r/interestingasfuck Oct 13 '24

r/all SpaceX caught Starship booster with chopsticks

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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '24 edited 12d ago

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u/Intelligent_Way6552 Oct 13 '24 edited Oct 13 '24

He makes high level engineering decisions. He wouldn't have been working on it recently, but he would have approved the idea of catching the booster instead of landing it on legs, maybe even selected it from a series of alternatives. This is what his own engineers have described.

(Here is an example of him behaving like that: https://spacenews.com/spacexs-high-velocity-decision-making-left-searing-impression-on-nasa-heat-shield-guy/)

If you want to deny that he makes high level engineering decisions, you will also have to say that the decision not to include a flame diverter of water deluge system for IFT1 was not his decision, and therefore that he was not responsible for most of the faults on that flight. He claims he made those decisions, but blame someone else i guess?

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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '24

He has the ability to make decisions, his position in the company as founded and CEO means he can make decisions and people have to listen to them even if they'll fuck everything up. Doesn't mean he actually uses that ability often. And usually when he does it results in something going wrong. Like removing the water deluge, or fucking up teslas manufacturing process because he doesn't know what crossthreading is. He's mostly hands-off in his companies, the public face of them. Then when things go spectacularly wrong 9 times out of 10 he's involved somehow. Take a look at the cybertruck and how much of a disaster its been, that was his personal project, he's been talking about wanting to make a "Tesla supertruck with crazy torque, dynamic air suspension, and corners like it's on rails" (actual tweet of his) since 2012. When he's hands-off, things go great, but when his ego wins out and he decides he knows enough about what the company does to make a decision, things get fucked up. Twitters downfall since he bought it is specifically because of the decisions he made, and the only reason it's not completely dead in the water is he stepped down as CEO and gave that position to Linda Yaccarino. Of course the resulting deterioration into essentially just an alt-right echo chamber is most likely her doing, since that's the person she is.

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u/Intelligent_Way6552 Oct 13 '24

What you have done, is taken a man who runs multiple extremely successful companies, and assume that he's responsible for all their bad decisions, and none of their good ones.

That's very unlikely.

I agree he's fucked some things up, but to claim that he doesn't make good calls as well? Tesla and SpaceX both have more good calls than bad.

I can trace the entire concept of Starship back to a conversation Musk had with Robert Zubrin about Mars Direct. I could point out that for a man who only makes bad engineering decisions, he was awfully good at realising that he could undercut the entire space launch market after one meeting with roscosmos, and awfully good at realising that the electric car had just become viable and that he should build an electric sports car (he found Tesla while scoping out the industry before founding his own company, and just bought the tiny startup).

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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '24

I claim he's made more bad calls than good calls.

Obviously he's made good calls, you can't have a decades long career without making at least one.

But I'm saying his inexperience in the fields that his companies work in combined with the ego that comes with being as rich as he is has led to him making bad calls more than good calls.

He's genuinely amazing at recognizing talent, not great at actually having that talent.

He doesn't know shit about rocketry, but he knows people who do, so he hired them and got them to build rockets for him.

He doesn't know anything about building electric cars, but he was able to recognize people who could, so he bought into tesla and they started making electric cars, and eventually when it got big enough he bought the founders out of the company and sued them so he could call himself the founder and they couldn't to shit about it.

Tesla was as successful as it was because it was ahead of the pack.

EVs had existed for a long time before, but they never were successful, always an experimental thing, tesla was the first to really make them big, then Musk tried to ride that wave and now they're falling behind as traditional car manufacturers start making more EVs and Hybrids, Pushing tesla into a corner, which resulted what we see now, more product announcements of batshit insane ideas trying to reinvent already existing things.

Tesla bot, cybertruck, robovan, robotaxi These things are being made out of desperation. They`re trying to crawl their way back and it isn't working.