Yes. Please do that. Destroy Twitter!
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What good is that distinction if you might only make a handful of these? Is Elon going to be selling SpaceX brand actuators to other rocket startups on eBay?
This is something Elon demanded while they were developing Falcon 1. They were far behind schedule; why stop to re-invent the garage door opener? Why devote time to that when there were numerous unsolved problems? They needed a successful launch or they were going out of business. This thing has to work. It’s not like you can get out of your rocket to pull the emergency release cord to open the garage door manually. This mini-project doesn’t make sense.
Yes, and SpaceX did that. They succeeded. Good for them. They succeded by not innovating, and that was actually the plan. They wanted to build a cheap, reliable workhorse and they did.
But the plan now is to abandon their working, reliable rocket. There’s no guarantee that Starship will work out and Elon isn’t necessarily helping.
They’re pretty good about testing after they lost a rocket to faulty struts:
Can’t find a followup article right now but the SpaceX testing of these struts found something like 25% of them failed far below the certified 10,000 pound limit so they just started building struts in house.
Assuming they still use the same actuator they’ve made ~250 of them so far and need to build another one for every second stage they produce.
I don’t know the economics, but it sounds like a way to pass the cost of the bots onto the people paying to use the bots…
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IIRC, they needed this actuator for thrust vector control on the Falcon 1 upper-stage engine (Kestrel). Falcon 1 flew five times. They no longer use or make Kestrel. What the books are referring to is probably an electromechanical actuator. The Falcon 9 engines use hydraulic actuators.
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I am in awe that you have managed to talk yourself around to believing that this anecdote is actually Elon showing poor judgment.
If Twitter went to $0.01 per month fee it would be dead within two months.
i know the whole “bots” thing is just made up nonsense, but it still just doesn’t even hold the barest of sense.
subscription based video games are infested with bots paying double what a twitter blue sub is… if there is money to be made whether it be selling something like influence/advertising/video game currency/nfts/astroturfing, the bots will be there. i wouldn’t be surprised if the number of paid blue bot accounts isn’t already a sizeable chunk of his twitter blue money coming in.
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That Falcon 9 wasn’t innovative and that they are abandoning that program are both spicy takes.
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Calling literally the only reusable rockets capable of reaching orbit not innovative is hilarious. And where did you get the idea they are abandoning Falcon rockets. Not everyone wants or needs a SpaceShip size payload. SpaceX is not going to use StarShip to maintain starlink and starlink needs continuous launches indefinitely.
Perhaps you’re not familiar with “the algorithm”, particularly step 1:
Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from “the legal department” or “the safety department.” You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Then make the requirements less dumb.
Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn’t delete enough.
Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. You should avoid doing this for parts and processes that should not exist.
Accelerate. Every process can be sped up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. Again, you should avoid doing this for parts and processes that should not exist.
Automate. This comes last. Wait until all requirements have been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and bugs removed.
Between the two of you, you listed ZERO specific examples. Why do I feel like I’m doing all the work here? I’m sure there are many minor innovations, at least in the use of materials (like their heat tiles). I just don’t know what a lot of them are. If we go down a list of major design elements, somebody else did them all first afaict.
SpaceX intends Starship to become its primary launch vehicle, superseding the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles as well as the Dragon 2 spacecraft currently used as part of NASA’s commercial crew program to the International Space Station.
Planned Starship flights include the development of SpaceX’s Starlink internet constellation
I dunno what to tell you if you don’t think launching a rocket to space, and then flying it back to earth and landing it on a boat and reusing it 10 times isn’t innovative. We apparently live in different universes if that just doesn’t count, it’s cool. Trust me, I understand that it stinks that the company doing humanity’s most advanced rocket stuff is owned by Nazi Elmo. It is hard to be nuanced about this stuff when teams are involved. It isn’t fun being the Cleveland Browns fan here and celebrating rape-adjacent touchdowns, I get it.
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That’s very cool. I was very impressed the first time I saw that. I like that they used names of Culture starships. But it doesn’t count as new rocket technology.
I guess if you exclude all of the innovations, they haven’t innovated anything. But yeah, back to charging for Twitter.
BTW, the Ashley Vance biography can be found online. I’ve criticized Vance but it feels like a realistic portrayal. I’ve worked for someone like Musk, and reading this sure brings back (mostly negative) memories.
Rough review through eight chapters so far:
A group of enthusiastic people are working their asses off. Chaos ensues. Elon berates people for no reason. Some of them are fired or quit. Disaster and bankruptcy loom. Then… a miracle occurs. Rinse and repeat.
I feel like you’re digging yourself in a hole defending something that doesn’t need to be defended. The anodote is a small one, used by an author, to tell a story. That story was that the rocket and supply industry is a cartel and with a cartel comes bloated prices. The specific anodote is pretty sparce on the details and certainly isn’t true that the total overall cost of the part was merely 5k or whatever.
But make or buy decisions happen all the time and there’s certainly a lot of bloat in the industry so I feel like rocket manufacturing hadn’t been completely optimised for manufacturing effeciency so make or buy is a pretty live question.
It’s be a lot better if the scope of these things were more business oriented as opposed to biographic. I mean it’s a good story but we can’t really tell of it was a genius decision, a bone headed one, or a wash just by the story itself.
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Two authors told the same story. It’s supposed to exemplify Musk’s genius but imo it doesn’t. Of course we don’t know all the details and we can’t evaluate the path integral or whatever to know for sure but I’m just taking it at face value. You can dick around making your own parts once you have a little breathing room, not when you’re staring down bankruptcy if you don’t fly soon.
I have to admit it’s pretty boring compared to the latest Elon news so I’ll let it go.