Notwithstanding advantages and disadvantages of human spaceflight vs robotic space exploration, I have always found the whole manned space exploration thing fascinating, exciting and cool. I have, because it’s the best thing going at this time, been really excited about SpaceX’ accomplishments and it has been amazing to follow their progress.
But, then there’s Elon. With his eccentricities, etc, etc rapidly going from quirky to weird to frightening, I don’t know how to square that circle.
Just venting but, man, this sucks that one of the coolest things happening is being driven by one of the world’s worst - and possibly most dangerous - assholes.
The problem with SpaceX is that Musk is a stupid moron who shouldn’t be trusted with a science fair volcano, let alone manned space exploration. It should be left to someone who is actually qualified for the job, not some rich transphobic techbro who inherited mommy and daddy’s money and has been riding that high ever since.
It’s not that hard of a circle to square. Hitler effectively founded Volkswagen, and Henry Ford was a rabid anti-semite who was awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle in 1938 by the Nazi regime. The VW and Ford automobiles remained fine products. Elon isn’t nearly as involved in the engineering behind Space-X as he likes people to think he is.
We’ve had robber barons, Rockefellers, Fords, Lindberghs, and many others whose politics were at times reprehensible but sometimes they invested their profits in America and the world to everyone’s benefit. The incredibly wealthy brandish wildly erratic double-edged swords.
It’s tempting to think that Musk is just an idiot and that he managed to achieve success by pure luck despite that… but SpaceX and Tesla are both highly successful companies. Starlink, too, though that’s obviously connected to SpaceX, and Musk was also involved with PayPal when it hit it big. So there’s obviously something that he’s doing right.
But then again, there’s Twitter. So while it’s clear that there’s some special talent that Musk has, it’s really hard to tell just what it is.
The best I can figure is that he used to be a business genius, and put actual control of SpaceX and Tesla in the hands of highly-competent people who are responsible for those companies’ continued success, and then suffered some form of brain damage that took away that gift, and so now he’s a crazy man with crazy ideas who’s destroying everything new he touches.
He had a boatload of money and recognized successful enterprises and potential of various technologies, and cobbled them together successfully. He did not invent the electric car or the rocket - he capitalized on other people’s inventions and just bought things as he went along. Sure, he did make some good business decisions, but he has been in the right place at the right time, and made the right connections, it seems.
As for SpaceX, they’ll be spending a ton of time and money on folly with the manned space program - let Elon be distracted with all that rather than whatever damage he’d do otherwise.
As others have noted, it’s not like Musk personally designed rockets or cars. But if there’s one area that does showcase his savvy, it’s precisely this.
Starlink is a product that many people want (fast internet anywhere) but that’s impossible to create without massive numbers of satellites.
SpaceX is a company that significantly drove down the price of getting things to orbit. But until SpaceX did that, the demand for putting things in orbit was kinda limited by the fact that people knew it was super expensive and didn’t plan projects that required tons of things in orbit.
If Starlink existed on its own, it couldn’t get off the ground (literally) because of how expensive coat to orbit was.
If SpaceX existed on its own, it might fail in the time between proving that it could drive costs down and customers who actually can make use of the higher capacity and lower cost coming up with plans.
According to Sam Harris, who apparently knew Musk personally, that brain damage was a crippling addiction to Twitter. And it kinda makes sense - IIRC Musk started to go off the rails after he called some guy who rescued children from a mine in South America a pedophile because Musk wanted the glory of doing it first, with a submarine? That drama unfolded on Twitter…
No, Elon Musk was never competent at any aspect of spaceflight, or electric vehicle design, or evactuated tunnel trains, or human-machine neural interfaces, or ‘AI’ learning models, or any other field of technical innovation. What he is good at is being a hype man to can bring in investors and stoke his legions of devoted followers. Whenever Elon opens his mouth and mumbles through some description of a technical aspect of ‘Starship’, or starts promising to put a million people on Mars, or babbles out pure bullshit on neurophysiology, it is obvious nonsense to anyone actually knowledgable in the pertinent field, and when he actually gets control of a real project you get…the Cybertruck.
You should think of SpaceX as a company where some competent, driven people with adult supervision and a large development budget made a single-minded effort to take mostly conventional technologies and stitch them together into a higher tempo space launch service that wasn’t several agglomerations of contractors forced together into a joint venture by the government which assured them a certain profit margin whether they innovated the capability for faster and cheaper capability or not, e.g. the United Launch Alliance. And for what it is worth, there is no indication that SpaceX is actually making a profit on the launches; they’ve never opened their books to either the public or the government, they’ve done continuous rounds of capital investment, and it really appears that the future of SpaceX really hinges on the Starlink constellation that is what required the high launch tempo and reusability (so as not to be hobbled by the number of first stages that could be serially produced by the Hawthorne factory).
SpaceX is not going to be sending people to Mars by the thousands because there are no actual provisions for how they would sustain a crew for 8-9 months in freefall nor how they would ship, land, assemble, maintain, and provision some kind of habitat if they did except for cartoons and crude animations with many obvious flaws, notwithstanding all of the physiological and hygiene problems with habitation in space and the low gravity field of Mars. It isn’t even clear that they’ve figured out how to perform the large scale fluid propellant transfers in Earth orbit required for their lunar lander because that is actually a really difficult problem that is not amenable to just improvisation and working it out on the fly.
For all that I’d really like to see permanent habitation in space (and have worked on proposals and developed my own concepts for solar-orbiting habitats mostly using minimally processed in space material resources, but realistically the costs, technical and material limitations, and the potentially unsolvable problems of long term human habitation in space without transhumanist-style genetic engineering make it a pretty ridiculous pursuit at this point, while the wealth of knowledge we have obtained from uncrewed probes and orbiting observatories at a fraction of the cost of a single crewed mission speaks to where our fiscally-responsible priorities should lay. Human space travel beyond Earth’s sphere of influence is great for the imaginative mind but implausible and exorbitantly expensive in practice, and even human outputs on the Moon make little sense once you consider the costs versus the questionable benefits.
I have two friends- one who used to work at SpaceX, and the other still does. They have both told me that SpaceX works despite Musk, not because. Whenever he comes to their office, he has to be “handled”.
I visited my friend once, and he gave me a tour of their offices (at that time). His desk was ten feet away from an actual rocket, which really thrilled my inner 13 year old NASA geek.
I suppose there could be some sense in which an organisation that is able to do that, is also able to deliver great things when someone (anyone) puts them under intense pressure, but it doesn’t necessarily take huge talent or skill or insight to apply pressure.
Twitter was perhaps his most successful venture yet. He invested $44 billion and effectively bought the global town square, turned it into a propaganda machine for right-wing conspiracy nonsense, leveraged the clout gained into effectively hand-picking the future vice president and substantially influencing the outcome of the election itself, and has now seen a $54 billion increase in wealth following the election. So not only does he have the ear of the future president in an unprecedented way, he also made a tidy margin in the process of gaining it, with the $130-$200 million directly spent for Trump’s campaign barely amounting to chump change.
And of course it will continue to pay off: Musk has apparently been chosen by Trump to head the new ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE; apparently this isn’t satire, we’re just actually living in the dumbest timeline), and Vance is already threatening withdrawal from NATO should the EU continue to be mean to Musk by doing mean things like requiring his businesses to follow the law and whatnot.
It’s increasingly seeming like this was a power grab by billionaires for billionaires, and Twitter, after the failure of Truth Social, was their organ of propaganda. Was that the plan from the start? I honestly can’t find it within me to believe that Musk does have the kind of competence and foresight necessary for that. But as far as exploiting an opportunity for all it’s worth and then some, this has to be a masterpiece.