see a good thing and think it cancels out all bad things
McDonnell Douglas seems to have gotten it done, from a quick skim of [1]. It appears they ran out of funding and the program was cancelled. According to the same article,
> Elon Musk stated that the SpaceX Falcon 9 development was "... continuing the great work of the DC-X project."
It's so sad that the current culture wants to judge peoples life based on the worst they've ever done. Yea, Musk is a troll online, but his success as a business/tech leader is something you can only doubt by donning the proverbial tin foil hat.
I care less about his "troll" posts online (implying there is a conspiracy of jews importing people to destroy America is just a troll and not an actual Nazi conspiracy guys) than his manipulation of the US government, mistreatment of workers, and maybe the most egregious of all, being a fake nerd and pretending to like Evangelion.
Can confirm, all aviation worldwide deals in feet and knots. It's also because it's much easier to do calculations on the fly (literally) - in your head. Metric is precise and logical but harder to use in stressful situations.
Can you please give some real-world example of why it's easier to do calculations? Not disputing what you say, just hard for me to imagine why it would be so.
1 knot is about 100 ft/min which is very convenient for descent at a specific glide slope (i.e. for 100 knots ground speed at 5% slope you want 500 ft/min descent rate). Standard is 3° which is about 5%.
Knots are also handy for navigation as 1 nautical mile equals 1 minute of latitude. And of course a knot is 1 nautical mile per hour. So if you're doing 300 knots, that's 5 degrees of latitude per hour.
The calculation in the metric system would not necessarily be more complicated, but it would be different because the reference points in the metric system are not directly aligned with the geography of the Earth.
"1 knot is about 100 ft/min which is very convenient for descent at a specific glide slope (i.e. for 100 knots ground speed at 5% slope you want 500 ft/min descent rate). Standard is 3° which is about 5%."
You are right. It's an easy calculation. But I would say its easy because its historically based on imperial units. Its easy to think about easy calculations like this in metric units like:
A 5% slope means descending 1 meter vertically for every 20 meters horizontally.
The gradient thing would work if ground speed and vertical speed were both in m/s, but km/h is more common in metric for a ground speed. You don't usually think in terms of hours during a climb/descent!
Glide slope of 3.6% would fit nicely though. Then, 100 km/h ground speed goes with vertical speed 1 m/s.
Metric navigation would use the fact 90 degrees of latitude is 10,000 km.
I suspect that the math is even easier using meters, meters, and meters per second than nautical miles, feet, and knots. I'll eat my hat if you can tell me the conversion from feet or inches to nautical miles without looking it up
This sums it up. Metric is nice and clean tenths, but the real world is seldomly easily expressed in clean tenths.
Another example: The feet is cleanly divisible in thirds, quarters, and twelfths, which is greatly appreciated in industry and particularly construction.
Also to be bluntly mundane, almost everyone can just look down and have a rough measure of a foot which is good enough for daily use.
Also, the "sterility" of metric doesn't do it any sentimental favours. Japan loves measuring size/volume in Tokyo Domes, for example.
If you're an amputee I truly am sorry for you and hope the handicap hasn't disrupted your life too much.
Jokes(...?) aside though, your absolute deference to precision is an example of why metric flies over people's heads. Feets, Tokyo Domes, arguably even nautical miles and so on are relatable at a human level unlike metric which is too nice and clean.
This sort of argument is odd to someone in a country which uses both, where a yard is intuitively "a bit smaller than a metre", a pint corresponds to a pint glass or "about half a litre" rather than anything meaningful and I'm aware that a rod and a furlong are things but have absolutely no idea what they correspond to. A foot is comfortably bigger than the average foot size, and an inch really isn't an easier unit to approximate than a centimeter
The SI was specially aimed to reduce such meaningless discussions, yet we steel have big endians and little endians comparisons, long after the dust settled.
One meter is about one long step for an adult. To approximate the length of a field, you just walk along it with big steps and count. It will not be correct, but pretty close. A cm is a little bit smaller than the width of your index finger. It's all bout what you are used to. Metric doesn't "fly over people's head" where metric is the standard way to measure things, but inches, feet, gallons, pounds, miles fly over our head because we are not used to it so don't have any frame of reference.
No, it doesn't. I'm European, never used imperial before I became a pilot, and it's easier. Check it out, the formulas are much simpler to do in your head. Intuition doesn't matter, all that matters is that I can do the calculations quickly so I know I'm within parameter limits.
I'm curious which ones you find easier? There or a few thermodynamics equations that are much more practical in SAE.
This is because the many units are often developed out of within discipline experiment, whereas metric tries to use fundamental units across disciplines.
The same is true for my students (german school system, iPads form 7th to 13th grade): They are marking, annotating and rearranging parts of the digitized pages as they like. It would be impossible with printed books.
(ok, they could take a picture with the camera and do the same)
They have/use printed books but most of the students are borrowing them from the school and are not allowed to write in them.
So I use mostly digital material and most of the books stay at home for studying (the books are heavy).
How many are there? Not even people in finance/accounting can do that as they need to handle physical documents that must never leave the office. HR, marketing, sales people need to do the same and meet the humans. IT people seem to be the only group capable of doing so, I don't know anyone else in any other profession who would even consider 100% remote a possibility.
Entire finance departments can work from home, my company is 100% remote, its a fintech company that handles and processes sensitive stuff all day.
Never impeded by regulation or data safety concerns, in fact, I think this company has better security practices than others I've worked for in the past to be quite honest.
There is an illusion that security requires an office. Most of it comes down to 'can you trust X person' vs any locality stuff.
We do have UK employees which I realize is decidedly not the EU though. We also have quite a few Canadian employees
I'm unaware of any meaningful difference in practice when it comes to the work stream though.
That said, I'm no lawyer nor an expert on the differences between the US (where I reside) and the rest of the world, in terms of specific data laws and handling procedures
My uncle was a CPA who worked in finance for decades. His last few were partially or fully remote. Some consulting was onsite, but that was never a surprise and didn't change suddenly with the winds of management trends.
I do manual labor. My manager (a very nice guy) must show up on location. After we talk about things I message him and repeat the very things we've talked about so that I have a written record of things.
They have him drive around the country for useless chit chat. If I ask him why stuff isn't done it is always this same excuse. He has to go to meetings where the goal pretty much is to write my whatsapp message on a piece of paper and for other people to hear themselves talk. I sometimes jokingly ask him how it went. The usual response is PFFF, a 5 hour drive for nothing. He manages both the day and the night shifts which adds to the joke.
I think we need to send in the environmentalists so that people can stop burning my gasoline, eroding my roads, killing the birds, stinking up my city, taking my parking spots and wearing out their car.
I propose a special daily commute tax, a flat fee for the first 20 km with extras per additional km and a multiplier for each hour shorter than 8 before the return trip. Lets also do an office tax per square meter.
FWIW, the vast majority of sales people I’ve spoken to over the past 5 years have been WFH/WFCS (work from coffee shop).
Certainly for bigger deals they come onsite for the final stages of the sales process, but most interaction is handled remotely and they aren't in an office.
Nonsense, Americans pay the most for health insurance. It's merely about how you use the money. Same with education. The American economy is so great it could afford an entire second military industrial complex and still have enough money left for healthcare and education.
