It’s interesting the cognitive dissonance this brings out in me. As much as I think Musk carries a fairly reprehensible aura, I would still like to see SpaceX succeed. Space has a funny, transcendent way of inspiring us.
Agreed. Separating those thoughts are valuable here and in life in general.
But like a lot of tech, the cool shit can have serious negative effects as well and it's important to be able to, again, acknowledge both appropriately.
The success of SpaceX has made him the richest man on the planet, and his money makes him dangerous.
He's only dangerous if you operate a legal system that allows people to be dangerous. Elon Musk has never been the problem. As long as he's not breaking the law it's all good.
The last 18 months have proven that the rule of law doesn’t apply to those who are rich enough to ~bribe~ lobby anyone who would enforce the laws.
(A donation to the presidential library, a new RV for the judge, a PAC that runs campaigns for the senator and rep - and Bob’s your uncle. Might cost 0.001% of your assets if you are a trillionaire. Cheap at ten times the price.)
It's always a trip to see the people who practically fetishize the law -- the archaic language, the written form, the pressed uniforms -- turn around and not only develop a self-serving selective blindness to their own team's violations of the law, which is the kind of nonsense you expect in politics, but also employ "stop punching yourself" logic to blame the law itself for those same violations. Absolute madness.
Billions of AI capex for a model that’s consistently forgettable and space computers, presumably data centers in space, are funding SpaceX?
Isn’t the opposite?
SpaceX has an extremely profitable launch program and a profitable Starlink. It’s a straightforward would be better off financially without X and X.ai.
instead of having an enterprise AI strategy, they've become a landlord, renting capacity directly to competitors on a month to month basis, competitors who are building their own compute and can cancel this rental contract at any time.
so they'll use that to try to print rosy revenue numbers, except the size of the contract is until 2029 and the month to month payments can be cancelled at any time.
and they only have capacity to rent out because they don't have an enterprise AI strategy, they overspent on GPUs for an audience that never showed up for Grok, it has abysmal usage and its radioactive because it creates CSAM and is based af. It's just outdated Nvidia hardware that they are trying to recoup just a little bit of value from.
and if you believe in space datacenters, I've got a bridge in brooklyn to sell you! actually space datacenters are the 21st century bridge in brooklyn, whoever is selling you about it thinks you are stupid. Elon Musk just wanted the trillionaire print by all accepted metrics, and got that, so he said anything and disclosed it properly, and 4.9% of the shareholders bought that plan because they were greedy hoping for a pop. The pop came. now they're underwater.
Elon Musk doesn't believe the total addressable market of SpaceX's other business lines are that valuable in comparison. 25 trillion TAM for enterprise AI applications, 3 for everything else. ruh roh
You should look at the S1 they filed with the SEC. All of their space related stuff including starlink shows a total possible market of 2 trillion, whereas they show AI as over 26 trillion. Basically almost all of their value is AI, not space related activities.
You don't need to virtue signal your dislike of Musk-the-person to be allowed to show your admiration for the exploits of SpaceX. I don't care what you think about Musk and I'm pretty sure I'm far from the only one. Yes, SpaceX is doing great, hopefully other companies will follow their clear lead and make space access more reliable and 'affordable' so that those great wheels-in-the-sky may one day become reality.
Actual, literal Nazis got us to the Moon and frankly no one cared. Not then, not now. Try separating politics from the advancement of humanity, you'll feel better.
"Do you know that your closest colleagues (including von Braun) have stated in company at Zinnowitz that it had never been their intention to make a weapon of war out of he rocket? That they had worked, under pressure from yourself (Dornberger) at the whole business of development and only in order to obtain money for their experiments and the confirmation of their theories? That their object all along has been space travel?"
The men had been arrested by the Gestapo and were going to be executed. Dornberger was also threatened with arrest, but he managed to get von Braun and the other released.
Another interesting factoid about the V2 program is it accelerated the collapse of the Reich.
How can that be, you might ask?
The V2 program was an incredibly expensive program, and sucked up enormous resources. But the V2 proved to be an inconsequential weapon, and did very little damage, because its guidance system was primitive.
The V1, ironically, was effective. Not because it wreaked critical damage on Britain, but because it was cheap to build and deploy, and the British spent a great deal of resources trying to stop it.
It reminds me of the current drone warfare.
Hitler also demanded that it be used to attack London, blowing up civilian homes, when it would have been much more effective attacking the staging areas for D-Day.
You've mentioned Dornberger's book to me in a previous conversation regarding Von Braun, and though I haven't yet had a chance to read it I just did some research on it.
From what I can tell it looks like like an amazing source for technical details of the V2 rocket but there are many problems with it that make it unsuitable for the kind of argument that you're attempting to make here.
First of all, the book wasn't written by Dornberger -- it was ghostwritten by a Nazi propagandist and aerospace enthusiast named Franz Ludwig Neher[0]. Neher is an interesting fellow, having been imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp for 18 months in the early 1930s and later enjoyed a career writing numerous Nazi propaganda biographies for 'Unsere Jagdflieger', a pulp booklet series issued on Hermann Göring's authority.
Looking at Neher's biography page on the German wikipedia we see that from 1951-1962 Neher was the press officer for the 'Gesellschaft für Weltraumforschung' or 'the German spaceflight society' in English, and even served for a time on its board. In 1952 Von Braun commissioned Neher to work on a Mars-project novel named 'Menschen zwischen den Planeten' which was published in 1953 apparently with poor reception by the public. Some reprints have a pretty cool looking cover though.[1]
I don't have time right now to dissect the actual claims made in V2 by Dornberger/Neher regarding von Braun but it's safe to say from everything I found that this is a very unreliable source for the argument that you're making as the man writing Dornberger's memoir was simultaneously the paid publicist of the German spaceflight lobby and von Braun's hired novelist.
Even in a first year history course essay assignment there's absolutely no way that this book would be considered an acceptable source to reference for non-technical details. Any instructor who was knowledgeable about the subject or who actually researched the sources would underline that passage in the essay with fat red lines and would scrawl the same kind of criticisms that I just made above in the margins in red pen. If your argument was the central thesis of the paper and this source was the evidentiary corner stone of that thesis you'd at best receive a C, but more likely a D grade.
In reciting this Werhner Von Braun apologia you have fallen for Nazi propaganda. Don't feel bad about it though -- we've all bought the big lie at one point or another. It's hard not to -- as the Nazis were pretty much the Wayne Gretzky of propaganda.
I'd like make this a teachable moment by introducing you to the concept of historiography[2] and one particularly important (and coincidentally German) author in the field: Leopold von Ranke.[3] It isn't always easy but proper analysis of sources is critical for making accurate claims and analysis of historical events.
No, the arrest most certainly happened, it's corroborated from enough sources that this isn't in question, though from what I can tell the arrest report no longer exist, but there are contemporaneous notes made by Alfred Jodl. Additionally from a cursory search there are conflicting reasons given for the arrest including what you've mentioned and even communist accusations.
When I said "Nazi" earlier I should have been more precise, I was referring to von Braun, Dornberger, and his ghostwriter as "Nazis" even though AFAICT von Braun was the only actual card carrying Nazi of the bunch.
With that said, the problems with this source remains. The ghostwriter has a financial conflict of interest with the subject which would bias him to make as flattering of a portrayal of the subject, and the people involved are all intrinsically untrustworthy because well... look at the bunch... a Nazi propagandist, a Major General from the Wehrmacht, and an actual Nazi.
Look at the circumstances around this, you have the Nuremberg trials having only recently taken place which saw a bunch of dudes these guys personally knew publically shamed and hanged, These guys themselves were directly targeting civilians with these weapons, It's the middle of the McCarthy Era -- There's no way these guys could tell anything remotely close to an objective truth.
Everything they're going to say in this context is to save their skin. They're gonna write "Oh yeah, arrested by those evil Nazis for being too peaceful and science-minded" not something more realistic like "von Braun made a deal with the devil that was an absolutely psychotic and dysfunctional authoritarian regime and the deal almost blew up but that von Braun is so damn lucky he must have a horseshoe up his ass."
An adjacent topic that I've wondered about for years is his come to Jesus stuff after the war. It's plausible that he had a serious reckoning with his world view from his experiences during the war but it also seems just a little bit too convenient, you know?
Yes, von Braun was a card-carrying Nazi. But something to consider. Professors could not get their research papers published unless they were card-carrying Nazis. Von Braun could not have headed up the rocket program unless he was a card-carrying Nazi. Did he make a deal with the devil? Yes.
He was also arrested by the Gestapo and threatened with execution if he was not more diligent in his efforts to develop the V2 missile.
I don't think it is implausible that he was less than enthusiastic about nazism. And once he was in the rocket program, there was no way out for him.
I do wonder whether much of USAID and similar programs are an instance of a road to hell paved with good intentions. If professional NGOs hollow out existing local organizations and destroy local ability to organize on the cheap, they may be basically condemning entire countries to perpetual dependence on someone's else's politics and budgets.
You're implying that von Braun was still a nazi when he was working in the US (he wasn't) and you imply that Elon Musk is a nazi in the first place when he's done nothing to indicate that.
Well, the Nazi party was banned permanently by the Allied powers on Oct 10, 1945, so technically every member still alive became an ex-Nazi at that point. Including the leaders later hanged in Nuremberg, and, of course, Wernher von Braun.
Of course some people say that once a Nazi, always a Nazi.
I fucking _loathe_ Trump. I still hope he makes America better. But god I fucking hate him. I think his policies are garbage, but I'd love to be proven wrong. All I see is bribery and nepotism... but yknow, he (finally) nominated Jared Isaacman. I'll fucking take it.
Musk is anathema. But yknow, I'm glad he's started the companies he has.
Starship is the SpaceX Cybertruck - lots of impressive engineering, but still doomed by terrible design choices from you-know-who. Stainless steel is just such a terrible choice for a rocket this large. Doomed the whole enterprise.
I know launches are exciting. Landings, doubly so. But eight launches to get to the moon is not a good rocket. Sorry.
Aluminum alloy and carbon fiber, because both have high strength to weight ratios. Steel is denser, so its specific strength isn't as high. But it retains strength at both lower & higher temperatures, and it's much cheaper. It's also cheaper/quicker to modify a steel design, as welding is easier than aluminum (at least for low carbon steels used in Starship). And if the same structure were made of carbon fiber, it would likely have to be fabricated from scratch.
I think choosing steel has helped Starship, as it allowed the ship to survive reentry and land in the ocean despite heat shield failures. Had the ship been made of aluminum, I'm certain earlier missions would have broken up when the aluminum heated up and lost its strength.
Does this mean you think Starship HLS will fail? It will use a steel structure and is planned to be part of future Artemis missions.
Also are you willing to stake money on that claim? How about this: If before July 25th, 2036, any version of Starship made primarily of steel (HLS, future Mars versions, etc) has an apogee above 2,000km, you pay me $1,000. If not, I pay you $1,000. If you like, we can bet some other amount up to $10k. And if you prefer, the loser could donate the amount to a non-profit/charity of the winner's choosing.