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by thelambentonion 3530 days ago
> The AMA, and even that specific question was all about the engineering challenges...

Re: that specific question, I may just have a different view of what constitutes a question on engineering challenges.

That AMA is of exceptional caliber, however, and there are definitely some gems to be found (see [0] and [1], in particular).

The fuel tank and rocket tech represent novel advances in rocket tech that are as-yet untested, afaik. A scaled-down test stand prototype and a prototype of a composite tank are certainly worthy of praise, but they still require an enormous amount of work to turn into a functioning product.

I'd also like to qualify some of my statements here: I don't think _any_ of these challenges are insurmountable. However I think that it would be impossible for all of them to be addressed on the time scale that Musk proposes, for the amount of money he has stated, with the manpower that SpaceX possesses.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/590wi9/i_am_elon_mu...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/590wi9/i_am_elon_mu...

1 comments

Which has been the case in all of Elons endeavours. They usually take twice the time at double the cost, and probably cost some marriages along the way. But he does get publicity and funds it out of his own pocket as far as he can.
A valid point. It's the case with most human endeavors that involve trying something new, I don't think it is unique to Elon's companies.