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Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

Very good points.

I think we (I, maybe) default to the mistake of thinking in terms of "one big systemic explanation." Ultimately, something like investment in or success at innovation doesn't follow strict rules. The factors that go into it tend to be local. Any practicable "Theory of Innovation" is likely to be true locally, at best.

A few years back Neil Degrasse Tyson, advocating for a re-funding of the NASA space shuttle, made the argument that private companies will never pioneer space exploration. Mars missions and such. He had Elon in his sights, but also others who were starting to "invest in space" at the time.

It was a good argument. It was logical, consistent with 50 years of space exploration experience and parsimonious with analogies from other industries, history, etc.

Neil was also wrong, and I think he'd agree to moderate that argument significantly today.

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Is the Space Shuttle really a great example? Two of the five exploded killing people and it ended up being more expensive and less efficient than the non reusable Russian equivalent.

https://gizmodo.com/the-space-shuttle-was-a-beautiful-but-te...

Is explode the right verb for Columbia?

Also, it's not as though the Russians and Soviets didn't have their share of in-flight fatalities as well.

The shuttle was capable of missions that wouldn't have otherwise been possible. It also ferried more people at once.

That said, the shuttle was severely underutilized and hence costed a lot more than it should have.

> Is explode the right verb for Columbia?

I don't think so, really.

Columbia didn’t explode in the sense of a massive detonation of something onboard. It had a hole punched in the wing during take off. During re-entry, hot gasses penetrated the wing and led to failure of the control surfaces, and the resultant loss of control (it was gliding at this point) caused heating and dynamic pressures that eventually led to vehicle break up [0].

Strictly speaking, the Challenger also wasn’t destroyed by an explosion. The failure of an O-ring on one of the Solid Rocket Boosters led to pressurised burning gas destroying the attachment hardware the held the SRB in place. The SRB ripped away causing the entire stack to tumble. Challenger ended up at the top and had its back broken by aerodynamic forces at the same time as the thin skin of the external fuel tank shredded, leading to a sudden massive burn of the fuel it contained (which caused the ‘explosion’ effect so visible from the ground). The crew compartment 'survived' all this and continued ballistically upward before falling back to the sea where it was destroyed on impact, killing the crew. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...

There were 135 Shuttle missions flown. Two ended in disaster.

There is a huge difference between a 1.4% failure rate and a 40% failure rate.

NASA got a whole lot of science done with those missions.

But more missions would have been flown if the Shuttle was more reliable. This is a kind of survivorship bias where we don't know how many missions would have been flown with a different design.

No, and it's not precisely the argument he was making. He was arguing for manned exploration generally, and large scale space projects generally. I was abbreviating, poorly as you point out.

Very true. I think there is also a lot of hindsight bias in the article and the comments

He was wrong, although the space exploration pioneering that SpaceX may do (landing on mars, for example) seems more likely to be motivated by passion than by shareholder returns.

But most companies are motivated by passion. The idea that it's all about shareholder returns is a myth put about by the ideologically motivated. Most companies don't even have public shareholders to begin with, and of the rest, it's not like Apple, Facebook or Google ever even tried to care about what their shareholders thought. They were totally open that they were motivated by passion and would invest billions into whatever pet projects the CEOs happened to find cool. Heck the trend has been to define voting classes such that shareholders are formally excluded from even marginal influence over decision making.

This stereotype of the corporate executive who only cares about increasing profits is based on a kernel of truth, but only because the world is full of mature companies whose leadership are devoid of ideas for where they go next .. so why not focus on optimisation ("shareholder returns")? But then again the world is full of NGOs with no vision, it's full of academic departments churning out low quality grant applications just so they can expand their labs. Lack of vision and a focus on money is hardly unique to any one kind of group. At least shareholder returns are about making money for other people rather than yourselves!

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