There's a lot of amazing real world technical accomplishments seen from SpaceX. They recently landed a 1st stage booster for the 9th time. There's been more than 50 successful landings now. The idea that you don't have to throw away 2/3rds of a rocket for every launch is a game changer.
I do wonder if some of these same things could, or would have been accomplished in the absence of Musk, but with the same amount of capital and under the leadership of Gwynne Shotwell. I think they would have. Musk has a big dream, and is great at hyping stuff, but it's not like he's personally engineering the Falcon 9 and its recovery system. Shotwell hired the right people to implement the grand vision.
What I'm concerned about is the people who think that Tesla can do no wrong, and it's the most amazing thing ever. When the reality between the sales/marketing pitch, as you've documented above, and what actually exists in the real world on a certain date is so divergent.
The optimization problem of hoverslamming a rocket is something that I can fairly easily wrap my head around. Even without the advances in convex optimization of solving that problem you likely could have done it with somewhat less robust approaches. I'm pretty certain that rockets could have been landed using the engineering pieces that existed in 2001 with incremental improvements and learning (maybe not as robust so your optimizer eats a few rockets in your first 100 landings).
When it comes to automated driving though you're really requiring solving entirely novel never-before-solved problems. If there is a spectrum between "found a company on doing some existing engineering twice as good" and "found a company on solving the Goldbach conjecture" then driverless cars are a bit more towards the latter than hoverslamming rockets is.
Musk has clearly been way off base with self driving, and Tesla’s manufacturing is nowhere near where he said it would be by now. However with SpaceX it seems like he really it directly in charge of engineering. It was him pushing the booster recovery program and leading it technically. Yes of course it took a fantastic team to get it to work but I honestly believe there’s no way they’d have got there without him first relentlessly trying out every technical workaround got every problem for years, and second being willing to throw massive resources at it. I can’t see Shotwell doing any of that. She’s great, but she’s the one that makes it a viable company, not a red hot innovator.
I love SpaceX, but I don't find them quite as miraculously impressive as some people. SpaceX is "just" doing what NASA did in their glory days: rapidly iterating, innovating, and then carrying those innovations all the way through to real world flight. That last part is key. In industry we call that "shipping."
NASA didn't stop innovating per se. In the 1980s and 1990s they worked out their own version of vertical take-off and landing and actually test flew it:
What you don't say is that NASA was uber expensive in their innovation, with things like not using common CPUs because they were not well tested. And nobody takes risks there anymore.
The difference between SpaceX and NASA is mainly that SpaceX cares about cost.
Or we can say that NASA has incentives to absurdly increase cost, like any bureaucracy.
There is no way the DC-X could have been developed without increasing enormously the budget (and taxes from Americans). That was the reason it was not done.
DC-X was nowhere near to being a reusable first stage. The X-33 was a suborbital prototype.
And innovation when you have many, many billions is one thing, if you have to operate in a commercial market but still find a way to innovate at that level its quite amazing.
I have issues with how Musk communicates, but fundamentally I think Tesla is innovating as much as SpaceX. Many here and me have lots of issues in how Self-Driving is developed, but fundamentally its the right concept.
What Tesla is doing with batteries is quite amazing. I have over the last 2 years spent a lot of time understanding the battery industry and what Tesla is doing is actually incredibly impressive. People mostly don't understand that because battery and battery production is far more obscure as topic.
However whatever else you can say about Elon, he is committed to the projects that he is committed too.
SpaceX will not give up on Starship, or at most replace it with a changed design that tries to solve the same problem. Tesla will not stop trying to push down the price of battery, they are comited to it and are willing to go all the way to vertically integrate mining if that what it takes. Tesla will not stop developing Self-Driving, they will push forward and invest as much as they need to invest.
I do wish the Communication around the Self-Driving technology would change. They should have just called it 'Co-Pilot' and sold a 'Advanced Co-Pilot' and say they are working on 'Self-Driving' but it not a product (yet). Stop promising it will come so soon, and I not sure about how I feel about letting Beta testers put up videos.
Sandy Munro was invited to SpaceX design review session, so he has some first-hand comments about that on this video (@6:17): https://youtu.be/S1nc_chrNQk?t=377
Problems that are conceptually simple can still be very complex once all of the details are added. Theoretically landing a rocket is a simple matter of turning it into a giant model aircraft and doing the math on how much fuel you need to reserve. Re-lighting an engine is conceptually easy too. In practice we know this is a huge accomplishment.
Self driving is a problem that starts out hard. Think about how you get a computer to recognize other objects, especially other cars, based on it's fairly limited set of sensor inputs. Once you add in the details, like dealing with unexpected road conditions, detecting vehicles that are partially invisible to your sensors, etc... and it's hard to see a future where the technology is viable, at least in the near term. All computer vision stuff currently has a sizeable false positive/negative error rate that you just have to accept. But on the road a false negative or false positive can be fatal.
There's a list of quotes just as wrong for spacex.
The issue isn't the predictions. It's the time frames he makes the predictions about. We will have everything he's said one day, but in the mean time we need to call him out for what he's done: lying, and why he's done it: to get money.
My take as well. I've known so many people like this. I've been a person like this. Someone close to me is working for a small startup run by a guy like this.
It's an unfortunate flipside to their willingness to work so hard-- they almost need to believe in the impossible to keep up the pace. Ideally there is someone between them and the public face of the company, but all too often they can't help spouting off stuff they should be keeping under wraps in front of TV cameras or in tweets.
Yes, he's a believer. This belief in discounting the reasoning gap between humans and software is why Musk is both up at night worrying about evil AI taking over the world (it may already be too late!) and also genuinely believes that autonomous driving is a "solved problem" that just needs some of the rough edges removed (just a couple of years away!).
It's like there is this enormous gulf that most others can see, but to Elon it's invisible.
So don't let anyone tell you that philosophy and theology don't matter. We are witnesses a multi-billion dollar bet being made on the basis of some extreme views about the nature of man, and because this appears to be a core belief of Elon, I doubt he will ever update his priors to make more effective investment decisions based on feedback from real-world tests. He will always view this as a project that is almost-ready with just a few technical glitches to overcome.
If someone in a position of power looks honest, it's either because they have such a huge competitive edge that they truly don't care, or because they are incredible bullshit artists. In the case of Musk it's a mix of both, and so far he manages to turn some hype into reality. He is the epitome of plausible deniability.
I think it's fair to say that an extra marginal tens of millions of dollars or so will not affect Musk's life in the slightest. I find it hard to believe that Musk is motivated by money at this point.
He was always like that, which is why he did two internships in one summer and dropped out of Stanford to founded Zip2. He slept in the office. They had one computer, so it ran the service during the day and he used it as a dev machine through the night. Some people, that's just the way they are.
>>I do wonder if some of these same things could, or would have been accomplished in the absence of Musk, but with the same amount of capital and under the leadership of Gwynne Shotwell.
That assumes the same objectives would have been pursued without Musk, which I find unlikely, given the skepticism and criticism Musk had to endure, and dispel, in order to keep his companies on-target, without a scale-back of ambitions, all those years.
I do wonder if some of these same things could, or would have been accomplished in the absence of Musk, but with the same amount of capital and under the leadership of Gwynne Shotwell. I think they would have. Musk has a big dream, and is great at hyping stuff, but it's not like he's personally engineering the Falcon 9 and its recovery system. Shotwell hired the right people to implement the grand vision.
What I'm concerned about is the people who think that Tesla can do no wrong, and it's the most amazing thing ever. When the reality between the sales/marketing pitch, as you've documented above, and what actually exists in the real world on a certain date is so divergent.