Incredible achievement, but what is more incredible is how many people (including almost all of my friends circle) have started rooting for SpaceX to fail due to the shenanigans of its founder.

I think as a culture we've lost the ability to compartmentalize. We should be able to criticize and even despise the head of a company, and at the same time celebrate when the intelligence and hard work of the countless smart and hard-working people at that company push the boundaries of what is possible for humanity.

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GMoromisato 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I'm rooting for SpaceX to succeed, and there are plenty of people like me.

This is not to condemn or argue with anyone who feels differently. But I think we need to be more visible.

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saubeidl 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wernher von Braun had the incredible achievement of shooting the first rocket up to space - the V2.

Thanks to the intelligence and hard work of the countless smart and hard-working people he pushed the boundaries of what is possible for humanity.

Still, I find it hard to accept we should compartmentalize and not think about who those rockets were built for and with what purpose.

	▲	ls612 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		>Still, I find it hard to accept we should compartmentalize and not think about who those rockets were built for and with what purpose. Yet that is exactly what the US did and we got the Saturn V out of doing so.

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jaybrendansmith 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I am rooting for them all. I don't need to like the founder, or his politics. I understand that Gwynne Shotwell and so many others are behind much of the progress.

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bad_haircut72 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Socialize the adoration, privatize the benefits. Should peasants be proud of their kings palace?

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Aeolun 5 days ago | parent [-]

If the king managed to build their palace in the clouds? Yes. That’s a pretty awesome achievement. Not the kings’s achievement, but the achievement stands.

	▲	anthem2025 5 days ago \| parent [-]
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yoz-y 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I mostly hope that Blue Origin will be a worthy competitor.

For me what this shows that the most important thing for a CEO to be successful is to have money, a vison (no matter how unrealistic or unnecessary) and a cult personality. Nothing else matters. Also it shows that with enough virtual money (I.e.: massively overblown Tesla stock) you can do just about anything.

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0xffff2 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Fun trivia fact of the day: BO was founded 2 years _before_ SpaceX. 25 years later, SpaceX has revolutionized the launch industry. Meanwhile, BO has only just had their first (and only) orbital launch at the beginning of this year. It's unclear to me what, if anything BO could do to really catch up at this point.

It's clear that money isn't the defining factor at least. When BO was founded Bezos was the richest man in the world. It has floundered for so long that Musk was able to build up a cult of personality around SpaceX and parlay that into even more money than Bezos.

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terminalshort 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos had way more money back then. And when Elon Musk founded SpaceX few people had heard of him and he wasn't even a billionaire. Tesla didn't exist yet, so there was no "massively overblown stock." And where is the "unrealistic vision?" Looks like it turned out to be pretty realistic to me.

	▲	metabagel 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Musk has a self-destructive streak where his ambition exceeds his understanding. Examples are over-automation of Tesla Model 3 production, autonomous vehicles without Lidar, and the Cybertruck. Will Starship every carry a large enough payload to justify the launch cost? I'm skeptical. Musk's Mars fixation is nuts.

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Zigurd 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

They each have different failings. Elon is taking an absolutely bullshit approach to project management: if Starship can't meet payload specs, it can't refuel in orbit. Neither of those monumentally risky milestones are even close to being attempted.

Jeff loves measurement and control. So he replaced his experienced aerospace guy with the Alexa guy. Because the Alexa guy works the Amazon way: everything measured and tightly controlled.

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nerdjon 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is something I am finding myself wrestling with a lot right now.

On the one hand I am a major space nerd and I see the value of what SpaceX is doing. Especially with it really seeming like no one is anywhere near their level. What kind of scientific advancements will be possible once this thing can be used normally and launches like this become commonplace.

But at the same time it is impossible to ignore the Elon situation. And that also directly relates to Trump as well. We are in this bonkers situation where he helped get a largely anti-science administration in power and yet also runs one of the companies that will help science.

It does raise serious questions about whether or not there will be limitations on what types of science can be done. Will they have some line in the sand and say they won't launch satellites that do "X", like maybe monitor climate change.

I think maybe rooting for them to fail is a bit much, but I am sure as hell hoping that someone else can catch up. But in the mean time I will celebrate these achievements cautiously. Recognizing the amazing work that the engineers at SpaceX have put into this, because they do deserve a lot of credit for that.

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bilsbie 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

What if the guy who built the world’s best rocket from scratch, who popularized EVs and brought self-driving tech to the masses, who built brain computer interfaces, dug tunnels, started OpenAI and PayPal…

What if he’s not an idiot?

What if we should actually be listening to what this guy says and considering it?

What if he has the same ability to see what nobody else can see early on in politics…

As he’s shown across the rest of his career?

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dwaltrip 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

What if he isn’t an idiot and has accomplished very impressive things, but has started acting like an idiot due to severe personal issues?

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ActorNightly 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>What if he’s not an idiot?

Lets evaluate that claim, by first defining what an idiot is, and then looking at his history, all the things he said, and all the things he has done.

Ill skip you the trouble of going through that process - he is very much an idiot.

Don't confuse the ability to throw money at something and make it work through sheer cash burn with actual intelligence.

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terminalshort 5 days ago | parent [-]

You don't look for smart people by looking for people who don't do dumb things. Everybody does dumb things. You look for people who have done smart things. Idiots don't do smart things.

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ActorNightly 5 days ago | parent [-]

No, you evaluate someone's intelligence by comparing what they claim to reality.

For example: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F1...

This statement alone disqualifies him to talk about anything self driving.

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natch 4 days ago | parent [-]

I’ll just leave this here for others to look at since I assume you’ll find some excuse to dismiss it.

https://x.com/niccruzpatane/status/1960865882240115052?s=46&...

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ActorNightly 4 days ago | parent [-]

I won't dismiss it, because Im not a conservative and my arguments aren't ideological. ill just tell you why its wrong from a technical level.

>Extra sensors add cost to the system, and more importantly complexity. They make the software task harder, and increase the cost of all the data pipelines. They add risk and complexity to the supply chain and manufacturing.

Yeah if you treat them like inputs to neural network and train on them. But you don't actually have to. Its like nobody bothered to open a book and read about Kalman filtering.

Meanwhile, they literally have guys that are data labelers and marking what a cone is in images. Sure seems efficient.

> Vision is necessary to the task (which almost all agree on) and it should also be sufficient as well.

Of course, except nobody in the space actually knows how to do vision self driving correctly. Hint - humans drive well not because of vision, but because we map vision to a 3d representation of the world on which we can run simulations on and figure out optimal path. The reason why we don't care what the obstacle on the road is for us not to drive over it is because we intrinsically understand the space that that object takes up and compute that a physical collision will occur which is bad.

So are never going to make self driving work with forward only passes from images to trajectory planning, unless you have a massive model running on 4 5090s in the cars that has seen so much data that it has most all scenarios built in.

>Sensors change as parts change or become available and unavailable. They must be maintained and software adapted to these changes.

Lmao what a pathetic statement. If you change out a lidar sensor and actually have anything that resembles sensor fusion it will still be way better than without. All you have to maintain is the little itty bitty piece of code that takes that sensor data and maps it to 3d space - all your existing sensor fusing software will just treat it as another input and use its contribution to generate a more accurate picture.

Im starting to think that these guys really just have no fucking idea how to do anything except run Pytorch.

Meanwhile, Waymo that is using lidar+cameras, winning market share, and is safer and more reliable.

> Having a fleet gathering more data is more important than having more sensors.

In theory, this is true. In practice, if you were to actually try to do forward only self driving, you need a compete set of data that represents crashes, and the thing is, not enough people crash irl. It really bothers me how all these figures in the self driving space obviously know what overfitting is (or maybe they don't lol), but fail to recognize that they are doing just that.

>Having to process LIDAR and radar produces a lot of bloat in the code and data pipelines.

Same as point one, and a stupid one. Sensor fusion with statistical methods like Kalman filtering is nothing new. You integrate the sensors, and even if they are off by a bit, the kalman filtering will take care of any noise or bias. Its been proven so many times over in literature in control theory, but yet these assholes think they are smarter than everyone because they do ML. Lol.

>Andrej predicts other companies will also drop these sensors in time.

At this point, given how Tesla self driving is doing after having a headstart on everyone, Id probably say that you are pretty dumb if you think he knows the space.

>Mapping the world and keeping it up to date is much too expensive.

How is it expensive when you can literally do the same thing Tesla is doing and just gather data from activity. The amount of changes of actual roads is going to be incredibly small. The point of the map isn't to plan routes assuming the map corresponds to reality, its to increase the accuracy because that map "sensor" also goes into sensor fusion.

There is a reason Karpathy left Tesla btw. He wanted to get out because he saw that the current way of doing things were never gonna work. You can't do vision only self driving with forward only neural nets, this should be obvious to anyone in the space right now. If Tesla had even a slight chance of winning, he would have stayed.

Of course he is a very positive spirited person that is never going to shit on his ex boss, and cause stock price to drop, so he is gonna come in and do these interview with Putins puppet, talk tech, and peace out to do his thing.

No go ahead and flag this comment because all of this is probably above your head and I have no idea what Im talking about, OBVIOUSLY.

	▲	natch 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks for the actual reply! I was pleasantly surprised. You are really all in on Kalman filtering! I don’t doubt you, but I think we all should be cheering for Elon, since unlike legacy auto, he’s leading the charge to give less money to the likes of MBS. If his team can figure out FSD (maybe with your help!) that will be a very good thing.

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saubeidl 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What if his motivations and class interest are not aligned with ours?

Are you the richest man in the world? If not, could it be that what is good for the person in that position is not good for you or most other people?

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jibal 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What if it's idiotic to focus on his intelligence while ignoring the fact that he's an amoral sociopathic cryptofascist bigot whose main concern in life is becoming a trillionaire regardless of what that takes, now that he's realized that terraforming Mars is out of reach (his previous ambition)?

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anthem2025 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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jaysonelliot 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

"Dug tunnels" - one of the most ridiculous boondoggles of any modern industrialist. The Boring Company is a machine for overpromising to get government contracts and underdelivering at exponential scale. He didn't start PayPal, he joined it and ended up getting fired, albeit with a golden parachute that gave him the chance to make more bets.

The "accomplishments" you're listing are mostly just investments that he managed to hype up very well. I'll give him this, he's an excellent huckster. But listen to his opinions? I wouldn't let him tell me what color an orange was.

	▲	anthem2025 5 days ago \| parent [-]
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bilsbie 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I love the arrogance that anyone who disagrees with you is “anti-science”.

Please tell us which culture war topics he’s anti-science on.

	▲	aDyslecticCrow 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		- Denial of climate change. - Deletion of economic databases. - Deletion of public health information and historical weather databases. - Criticism of vaccine effectivness - Defunding of health and climate research funds. - Leaving the largest international research alliances in Climate and Health. - Defunding of NASA He called the administration anti-science, which is well grounded claim. But no part of the phrasing implies that "republicans" are anti science or that you are.
	▲	nerdjon 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Do you mean Trump or Elon? No where am I stating that Elon is anti-science, only that he helped get an anti-science administration in place. As far as Trump (and the administration in general) being anti-science. I really don't think I need to list examples of this.

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bethekidyouwant 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

“a satellite that monitors climate change” - really you think Elon Musk is not gonna fly satellites with instruments on them that point downwards?

	▲	nerdjon 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I am stating an example due to the current political discourse over climate change not that it would be something they specifically would not do. My point with stating it, is it is not unreasonable to ask the question if we are reliant on a company with someone like Elon owning it is what the company will and will not fly going to be dependent on politics.
	▲	anthem2025 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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BlackjackCF 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s honestly amazing what SpaceX has been able to accomplish despite Elon. I mean - look at what his interference has done to Tesla and Twitter. The execs at SpaceX seem like they know how to manage Elon so that their employees are actually able to deliver.

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Sparyjerry 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Shenanigans of its founder being falsely accused of doing a Nazi salute when he was just waiving and not agreeing with certain peoples politics. When someone tries to compare someone to the most evil person that has ever existed then odds are that person is lying through their teeth. On one had we have a 'wave,' literally, and on the other hand we have genocide. It's incredible to me how many people choose not to see through the lies about Elon Musk, even though they have the capability, and to this day think he is a nazi.

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anthem2025 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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yepyip 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[flagged]

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protoster 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[flagged]

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Sparyjerry 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Supporting DOGE is an extremely intelligent thing to do with the amount of debt our government has, 34 TRILLION last time I checked. Supporting a democratically electable party, and eventually the elected president of your choice is the right and moral thing to do by all objective measures, including if you believe in majority rule. Politics is always about disagreement and every generation thinks their disagreements are the most dire, but in reality live moves on. By siding with the literal winning party you are defacto 'moral' in the eyes of the majority.

	▲	jurking_hoff 5 days ago \| parent [-]
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leobg 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Did you ever make the effort to ask why he did those things? There’s a possibility that the person who aimed high for team humanity with SpaceX, Tesla and Neuralink was doing exactly the same thing in the examples you named.

	▲	metabagel 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=titl...

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ActorNightly 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[flagged]

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terminalshort 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

So he's generally an ass to work for, got behind a politician you don't like, and fired a bunch of bureaucrats that probably shouldn't have been fired? Is that it? GWB started a completely unnecessary war, so if that's your example of OK in comparison, then I struggle to understand your standards.

> Vertical landings using engines to slow is inneficient. Sure, you reduce system complexity in not having wings or parachutes, but you gain it all back with things like engine restarts, and the need for high pressure ratio engines.

Well, the most cost effective rocket ever built uses this, but please do elaborate. What system do you propose that would be better?

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ActorNightly 5 days ago | parent [-]

> Is that it?

I was thinkin more along the lines of unconstitutionally cutting things like USAID thats going to actively result in more unnecessary deaths, personal vendetta against LBGT organizations in cutting those budgets, cutting IRS funding which is going to end up costing more ironically as there isn't enough staffing to pursue all the people using tax avoidance

Not to mention in general supporting someone and donating campaign funds who literally tried to coup the government, contributing to him being elected, and thus being responsible for everything that Trump is doing, from fucking up the economy further to playing wanna be dictator with ICE, all of which have long term repercussions.

In comparison to GWB, Trump is going much worse (especially if you want to compare deficit spending), and Musk has a direct hand in that.

>Well, the most cost effective rocket ever built uses this, but please do elaborate.

Cost effectiveness has nothing to do with engineering. For example, I can start a car company, fund it with my other business venture, and then sell cars for $50 and it would be the most cost effective car.

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terminalshort 5 days ago | parent [-]

> cutting things like USAID thats going to actively result in more unnecessary deaths

That's bad IMO, but not helping people isn't remotely the same as starting a war that kills them (different if they were US citizens, but in this case they aren't).

> personal vendetta against LBGT organizations in cutting those budgets

I don't even have anything against these organizations, but I would cut their budgets to zero if I were in charge because funding them is none of the government's business.

> cutting IRS funding which is going to end up costing more ironically as there isn't enough staffing to pursue all the people using tax avoidance

This is dumb, but hardly a moral issue.

> In comparison to GWB, Trump is going much worse (especially if you want to compare deficit spending)

I 100% agree, but so was Biden, and I don't blame everyone who supported him either.

Fundamentally I don't blame Elon (or anyone else) for anything that Trump (or whoever they supported) has done that he didn't have a direct hand in e.g. DOGE. It's the nature of politics that you have to swallow a lot of things you don't like when you choose a side to support.

	▲	ActorNightly 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Look bro, we can spend arguing about details, but in reality, its pretty easy to put a nail in this: Trump tried to coup the government in 2020. And Elon supported this. This is not arguable. There is no fake media around this, you can read the lawsuit that resulted in the Supreme Court immunity ruling yourself. You would have to prove with exceptional evidence that whatever Biden did or Kamala would have done would have been much worse. Literally no other issue matters until you get over this bridge. Unless of course you are in support of a dictator and think his attempt to throw any legal process and the constitution out was justified, but at that point just say that instead of dancing around the issue. >It's the nature of politics No, at this point its solely in the moral/fabric of society territory.

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avmich 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Starship is such a fantastically dumb idea

I'm sure there could be better rocket configurations than Starship - but so far Starship is better than other existing schemas. Starship is really good comparing to others - getting the cheapest kilogram to orbit cost in perspective.

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ActorNightly 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

As I said in my other comments, just cause something is sold at a lower cost doesn't mean its optimal.

	▲	avmich 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> As I said in my other comments, just cause something is sold at a lower cost doesn't mean its optimal. No, Starship isn't optimal, it's just better than existing alternative by this specific criteria. If you need some other quality, you may rationally choose something else. The point was that the price of kilogram to orbit is an important criteria for many customers, so they logically choose Starship.

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metabagel 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That's assuming it can carry the payload envisioned, which seems iffy at this point.

	▲	avmich 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> That's assuming it can carry the payload envisioned, which seems iffy at this point. Envisioned payload? What do you mean?

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idontwantthis 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[flagged]

	▲	metabagel 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Spacex under Elon Musk is the precursor to Weyland-Yutani.

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maxehmookau 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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natch 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

That is a super bad take and we will probably both get flagged and rightly so (in fact I will even flag myself to get this off HN faster if it’s not deemed helpful) but your attempted slur deserves a response.

The parties opposed to child rape and unreasonable levels of immigration in Europe get called far right because they do scoop up a few far right supporters. But that’s unfair given the alternatives. HN really isn’t the place but let’s just say overall maybe it would be better if Europe doesn’t devolve further away from freedom and western values.

	▲	ActorNightly 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		>The parties opposed to child rape and unreasonable levels of immigration in Europe get called far right because they do scoop up a few far right supporters. Flagging your comment as well because AFD is definitely not a "few far right supporters". The issue isn't being against child rape and unreasonable levels of immigration. The issue is that the people who are against that are all liars and charlatans, just like in United States, where the party of moral righteousness and small government is full of child molesters and currently doing some pretty authoritarian shit. Just because a problem isn't getting addressed as fast as one hopes doesn't mean that one should completely jump ship to literally anyone who offers support for your cause.
	▲	5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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lstodd 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

At a cost of indiscriminately imprisoning and killing people (remember Korolyov and von Braun)? Surely. he-he.

If Musk does achieve a second foothold for the humanity, then any and all objections to his methods become irrelevant. So far he does deliver. So we wait for the final result.

Also, if you don't know, we've got a war in europe for like 3.5 years already. I'm seriously curious how many times a space-x total program cost since their start in 2000s has been already sunk into that.

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MOARDONGZPLZ 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Setting aside the founder or company itself, philosophically and ethically the “ends justify any means” concept is deeply flawed.

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natch 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I agree with your general statement, but in this particular case nobody has credibly articulated any real problem with the means.

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Zigurd 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Especially when the ends are even less likely to work then Marxism Leninism

	▲	lstodd 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		But the scientific method does work. So we observe the experiment kindly undertaken by Mr Musk. And then when some results happen we decide. Remember, development of the R-7 into the most reliable expendable booster took about 40 years and that with full backing of a Soviet Union.

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anthem2025 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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