231–240 of 303 posts
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Having played several hundred hours of KSP I can confirm you shouldn't underestimate momentum. It's amazing that it's even possible. I think the number I've heard is if the earth's gravity was something like 10% stronger this wouldn't be feasible.
Can you elaborate on this? Are you saying with a 10% higher gravity we wouldn't be able to escape Earth's field with any amount of thrust? What?
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Budget, as in expenditure per year no market value.
The budget is what the general voting public values NASA at for a given year, while the market cap of a firm is what the last sucker to buy a stock thinks it's valued at.
Value of NASA is quite a bit more than their yearly expenditure.
I mean, SpaceX is great and all, but it's no Cargill or even in the same league as Cargill or other similar companies like Koch (which is #2 in the US): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill Revenue: US$109.6 billion (2017)[1] Net income: US$2.835 billion (2017)[1] Total assets: US$55.8 billion 25% of all United States grain exports 22% of the US domestic meat market
Yeah I found the valuation mildly depressing for similar contexts.. considering the total value of spaceX is less than half of the proposed ~increase~ to annual US military expenditure this year. We could afford 2 fully-blown spaceX per year just by maintaining our present disproportionately large military rather than expanding it by roughly a Great Britain this year.
It's unbelievably depressing to me that we could be leading civilization into a multi planetary age but choose not to.
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I'm neither an Amazon nor Bezos fan, but that ethos is something I respect. Rocketry isn't something you rush. Frankly I'm surprised SpaceX hasn't had more mishaps given the breakneck speed at which they operate.
The vast majority of SpaceX's current success is attributable to government funded research and experiments (the entire space program for the last several decades) and government funding (currently) that Musk is taking advantage of. They don't have more mishaps because the innovations they're undertaking are small relative to the existing body of research and experiment, and built on a solid foundation that already e…
SpaceX is currently launching space shuttle sized payloads for a price that is over 40 times less than the shuttle, and less than half the cost of other private competitors, and at a cadence none of them have ever achieved.
Re-use is the key launch technology of the future and its greatest and only commercial application has been done by SpaceX.
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Because you don't make the choices he made if you love money. You absolutely do not start a rocket company. "If you want to make a small fortune in the rocket business, start with a large fortune." That being said, maybe we're looking at things differently. I'm sure he prefers having money than not having it, but the macro scale choices he's made imply he values other things more than his personal fortune.
The popular opinion is that if you start a rocket company you will fail but if Musk thought that he would fail, he wouldn't have started SpaceX. He thought he could succeed in rockets = he thought he could make money off rockets. Musk is a businessman just like all the others, he just has a public persona/PR team which appeals to "nerds."
>>Scott Pelley: How did you figure you were going to start a car company and be successful at it?
>Elon Musk: Well, I didn't really think Tesla would be successful. I thought we would most likely fail. But I thought that we at least could address the false perception that people have that an electric car had to be ugly and slow and boring like a golf cart.
>>Scott Pelley: But you say you didn't expect the company to be successful? Then why try?
>Elon Musk: If something's important enough you should try. Even if for you — the probable outcome is failure.
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Not really. In the 60s we basically verified that certain rocket and engine designs work and that we could go beyond earth orbit. Creating a reliable, long lasting and reusable space rocket/vehicle is, in my opinion, orders of magnitude more difficult. Just look at the Space Shuttle failure as an example of trying to do space on the cheap. Also, remember it took about 5% of the US GDP in the 60s to put men on the moo…
A reliable, long use rocket is not exactly new either. Delta II first launched in 1989, 153 launches, 151 successes. There will be another launching this fall for JPSS-1.
Space-X is, at long last, getting their launch rate up. 9 Falcon-9 launches so far this year. For a while, they had commercial customers canceling because they were way behind on their launch schedule. It's quantity of successful launches that makes money in that business. Not much is happening at the Brownsville TX site, where Space-X still hasn't done much more than pile up dirt and wait for it to settle. They're b…
They don't need Brownsville, they need both the Florida pads up and running. Brownsville will add even more, but the Florida pads are more important.
> Mr. Musk faces competition from another billionaire. Blue Origin, a rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, aims to send tourists and supplies into space. Is that line even close to true? Last I heard Blue Origin was years away from revenue and far behind SpaceX in terms of capability and manufacturing.
They are the only direct competitor on technology development. In 10 years, BO aims to be flying reusable rockets larger than the Falcon 9. You can't say that about and other company (except for SpaceX). They are more directly a competitor for talent. Rocket engineering is a small world.
> Mr. Musk faces competition from another billionaire. Blue Origin, a rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, aims to send tourists and supplies into space. Is that line even close to true? Last I heard Blue Origin was years away from revenue and far behind SpaceX in terms of capability and manufacturing.
Think of Musk as Howard Hughes+, think of Bezos as John Carmack+.
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The popular opinion is that if you start a rocket company you will fail but if Musk thought that he would fail, he wouldn't have started SpaceX. He thought he could succeed in rockets = he thought he could make money off rockets. Musk is a businessman just like all the others, he just has a public persona/PR team which appeals to "nerds."
From a Musk interview with Pelley a while back on SpaceX/Tesla: >>Scott Pelley: How did you figure you were going to start a car company and be successful at it? >Elon Musk: Well, I didn't really think Tesla would be successful. I thought we would most likely fail. But I thought that we at least could address the false perception that people have that an electric car had to be ugly and slow and boring like a golf car…