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by sillysaurus3 3837 days ago
This hero worship is utterly stupid. It's also a disservice to children. We're teaching them that there are heroes, and then everyone else.

Bull. Work as hard as Elon did, and you'd make the same progress. It also required luck. No PayPal, no Elon. And there could only be one PayPal, at precisely that time in history.

A better question is, why did Carmack fail where Elon succeeded? Armadillo Aerospace was supposed to be SpaceX.
4 comments
sjburt 3837 days ago
Carmack invested about $2 million into Armadillo in its first 6 years. Elon invested $100 million in that time frame (actually, the first 4 years of SpaceX).

Armadillo did OK actually, they just were on a completely different trajectory. It was very much a hobby project for Carmack.

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derekp7 3837 days ago
Not only that, but wasn't Armadillo one of the "straight-up-to-100KM-and-return" (suborbital) designs? If so, then there is no money to be made in that (except for wealthy people that want a 20 minute thrill ride). It is the "lateral velocity of Mach 25" type of rocket that gets you satellite launch contracts.
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theodorton 3837 days ago
Tim Urban, who co-hosted the live coverage, has written four in-depth articles on Musk and SpaceX. In the last article he attempts to describe the reason behind his success. TL;DR: Thinks from first-principles instead of analogy, treats human brains like computers.

http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-se...

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ChuckMcM 3836 days ago
There is one school of thought that goes that SpaceX's mission to "Get people to Mars" requires so much more than simply putting things in orbit that people set their expectations that this is only the beginning. If you set your expectations that you just wanted to get to space and straight back down again, you don't invest in things which would be helpful to a Mars mission.

So while building a resuable booster for rockets might be the entire goal of some company, for SpaceX it was only the first step in a lot of bigger goals in order to make it feasible to go to Mars. And in so doing, and creating a capability that they can sell today to fund future development.

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ohitsdom 3837 days ago
Hero worship is stupid, but everyone is different. We all couldn't be Elon if we worked as hard as he does.
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