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Comment by alsodumb | Hacker News Reader

I love how the goalposts keep shifting all the time - "Tesla can never manufacture a mass production car", "Elon cannot run a hardware company", "Electric cars can only sell when subsidized". The truth is Tesla and Elon pushed an entire market forward. Tesla paid back their loans while other car manufacturers didn't.

SpaceX was not the first in the launch business - they were in fact the only one who attempted to break into a monopolized market that no one dared to touch. It's remarkable that they not only fight their way in, but also did it so well that they became the largest launch provider in the country, and in some cases the only one in the United States - SpaceX saved the tax payers a ton of money by reducing launch costs.

You don't have to either hate or love a guy - Elon fucked up multiple times, often talks shit, but give the man credit where credit is due.

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https://www.engadget.com/2008-06-30-tesla-motors-elon-musk-p...

This goalpost hasn't moved for 14-yrs.

I mean it's well known that Tesla has a insane profit margin (in the car manufacturing market) when compared to other players. The could sell a car around 30,000$ (adjusted for inflation) if they want to - they in fact came pretty close to that a while ago.

The question is, why would they? Why would they reduce their price if they can actively sell all the cars the manufacture? They in fact had months of wait time until recently. Why would they sell a cheaper car when there is no serious competition cutting their market share? It's no different than apple not reducing the cost of their iphone - they have no incentive to do so as long as they are making money and have no serious competition under-cutting them.

Tesla's pitch is partly 'electric car good for climate' yes, but at the end of the day they are a for-profit company and their main objective would be to maximize profit.

> at the end of the day they are a for-profit company and their main objective would be to maximize profit.

The Tesla master plan was from the beginning to reinvest these profits into manufacturing a cheaper car. They did this with the Model 3, but now it kind of looks like they've given up.

If you take $30,000 in May 2008 and adjust for inflation [1] to February 2019, the equivalent price would be $35,005.

In February 2019, Tesla announced [2] a Model 3 for $35,000.

So if you're looking at the numbers by relative buying power, they weren't doing too bad up until car prices went insane the last two years.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

[2] https://www.tesla.com/blog/35000-tesla-model-3-available-now

I thought they sold a very small number at 35k, and certainly the implication is that price point (at least adjusted for inflation) would be maintained. What's the cheapest Tesla you can buy now.

I can contribute one more data point: Space X invented a new alloy steel to drive down the cost of the surface material of Space X rockets to $4/kg. That's some serious science and engineering. And this improvement is probably a very small one compared with thousands of innovations made by Space X.

Do you know what prices per kg looked like before this new alloy?

Aluminum lithium alloy was about $40/kg, and carbon fibers about $130/kg, without considering the cost of insulation tile.

Cool, that’s a significant improvement. I’m not sure how often magnitude-scale improvements occur in material sciences, but my instinct is that it’s rare.

Citation needed.

Falcon 9 uses a carbon fiber skin over an aluminium honeycomb.

And Wikipedia claims that Starship originally used bog-standard 301 Stainless Steal, and later switched to also bog-standard 304L Stainless Steal.

The only alloys that I'm aware of SpaceX developing are inconel alloys for hot, oxygen rich parts of their engines.

Also PICA-X is a SpaceX variant of a NASA heatshield.

It's typical for SpaceX to use the off-the-shelf material initially, then do R&D to customize it for a material that better suits their needs.

IIRC, Musk explained it in a SSB-BPA joint meeting last year. They considered carbon-fiber, aluminum lithium alloy, and 301 steel. It was a fascinating discussion. The materials were great under low temperature, but had other issues as well as degraded performance under high temperature. For instance, carbon-fibers can leak gas (or react with the percolated fuel?). Starship eventually used 30X, a steel alloy.

So Starship doesn't use 30X stainless steel?

We went through all this with the haters about Steve Jobs

> I love how the goalposts keep shifting all the time

Which ones? The ones where cars would self-deliver five years ago? That Mars colonisation would have begun this year? That Cybertruck would deliver three years ago?

The goalposts are Elons.

Every big tech company misses their targets the same way, because they’re way too ambitious. Look at Waymo and Prime Air.

> The truth is Tesla and Elon pushed an entire market forward

Arguably EU regulations did just as much to make EVs viable.

My own personal take as someone who actually commuted on 85 with my wife and saw more and more Teslas on the left lane as the years went on, is that electric cars being allowed on the carpool lane provided a huge initial boost to Tesla sales. All the rich folks buying Model S so they could avoid traffic.

But I am bitter. I was actually commuting with 2 people on the car while rich folks bought their way there (totally on purpose, so the electric cars become more popular, I know)

The Palo Alto Prius!

From what appears to be a change in sentiment, with younger people, over the past 10 years or so, we appear to be heading into a slump of extreme risk aversion.

As much as I've come to dislike the guy in recent times, these points are still valid. He did that. And it's something.

No, HE didn't do that. Teams like three levels under him did that based on a vague goal he set and some people under him refined. Why should "let's do something hard" lifted up as some kind of magical ability? Where were all the people praising Kennedy as the smartest man alive for telling NASA to go to the moon?

> SpaceX saved the tax payers a ton of money by reducing launch costs.

Do the tax payers really need anything launched?

Yea they do. Science experiments, future commerce, national defense, etc.

> future commerce

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge

> national defense

Yeah yeah, I've been hearing that ever since Ronnie Ray-gun 40 years ago.

Weather monitoring. Got anything against that too?

Not per se, but it does seem like the volume of stuff launched into space vastly exceeds the need for it. And the environmental effects on the upper atmosphere of the increasing number of rocket launches is worrisome.

I’m excited for the Methane leak scanning project. There’s probably a lot of little projects like that that wouldn’t have been possible before the current launch market.

I don't entirely understand why people are debating this point. The taxpayer doesn't pay for what he needs, he pays for what the government does. There are endless benefits to space for the consumer, but even if there weren't he's still paying for them.

Don't like endless wars? Thanks for your feedback, now give me 30% of everything you earn so I can pay for them.

Tax payers seem to enjoy their Uber / Uber Eats type services which depend on GPS.

This tax payer doesn't.

If you don't think GPS as it's own thing is a net good, value adding part of the world, the problem might be you, not things in space.

I was talking about Uber / Uber Eats.

Oh thank goodness. Enthusiastic agreement.

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