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Comment by zaroth | Hacker News Reader

What’s amazing to me is when companies do things like this that, for the general public, make perfect sense only in retrospect.

Most seemly well-run companies are a total shit-show from the inside. Stupid projects with features that no one wants, that engineering can’t build, destined to never sell.

It’s just plain refreshing when you see a company firing on all cylinders (sorry, couldn’t help myself) to the point where a shrewd move that helps capture the market only becomes apparent, even to industry insiders, months or years later.

It’s particularly satisfying when the CEO maps it all out in public years ahead of time and then executes on that vision relentlessly for a decade, despite the constant hate and doubt.

</Fanboy>

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Shout-out to Gwynne Shotwell, who is a massive factor in the company's success.

Gwynne Shotwell :)

Dang it. Fixed.

+1 for that, Elon might have the vision, but without adult supervision SpaceX would have folded a while ago.

I'm not sure I'd put it that strongly, but it is quite clear that Shotwell has been a huge factor in SpaceX and the absence of someone like her is part of why Tesla is comparatively less healthy. She deserves a lot more credit.

What exactly is wrong with Tesla? You are comparing apples to oranges here and Tesla are doing fine regardless. Didn't they just post a profitable quarter after meeting production goals on the model 3 and virtually the entire market betting against them?

Both companies are fine, and Shotwell is an industry veteran who is no doubt valuable to SpaceX, but don't be ridiculous to think either company would be anywhere without Elon at the helm.

At one point SpaceX was down to a single make-it-or-break-it launch. Had that failed the company would've folded. Not true anymore, but was at least at one point in the past. Previous HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18046049

Lol hyperbole much?

I'm all for credit where credit is due but Shotwell is a completely interchangeable and irrelevant piece of the puzzle here. There are many CEO's, men and women, who could have been in her role. All of the top talent at SpaceX could have been at any other company, but it took Elon steering a ship of motivated individuals, cracking the whip, and putting it all on the line for SpaceX to get where it is.

I really don't understand this recent wave of people who until now loved the guy but after he took a page out of President Trumps say whatever you're thinking book, people hate him.

I think it also made sense beforehand. But the main issue is that most companies are extremely risk averse, perhaps even out of necessity. The stock market butchers companies based on their results over 3 month windows. That's really about the most idiotic system imaginable, but it's the one that we have. This is why I think ever more of the companies with big goal driven ideas are staying private. Go public and suddenly everything is about reducing risk and working to min-max on a quarterly cycle, annual in the worst case.

This is really distorting progress in our country because while going public may severely impair any longterm revolutionary goals of a company, it'll also make you [the founders] filthy stinking rich.

> The stock market butchers companies based on their results over 3 month windows

In the "risk-on" phases of the past few cycles, the stock markets have loved risk takers. The problem, I believe, is in management not wanting to ruin a good thing.

I don't think I had an opinion beforehand or anything. I mean I was always down with the idea. But I think the problem is that it's such a long process to get from point A to B, and then the market for putting things into orbit is pretty niche that most people just can't see the potential. And lot of people are living from paycheck to paycheck aren't really planning years down the road. It's completely out of their realm of experience or expertise in every possible way. And they would never attempt it so that's get projected onto the world as, "Anyone who attempts this is foolish."

Hindsight is 20/20 after all. And vision is only lauded in hindsight. Because a vision that ends in failure gets a big "I told you so." from people who usually have none.

> the market for putting things into orbit is pretty niche

It's only niche until the price comes down, like for computers, cars, air travel, aluminum, coffee, etc.

Fun fact: aluminum used to be more valuable than gold.

From here... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium

"As Wöhler's method could not yield great quantities of aluminium, the metal remained rare; its cost exceeded that of gold. [57]

...

[57] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium#cite_note-Venetski-6...

Two things:

1. Things can be niche because there just aren't that many people who want them, rather than because you couldn't make them cheaply if there was demand. A good quality Videodisc player for example costs far more now than it did at the height of the format, because only weird retro collectors want one so there's no reason to mass produce them. Videodisc players are niche.

2. We're talking about literal space, it can actually fill up. Some orbits are either so low that everything de-orbits soon enough anyway and needs replacing, or so high that we'd never conceivably fill them, but in between are plenty of useful orbits that are finite, so filling them up with more crap doesn't make any sense even if you could do it for free.

It’s not so much that there’s not enough room up there, but rather if any odd piece of shit decides to disintegrate the debris field will make a large swath of orbit uninhabitable until the debris falls back to Earth.

So even if getting up there gets cheap the things we put up there will still need to be expensive.

Except that this isn't hindsight being 20/20...this is foresight.

> And lot of people are living from paycheck to paycheck aren't really planning years down the road.

The average joe had and could have had nothing to do with SpaceX's success. I think OP is referring more to people who could have had an impact, like government entities or aerospace company CEOs.

>cylinders

You mean capacitors. Ba dum tshhh.

Actually I’m this case I think he means combustion chambers...

No. I think they're referring to Tesla (and its struggles) seeing that it's a car company and cars classically run on cylinders, but since Tesla's are electric, no cylinders. You know since Elon Musk is a founding member of both SpaceX and Tesla.

I thought they were referring to SpaceX as well seeing as it's 3 cylinders and the topic at hand.

SpaceX, not Tesla.

Do rockets have cylinders?

you mean the white pointy tubes? yes.

Eh, the Falcon 9 Heavy was years later than what the CEO "mapped out" and is missing an major feature of the original design (crossfeed). They may have done better than their competitors but SpaceX have had their share of mishaps along the way like anyone else. A lot of the "hate and doubt" was justified; certainly the people who said there was no way Falcon 9 Heavy would be flying in 2013 like Musk was claiming turned out to be... 100% correct.

If Wikipedia is pointing at the right numbers, the final Falcon Heavy has 20% more payload to LEO than the initial proposal with crossfeed. Late? Yes. More capable than projected? Yes. Low R&D budget? At $500mm, amazingly so, especially for being late.

> the final Falcon Heavy has 20% more payload to LEO than the initial proposal with crossfeed.

They met the payload goals thanks to unanticipated improvements to Falcon 9 performance. But it rather gives the lie to the "the CEO made a plan and they executed that plan" narrative; actually a substantial part of the CEO's plan was a blind alley and they wasted a lot of time chasing it.

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