[Sysreq2]

SpaceX and by extension Starship are critical for the entire western space industry. Last year SpaceX was responsible for something like 90% of the stuff sent up. Then China and then Russia. There is simply no one else in even in the market right now. SpaceX has lowered costs by an order of magnitude already and hopes Starship will drop it by another.

If you don’t like Elon Musk that’s fine. But his companies get stuff done. Blue Origin has been around longer, has gotten more from the government (Yeah, really) and been getting a billion a year from Bezos with nothing to show for it. It’s insane how much SpaceX has done while everyone else has been doing nothing.

[cryptoz]

I agree with all of that but it’s not like BO has nothing to show for it. They are likely to reach orbit soon with a new serious rocket. And I say this as a BO hater.

[bigiain]

> SpaceX and by extension Starship are critical for the entire western space industry.

That is both true, and monumentally depressing.

>If you don’t like Elon Musk that’s fine. But his companies get stuff done.

For extremely broad values of "stuff" <glances over it the dumpster fire Twitter has been reduced to, and the CyberTaxi launch, and and and>

Yeah, SpaceX has been mostly hitting it out of the park. Tesla kinda was for a while 5 or 10 years back, but way less so these days. I can't think of another example of an Elon company "getting stuff done" in a positive way. I'm more inclined to think SpaceX succeeds due to the huge amount of luck a billionaire benefactor can bring to a hard problem, and succeeds in spite of rather than because of any other influence from Elon.

[concordDance]

> I'm more inclined to think SpaceX succeeds due to the huge amount of luck a billionaire benefactor can bring to a hard problem, and succeeds in spite of rather than because of any other influence from Elon.

In my view its more because Musk's approach of first principles thinking works much better (compared to alternatives) in a highly conservative industry making complex physical things.

Twitter is a large part him failing to realize it is an ad company and thus he needs to make advertisers happy to spend money there, which means very active brand management and PR. He has had probably the most negative PR in history, in terms of volume of negative articles. That is an absolutely awful position from which to try and run an ad displaying business.