The real news about Tesla is their engineering quality has gotten worse over time, with their fatalities going up significantly.
Newer versions of Elon Musk’s engineering culture designs are far, far worse than earlier ones. This is extremely important to recognize.
There is no reason to believe Tesla knows how to get better, how to learn from mistakes, because a decade of data shows their delivery culture is mostly fraud tightly controlled by a documented serial liar.
SpaceX is shaping up to be even worse.
Today’s launch explosion is a very good reminder of how the Soviet N1 program looked like a failure to rational observers, no matter what the top-down centrally-controlled party boss called success.
As you can see from the picture above, the N1 had a lot of engines. Whereas the Saturn V was powered by only five enormous engines, the N1 had thirty little ones. 24 of them formed a ring around the outside of Block A, the name for the first stage, with six placed in the center to provide roll control. The thinking was that if one of these small little engines was good, then strapping them all together would be great. This idea went horribly wrong though.
Uh-huh. History, folks. It’s important. Really important.
Of course people will say everything is different. Physics isn’t what it was in the 1970s. But that attitude is mostly nonsense. Like saying political science isn’t what it was in the 1970s. Elon Musk thinking like a dictator is actually worse with modern computers than if he still put pen to paper.
SpaceX is therefore arguably on a worse trajectory than even the Soviet N1 catastrophes. SpaceX has to prove there are differences enough from the N1 program to prevent disasters, instead of simply repeating old mistakes and labeling everything “success” in a participation medal.
Like, who thought SpaceX doesn’t need parachutes or launch escape capabilites? Survival is the objective, not just taking as much money as possible from people before burning them to death (Holocaust reference, yeah).
Of course people will say huge failure doesn’t matter to some nation-state or billionaire. That is just flat wrong. Failures matter the most here.
US space industry funding drops 53% in Q1, hitting 8-year low
Money talks. Funding shortages reflect pain, like the black hole of Cold War spending that Gorbachev famously recognized and acted upon to stop losses.
Elon Musk often whines about how much he worries about losing money. And SpaceX delays launches, so they clearly act like they care until they pretend like they don’t.
SpaceX’s Next-Gen Starlink Satellites Have Started Falling From Space. The first batch of Elon Musk’s upgraded Starlink internet satellites experienced issues shortly after launching last month.
SpaceX reads to me like a restart of the South African space program under apartheid. You know, a racist mission to explode rockets on Earth to kill people here instead of Mars. But seriously, where do you think Elon Musk came up with his rather specific ideas for Starlink?
…between 1963-1993, South Africa’s apartheid ancien regime started various missile projects. A secret military space launcher programme aimed at orbiting reconnaissance satellites…
Anyway, I’m old enough to have worked at NASA and seen things done very differently to a Soviet-like cult of personality under Elon Musk. It’s sad to see anyone put any trust into anything his heavily censored star-struck minions are flailing and failing around with.
The infamous prince of apartheid emerald-mining already has a shameful legacy — the many graveyards of innocent people killed by his apparent flagrant disregard for human life.
