Tesla to raise $1B

You're missing the point. If indeed your second point is true:

> EVs are the future, and they're only going to continue to replace gas-powered cars.

Then the fact that the "electric car novelty will wear off" is a given. By definition, electric cars can't both be the norm and a novelty at the same time.

Except in most cases disruption doesn't work. The canonical examples from "The Innovator's Dilemma" all fall apart under scrutiny (as in the "disrupted" companies end up eating their disrupters for breakfast). GM is now doing a better job of executing in Tesla's space than Tesla, and that situation is not going to get better for Tesla.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-...

I had a colleague of mine (who works on rockets/spaceflight, has done so for decades) say the barge landing was impossible.

As far as your other demanding questions, no breakthroughs in physics have been necessary to make reusable launch possible. People have constantly made predictions that somehow physics precludes reuse, let alone fast turnaround reuse, from being possible. But that has never, ever been the case. Still people (who ought to know better) will continue making such ridiculous statements. And yes, SpaceX has disproven a lot of these myths.

Privately developed orbital rocket (i.e. not based on government missile parts, etc): Falcon 1, done. Privately developed capsule return from orbit: Dragon, done. Vertical landing recovery of a first stage for an orbital rocket: Falcon 9, done.

First landing on an autonomous ship: Falcon 9, again, done.

In less than a month, they'll also do their first orbital flight on a reused first stage.

Lesser-known accomplishments by SpaceX: Merlin 1D has a thrust to weight ratio of about 180-200 in its latest incarnation. That's dramatically better than the next-best, the NK-33 (at 137). And it's a big reason they've been successful at recovering so many stages without a prohibitive performance penalty. And it accomplished this by using deep propellant subcooling, which had never been done before except in some subscale tests.

Supersonic retropropulsion of the first stage is also something that had never been done before. It's a key enabling technology for Mars landings, and NASA was scared to baseline it for any of their Mars architectures and couldn't afford the tens of millions for a dedicated test. SpaceX gave them the data for free (in exchange for some in-kind services like data collection, but no money). Now every NASA human-scale Mars lander concept assumes the use of supersonic retropropulsion. This is a big change.

Crew around the Moon is not a PR stunt but a revenue source for SpaceX. Red Dragon is not a PR stunt but a key in SpaceX's (and the world's) ability to land large payloads on Mars and test the ISRU technology needed for sustainable crewed Mars missions.

Raptor, which has already had some test fires, is a truly scifi engine. It'll be the highest performance engine (in terms of chamber pressure, which is a key metric for thrust to weight ratio, and especially Isp for a given propellant combination, and also for thrust from a given engine size and thus for manufacturing efficiency) ever. A full-flow staged combustion engine, two-stage turbopump. It's insanely high performance and will get similarly high thrust-to-weight ratio as Merlin in spite of using a less dense propellant.

The ITS will dwarf all other launch vehicles in terms of raw size, raw thrust, raw payload, and especially its fully reusable upper stage/spacecraft combo.

And it's not even that SpaceX are the first ones to imagine these technologies (although some details are novel), it's that they're actually doing them. And that's a big difference. There are virtually no good ideas in aerospace that were not at least imagined by the end of the 1960s, but the vast, vast majority have languished. There have been several other abortive attempts to develop a low-cost private launch company, and (beside Orbital, which has a very different company mindset now) SpaceX is essentially the first successful one.

There will be others, but they were catalyzed by SpaceX. SpaceX's high churn rate has fertilized the whole American rocket industry. And this is very good. Even if SpaceX fails now, Blue Origin will succeed where SpaceX has prepared the ground. (Blue Origin essentially /cannot/ fail, since it's bankrolled by Jeff Bezos, who has more money than God.)

You say that, but in recent decades, Intel was more profitable than the typical PC manufacturer that bought chips from them. Hard technology can be a very lucrative competitive advantage.

This is total conjecture, of course, so take it for what it is.

I need to go back a ways on this one. I have been flying model aircraft for decades.

If you go back far enough it was impossible to even consider flying an electric powered airplane because alkaline batteries simply didn't have the energy density.

Sometime later came NiCd batteries and they eventually hit that sweet spot where you could stick a few of them in a plane, put a motor in the nose and fly for a few minutes. I had gliders with 27 NiCd cell packs what weighed in at somewhere around six or eight pounds all by themselves.

A few years went by (6 to 10, don't remember) and LiPo batteries surfaced. Now I could actually fly jets. And the glider with the super heavy 27 cell NiCd pack got a very light and small six cell LiPo pack, a far more efficient brushless motor and performance was out of this world.

Today electric powered model aircraft are probably the majority of the product sold and they include high powered helicopters and even the "impossible" quadcopters.

These transitions were mainly the result of energy storage technology, nothing else mattered until you could carry enough energy at a favorable weight ratio and in a favorable volume.

The companies that brought us these transitions, very much in the spirit of "The Innovator's Dilemma" [1], were not the same companies that provided the older energy storage technologies.

This is where I come full circle to Tesla and the Gigafactory.

Tesla has done a great job with this and it has positioned itself to benefit from scale in manufacturing battery packs with the existing best-in-class energy storage technology. They will, in this regard, do well.

Yet, this will become a significant liability if and when the next step change in energy storage technology comes about. Scale has it's benefits, but it can also kill you.

Again, this is conjecture. Imagine a day within the next 3 to 5 years when someone demonstrates a technology with three times the capacity, in half the volume, with half the weight and none of the longevity problems. We recently saw just such an announcement, although it seems the technology suffers from a power-to-weight issue at the moment.

Imagine someone else finally develops a supercapacitor system that makes current Lithium-based cells look as bad as they made NiCd cells look years ago.

Whoever does that will trigger the inflection point and a massive migration away from internal combustion engines to electric powerplants. Just like it did with model airplanes.

In the model airplane world, the pioneers of electric flight were absolutely skewered by the established (and some new) players in model airplane manufacturing. Most people today don't even know the names of the pioneers.

Tesla could suffer this fate. The Gigafactory could actually become a huge liability. Imagine having such an operation at a time when nobody has any interest in the technology you can produce.

I truly believe other manufacturers are waiting in the wings for this inflection point while they experiment and get ready. I have a gut feeling we are not too far from that moment in time when a significant enough technology shift occurs to make electric transportation viable for the masses.