I think there is more "secret sauce" in Tesla than in SpaceX. SpaceX is doing great implementations of pretty conservative designs. In any case, both are "product" companies and benefit from patents less than "design" companies. Contrast SpaceX with Mojave Aerospace Ventures (the investment vehicle that owns the Spaceship One IP developed by Scaled Composites).
So far their designs have been fairly conservative, but they've made some pretty significant advances in manufacturing process and in materials as compared to their rivals, despite their designs being relatively similar. Heavy use of friction-stir welding would be an example of the former, and the PICA-X heat shield material would be an example of the latter, and details of the former (if you watch SpaceX factory tours on youtube, etc.) are considered trade secrets that aren't shown to the public, even though they're not patented.
> SpaceX is doing great implementations of pretty conservative designs.
Like the other reply mentioned, they are certainly working on some technologies that are starkly less conservative. One example is the Grasshopper [1], a reusable first stage that is capable of returning to the launchpad under controlled burn.
It's worth mentioning that their "less conservative" VTVL rocket is currently hitting about 10% of the DC-X's ~3100m record.
While the grasshopper is very cool, the concept of a VTVL rocket is not new. Hell, the Apollo Lunar Module technically landed and took off afterwards, as well!
In particular the rocket system that landed was discarded and a new rocket system took off, so I don't think it's even "technical". It's like calling a car that rolls off a ferry an "amphibious" vehicle.
Eh, if you could make a DUKW that, upon reaching land, could (or had to) shed its hull and become a proper vehicle of some sort, I'd still call it amphibious.
I remember reading the arguments for reusability etc 1990 on usenet's sci.space (and later sci.space.tech). Henry Spencer et al made good points.
You have to wonder how large a role is played by NASA not having a shuttle now -- and hence no motivation to use its political clout to stop competition?
Let us just hope delaying the real space age capabilities a few decades won't result in the death of humanity... (But if we go extinct because of a bureaucracy's need for job security, we arguably deserve what we get.)
It's long been argued by Jerry Pournelle and others that a fully reusable spacecraft could be built by being "starkly conservative" in materials and technology, but using modern construction techniques.
Everyone has criticized you based on how great SpaceX is. I'll go the other way.
Tesla at its heart is "put a ton of batteries which were developed by other companies into an electric motor that drives a car." People have been trying this formula for over a century. Tesla happened to do it when battery technology was just good enough to work, with really good styling.
Looking at the spectacular flop of the Fisker, packaging is far too often understated. Most people don't understand how complicated automotive systems are and how difficult it is to integrate them all together without numerous bugs and annoyances. Most big name automakers use off the shelf systems from third parties. Tesla did not.
Tesla won the highest score ever achieved from Consumer Reports while Fisker perished with a similar formula. That isn't simply luck.
Indeed. Their factory alone is a marvel, not to mention the Model S itself. Check it out on Megafactories, some great details on how they attain very high levels of quality for every vehicle that rolls out the door:
To say this is highly disingenuous, and disregards the massive amount of work into the energy management system researched by Tesla.
Put a ton of batteries into a car? Yeah, that's how they get 265 miles to a charge. Clearly all other EV cars just need a ton of batteries to solve the range issue.
In fact, Tesla's approach to battery packs is revolutionary - it goes completely against the status quo in the same way that Google's use of commodity hardware went against the status quo in the late 90s. Tesla packs use about 7000 commodity li-ion cells which are arranged in a pack with individual software-controlled charge management.
A user on the Tesla Motors forum pointed out that if Tesla actually implements their battery patents, the battery pack which was displayed in a National Geographic documentary (pixelated, of course) was in fact a fake.
Think about gasoline cars. People have been building those for ages, and it's not exactly difficult to make a car: you just put a frame, an internal combustion engine, and a steering system together, right? And yet it's still not that easy to make a well selling automobile.
The number of new automakers who enter the market over time and do very well is very small.
The thing about Tesla is not that they managed to make an electric car, the important thing is they managed to make one with all of the right tradeoffs and design choices to be a car that people actually wanted to buy. That's a big deal even for conventional automobiles.
Moreover, Tesla has done the most important thing possible with electric cars: they've made them no longer a joke. That will make a much bigger difference in the future decades regardless of whether Tesla continues to succeed or not. Now that electric cars are in many people's eyes a legitimate, and even perhaps enviable, vehicle to own people will start evaluating them on the merits and increasingly choosing to buy them. Which will lead to more and more successful electric car models and companies and a snowball effect in terms of the amount of cumulative profits from electric car sales which will get plowed back into R&D for electric car development. All of which is an absurdly huge win for electric vehicles.
Now, it's not as though Musk did something absurdly special with Tesla (heck, he didn't even found the company), but there's a strong argument he didn't do so with SpaceX either. The Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 are not technological marvels, they're simply, practical sensible designs well-executed. The same could be said of the Tesla vehicles. However, today it seems like simple practicality well-executed is hard to come by in most industries, and he deserves a lot of credit for putting his money and time on the line and staying the course.
Before the Model S, purchasing an electric car would mean that you are sacrificing performance, luxury, styling, and range for a clean, efficient, electric car. With the Model S, the only sacrifice you make is the range. Everything else is on par, or better, than other vehicles in it's class. People aren't only buying it because it's electric, they're buying it because it's a great car.
Of course, the range issue is only due to an already existing fuel-distribution network in place built over decades.
It could well be that Tesla's goal would be to disrupt that fuel-distribution network, first by selling great client devices (i.e., cars) and then implementing and selling access to the network that provides current petroleum cars with "near-infinite range"
It is obviously not just that. You just simply don't put together four wheels with motors and a battery pack and call it a car. Forgetting about everything inside (interior design, user interaction, fancy touchscreens, etc) and looking at it from a point of systems integration, it is really hard to design good suspension systems, optimize the aerodynamics and tune the dynamics of the system to have good handling on a broad set of road conditions. Tesla got it right and the big auto makers will eventually get it right too, but by no means is an easy task.
My understanding is that although kerosene burning rocket engines are nothing exotic or unfamiliar to the Chinese (or really anybody), the devil is in the details. For example, the details of the explosive forming of the regeneratively cooled Merlin 1D combustion chambers is allegedly pretty damn "secret sauce".
> SpaceX is doing great implementations of pretty conservative designs.
Mostly. So far. But very quickly SpaceX will start building things that have never been built before, and I would assume small teams are already working on the designs. Ships like human-rated Mars landers, colony buildings, fuel-creating reactors for Mars, etc.