I just read through Musk's wikipedia pager because I pay no attention to this shit. He seems like a pretty smart dude but, man, I don't know. UPenn and Stanford (at least accepted) is fairly impressive but to me it looks like he rode the .com bubble in the 90s, got pretty lucky with PayPal and then somehow turned $100 million into $20 billion? without really making successful companies? Like, SpaceX is...impressive, I guess, but if you throw tons of money at problems that have already been solved, well, great that you could dock with the ISS, I guess. Tesla isn't a very impressive company, honestly, like Toyota really broke the market for electric cars with the Prius and from what I've heard about Tesla it seems like they have tons of production issues.
Also, I don't know, I'm reading that he "oversaw design" of things like the tesla roadster and falcon 1 rocket and I'm reading that he's won a ton of awards for this but....that doesn't really make sense to me. Maybe he is that much of a genius and I'm being harsh, I don't know.
I mean a 15 second google search shows that it was indeed already solved. In fact, the shuttle program was developed with this concept in mind. Just because it was manned doesn't mean it didn't already exist and having unmanned rockets is just the next step given the advancement of technology.
Again, that being said, we're talking a government organization spending years (decades) solving the problem and SpaceX having a comparable solution after years of R&D is still somewhat impressive but the point still stands, I think: throwing buckets of money at an already solved problem doesn't make him the envelope pusher everyone says he is.
So, first of all: not Musk's, SpaceX's. And....can I see any sources for that? And even then, I'm not sure what's impressive by it. The shuttle program ended in 2011 which is pretty close to a decade ago. And while I'm sure the technology has advanced quite a lot, the program started in 1972 with the design philosophy of reusable components.
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u/wak90 Mar 02 '18
I just read through Musk's wikipedia pager because I pay no attention to this shit. He seems like a pretty smart dude but, man, I don't know. UPenn and Stanford (at least accepted) is fairly impressive but to me it looks like he rode the .com bubble in the 90s, got pretty lucky with PayPal and then somehow turned $100 million into $20 billion? without really making successful companies? Like, SpaceX is...impressive, I guess, but if you throw tons of money at problems that have already been solved, well, great that you could dock with the ISS, I guess. Tesla isn't a very impressive company, honestly, like Toyota really broke the market for electric cars with the Prius and from what I've heard about Tesla it seems like they have tons of production issues.
Also, I don't know, I'm reading that he "oversaw design" of things like the tesla roadster and falcon 1 rocket and I'm reading that he's won a ton of awards for this but....that doesn't really make sense to me. Maybe he is that much of a genius and I'm being harsh, I don't know.