this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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People really under estimate how important he is to SpaceX.
Reusing f9 1st stage - His initiative
Landing f9 on a barge - His initiative.
Making Starship Stainless Steel - His initiative
Catching Starship booster on chopsticks - His initiative.
The list goes on and on.
Without someone like him pushing for these radical things that everyone else thinks is impossible or a bad idea we wouldn't recognize what SpaceX would be.
Instead we have things like starliner which is a disaster, and blue origin which started before SpaceX and has never reached orbit.
SpaceX would slowly transform back into 'old space' if he was forced out as there are very few people willing to take the risks he takes.
Edit: and it's even very possible that the wrong CEO takes SpaceX public too soon which would make all the risk taking and fail fast development cycle they use impossible. Think of the stock crashing when a test flight fails and the pressure from investors around that.
Are those examples actually his initiative, or him championing someone else's idea?
Reusing f9, landing F9 on barge, and Stainless steel were his initiatives. The SS one was a particularly hard win for him with a lot of internal push back.
Catching Starship on the chopsticks might have been an idea he heard outside of SpaceX, but that he then championed, again to a lot of internal push back, I'm not 100% about it being an external to spacex idea though.
Edit clarity and below
Those are just examples though. And I'm sure there are times as you suggest that people suggest a difficult idea that he then champions as well.
That he can champion these radical things, his idea or not, is still the key point of his leadership that will be lost.
For example, someone must have suggested they use a full-flow staged combustion fuel cycle for raptor. He had to sign off on that. No one had ever designed and flown a engine like this before. The russians came closest making one, but never flew it. The predecessor to this engine in the 60s or whenever, NASA didn't even think it was physically possible to make until the Russians made it.
The main point is, you need a crazy person to have crazy ideas. Even if 95% of his ideas are shot down, the last 5% are still crazy shit nobody else would thought was possible and never bother to seriously pay some engineers to try it if he wasn't in a leadership position.
Without him, there will be much less crazy, but both the good and bad kind. I fear the day SpaceX just becomes another Boeing.
Seriously, just landing rockets was laughed off as a stupid waste of time by all the industry incumbents just 6 years ago. That was a crazy stupid Elon Musk idea even dumber than the cybertruck at the time, and look where we are now.
Elon founding spacex in the first place had people laughing at him and the thought of him destroying all his wealth.
I don't think his personal accomplishments really matter in the face of his support for the far right, crushing hatred of trans people, calling people pedophiles and the absurd amount of misinformation and bigotry that he promotes on xitter.
If SpaceX needs an absolute piece of shit like him in order to succeed, then there shouldn't be a SpaceX.
Yeah but all of that was before he stopped taking his meds.