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Comment by warent | Hacker News Reader

Pretty much every famous genius in history has spewed numerous claims, collecting lots of hits and lots of misses along the way. It's part of being human that thinks big. Thinking big means missing the mark a lot.

I'm not an Elon fanboy, it's just a little bizarre to me that people mark this guy up as a crazy liar who shouldn't be taken seriously, meanwhile many of his bold claims have actually resulted in advancing tech and science in staggering ways. Like, people were saying the same thing about his claim to land first stage boosters, and here we are.

Side note, apparently he is still actively selling off all his possessions.

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Making extremely aggressive predictions about a topic that you know nothing about isn't "thinking big". Somebody with massive media attention and countless acolytes needs to wield their power with care, especially given that a pandemic is driven by human behavior (if it's not a big deal, why wear a mask?). Not knowing what you don't know is just foolish.

I mean, Starship exists and with each (frequent) test flight it gets closer to delivering on the promise of full reusability, which is jet-age-level shit.

F9 is also incredible and has made the impossible possible... and Starlink is one instance of that, which also exists and is usable.

You can't really highlight his failures without also giving credit where credit is due to his (and his organizations') successes.

I'm really curious how he gets such smart and talented people to work at his companies.

Fact check: Starship has been in development for about 8 years, has exploded on every landing so far, and has never reached orbit.

That's not true, one exploded before landing a few days ago. :P

Uhm. Yeah, prototypes of the next general vessel have exploded while gathering data.

Meanwhile, Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy have made numerous successful and commercial launches and landings.

I don't want to deny the successes at all. But everything SpaceX has achieved so far was possible before. I guess the statement that Starship is getting closer to its promise can be expressed that way, but it almost sounds like it's already close and in reality it's far from being ready.

Also consider that it took NASA about 9 years to fully develop the Space Shuttle from ground up and they didn't lose a single vehicle during testing - 50 years ago!

No, they lost one when it mattered most: when humans were on board. Besides, Starship is meant as more of a replacement for Apollo than for the shuttle.

This does not contradict what I wrote.

It's not a contradiction what I wrote, it's a fair point. Two of the five shuttles eventually exploded with passengers on board. Better to learn the hard edge cases in testing.

You probably shouldn't have started the sentence with "No" then, but never mind. Let's hope that space travel will be safer in the future.

Anyway, I really just wanted to point out that 50 years ago it was apparently possible to develop spaceships in less time without a "move fast and break things" approach.

The Apollo program cost about $156 billion in modern money. Starship's approach is very cheap in comparison. Must estimates about $5bn.

Correction they lost 2 shuttles not one

> But everything SpaceX has achieved so far was possible before.

This is not accurate: reusable orbital first stages is a SpaceX first, and the cost savings it yielded enabled Starlink, which is another SpaceX first (high speed, low-latency, low-altitude LEO satellite internet).

Reusable rockets were developed by a private company 30 years before SpaceX.[1] Using such rockets as first stages is what SpaceX did first, I give them that. But it's more of a means to an end than an achievement. The savings so far are much lower than claimed. Deploying LEO satellites is nothing new. StarLink is burning a lot of money and it is questionable if they will ever become profitable.

[1] https://youtu.be/JzXcTFfV3Ls

The reusable DCXA in that video is not an orbital rocket. The F9 first stage is.

No, there was no reusable first stage before SpaceX, and pretty much everyone in the industry was laughing at Elon for even proposing it. Would you please stop lying about SpaceX?

Reusable first stages are not an achievement. Reusable rockets were invented 30 years before SpaceX. Using such rockets as first stages is a questionable decision by SpaceX, which may be a means to an end if it can save costs.

Who had a rapidly reusable first stage 30 years ago?

And how is it questionable? They've got the cheapest (for their class) launch prices in the world.

Exactly. And us Europeans just got our collective ass handed to us, realizing that our new shiny planned rockets wont cut it in direct competition even if us tax payers shoulder the development costs.

Elon says stupid things sometimes, but I would rather have most of the time, than more stupid manager talk from our German companies with their 'electrified intelligence' and AI in our dashboards (because they bind a GPS coordinate to a setting like Tesla).

You are surely trying hard to rewrite history.. Who had reusable first stages 30 years ago?

Reusable rockets: https://youtu.be/JzXcTFfV3Ls

Please stop trolling.

Fact check: Starship was in development for much less time than SLS, it costs order of magnitudes less and it had several successful 10 km flights. Your comment is absolutely misleading if not outright false because starship as we know it with the steel construction is from end of 2018, so a little more than 2 years ago. The current testing pace is two launches in less than 30 days. SLS had a failed static fire in January and it took them 3 months just to do another static fire. Starship performs multiple static fires per day and it’s the only vehicle in history that managed to fly with full flow engines.

Raptor may have begun development for 8 years but Starship has only been in full development for about 3 years.

And Raptor is an enormous achievement. A full-flow combustion engine that actually looks likely to be used.

> Pretty much every famous genius in history has spewed numerous claims, collecting lots of hits and lots of misses along the way.

Of course, so has every famous idiot.

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