Wait, I just read a longer version of this quote and the part they were talking about was otherwise going to cost $120k!!? That seems like an important detail.
Didn’t he get got for sexual harassment?
JFC
I did Nazi that… Nah, we all saw that coming
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Someone not on Twitter needs to ask him to explain in detail what that means lol lmao that will literally never happen
Kristen Welker’s next Meet the Press guest is fired up on a lot of issues
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Who will be the next boogeyman for the right after Soros dies?
- A Jew
- LOL, duh, A Jew
0 voters
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Yeah. I thought I included that but didn’t so I feel bad. But not that bad. What Musk proved was that even at $120k, the garage door opener/actuator was not unreasonably priced and that it was Elon, who thought it was worth $5k, that was full of crap.
I didn’t notice this in Vance’s book so it must be a more recent invention: Isaacson says Elon came up with an “idiot index” for identifying over-priced parts they could make themselves; he says after a while they were making 70% of their own components. So I would expect that, after 20+ years of SpaceX, there would be many good examples of cost-savings. At least enough of them that the same anecdote wouldn’t appear in two biographies written eight years apart. Yet the same actuator story is in Isaacson’s book:
https://twitter.com/Austen/status/1701969527393665296
You’ll notice though, that the nine months of the engineer’s time working on the actuator is left out here. That seems like an important detail!
The valve mentioned in the same paragraph is the same kind of nonsense. Maybe the genius part is that labor and overhead are free and you can get suppliers to accept zero profit. But to be fair, they must be doing something right so maybe they just chose bad examples and overall they’re killing the pricing game. Like I said, I don’t know anything about business.
Call me cynical but it seems to me that a lot of business innovations, like Elon’s index, are just taking an obvious idea, giving it a catchy name, and hyping the shit out of it. After getting through the SpaceX part of Vance’s book, I’m still struggling to identify examples of genuine technological innovations. I don’t doubt they exist but what are they? @atatop said reusability is a game changer. Yeah ok but that’s not exactly a new idea. I mean reusable rockets appeared in Buck Rodgers and Flash Gordon comics in the 1930s. Reusability was a major selling point of the Space Shuttle, which was designed starting in the late 1960s. The DC-X (1990s) was pretty cool.
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Reusable rockets not being a new idea and actually making one that works and is reliable are two very different things. Leonardo da Vinci and helicopters are a good example of that. So far no other company has managed to land a first stage capable of taking a payload to orbit. And a bunch of companies tried. Some had smaller prototypes that landed but then couldn’t reliably repeat that for full size rockets. Only Blue Origin landed a first stage that can get people in a suborbital flight and did so 22 times with 1 failure and 1 partial failure. It’s successor was supposed to be bigger than the falcon heavy but its launch date is already pushed out to the end of 2024 at which point it could very well already be obsolete if SpaceX manages to get StarShip working. New Glenn might have a reusable second stage which would make it better than StarShip but that is still only a rumour.
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At this point in my life, I’m starting to believe that genuine innovations are for suckers.
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?? I feel like one of us is completely misunderstanding the story. Elon said that he thought the part could be built for $5k, so he assigned an engineer to design it with that budget, which the engineer successfully did. This shows that Elon was correct. Are you reading this to say that the replacement part took 9 months of engineer time per unit? I took it to mean that the 9 months was spent designing and prototyping and such, and that the marginal cost for each unit was $3900.
I wonder there are revenues associated with tesla’s ev charge connector becoming the industry default.
Right, and even if they were buying an off the shelf part, there would have been time spent by the engineer to integrate it into the design of the rest of the rocket, test it, make sourcing agreements, etc.
A reusable second stage wouldn’t make NG better since Starship also has a reusable second stage but it’s definitely better for Blue.
And we’ll just take the billionaire’s word that the part was made just as safe and well tested as the replacement part in the 9 whole months the jr engineer spent developing it? There is so much over-engineering in space parts that there is a lot of room for corner cutting before the accidents start. We still haven’t seen anything to make Elon move farther into the good column instead of in staying the lucky column.
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Right - that story sort of sounds like it could have been about OceanGate. Yes, you can likely make most pieces much cheaper than you buy them, but it’s often going to be at the cost of testing/safety.
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