Hmm, who do I trust, the guy who figured out how to land rockets onto a barge, or some “analyst” desk jockey who has been consistently wrong his entire career? Tough question. I think I’ll go with the rocket guy. He has a pretty good track record.
> Hmm, who do I trust, the guy who figured out how to land rockets onto a barge, or some “analyst” ...
This kind of comment is a disservice to all the engineers who actually figured it out. Elon Musk is certainly a visionary and a financier, but is not a 1000x engineer/mathematician who did all the work himself
The reality is that Elon is and was the Chief Engineer for the Falcon rocket family. He had the vision, the finance and he lead the engineering effort extremely directly and successfully. He overruled his top guys on multiple decisions and usually he turned out to be right.
Go listen to Tom Mueller on the design choices made for the Merlin example.
But of course nobody does everything himself, but for some reason I read this sort of comment made about Musk in every single thread but not with most other people.
While it is a good idea to spread to credit for SpaceX's acheivements around, Musk himself has done more engineering of products at SpaceX and Tesla than any of his peers. His title as CEO of both companies is somewhat misleading as he has very little involvement in business operations of either company and spends most of his time engineering.
Not a comparison I would choose. He has a pretty good track record of producing a few dozen rockets a year. You could be generous and say a few hundred rocket engines a year. A comedian might say he has the same track record with cars - ba dum - tish!
Tesla's inability to quickly ramp up Model 3 production is pretty much one of those "fact" things at this point. The same goes for every model they've brought out, it's taken a long time to get decent production rates on any of them. So this isn't so much predicting problems he's going to have, but explaining the causes of all the problems they've already had and are having right now.
But that's the great trick he pulled....convincing everyone that not reaching 500,000 cars per year in 2 years is "failure"-- that Tesla is exhibiting an "inability."
But it is a failure. If you make predictions as a public company and then you can't live up to them you have a problem. That's not to say Musk has done some spectacular stuff but he's definitely not on target. Let's hope it all gets fixed before time runs out.
Investors are entitled to believe goals are achievable. If the goals are not achievable, they have to be corrected as quickly as possible or else legal consequences may stem. If you made an investment even with all the flowery legal contract language, how would you feel if the CEO said "it was always a moonshot" having previously said "it's achievable"
But SpaceX builds very complex machines at a low rate, whereas Tesla tries to build less complex machines at a very high rate. I'm not sure if knowledge is transferable.
This is an interesting juxtaposition, but I’m not (really) sure it’s true. Is a rocket, even one with an advanced control system such as those designed by SpaceX, really ‘simpler’ than an electric vehicle? We certainly think in those terms, because rockets are exotic to our experience whereas cars are experientially mundane for most of us, but I don’t think the facts of the matter are that clear cut.
They're certainly more complex as a result of higher quality demands. A car can be tested under real-world conditions and fixed if it shows any manufacturing defects. Any mistakes with a rocket are very expensive.
Testing is also very different. For a car, you can build a batch and test it extensively under all conditions, fixing errors as they come up. If you develop an assistance system, you can test this extensively before releasing it. Rockets are so expensive that SpaceX had only a few trials for their landing system. You need to make sure that both hardware and software work perfectly without ever testing them in production.
It's worth noting that one big advantage SpaceX has over other rocket makers is that SpaceX gets to inspect landed first stages. That makes their rocket development closer to airplane development than everyone else's rocket development, and no, it doesn't have to be perfect before it is tested. It just has to be good enough to land.
There was a point in the early 2000s (and I don't know how long it persisted for) when ESA had a very hard time hiring rocket scientists because they were all being slurped up by car manufacturers to work on drive-by-wire systems.
And how does that compare to the development of early combustion or electric engines?
I'm not so sure about electric cars, but I would judge a rocket to be less complex than an ICE car. Rockets just have much more spectacular failure modes and are more expensive due to size.
They guy who figured out how to land a rocket on a barge is a spacex employee who is an expert in control theory, who was probably hired by another employee of Elon Musk. So I’m not really sure what you comparison means.
Who do I trust? A person I can identify by name and track a person down who has written an article. Or an anonymous account on HN named 'throwaway*'. Yea...you see?
I digged out a report from Bernstein (the same company that delivered the one reported in the article) from 2011:
"They have concluded that improvements to conventional engines will be key over the next 10 to 15 years and HEVs will become viable on a large scale by 2020. They believe near-term mass market adoption of electric vehicles is unlikely given the tough financial comparison with ever improving combustion engine vehicles. While premium-priced plug-ins may become viable earlier, by definition they will be niche products."
Who do I trust, the guy who was told “It is impossible to reuse rockets” by all NASA engineers and built a company around it, or the analyst described as follow:
> Warburton, who spent his career before Wall Street at the International Motor Vehicle Program — a partly academic, partly commercial organization based at MIT — wrote that "automation in final assembly doesn't work."
It doesn’t even matter since it’s not public money. Which makes me wonder about the analyst’s intent: Tell people not to invest? Do people not know Tesla is super-risky? but if they succeed to obliterate this anchored rule that automation doesn’t work in the final assembly, isn’t that a superwin that stakeholders dream of?
Friends who invested in Tesla didn’t “invest” so much as “donated” money for what they think is a good cause. And perhaps because it’s fun to hear the NASA chief say “I had asked my engineers and they told me it wasn’t possible”.
Does he really have a good track record? If I recall correctly the Falcon 9 has a terrible success rate for a modern rocket. Something like 94 percent.
I don’t really think there is any way in which the adjective “terrible” would be an appropriate use of the word here. Also note the low numbers involved here, the different contexts and the plain arbitrariness of such comparisons. One failure more or less can make a world of difference here, despite maybe not being the most reliable indicator.
94% is about the long term ballpark figure for successful orbital launches but it is true that some newer rocket families may have ever so slightly higher reliabilities.
Atlas, Ariane and proton have fifty+ years of investment tail behind them and a fifth generation in atlas is probably more than musk has had in spacex in generation terms no?
Given the rate at which SpaceX has been improving their line-up you can't really do a 1:1 comparison between platforms that are essentially static and what SpaceX has been up to.
And over time their failure rate has been dropping steadily, since 1/1/2017 they've launched about half of all F9s and all have worked perfectly. It's gotten to the point where the press will crow 'failure' if they don't manage to land the first stage on the barge, which is apples-to-oranges with the rest of the industry, who are - rightly - getting seriously worried.
Neither did Ariane 5, Atlas V, Delta IV or Soyuz-FG. Of course SpaceX profits from the state of the art, but not developing the Xth iteration over a proven and battle-tested design with decades of flight-data is a disadvantage for SpaceX.
