Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by moralestapia | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

moralestapia

Real experts said reusable rockets were impossible ...

View on HN

Did they?

Yes. Is my comment ambiguous or something?

Seems to me like a sentence that's quite easy to understand.

Lots of false sentences are easy to understand.

I understood what you wrote, my question was whether it is true.

A real expert told Elon that self landing rockets were possible over chutes. The retconning to build the myth of Elon is ridiculous.

Lars Blackmore was doing self-landing rocket research before he went to spacex. Musk's reusable rockets (who doesn't want that, this is why the shuttle exists) wanted to use parachutes.

No, no rocketry expert ever said that reusable rockets were impossible. They would have told you that the cost to develop them would not recoup itself based on the then-existing demand for orbital payloads, and that banking on such demand materializing would be a massive gamble (which is why Starlink exists).

"What I’m discovering in the market is that SpaceX primarily seems to be selling a dream, which is good. We should all dream. I think a $5 million launch or a $15 million launch is a bit of a dream. I think reusability is a dream. How am I going to respond to a dream? First of all, you don't wake people up. They have to wake up on their own."

https://www.facebook.com/61572338938589/videos/in-june-2013-...

Pathetic argumentation in this thread, to be real.

Falcon 9 is partial reusable, took a lot of money to do so and yeah its a good product. Not sure how expensive it was for US americans to gift it to Spacex but sure.

The highest number though is like 30 uses and Starship still hasn't profen itself.

Also the boring company, Doge, Solar City, the cybertruck etc.

So what do we get out of this? Musk is for sure not just an idiot, he for sure sees sometimes good opportunities, but also he had the money to invest in these and he got lucky a few times too.

Btw. the cybertruck he announced, never came.

> Falcon 9 is partial reusable, took a lot of money to do so and yeah its a good product. Not sure how expensive it was for US americans to gift it to Spacex but sure.

How much money have Americans gifted NASA to pay Russia for launching payloads ton Soyuz rockets?

Do you frame all government funding as "gifting"?

And you could just as easily frame it as Musk "gifting" something to the US government by offering cheaper launches than Roscosmos and Boeing/ULA, and developing new capabilities cheaper than Boeing

Are you trying to argue against me? Because you are doing a strawman.

Let me criticsize NASA for paying / gifting Russia for launching payloads.

So we are now back to square one.

Pls continue

Reply on news.ycombinator.com