alt Hacker NewsDamage control at SpaceX https://www.theinformation.com/articles/elon-musks-no-2-at-s...
Damage control at Tesla https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-tesla-life-inside-giga...
Twitter finally distracting him away from his meddling https://www.yahoo.com/news/spacex-employees-relieved-elon-mu...
> Uhh... we tried that. it'd called NASA, and it's been behind the soviet union since the early 2000's.
Fascinating. You know what, actually, this part of the conversation is far more interesting to me. I concede that Musk is a super genius that definitely didn't do a Nazi salute on live television. I'd rather explore this with you.
So, you said it right there... NASA, which functioned as a government sponsored project manager distributing out contracts to businesses from a government budget... Failed to keep up with the Soviet Union space program, which was, well you know the answer! Fully nationalized.
I'm not surprised that American half measures at nationalization fail, just like I'm not surprised that the HSR failed through crony capitalism. There in the name. I'm arguing for something a little more dramatic than NASA. Something provably effective. Speaking of HSR, I'm reminded of another modern nationalized infrastructure project that is unparalleled in scale or success, somewhere in the East ;)
> Why do you feel the right to be able to take what someone else has built?
Musk's money has value only because of the society we all together create. It's silly to draw some lines around and say "actually the country's national space program should move to the whims of this one guy that signed investment paperwork and occasionally yells at people on a factory floor." A deeply unserious way of managing something critical to national sovereignty. The Soviets understood this which is why they got to space first. The Americans could only come close when they got a little commie about it; they surpassed the Soviets only when they centralized even more than the Soviets did, which is why Ayn Rand got upset enough to write about it: https://courses.aynrand.org/works/apollo-11/
I don't know if we are talking past eachother, or you are proving my points here? NASA would be nowhere without spaceX. In a centralized system, they never would have developed reusability, because economics are not a consideration. And when you try and produce an end good where economics are not part of the consideration, even with success, you achieve failure.
If SpaceX was nationalized, Starship development would of never happened. Catching the boosters with giant chopsticks, would have never happened. We would probably spend $100B to get to a human to mars and we'd say "Done". However, keeping a profit incentive ensure proper allocation of resources and goals with economic fucundity instead of dumping 60 years to build a death trap with no meaningful payload capacity to the moon. SpaceX has only 20 years, and has rapidly advanced past any agency or company on the planet. SpaceX has the capacity and access that Governments wish they could create, but inside a government system the incintives can never exist to create those in the first place.
edit: Those three links you provided... The last one, a "Calmer work enviroment" because His [Elons] demands have sometimes led to staff reworking the product again for its functionality."
Don't you think these articles kinda of disprove your original statement that he's not intimately involved in the design details? Yes, definitely Elon is not known to be subtle with his employees and he definitely yells alot I can tell you that from first hand experience. Shotwell is definitely the more level headed of the two, with a much higher EQ, so of course, when Elon comes in and fires the entire Starlink team, comes in and redesigns it from scratch, she picks up the pieces of those in his way. At Tesla, however, there is no equivelent to shotwell.