[Update a few minutes later]
On reading through it, this jumped out at me: “The brain strain of designing the car is tiny compared to the brain strain of designing the factory.”
What is more important about Starship is not the design of the vehicle, but the fact that he’s building a shipyard.
What is more important about Starship is not the design of the vehicle, but the fact that he’s building a shipyard.
Yes. Along those lines, Elon has talked about the complexity of the orbital launch mount vs the Starship/Super-Heavy rocket in the past.
He will no doubt end up building two shipyards. One at Boca Chica the other at Cape Canaveral. My hope is he’ll need them because of launch rate, not because the regulatory environment in the US precludes >1 launch facility.
“Elon maintains a constant state of urgency by employing “surges”.
What is a surge? At least 2-3x a year, he sets an insane deadline which requires all-hands-on-deck and around-the-clock activity in order to meet a goal.”
“Those who have worked with Elon for a long time know when he is entering a mood known as “demon mode”1, which is when he is particularly prone to outbursts.”
“Elon never asks an employee to do something he wouldn’t do himself. He typically works 100-hour weeks and rarely takes time off. When he did take a break to visit South Africa in 2001, he contracted malaria and almost died. The lesson he learned from this experience was that “vacations will kill you”.
Someone here explain to me that this does not describe a cult.
Elon does not murder employees who quit.
Overuse and manipulation of words like “cult” is how the left is winning. Explain to me how your post is not racist, misogynist, and transphobic, and why you shouldn’t be cancelled, then, if you don’t shut up, accused of rape by sixty-seven women you never met, including some rapes that took place before you were born…
OK. I’ll put you down for a “maybe.”
Someone here explain to me that this does not describe a cult.
Sounds like standard entrepreneurial behavior … LONG hours and high stress.
“He will no doubt end up building two shipyards.”
Already is. The ‘Starfactory’ at the Cape has already been built, though they have taken the parts for the high-bay to Texas to build another there first. It seems all work for Florida Starship has been paused for some months now.
What they are doing at the Cape though is building a crew access tower at SLC-40 so that a Starship RUD at 39A doesn’t cut-off Dragon access to the Station.
What good is having a factory if the government won’t let you use the product?
FAA confirms: No Starship/Superheavy launch license until Interior approves
If the competition for space dominance was being taken seriously, Fish and Wildlife wouldn’t be given a veto to wield over the US effort.
It would be nice if Congress would just withhold funding (employee pay) for the FAA and Fish & Wildlife until Starship launches.
Hence the dual-track. SpaceX will have to double down on the development of a launch facility at Cape Canaveral. It’ll be hard to shut down that effort without also shutting down the entire space industry not launching out of Vandy, Wallops or Kodiak.
OTOH the next round of Falcon 9 contracts with NASA/USAF/USSC might get to be a little more costly to reflect the costs to SpaceX of regulatory delays…
I’m a regular viewer of https://www.youtube.com/@Whataboutit and Felix does a good job of covering the ever-expanding infrastructure in Boca. It’s pretty obvious that Elon is focusing on building an efficient rocket factory.
I was going to post this somewhere else, but didn’t work:
–Paul Milenkovic
September 18, 2023 at 12:12 PM
“Elon maintains a constant state of urgency by employing “surges”.
What is a surge? At least 2-3x a year, he sets an insane deadline which requires all-hands-on-deck and around-the-clock activity in order to meet a goal.”
“Those who have worked with Elon for a long time know when he is entering a mood known as “demon mode”1, which is when he is particularly prone to outbursts.”
“Elon never asks an employee to do something he wouldn’t do himself. He typically works 100-hour weeks and rarely takes time off. When he did take a break to visit South Africa in 2001, he contracted malaria and almost died. The lesson he learned from this experience was that “vacations will kill you”.
Someone here explain to me that this does not describe a cult.–
http://www.transterrestrial.com/2023/09/18/six-thoughts-on-elon-musk/#comments
In comments of: Six Thoughts On Elon Musk
–A book review.
[Update a few minutes later]
On reading through it, this jumped out at me: “The brain strain of designing the car is tiny compared to the brain strain of designing the factory.”
What is more important about Starship is not the design of the vehicle, but the fact that he’s building a shipyard.–
http://www.transterrestrial.com/
As far as shipyard, he spent far more money on them than cost of building Starships. He probably spent more on rocket fuel than on building Starships.
As far as cult and Musk. It seems his best workers, are Mars fans- which is a cult. It was a cult before Musk built falcon one.
I tend to think he is using that existing cult, but he seems to a member. He making their dreams come true- just waiting NASA would have been foolish.
So fans are making NASA explore Mars in a realistic or possible way.
Whether fans using Musk or Musk is using Mars fans- it could be both.
If Elon Musk is a 1000W light bulb, won’t he last longer on our behalf if he can burn only at 750W?
Burning out his fuse up here alone…
https://youtu.be/8wI4jMxveyI?si=XoSeNw11Q2FyfEoj
Elon Musk isn’t anyone else’s to claim; he is his own being and working for his own purposes. Granted, he seems to truly believe that making humanity multi-planetary is required for the survival of the species, but he doesn’t owe the species anything that he’s doing.
On top of that, tomorrow isn’t guaranteed to any of us. Why put off for tomorrow what you can do today? Yes, there is a balance that perhaps you may have more tomorrows if you don’t burn yourself out today, but that’s still not a guarantee.
Doubly so when it comes to exercising stock options in a startup. Just sayin’.
“Elon never asks an employee to do something he wouldn’t do himself. ”
It is called leadership. Follow me up the hill, men.
One of the things that impresses me about Musk is that he is an excellent builder of teams. He has a reliability team which makes F9 launches, payload deployment, and first stage recovery yawn-inducingly successful.
He cannot see to the checking out of every rocket. But he has built a team with the eco-system that can do the job.
He cannot design all this stuff himself but he has excellent design teams with excellent ideas.
He can’t rebuild the Starship boosters for hot staging by himself in record time but he has a team that does the calculations and does the building in a time span what would take NASA 15 years.
I think one of his major skills is building a working team.
I’d like to know more about the Project 1337 team. When it became clear Raptor 2 wasn’t up to snuff (to costly, too unreliable, too hard to build), Musk put together a team to design a new engine (referred to as LEET, and apparently too many people on the interboobs can’t see that’s how you pronounce 1337 [lEET]) that would be more powerful, more reliable, cheaper and quicker to build. No engine emerged, but the team’s best ideas were passed back to become Raptor 3.
No engine emerged…
So no fleet of 1337?
… and if you think that doesn’t rhyme, I’ll bet you think 10 represents the number ten.