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by iamcurious 1531 days ago
Only by reading the plan, he reminds me of an early Elon Musk. It has the first Paypal then Space X vibe. I wonder how many other people have similar dreams, but can't deliver cause their parents aren't rich.

Edit: added middle sentence
1 comments
ceejayoz 1531 days ago
Just because "reusable rockets" got laughed at by the existing space industry doesn't mean every laughable idea is secretly feasible.

"My new database will make building a Dyson sphere easy" is a slightly... loftier claim than "we can probably land rockets and reuse them".

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iamcurious 1531 days ago
I see what you mean, but I wasn't referring to Space X accomplishments but its ambitions.

The "we can probably land rockets and reuse them" is what it delivered so far, the claimed ambitions (laughable or not) are about making humanity interplanetary.

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ceejayoz 1531 days ago
The number of steps between "I wrote a quirky database" and "I built a Dyson sphere" are substantially more numerous than there are between "I got reusable rocketry working cost-effectively" and "I used those rockets to put people on Mars".
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lostmsu 1529 days ago
While I agree with you on the guesstimate, surely you can't exactly know the number of steps in question.
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ncmncm 1531 days ago
Ambitions are free. Capability is expensive. Achievements are valuable. Ambitions do not predict achievement.
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macspoofing 1531 days ago
>just because "reusable rockets" got laughed at by the existing space industry …

Were they laughed at? After all, the Space Shuttle was around for decades. It turned out that reusable rockets were not cost effective nor particularly safe. Space X has yet to show reusability is viable.

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ceejayoz 1531 days ago
> Space X has yet to show reusability is viable.

This is a bizarre assertion. It's clearly viable; no other American launcher can currently carry crew, they gobbled up 60% of the global commercial launch market by 2017, and they're undercutting everyone on price very successfully.

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grandrew 1531 days ago
I'd say what this all proves is that a free market and private sector is much better at those things than a communist'y government-run project.
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