What do we think of this guy?

>>8405681
His cars are nVidia tier trash.

>>8405691
t. AMD cuck

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>>8405692
Nah. Enjoy your Lithium burns.

>>8405681
I don't like that he has a cult of personality, even here on sci. This implies he attracts brainlets so he cannot be that good. That said, dream on mars man.

>>8405681
Malcom Merlin?

I may not agree with his methods, but his intentions are admirable.

I think all of reddit who loves going to space doesn't realise it's a real big waste of public money

They care when money gets wasted on shit they hate but because it's in space it's AWESOMEBALLS

The best argument is that some new minerals might or will be mined on asteroids and that it'd be better to have an extraction plant on Mars

That's more of an economic argument though and you know all the people aren't thinking about that when they think about OMG SPACE TRAVEL they're imagining the Jetsons for some reason

>>8405681
Absolute madman
http://waitbutwhy.com/2016/09/spacexs-big-fking-rocket-the-full-story.html

>>8405714
>going to Mars is a waste of money
>significantly improving our chances of survival and expanding our frontiers
>beginning our potentially star spanning empire and raising our carrying capacity to an entire planet
>creating a massive fuckhuge labs on a planet for testing alien soil and gravity mechanics
>new business opportunities free from the limits of earth law
>Waste of money
Theres being pessimistic and then there's being an asshole

>>8405723

Private companies can fund Mars if they want.

Public funds being spent on space exploration for the benefit of private companies and rich citizens who will be shipped there is flagrant waste

Why should the public pay a cent for space exploration that they will not benefit from?

>>8405727
Because In twenty years people can save up and go themselves if things go right
Or in other words
>why should the people pay for funding these masive ships to go to the new world for the benefit of private companies and rich citizens ?

>>8405714
You did a very good job ignoring his main argument that humans should be multi-planetary, so we have a smaller chance of going extinct. Of course, you're a brainlet, so you're unable to think about things over the long term, you just think that "well, we haven't gone extinct yet, so we probably won't in the near future" or "why should I care what happens after I'm dead".
You also ignored that he's the first to develop reusable rockets, because we finally have the technology to do this, but no-one else seemed to give a fuck.
Going to Mars will be good for the public, because it will obviously lead to the development of new technologies, which will then become part of our everyday lives.
Also, what is this public funding meme? As far as I know, spacex is privately funded, yes it has some government contracts, but so what? It's not like they just gave him free oney.

>>8405741
I didn't ignore shit.

The public would be paying for the 0.00x% of the population who gets to live in the event of an extinction event.

Why?

Private companies can pay for that if they desire.

What does the public taxpayer benefit from a re-useable rocket?

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>>8405741
>Also, what is this public funding meme? As far as I know, spacex is privately funded, yes it has some government contracts, but so what? It's not like they just gave him free oney.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-20150531-story.html

>>8405744
Research dumbass.
Same reason they payed nasa.

>>8405750
Let's just agree that you think wasting money on enterprises the private sector could fund is worth it because they develop random technology that never gets used by most taxpayers and I don't that wasting that money is dumb

>>8405738

>Believing that Musk will reduce the cost so much, that anyone will be able to move to Mars for the cost of a house.

I've got nothing against Musk when it comes to LEO, but his Mars plans will never work in general, or work with many of the features that differentiate it from a "standard Mars colonization" cut.

>>8405744
>What does the public taxpayer benefit from a re-useable rocket?
gee I don't know, it's not like cheaper spaceflight = cheaper satellite to orbit = reduced costs/better quality for services that need satellites.

>The public would be paying for the 0.00x% of the population who gets to live in the event of an extinction event.
>Private companies can pay for that if they desire.
If they can they probably will.

>>8405748
Oh wow they gave spacex like 20 million dollars, what a large amount of money. All the other money went to Tesla and solar city because the government funds "green" technologies.

>>8405752
That's some random dude, not me.

>>8405748
>Government gives SpaceX $5 billion to aid in their development of space technology
Outrageous

Meanwhile much larger fish such as Lockheed Martin are literally draining trillions of dollars from Uncle Sam's pocket.

>>8405772
I don't see why creating a new problem is the solution to an old problem

>>8405770
Alright so your example is that satellite technology has a lower cost now. Again the private sector can do that if they want.

This is all a question of how taxpayer funds should be used and I will never concede it's worth spending it on anything that isn't assisting the already needy homeless/seriously ill people on earth.

>>8405758
>but his Mars plans will never work in general,
Why. Honest question

Next President desu

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>>8405681
Appropriate.

>>8405775
>This is all a question of how taxpayer funds should be used and I will never concede it's worth spending it on anything that isn't assisting the already needy homeless/seriously ill people on earth.
That's never going to happen. Homeless and poor people are never going to be the priority for those at the top.

And of all the things we could spend money on, space is one of the best.

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He's a scam artist whose job is to act as a money 'cleaner' for the government. He is the lowest tier of scum and is going straight to hell, and he doesn't even know it.

>>8405808
Why are you so mad? Because he's more successful than you in every way and will probably get a statue on Mars while your grave will be egged by edgy teeangers before it get dug up to fit a plot for a new walmart?

>>8405792
Dream on, mars man

http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/11/opinions/america-will-take-giant-leap-to-mars-barack-obama/index.html?adkey=bn

in a rich mans world

>>8405681
not science related

>>8405785
The only issue is funding. It will work

>>8405741
>humans should be multi-planetary, so we have a smaller chance of going extinct
This argument is so retarded and only stuck because it's repeated ad nauseam. Yet it seems none of its proponents has ever put any serious thought into it. The fact of the matter is that even if a dinosaur-killer asteroid hits Earth or if any of the other extinction events occur that we know from Earth's history, she will still be a far more hospitable place than Mars. And rebuilding the human population after such an event on Earth will be far easier than building it up or rebuilding it on Mars.

>>8406034
How if the earth population near entirely died off from the event?
Earth may be hardy but human's arent. It's good to have a back up encase the earth population is to ever drop below a million again through unnatural cause

>>8405949
>The only issue is funding. It will work
That's hardly the only issue. They have huge technical hurdles to leap.

If their past performance is any indication, everything will take at least twice as long as they're predicting at this early stage.

Even with ample funding, it could easily take 20 or 30 years and $40 or $50 billion to get the reusability they're claiming they'll have in 5 years for $10 billion.

>>8405723
I don't know what's worse -- that you haven't actually thought about any of those points and how stupid they are or that you drank up his Kool-Aid instantly

Are the physics majors at your guys' uni obsessed with Musk? The one's at my school are ALWAYS talking about him.

>>8406114
Great arguement, sure convinced me

>>8406034
The point is to eventually make the Mars Earth-like, with a proper atmosphere and (an artificial) magnetic field, so if something goes wrong on Earth, the people on Mars can help rebuild Earth.

>>8406046
>How if the earth population near entirely died off from the event?
First, no extinction event will kill the entire human race. We're too successful for that. In extinction events it's species that hold narrow ecological niches that die off first. We humans however have expanded over the entire planet and can survive as a species even if we draw resources only from the very cold regions or, alternatively, the very warm regions. We're extremely flexible and adaptive. That's why no extinction event can kill us off as a species.
Second, having said that, even of we survive as a species, a large number of individuals may die, depending on the severity of the event. Nevertheless this doesn't do any harm to us as a species. Even if 99.99% of us die, there'd still be several hundred thousand alive. Easily enough to rebuild the population. In its history humanity went through a population bottleneck of 10k-30k individuals. Yet these few spawned the 7.35 billion that are alive today. Scientists have established that with proper choice of genetic diversity a population as little as a few hundred individuals could rebuild the entire population without adverse effects on the gene pool like e.g. hereditary diseases. And with the advent of globalization and multiculturalism we're in the process of making sure that the entire genetic diversity of the human race can be found in every place. So each pocket of survivors will be enough to repopulate Earth.
In fact, it will be quite easy as Earth is such a benign environment compared to Mars. We have a magnetic field, atmospheric pressure of ~1 bar, a complete ecosphere to draw resources from etc pp. Even if an extinction event was to turn the entire Earth into a planet-wide equivalent of Antarctica or the Sahara desert, these conditions would still be infinitely more hospitable than Mars.

>>8406129
>The point is to eventually make the Mars Earth-like, with a proper atmosphere and (an artificial) magnetic field
People who say shit like that have never ever spent the couple of minutes to calculate the energy demands of such a project in order to get a first quick sense of its utter infeasibility.

>>8405792
DREAM ON, MARS MAN

Currently one of the best humans on this planet, at least how I see it. People like Musk inspire the rest of us to reach the same heights he's soaring at. He honestly has the best interest of the whole human race in his heart - something which can sadly be said for only a few of us.

I would gladly die for this man; his work must not be hindered.

>>8405748
I dont even see how this is an issue. Should be money be handed to poor, dumb niggers instead? Colonizing Mars is the TOP priority right now, pretty much above anything else save bare necessities. It should get all the funding it can, be it stolen by the government from the taxpayers' pocket or not.

>>8406120
There's nothing to argue, if you're already sold on the idea nothing can save you

>>8406274
t. privileged white boi living with his parents

We have a problem with PO-VER-TY asshole. You know how to fix poverty? By fixing a basic income for everyone, at least for people who are below the poverty line.

How to get this money? Defund NASA and all bullshit fake researchers. Boom, 10 billion dollars already. Second, cut down the military. Boom, 10 quadrillion dollars already. We can now give a basic income even to the entire continent instead.

>>8406319
poverty is a social construct
it doesn't actually exist

>>8406324
You are a social construct.

>>8406319
>You know how to fix poverty? By fixing a basic income for everyone, at least for people who are below the poverty line.
Hol' up, hol' up, hol' up... if we just printed a few more zeroes on the $100 bill, everyone would be a billionaire, and then we could all do like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and use our money to eradicate different diseases and bring internet to Africa for those unprivileged African people. You are a GENIUS, truly the next EINSTEIN.

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>>8406109
As I said funding will determine their fate.
Mistakes will happen but the entire team of Spacex want to go to Mars.
They are literally building their own spaceship to go to Mars. I heard an engineer at Spacex say that when the system is in place and he has a replacement, he will go to there. Same with Elon.
When the company is secured he will go as well.

These people are not doing this for philosophical reasons. They simply desire to go to other worlds.
All the pieces are in place...except funding :)

>>8406144
Luckily some molekules absorb heat very well.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#

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>>8405792
Dream on Mars Man

>>8406356
A whole world of people on Earth hasn't done shit in hundreds of years
Talking terraforming on Mars is insanity

>>8405770
>Oh wow they gave spacex like 20 million dollars, what a large amount of money.
SpaceX has received over a billion dollars in development funds from the government, with several billion more in sweetheart contracts, and a tremendous amount of free services and subsidized facilities.

>All the other money went to Tesla and solar city because the government funds "green" technologies.
Isn't it just a funny coincidence that all Musk's current endeavors are in heavily-subsidized areas?

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>>8406361
Heres the better version

>>8406348

And the rocket. And the plans to replicate an industrial process on Mars. And all the technology for massive orbital refuelling. And the cluster of 42 Raptor engines working. And the technology for landing worlds heaviest rockets and worlds heaviest second stage RTLS style. And artificial gravity so the astronauts don't land with bones made of jelly. Seems like a lot of techs need to be developed from scratched within 2030, doesn't it?

Will we be alive to see a Mars landing? Most likely. Will it be SpaceX? Perhaps. Will you be able to sell your house, buy a ticket on a craft to Mars, and start living your life in a commie utopia? The fuck do you think this is, an Arthur C. Clarke story?

>>8405714
Colonizing another planet is literally the most important thing for humanity right now. It reduces the probability of our extinction by many orders of magnitude in one fell swoop.

>>8405723
>significantly improving our chances of survival and expanding our frontiers
>beginning our potentially star spanning empire and raising our carrying capacity to an entire planet
That's the definition of wasting money. The "survival of humans" is a spook and a shitty one at that. It's not relevant to you what happens in ten generations. If you have so much energy to spend, improve the live of your neighbors.

>>8406348
>>Even with ample funding, it could easily take 20 or 30 years and $40 or $50 billion to get the reusability they're claiming they'll have in 5 years for $10 billion.
>As I said funding will determine their fate.
Here's the thing, though: developing this in 20 or 30 years for $40 or $50 billion is not really a grand accomplishment. 30 years ago was 1986. 30 years in the future will be 2046. It'll be a different world. Someone else will already have gone to Mars. Off-the-shelf computers and robots might design, test, and build a fully-reusable rocket in a week.

SpaceX has been doing what it's been doing because this stuff has gotten far easier in the last couple of decades. They didn't invent the 3d printing that works for most of a rocket engine. They didn't invent lithium aluminum or friction stir welding, or the fabrication techniques that make large composite propellant tanks possible, or the fluid dynamics simulations that allow them to simulate their designs before building them, or the computers that they run them on. They're just looking around and using the best stuff they can find, and that stuff goes on getting better without them.

The more time that goes by, the easier it will be to design and build the kind of stuff they're talking about building. A drawn-out project will become irrelevant in the face of advancing technology.

>>8406356
Apparently the word group "calculate the energy demands" is too frightening for people to challenge their own bullshit beliefs.

>>8405714
I wish you could choose where you're taxes went to outside of the bare necessities and everything would still work. I feel like the bitching would go down by at least a little and we would be a multi-planet species much sooner.

>>8405714
Would you still be just as upset if space x just charged nasa the same for already cheaper work that does benefit the tax payers (just inefficiently) and with re-usability, do it for a fraction of the cost, and just pocket the rest for musk's bank account which would then immediately be spent on a diamond encrusted hous- i mean making humans a multi planet species?

>>8406996
Then go live in some shitty forest somewhere where you don't have to pay taxes so a fraction of 0.4% of your tax won't be spent at all on space exploration.

>>8405727

We should shut down CERN

>>8406403
then kill yourself if nothing matters

If we don't have people like Musk. Then space travel will be robots and low earth orbit.

>>8405681
Popsci fag. Made a lot of money though.

>>8405723
Except real life isn't Eve Online.

>improving our chances of survival and expanding our frontiers
No. Mars is incredibly unconducive for life - any colony on Mars would be sustained by Earth with food, water and oxygen.

>star spanning empire
The nearest star is 4.3 light years away

>fuckhuge labs for soil
What? You want a huge lab for fucking soil?

>gravity mechanics
Gravity on Mars is 3.7m/s^2

>new business opportunities free from Earth laws
I'm assuming you have never started a business. Protip: business don't exist without laws. Everything from steel quality standards to the stock market keep the modern economy running.

>>8407215
>No. Mars is incredibly unconducive for life - any colony on Mars would be sustained by Earth with food, water and oxygen.

For a while, until it could be self sufficient. The infrastructure isn't there but if it was, you could absolutely use the minerals to create and grow until you could support yourself to not only survive and stay neutral, but to thrive and expand. Obviously it's not ideal but its an engineering challenge, not a fundamental impossibility, for human life to be sustainable on Mars.

>The nearest star is 4.3 light years away

Anons point was that this is the first real step in that long long term goal of some form of consciousnesses derived from us spreading out into the cosmos. The incredibly difficult, borderline impossible task of interstellar travel isn't going to be trumped in the next however many hundreds of years or so, maybe never even with pure AI, but it's either a doable task for the far, far, far future beyond our scope, or we just colonize the solar system and colonizing Mars is the only real first step. ( o'neill fags inbound ) If we can't do this then we remain here until an extinction event.

>What? You want a huge lab for fucking soil?

Just for soil is stupid but I think he means new science in general.

>Gravity on Mars is 3.7m/s^2

I may be wrong but I think he means how gravity effects things on Mars, not the gravity itself. No need to reply with the jello babies zinger, we'll have to see how that plays out and whether it can be fixed by altered genetics or if its no big deal.

>I'm assuming you have never started a business. Protip: business don't exist without laws. Everything from steel quality standards to the stock market keep the modern economy running.

Obviously he isn't saying there will be no laws, that would be stupid, he's saying there will be new business opportunities that won't be held back by moral based laws on Earth deemed invalid on Mars. It's a fresh start standing on the shoulders of giants.

>>8405714
Pushing new frontiers is never a waste. It's the #1 reason why we've gotten as far as we have. If we stop, everything will collapse in on itself and humanity will be faced with a millennia-long dark age and may never recover entirely.

Having a "new world" or "wild west" of sorts available and wide open does wonders for releasing pressure from society and provides a way for the restless to be productive. It's vital to modern civilization and it can't be found anywhere on Earth.

>>8406372
>SpaceX has received over a billion dollars in development funds from the government, with several billion more in sweetheart contracts, and a tremendous amount of free services and subsidized facilities.
And yet it's still peanuts compared to all the cash burned on the military and the egregiously inefficient old space industrial complex.

>>8405681
>we think
What do you mean by "we", Peasant?

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>>8405681
A filthy sexist patriarchal misogynistic male chauvinist pig.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/elon-musk-follows-zero-women-on-twitter

>>8407274
>be new business opportunities that won't be held back by moral based laws on Earth deemed invalid on Mars.
Annnnnnd what businesses would be those be? Child brothels? Blood sports? Nuclear weapons for sale?

>>8407673
Hunting children with nuclear weapons then sleeping with the radioactive remains.

>>8407670
Well, at least he's not a rapist or sexual predator.

>>8406396
They know how to be engineer solutions to problems.No one said we would go there with bicycles and scuba diving equipment. They are working on doing it economically. So money is the problem.
>>8406472
The plan is developed as a result of 5 years of board meetings betwen Spacex engineering team.
Its drawn out already but they made progress and are comfortable telling us about it.

>>8406371
I am unable to process this

>>8406505

The energy requirement decrease by two orders of magnitude after you account for the runaway greenhouse gas effect that will take place. You need to kickstsart it.

https://www.google.com.tr/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.dartmouth.edu/~humbio01/s_papers/2001/budzik.pdf&ved=0ahUKEwie-trv99TPAhXrJcAKHQ0ZApIQFggaMAA&usg=AFQjCNFFj0FyU6S6THRpuajP-iDgZ_3H3w&sig2=LZ38Z5FmVSKmZwrmwsEn3A

>>8406403
>it's not relevant to you what happens in ten generations.
Then why the fuck do you have an interest in Science?

>>8405681

He is one of the only (with Google and Facebook) that worthy projects for our time.


We expect this since 1969.

>>8407673
Guess you could ignore the environment

until you couldn't again

>>8407684
>They know how to be engineer solutions to problems.No one said we would go there with bicycles and scuba diving equipment. They are working on doing it economically. So money is the problem.

That's basically the same as saying "SpaceX works in mysterious ways".

He's smart and sexy. All these brainlets are mad they will never be half the man he is. Even if they are more intelligent, they will never be savvy enough to make the world a better place in as many ways as he already has.

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The good kind of superiority complex

>>8407882
Name the ways he's made the world a better place.

>>8405758
That's what they said about PayPal. And Tesla. Good luck.

>>8407586
>>>Oh wow they gave spacex like 20 million dollars, what a large amount of money.
>>SpaceX has received over a billion dollars in development funds from the government, with several billion more in sweetheart contracts, and a tremendous amount of free services and subsidized facilities.
>And yet it's still peanuts compared to all the cash burned on the military and the egregiously inefficient old space industrial complex.
See, now you're changing the argument.

ULA and MSFC are certainly inefficient, but you can't understand that situation while being willfully blind to the underlying reality.

ULA comes from an experiment in semi-privatization of the rocket industry, having companies put private investment funds into vehicles while still intimately involving Air Force personnel in the design and qualification process. The arrangement combined the worst of private instability with public inefficiency. To sustain the launch capability, it was necessary to effectively nationalize it (and to maintain the trust between military and contractor, compensate them for their investment), with the fig leaf of "service contracts".

MSFC (previously the shuttle, now SLS and Orion) is a very old, very established jobs/pork program. It's a way of injecting federal funds into communities which would collapse without them, one of the many bits of baling wire and duct tape that allow a high-tax, high-regulation, fiat-money "free market" economy to limp along for another decade.

Neither ULA nor MSFC is practically cuttable. Any funds SpaceX extracts from the government are simply an additional burden on the taxpayer. Worse, SpaceX is full of people who could be employed on the truly private market, rather than on that government tit.

>>8407846
The opposite is also "wah hard stuff works in mysterious ways it cant be done" go to the middle, is it physically possible? Do they have the competence? ( inb4 helium problems = impossible ) We will see, maybe they don't, maybe jello babies will become a big problem and will halt the colonization for the foreseeable future, but taking what you consider possible, SpaceX actually achieving mars travel, going the extra stretch of having everything work but its made of materials proven to be reusable, which with that assumption would mean 500,000 - 1,000,000$ tickets looking at the math of people per ship and ship cost with reused flights, it's not just a clarke fantasy, it can actually happen even though its not likely and definitely wont happen on time.

>>8407673
Obviously not because im not talking about evil pleasure businesses that might stimulate the Martian economy, im talking about businesses that would benefit both Mars and Earth like unhindered research into genetically altering humans without people in power going "muh god's plan" or stem cell research on fetuses, or more nuclear research (if it was economical) without "muh Chernobyl" or anything else i can't think of that would be halted by Earth rules. Im not making the case that this will save the universe but it's neat to have a fresh start on the acceleration of advancement of a few fields that have potential.

>>8407978
You don't think spacex has the potential with leo reusability to save the tax payers much more money over time instead of just paying inefficient ula and friends forever?

>>8408015
>You don't think spacex has the potential with leo reusability to save the tax payers much more money over time instead of just paying inefficient ula and friends forever?
1) Space capabilities are important, so we don't want them to be so cheap that people make the low cost an excuse for poor availability and unreliability.
2) Fanboy enthusiasm aside, we don't want to drive a radical increase in launched mass and lowering of barriers to entry in space, because space access is a key strategic asset and this could destabilize the world power structure, which we're currently on top of and therefore really don't want to disrupt.
3) SpaceX has never had the potential to reduce total launch costs, only to increase volume. For a current launch customer to save money, they'll have to accept a smaller share of the total launch volume, which for the US government would mean to surrender the dominant position.

ULA isn't a forever situation. That was paying off a big mistake in the 90s. The loss was made in the past, it's just being paid off over time. Delta II rockets, for example, were much more affordable in the past, comparable to Falcon 9 launches and big enough for most scientific missions.

As I already explained, MSFC isn't a place where you can "save the tax payers much more money". The point is to spend the money, so it's supplied to certain communities. You're not going to fix the fucked-up underpinnings of the American economy with cheap rocket launches.

>>8408061
Interesting points about the economy and remaining dominate but about #3

Unless im missing something, you're wrong if you think spacex doesn't at least have the potential to reduce the advertised launch to orbit price beyond what it is now. It costs around 20 million to make the first stage and when they get it back, the total inspection cost along with replacing electronics and more propellant is around 2 million at most, still charging for the overall cost of everything else, would be around 18 million saved if you just used it one more time. Multiple times and it drops even more.

>all those idiots spouting nonsense about muh Humanity and muh Human Race
sure i didn't expected /sci/ to be this spooked

>>8408132
Yeah, fuck humanity!

>>8405681

WE

Think by oneself anon

>>8408113
>you're wrong if you think spacex doesn't at least have the potential to reduce the advertised launch to orbit price
You misunderstand: I said the total cost, not the cost of an individual launch. SpaceX might sell a launch cheaper than ULA, if sufficient numbers of launches are sold, but it won't spend (or take in) less money than ULA.

Space access is largely strategic, positional. There can only be so many satellites in orbit. We're already approaching the point where each additional one is a nuisance and a threat of Kessler Syndrome.

The reason nobody has done what SpaceX is doing is that there isn't demand for such a large number of launches. Not only is there not demand, but creating the supply is likely to be dangerously destabilizing.

Consider: a hundred ITS "spaceships" with 300 tons of cargo and full loads of propellant would each have more energy than the Little Boy bomb which destroyed Hiroshima, and be capable of devastating a city center. Regardless of its intended purpose, that's effectively a strategic arsenal.

>>8408168
Im still missing something.

Dumbed down, how does SpaceX spend the same if, lets say for the sake of dumbed down argument, they both spend lets say 100 million for the launch cost, the cost of making an explosive tube put a satellite in orbit, how does space x spending 80 million with reusability still equal spending the same.

>>8408179
First thing you need to understand about SpaceX is that their commercial prices on their expendable launches do not cover their costs. That's not how they make money, it's not how they stay in business, although they like to imply that's how it is.

And the problem isn't the cost of the rocket. It only costs them around $30 million to manufacture another Falcon 9. The problem is launch rate. They have fixed costs, and development programs, that cost more than the $200 million or so they can take in per year, above their marginal costs, by operating Falcon 9 as an expendable rocket. They have a big factory/office building, they have various test sites, launch pads and associated facilities, a private spaceport under construction, drone ships they're trying to upgrade into floating launchpads, and now they've opened a satellite-development branch in Seattle.

If their launch rate doesn't improve, reusing the boosters might eventually save them another $100-$200 million per year, which is good, but still would not allow them to sustain their company on private launches at the advertised price, or even pay reasonable interest on the development costs.

Rockets aren't something produced in huge numbers at a distant factory you don't have to worry about, so you can just buy however many you need off the shelf. Rockets come from big, expensive programs, which produce and launch a small number of vehicles per year, and the "unit cost" is a largely imaginary figure, while prices are set for strategic reasons and may have no relation to cost.

Trying to simplify the problem by thinking of each rocket as costing a certain fixed amount is childish reasoning.

>>8407935
Made it easier to detect salty kids who hate anyone more successful

>>8408216
I already said i was missing something, the childish reasoning was on purpose so i could understand where you were coming from because it obviously doesn't work like that.

" If their launch rate doesn't improve, reusing the boosters might eventually save them another $100-$200 million per year" Thats all im talking about but if space x R&D equals more than ULA's extra cost for inefficiency and reliability then thank you for letting me know. I still hope the R&D does great things in the future though. Have a good day.

>>8405808
Yes, because putting all the money you have, and then some, into a venture that has a very low chance of success, because you believe it's important to our future, is a classic scam artist thing to do.
Fucking idiot.

>>8406319
I actually thought you were serious for a second there.

>>8408623
>putting all the money you have, and then some, into a venture that has a very low chance of success, because you believe it's important to our future
I don't know who you're talking about, but it's not Elon Musk.

He got rich in the dot-com bubble, starting and selling also-rans (most of his money came from starting a competitor to PayPal that got bought out by PayPal). If you want to know where that easy money came from in the end, all the crazy losing bets were eventually made good in the multi-trillion-dollar bail-out.

After that, he semi-retired and settled down to enjoy his fabulous, unproductively-gained wealth. Two of his interests he wanted to waste money on were sports cars and space rockets. As he got into them, he saw opportunities to play with these things in a big way, and sustain his funtime with revenue, and even make a profit. His contact with the social circles of the extremely wealthy, and experience with top-end luxuries, also revealed to him that it *does* actually matter whether you have a hundred million or ten billion.

He saw opportunities to build his fortune much bigger where the government was spending money carelessly, and he pursued them relentlessly. You think he was trying to be a nice guy and just happened to become a billionaire along the way?

He has never laid so much of his fortune on his line that he risked losing the option of retreating to a life of leisure and comfort beyond what any of us can expect.

>>8405727
The public benefits a shitton from space exploration. More exciting stuff to get the laypeople excited always = more people going into science (even kids who grow up to be great geniuses get inspired by shit like going into space), and more of a demand for the government to fund science in general. Seems like a ridiculously important investment to me that the public sector wouldn't be willing to make because it is way more long term than most private investments.

>>8408015
Space exploration would barely cost taxpayers shit. "save taxpayer money" is an idiotic excuse for not investing in something beneficial that most companies see as too risky.

>>8408061
>SpaceX has never had the potential to reduce total launch costs
?
How does reusable rockets not reduce launch costs? Are you one of those people who assume the launch market is totally fixed?

>>8408848
I already explained this. Total launch costs, not per-launch cost.

The idea that SpaceX would somehow result in the US government actually spending less taxpayer money on launches is absurd.

The idea that a larger launch volume is "better value" for the taxpayer, even though the total cost outlay is higher, is deeply questionable, not least because this technology will inevitably be copied by America's rivals, and likely in a surprisingly short time due to the highly automated production processes.

>>8405792
DREAM ON, MARS MAN

>>8409046
Except total costs to the government will go down, both in launch and in payload

>>8408839
I completely agree but just wanted to level with him before discussing details. In the end if a couple billion is or isn't "wasted" it doesn't matter compared to the stupid bullshit spent elsewhere. Imagine if space x got a years budget of the air conditioning costs of US soldiers in the middle east, not gonna happen but my god.

>>8409046
When people talk about saving taxpayer money, it's rare that they're ever talking about not spending as much money. It's more about getting better bang per buck, and SpaceX can do that.

>Falling for the Elon will take me to mars meme

I know /sci/ is bluepilled but come on

chomsky and musk. every reporter accepts they're expert on everything that comes out of their mouth. if the media actually gave true experts a fraction of the attention we might actually improve but it's a cult-of-personality circlejerk as always.

>>8409187
To meme properly about Elon Musk, you must first understand the significance of soap root:
http://mysite.du.edu/~treddell/3780/Kornbluth_The-Marching-Morons.pdf

>>8409187
Believing it is absolutely going to happen on time like our lord and savior said so is stupid but what about the basic plan is fundamentally flawed in any way that would make the goal undoable?

>>8409230
Manned Mars mission will happen with or without Mars. Musk's orbital rockets just might make it cheaper.

Colonising Mars however is a pipe dream.

>>8409276
colonizing in the usual sense won't happen.

though I can see Mars becoming an industrial world. a place people go to work for a few years . mining and making things to put into orbit around earth. Where the gravity is enough to make work easy, yet low enough for easy heavy lift launches to ETO.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU7FuAswPW0&feature=youtu.be
^ ^ ^
muskfags in general

>>8409276
You're not listing anything that makes it impossible, just staying safe by saying [incredibly difficult task relative to everything we have ever done but is physically possible will happen] buut [slightly harder task that takes more effort but is still possible] nah thats a pipe dream. Tell me why, valid reasons ive heard so far might be jello babies, not enough outside support, thats about it. Everything else is just an engineering problem well within reality.

>>8405681
Hi, reddit.com user here. I want to suck his cock. I used my mom's credit cards to buy stock in his company and then I sold it for reddit gold. OMG I live being a 1st year STEM major and a virgin!

>>8407940
Making a payment service and a electric car that bursts into flames is not the same as creating the worlds biggest rocket, driving the price down till they're dirt cheap, replicating an industrial process on a dead planet and do deep space mining.

>>8409350
is musk really reddit? fuck him then

>>8409753
Even though teslas are statistically ~5 times safer than gasoline cars when it comes to catching fire, and you make a good point about how it's not the same, consider what they've done with spacex rather than making electric cars or software, not saying they got it in the bag but its certainly doable physically with what they've done with landing, making the engine, and one of the hardest parts, the enormous composite tank. Obviously if other major companies and sources of power don't come in to help push the development of the actual infrastructure on mars though then thats detrimental to the goal because they cant do it all, all they can do is provide the access and some development on the ground but even the muskiest musketeers cant say they'll do it all, they just have to show its possible.

>>8409704
>why colonising Mars is impossible

Colonies are self sustaining, or at least doesn't run a trade deficit. Mars' atmosphere is negligible, its water is locked up in ice underground and the temperatures are inhospitable to life. There's no carbon cycle, no water cycle, no oxygen cycle. It will never sustain humans.

The only way people will live on Mars is in sealed habitats. Unless the habitats are a 100% efficient in recycling, these will need regular imports from Earth of food, oxygen and water from Earth.

And Mars can export nothing. Even if the surface of Mars were pure, easy to ship blocks of gold, it would be a waste of money to bring them back. It currently costs nine thousand dollars per pound to put something into LEO, supposedly four thousand for Falcon. It cost $50,000 per gram to take rocks from the moon. Gold cost $40 per gram. Mars would be exponentially more expensive than moon rocks.

>>8409820
The plan is not to supply the colony with trade.They will launch a satellite business to develop the rocket and pay for the colony.
Nobody in Spacex is saying that so you have not given any reason why the plan is flawed.

>>8409820
Sealed habitats, exactly, except the 100% recycling thing is invalid, you get the water from the ground, the oxygen from the water, and the food can be grown on farms in more sealed habitats, you absolutely need to import earth dirt, i get that, but with enough, you could be self sustaining. The export part is very true except for science breakthroughs and new technology created on Mars. But yeah, you definitely can't ship back anything to make a profit except for an incredibly microscopic amount of people willing to pay for rocks. It will have to be funded by the people themselves, the government so they can tag along and do science way cheaper than originally planned, brands, brands everywhere, and honestly, literally a go fund me or something, not everyone is Arthur c Clarke but i bet enough people would donate to the cause to add up to a few billion.

>>8409847
And also you can use the minerals around you to actually build so at a point, you dont have to keep sending more habitats, they can just keep growing.

>>8409820
>Mars would be exponentially more expensive than moon rocks.
uh no it wouldn't... because thats an extra benefit to the whole program. You can bet mars goods will be a billion dollar market.

>>8409844
As the colony's population increases, the imports proportionally increases. For perspective, NASA spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year to supply three astronauts in orbit. SpaceX couldn't even pay for the ISS.

A colony expands, grows and spreads. This Martian colony Mars wants to start, assuming someone pays the hundreds of billions necessary, will be a research outpost like Antarctica. Not a colony.

>>8409820
>these will need regular imports from Earth of food, oxygen and water from Earth.

No. All of those things can be manufactured on Mars. Water, Carbon, Oxygen, all there. That's why Mars is better than Venus - accessible resources. Higher initial outlay, but ISRU is the only way to go for anything long term.

>It currently costs nine thousand dollars per pound to put something into LEO, supposedly four thousand for Falcon.

Also no, $1300 per lb to LEO on Falcon. And if you're shipping from Mars, your cost will be reduced - half the dV cost to Mars is getting off of Earth.

Your comparison to Moon rocks is also improper - that involves sending a mission from Earth, landing on the Moon, taking back a miniscule mass fraction of rocks and bringing most of the mission home with you. Presumably you'll leave all the production facilities on Mars and its not re-sent for every mission, so the flyaway cost will be much lower.

But your conclusion is right - still infeasible to ship minerals from Mars, especially when you consider the cost of mining them in the first place.

>>8409847
>ice from ground, oxygen from water, food from underground houses

And where are you going to get the energy for all this? To melt the ice, apply electrolysis to the water and the artifical light? And it's not just oxygen, humans need nitrogen, pure oxygen is toxic. Not impossible theoretically but financially - every pound of equipment you ship costs tens of thousands.

Now assuming you do all of this, you couldn't expand. The factories you need to produce these things, solar panel factories, electrolysis equipment, even light bulbs, don't exist on Mars. To build the entire supply chain from raw minerals to products on Mars is out of the question. One light bulb factory must weigh millions of tons - trillions of dollars to ship to Mars.

This is not Civ 6 - why would science gain an edge on Mars? Because there's less gravity?

Billions wouldn't even foot the cost for the fuel. For comparison the ISS cost 100 billion over decades. And that's something dozens of kilometres above earth. Mars is millions of kilometres away.

>>8409868
How are you going to manufacture carbon, oxygen and water on Mars? You couldn't even pull them out of thin air because the Mars atmosphere is almost non existent.

Sorry, 1,300 per pound. And how would you produce the rocket fuel needed from Mars?

It would be an unfair comparison if Mars supported a high tech economy capable of manufacturing rocket fuel and rockets. Just one factory must weigh millions of tons. And you can't build one with materials on Mars because there's usable no materials on Mars to use - concrete, steel, glass, et cetera.

>>8409867
Satellite business alone is estimated to bring tens of billions of dollar in a year.
Which csn cover the cost of the colony at least for a single year.
So you still cannot pinpoint the fault in the plan.

>>8409899
?
Why do you bring up the ISS? That was done using the most expensive launch vehicle ever made.

Full reuse drops prices down 100x
Scaling up launch vehicles will drop it another 10x

>>8409899
A kilogram of solar panels give 90kwatts in Mars.
With just a single ITS mission you can send lets say 200 tons of solar panels which is more than enough to cover all your needs.
The point of orbital fueling and giant reusable rockets are to reduce cost of sending things up.If this rocket works 1000 reuse of main booster and 12 for spaceship the cost of a pound to space drops to 60 dollars.
I think SpaceX has a solid handle of this Mars thing

Those reusable rockets are pretty neat, but Im pretty sure at this stage its cheaper to just dump the booster into the ocean and save on the fuel to bring it back. He should take that ridiculous pneumatic train thing and point it straight up.

>>8409905
>You couldn't even pull them out of thin air because the Mars atmosphere is almost non existent.
You're talking out your ass. The atmosphere is carbon dioxide. Thin sure, but it's not non-existent. You wouldn't even need a particularly good compressor to bring it up to pressure.

>how would you produce the rocket fuel needed from Mars?
Cliche answer is the Sabatier reaction - we can extract hydrogen from water and CO2 is readily available. Fancier methods exist but it's the simplest as all it really needs is a nickel catalyst.

>It would be an unfair comparison if Mars supported a high tech economy
We never mined moon rocks for commercial gain - which is what we'd be doing if it we tried to export gold or what have you. It's like using the cost of 747 to work out the cost of a F-35 - sure they're tangentially related but any comparison is going to be grossly inaccurate.

We don't need to ship mining equipments and refineries for Apollo missions, and we don't need to duplicate the mission hardware 16 times for Mars mining. It's also not the '60s anymore. They're not comparable.

>manufacturing rocket fuel and rockets... And you can't build one with materials on Mars because there's usable no materials on Mars to use - concrete, steel, glass, et cetera.

You can literally make all but one of those things on Mars. And relatively easily - we've covered fuel. Silica glass, suphurcrete and iron refined from the soil are simple enough and have already been the topic of research. Rockets the sticking point. Making microcontrollers to control the rocket or precision parts is the hard bit but given we're talking about Musk's work specifically presumably we're dealing with reusable rockets shuttling to orbit. This lessens the strain and makes shipping new rockets occasionally much more feasible than disposables.

Nah, lack of technology is not what makes mining Mars infeasible (short of space elevators). Its just that its cheaper to do it here.

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yfw brainlets don't realize we live on an incredibly heavy planet
yfw brainlets don't realize that humans are from the get go a more brutal race because of this
yfw brainlets don't realize we are the warrior civ
space is gay

>>8409899
>Not impossible theoretically but financially - every pound of equipment you ship costs tens of thousands.
Which is why you concentrate on bring those costs down, just like Musk is. If SpaceX can make the ITS a reality, that alone will drop per-flight costs a lot. As long as we keep playing around with slingshotting tiny tin cans into space, spaceflight will be prohibitively expensive. We've gotta go bigger. Way bigger.

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Say what you want about him but I like his wife.

>>8410375
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m79cvHckUIM

even now?

>>8408813
> He has never laid so much of his fortune on his line that he risked losing the option of retreating to a life of leisure and comfort
Except he almost had to declare bankrupcy when his first rockets failed one after another and it was only through borrowing money that he managed to fund another, successful rocket.
> he saw opportunities to play with these things in a big way, and sustain his funtime with revenue, and even make a profit
You make it seem as though he's just fucking around for fun where in reality the guy has put in 100 hours a week for a long time and is even now doing 80-90. This is no joke for him.
> You think he was trying to be a nice guy and just happened to become a billionaire along the way?
It's pretty obvious that Musk's main concern is profit, otherwise he wouldn't be pushing forward at such breakneck speeds. He's investing almost everything into further developing his plans, especially the car and battery factory which he wants to automatize to an unprecedented level. It's a constant succession of bold moves, far from the surefire way of turning a profit.

>>8410448
>It's a constant succession of bold moves, far from the surefire way of turning a profit.
It's true, everything he does is a huge payoff gamble of one sort of or another. Of course he does what he can to increase chances of success, but it's still a gamble.

It's much more entertaining to watch than the typical glacially slow and complacent approaches usually taken in the automobile and space industries, because it means a bunch of cool stuff might come to fruition. Either way it's fun to see the sticks-in-the-mud detractor peanut gallery get all angry and butthurt about nothing.

>>8410008
>sabatier reaction
And how are you going to get the energy for the reaction and infrastructure to produce industrial qualities of it, then cool and compress it into liquid hydrogen?

>cost to Mars

Curiosity has a mass of about 900kg

An Atlas V 541 should cost ~235M$

That means it cost 261k$ for 1kg to Mars

Falcon Heavy' s LEO is approx six times less than Atlas and converting it to pound

261,000/2.2/6~20,000 per pound.

>possible to refine scilla glass, suphurcrete and iron from Mars
Possible isn't necessarily practical. How are you going to get a blast furnace to Mars, mining equipment, surveying teams, and so on to Mars without bankrupting yourself? Obviously it's possible, just not economical. With the captial cost added with 20k per pound of equipment it will never be practical.

>>8410448
>Except he almost had to declare bankrupcy when his first rockets failed one after another and it was only through borrowing money that he managed to fund another, successful rocket.
SpaceX, the corporation, almost had to declare bankrupcy, not Elon Musk.

>You make it seem as though he's just fucking around for fun where in reality the guy has put in 100 hours a week for a long time
This is how he enjoys spending his time. He's the boss of a car company and a rocket company. You think that's because he thinks cars and rockets will save the world?

>He's investing almost everything into further developing his plans, especially the car and battery factory which he wants to automatize to an unprecedented level. It's a constant succession of bold moves, far from the surefire way of turning a profit.
Are you kidding? The surefire way of not turning a profit is to do what other people are already doing.

Yes, he plows the revenue back into the company. This is how you make money in today's world: increase the value of companies. If you take a dividend, you have to pay the full income tax on it. If you sell shares of stock, or the whole company, you pay lesser capital gains tax. If you use the stock like money and trade it for other assets, you don't pay tax at all.

>>8405681
Musk is on-point with Tesla, which I think will meet all of its current goals and become a successful electric car/energy company.

SpaceX is a wreck right now. Musk needs to stop blowing up rockets and actually try meeting his short-term goals. You don't win contracts by discussing Mars colonization concepts that SpaceX isn't able to realize (it's like saying JAXA will do a Mars mission).

His AI fears are possibly rational, but his theory that we live in a simulation is not even worth discussing. Even if we live in some aliens' supercomputers, which I doubt, it doesn't matter to us.

>>8405727
SpaceX is a private company you mong

>>8410854
>compress it into liquid hydrogen
>Curiosity
>Atlas V
>Falcon Heavy
Holy shit, learn at least a little basic background.

The Mars plan is to use the huge and fully-reusable ITS for transportation. The upper stage lands hundreds of tons of cargo, or up to a hundred passengers, directly on Mars, then is refuelled and flies beck to Earth to be reused in a couple of years.

They're not talking about a system six times as cost effective as a NASA's Mars probes, they're talking about a system a thousand times as cost effective in the long run, and a hundred times as cost effective on the first mission.

And the Sabatier reaction doesn't produce hydrogen, it consumes hydrogen (and CO2), and produces methane (and water).

>>8405681

Welfare baby.

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>>8405709
underrated response, made me laugh pretty hard

>>8411081
Government was going to give the money to someone. We should be glad Musk was there to get it. As anyone else would be less competent, or they're already established companies.

>>8411102

Still a welfare baby.

>>8411184
cars and rockets are incredibly capital intensive to start up and produce.

Bezos is funded most of blue origin him self. Which is why he is still only shooting dildos into sub orbital flight. instead of putting payloads into orbit.

>>8410882
I'm assuming you think he's lying about having to borrow money from friends to pay rent and spacex's original plan right?

Anyways, the only person that really knows what the intentions are without speculation is Musk himself until we see him actually putting large amounts of money into Mars. If he really wanted to just make billions without making billions while advancing with those billions to a point where the money wouldn't be coming back in from Mars, then he'd just dominate the launch market and never touch Mars.

>>8410939
ITS will be powered by Raptor rockets.

My mistake, I mean methane, not hydrogen.

I'd like to see your citations for ITS being hundreds of times more cost effective than current rockets.

>>8411336
cheaper fuel, reusable, puts a fuck ton up into orbit at once.

>>8411339
That's not a citation.

>>8411347

thats not an argument, retard.

>>8405792
DREAM ON, MARS MAN

>>8411336
>>8411347
Full reuse + super heavy lifter = 1000 x cost savings

>>8405792
Dream on, mars man.

>>8411269
>I'm assuming you think he's lying about having to borrow money from friends to pay rent and spacex's original plan right?
So how do you figure he also became the controlling interest in Tesla during SpaceX's early years?

>>8405714

Space is a viable economic pursuit, the only thing that makes it not viable is the Outer Space Treaty (or rather, the Outer Communist Theory), which states space is the common heritage of man, you can't own land on celestial bodies, not naughty nukes or guns in space and other hippy shit. If nationals and companies know they could claim land on celestial bodies or a volume of space relative to Earth, people would already be up there. But because of the UN and globalist cooperation, nobodies allowed to have them.

>>8405792
Dream on, Mars Man :`)

>>8406319
Gr8 b8 fag

>>8405785

Because they struggle to build structures in Anartica for permenant human habitation. Mars is basically Antartica, 54.6 million Kilometers away, with less water, no oxygen and radiation. Any colonization effort of Mars will require interplanetary infrastructure for a constant supply of technology and organic material from Earth and Asteroids. Its do-able, but not with Musk's "We'll send a few humans on a year long trip and see what happens" approach. Whoever colonizes Mars will likely have already been living in space for years.

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>>8411979
They're are also not fucking allowed to mine shit from Antarctica, even though there's tons of coal and oil and other minerals there that could sustain a colony.

The Antarctic treaty prevents mineral exploitation, not availability of minerals. Pic related is exposed coal deposits.

>>8411979
>Because they struggle to build structures in Anartica for permenant human habitation.
Not really, it's just we don't want to because of >>8412005
It's like saying we have a hard time colonizing national parks.

>>8412005

It pisses me off that kind of stuff. I believe in preserving the environment to extent, but this morbid fear of damaging a fucking ice cube with nothing living on it 2 miles thick is silly.

Its like the Outer Space Treaty. I love the planet's and their natural terrain (studying them is what I want to go into), but for fucks sake lets not pretend Mars isn't a wasteland.

>>8411336
>I'd like to see your citations for ITS being hundreds of times more cost effective than current rockets.
Ignoring the idiotic >citations

ITS is planned to feature airliner-like reusability, reducing Earth-orbit launch costs to near the cost of propellant. Additionally, it will be fuel-efficient (with excellent specific impulse and inert mass) and use the cheapest propellants available: methane, the main component of natural gas, and oxygen, a major component of the atmosphere. On top of that, it will be large, to keep unavoidable per-launch costs to a minimum, with a payload to LEO of over 300 tons, depending on upper stage configuration.

As for actually travelling from LEO to Mars and back, the system has an even larger advantage: the upper stage itself serves as the atmospheric entry and landing vehicle, and the return vehicle, as well as the propellant liquefaction and storage facility. Like the "Red Dragon", this simply uses a sufficiently robust and versatile entry and landing system developed for Earth, on Mars, with minimal, software-only changes needed for the transition.

>>8412158

The ITS upperstage can SSTO and still carry tens of tons to orbit.

ITS booster can put 300 tons into LEO. imagine how much mass it can put to JTO with out needing to refuel an upperstage first.

>>8412013
>this morbid fear of damaging a fucking ice cube with nothing living on it
That's not the point of the Antarctica treaty. Like the Outer Space Treaty, the agreement not to claim territory is meant to prevent a war over valuable land.

>>8405714
You're literally retarded because there is no economic argument for space beyond LEO. Not for at least another 100 years.

>>8412235

Yet in the process it gaurantees no-one can have it and advnace. We're best off just forming a coalition of capitalist countries that enforce property rights there.

>>8411965
I don't think I completely understand what you're asking.

>became the controlling interest in Tesla during SpaceX's early years?

Because he still had plenty of money in the early to mid 2000's and used it for tesla and space x. Again, that's obvious but I don't think I'm on the same page.

The borrowing money part and early space x plan part are 2 different things.

Elon has said multiple times that in 2008 during the recession when money was tough and he was having to pour the rest of his savings just to keep them alive, he spent so much money from his paypal savings on his companies that he had to borrow money just to pay his own personal rent. You can say he's lying but I was just asking if you thought so.

The early early years of space x is a separate thing.

Again, you can claim he's lying if you want to, but Elon's original plan for space x was to use almost all of his money just to buy 3 Russian ICBMs and hire enough engineers and technicians to put a plant in a sealed lander on Mars to try and motivate everyone to get the NASA budget up so they could actually go to Mars. This goes against your belief that he's in this just for the money and not for the goal and money.

>>8412244
Platinum group metals.

They are valuable enough to justify the expense of space mining. Needed in electronics.

Musk never founded Tesla, you fucking morons, he bought his "co-founder" status with an investment while simultaneously slandering/defaming the true founder in the process of forcing him out.

Musk is a despicable cartoon of an innovator obsessed with his vanity. Don't let his uncharacteristic social charisma fool you, he loves being in the spotlight. If someone like him actually cared about improving humanity, they would just do it. They wouldn't continuously posture themselves for the media talking about neural "laces" and AI, subject matter they knows nothing about.

Musk isn't a scientist, isn't an innovator, he's a two-bit charlatan. Only the less intelligent fall for this clearly grandiose charade.

Musk stole the Hyperloop concept, then paid off the true inventor just days before going public with his "gift" to humanity.

>>8412802
>your belief that he's in this just for the money
Jesus. What's wrong with your brain?

Here's where this started: >>8408813
>After that, he semi-retired and settled down to enjoy his fabulous, unproductively-gained wealth. Two of his interests he wanted to waste money on were sports cars and space rockets. As he got into them, he saw opportunities to play with these things in a big way, and sustain his funtime with revenue, and even make a profit. His contact with the social circles of the extremely wealthy, and experience with top-end luxuries, also revealed to him that it *does* actually matter whether you have a hundred million or ten billion.
>He saw opportunities to build his fortune much bigger where the government was spending money carelessly, and he pursued them relentlessly.

SpaceX has never relaunched a rocket. SpaceX has never had a manned mission.

Let's pump the brakes. Making human beings a 'multiplanetary species' is a bit far fetched. But hey, if you feel that we need to devote a shrinking resource base to planning for a one in a million year event, then bravo. I suppose the billions, maybe trillions, in infrastructure debt doesn't bother you. Building chemical rockets -- a deadend architecture -- is paramount to dying in space because hell, who wants to die on earth when the bridges crumble, the electrical grid fails, the food supply collapses, transportation infrastructure unbuckles, and all these complex interdependent systems unravel due to negligence and lack of primitive foresight.

>>8412830
He might be a dot-com lottery winner, but he's intelligent, thoroughly educated in science, and he takes time to learn about the things his subordinates are doing.

So he actually knows who does good work, and he didn't retreat from slogging through all the business and legal shit into a comfortable salaried tech-only position.

Whatever else you might say about him, he's an effective manager, and those are rare.

>>8412866
>thoroughly educated in science
There's no basis for this argument. Anyone can read a book on AI and posture their socalled intelligence to the media. There's no shortage of this behavior online. All these 'intellectuals' running around pontificating about shit they just googled. It's called attention whoring.

> effective manager
The world is full of effective managers. Many of them don't steal credit for work from their subordinates like Musk routinely does. He's a megalomaniac. If he actually cared about his employees, he would one, give them credit, and two, pay them healthy salaries. Neither of which he does.

But hey, if you want to buy into the pretense of genius, you should let him sell you a car. Because that's what he truly is: a car salesman.

>>8412846
>Jesus. What's wrong with your brain?
Nothing, whats wrong with yours? It's going to get annoying if you can't move your eye one millimeter to the right after choosing your favorite point that I wasn't even talking about, obviously he saw opportunities to do things much better with more growth but

>You think he was trying to be a nice guy and just happened to become a billionaire along the way?

>You think that's because he thinks cars and rockets will save the world?

Him wanting to spend his hundreds of millions, that could have been spent on a life of luxury for the rest of his life to put a plant on Mars so NASA could get a budget increase so we could start to take the first steps to become a multi-planet species and advance humanity (if you disagree with advancing part then save it for another argument) goes against your belief that he is just in it to make money and live the multi-billion dollar experience rather than the multi-million dollar experience. You can still claim he's lying and we can agree to disagree but you can't act like you weren't just saying he did all this to just suck the gov tit and make billions without also believing in the goal. (''save the world'' [although obviously he's not ''saving'' anyone and that statement is an enormous exaggeration, long term it is a tiny species improvement that he believes in, if we assume he isn't lying])

>>8412895
>>thoroughly educated in science
>There's no basis for this argument.
He has a bachelor's degree in physics. He's also ready to talk about the design of his company's advanced products in considerable technical detail.

>The world is full of effective managers.
Is that the world where the sky is pink and cotton candy grows on the trees?

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>>8412916
> bachelor's degree
> thorough education
Do you even hear yourself? Mindless hero worship has functionally destabilized any notion of self control.
> considerable technical detail
Entirely relative to intelligence of interpreting model. Neil deGrasse Tyson probably blows your hair back too with his deep and technical literacy.

>effective managers
The world is also full of ineffective managers, giraffes, and a atmosphere of 78% nitrogen. Non of that was probably covered in your 'I <3 Elon' newsletter.

>>8412830
>Musk is a despicable cartoon of an innovator obsessed with his vanity.

why despicable

> If someone like him actually cared about improving humanity, they would just do it.

Which he is trying to do, something like 95% of his time is just engineering and managing, the rest is the interviews he does. If he wasn't thoroughly involved in his companies and just went on tv all the time then I would agree with you.

>Musk isn't a scientist, isn't an innovator, he's a two-bit charlatan.

hahaha what? Obviously he isn't anywhere near being a genius nor scientist, but he absolutely engineers and doesn't just rely on PR to try and boost his companies, try not to get annoyed by musketeers and just go to the opposite end of the spectrum with the same amount of bias but just in the opposite direction with the same number of ill informed facts.

I get that you're trying to bring the ''REAL LIFE IRON MAN'' crowd to reality, but you're going far enough to the point where you are being disingenuous or foolish trying to knock him down a pedestal.

He's not a genius

He's not a scam artist

He's just a hard working nerd with money and an incredible team.

Also

>Many of them don't steal credit for work from their subordinates like Musk routinely does

Can you provide any evidence of this, some of his fans may say its all him but I've heard Elon give credit to his engineers and others many times whenever something big happens.

>>8412910
>Him wanting to spend his hundreds of millions, that could have been spent on a life of luxury for the rest of his life to put a plant on Mars
He wanted to use 3 ICBMs. When he got an offer of 1 ICBM launch for $8 million, he rejected it as too expensive, and started looking at other options, like building his own rocket.

He wasn't planning to "spend his hundreds of millions", he was planning to spend a few tens of millions, a significant but minority portion of his wealth. He was going to have a life of luxury regardless of whether he spent that money.

And in the end, he got cold feet and realized he could make money instead.

>>8412934
>> bachelor's degree
>> thorough education
>Do you even hear yourself?
A bachelor's degree in physics is a very respectable achievement. Nobody has called him a professional scientist, and he has never claimed to be one, but he knows a lot of science for an entrepreneur/manager.

Going beyond that wouldn't just be getting thoroughly educated, but entirely specialized.

>>8412224
>>8412158
>>8411414
>>8411349
And I can say the sky is green. I'd like to see more than pretty speeches about this miraculous cost savings.

>>8412013
>damaging an ice cube

Where does the water go when it melts?

>>8412959
>When he got an offer of 1 ICBM launch for $8 million, he rejected it as too expensive

Wrong, the advertised price for the rocket was 7 million a piece and when they got there they said it was actually 21 million a pop which is when they decided to make their own.

The 3 rockets do not represent the entire cost of getting the rocket ready to launch, payroll, buildings, communication equipment with the rocket, communication equipment with the lander, fuel/propellant, and the big one, the Mars lander itself, 3 total possible times.

You are right, I was wrong about the hundreds of millions with it being a hazy exaggeration, but also consider that its much more than a few 10's of millions. While he could absolutely have saved a few million and not went broke with the original plan, him spending a (debatable, number crunching wise) majority of his money on developing the infrastructure to develop a special Mars lander and land it on Mars just to try and help out humanity and make no money (I honestly don't think it would have done anything really) shows he cares for the vision and isn't just trying to make billions for luxury.

The only thing you could say is I guess maybe he got a ~~~85 - 160 million dollar 80 hour work week for 4 years adventure out of it and had so much fun, even though he's said starting companies is like chewing glass and staring into the abyss, that it was a fun luxury for him.

Again, more clearly, going on the assumption he's not lying about that original plan, my point is you're wrong about him just wanting to make money to be on the billionaire level without also actually believing in the vision genuinely. He wants to make a fuck ton of money, absolutely, you need that money for the goals, and absolutely, he spends money on luxuries like his house so he definitely lives the rich life. I'm not saying he's a monk, but saying that he really is trying to advance humanity in some way because he believes it's important to our future.

>>8413142
>land it on Mars just to try and help out humanity
Why do you have to spin everything as being to "help out humanity"? It's a stunt. It would be interesting and fun. Plus it would make him famous.

>and make no money
Publicity can always be exploited for profit.

>>8405792
DREAM ON, MARS MAN

>>8407679

wait until the Sunday edition of the wall street journal in a few days.

>>8413154
>reading comprehension
or
>this much of a cynic

''put a plant on Mars so NASA could get a budget increase so we could start to take the first steps to become a multi-planet species and advance humanity''

I bet we both agree that it probably wouldn't get congress's dick hard enough to actually change the budget by any humanity changing amount, but that was the goal.
It was absolutely a stunt, a stunt that was supposed to help out NASA so they could do the stuff that wasn't a stunt. It probably would have made him famous too, like I said, not a monk.

Also

>It would be interesting and fun

so you're going with the 100 million dollar brutally hard hobby route, got it, just wanted to finally reach a point where I know there's nothing left to discuss and we just disagree on what we'll never know, what his true intentions are.

>Publicity can always be exploited for profit.

Even if you spend 50 billion dollars on being the first person to stack up 20 B-2 bombers on Mt.Everest and blow them up with diamond encrusted platinum encased explosives? Obviously there's a range between the perfect publicity for money ratio like spending a million dollars on the keeping up with the kardashians show for tens or hundreds of millions in return or something, and spending around a hundred million dollars to put a plant on Mars with maybe millions in return in logos if they spammed it. If it was manned, sure, that was Mars One's plan and the publicity calculations worked out assuming they could magically get there in the first place with almost no money or competence, but a plant isn't nearly as monumental, it would make history but wouldn't tug the average Joe's heart strings enough to utilize it for profit. Point is, genuinely believing in the vision, not just for profit, based on the assumption that that was the goal. If you think he was lying or just trying to get famous then I can't change your mind. Again, we'll all see if he's genuine or not if spacex gets to Mars.

>>8406403
Very good point
>>8407693
Retard. A new scientific advancement can have immediate benefits on the population. Think penicillin. That began saving lives the same year it's medical usage was realized

>>8413200
He wanted to spend about a quarter of his fortune in a way that would have made him world famous. That's quite reasonable for a step up in the world.

And in the end, let's not forget, he abandoned that plan in favor of one that directly makes him money and gives him even more fame.

It's MVP thinking, the way entrepreneurs work. The Mars lander was the minimum viable product for him to leverage his wealth into fame in the neglected space arena. it served as an organizing principle for his initial investigations into and connection-making within the industry. But as he got further in, he saw better opportunities.

This is how someone ends up with a $12 billion net worth in his mid-40s. It's not by trying to maximize the benefit for other people than himself.

>>8414218
>He wanted to spend about a quarter of his fortune in a way that would have made him world famous. That's quite reasonable for a step up in the world.

Where the fuck did you come up with a quarter from, this is really starting to get annoying.
he had what, 22 million from zip and 165 million from his share in paypal excluding money hes already spent? He could have saved a few million but he would have been dry compared to just keeping the money for something else. Just for this task alone, you can't develop a sealed Mars lander to support plant life and make 3 of them with landing gear for ~25 million dollars. That's on top of everything I mentioned before about the infrastructure and achieving the task getting it there safely.

>And in the end, let's not forget, he abandoned that plan in favor of one that directly makes him money and gives him even more fame.

Of fucking course he took the smarter route to get way more money, and get way more famous, you're missing the point.

He cares about the vision along side getting famous based on the ICBM story where he would have lost a majority, yes majority, (you can't do an even cheaper poo in the loo mission 3 times in a row for 25 million dollars) of his money to attempt to put a plant on Mars to help out NASAs budget. It would have made him famous but would not have offered a profit (unless someone wanted to buy space traveling plant containers) than if he just spent the money on developing regular space x with the ~100 million and then getting the connections, fame, and more business opportunities to grow.

>The Mars lander was the minimum viable product for him to leverage his wealth into fame in the neglected space arena. it served as an organizing principle for his initial investigations into and connection-making within the industry. But as he got further in, he saw better opportunities.

If you could do it 3 times for 25-40 million then I would agree with you.

>>8414218
>>8414337

But you can't do it for that little, it would have taken up a majority of his wealth and then he would have been left with not nearly enough to develop the rest of space x to make money by making their own rockets. He did choose the smart route which in the end did make him famous and much richer obviously, but along side that, that plan in the beginning showed he cared about the vision and not about profit because there would have been no way to have enough money left over, even being famous, to develop space x to make their own rockets and make a profit.

>This is how someone ends up with a $12 billion net worth in his mid-40s. It's not by trying to maximize the benefit for other people than himself.

Him wanting to make lots of money is not whats being debated, he obviously wants money and he doesn't get it by giving it away selflessly. What you don't seem to get, or can't get because you can't understand that it wouldn't have been a fraction of his wealth, it would have been a irreversible majority just for one goal that was to try and help humanity out a little bit before he found out he could do so so much better, is that he cares about the vision.
Looking at right now, we both know 2 things, he wants to grow his fame and his money ( to eventually help humanity is whats being debated ), we both agree. What you don't know, is that ( this is the part thats being debated that applies to his thoughts now ) the previous story shows he cares about the vision.

As clearly as I possibly can make this for you.

Past Musk : Wants to help out humanity in some way, check.

Wants to make a profit, not check.

Present Musk : Wants to help out humanity in some way, based on the past, check

Wants to make a profit, check ( He needs a lot more money in order to make even more money in order to help out the people other than himself long term much better than the original plan )

Future Musk : We'll both see in the years to come.

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>>8405792
dream is dead.

>>8414150
You can have energy wasted on fruitless bullshit, energy spent on short term pay back like penicillin which is fantastic and should be encouraged, and long term scientific advancement that shouldn't get anywhere close to the amount of energy that short term advancement gets, but should still exist for the fundamental seeds to help out in the future.

I wouldn't apply this to Africa or something though because they really do need every cent they can get in order to have enough short term benefits to grow enough to be able to afford more short term benefits along side long term benefits. They can't afford the (overwhelmingly larger than long term benefit price tag) bullshit but since we obviously can, I just wish people would complain about that first before they scrape the .4% bottom of the barrel for ''wasted tax payer dollurz'' that could be put to use on crack babies and homeless people.

>>8405681
Tesla is shite
Space X is awesome

i like his work ethic and his stance on risk. i don't particularly enjoy the cult around him... from pop culture ("real life tony stark") to his employees ("elon this, elon that, elon's dick, elon said"), it is fucking annoying.

>>8414337
First of all, when you have hundreds of millions of dollars, it doesn't just sit there being the same amount of money. The normal expectation is that it grows over time. While investment returns vary widely, it's usual to get in the neighborhood of 10% per year from money you're not doing anything else with. So unless he was in a rush to spend all of his money up front, or he was outspending his returns on other things, he would have more money when it came time to actually pay the bills on a big, multi-year project than he started with.

>you can't develop a sealed Mars lander to support plant life and make 3 of them with landing gear for ~25 million dollars.
I don't see why not. More importantly, I don't see why Musk wouldn't think he could.

An ICBM would send only a very tiny payload, and very small payloads are easier to land. An all-passive landing should be possible, like Beagle 2 used.

So there'd just need to be course correction on the way, and landing would be heat shield, parachute, air bags. The landed package would just be a camera, an antenna, some solar cells, some seeded soil, and an insulated transparent dome or ball.

There's no reason this all couldn't be put together by a half-dozen smart, experienced people working for a few years, with a few million dollars to spend on supplies and contract services.

>>8414447
>he would have more money when it came time to actually pay the bills on a big, multi-year project than he started with.

If he spent only around 10 million a year then maybe.

>I don't see why not. More importantly, I don't see why Musk wouldn't think he could.

Musk has said himself it would have used up most of his savings, he never had a 25 million dollar plan because that's not reasonable, but again, I guess he could just be lying.

>like Beagle 2 used
Which cost around 120 million dollars for the one shot?
I know they would be able to do it cheaper and its not the same payload but not down to home depot prices.

>There's no reason this all couldn't be put together by a half-dozen smart, experienced people working for a few years, with a few million dollars to spend on supplies and contract services.

Just like any project, it's fun to imagine the overly optimistic boiled down bullet point scenario where everything works out perfectly for half the price.

When things go to space, they need to be much better than the conventional route and the difficulty seeping in from the gaps between the bullet points become very real. They could make a glass dome with dirt and a cell phone for probably 100 dollars just like you could make a cheap pathfinder with an RC car and a solar panel but making a working Mars lander exponentially grows the price. Notice We've run out of numbers because neither of us really know what we're talking about and we're both close to being right with enough assumptions but I think we've reached the end and can call it quits.

I think the man is genuine in the belief that his companies are going to help humanity a little bit in the long run and that's part of why he does it and you believe he's only in it for the money and he's interested in it. I come from a place of naive hope that there's purpose past just money and fame and you from cynical realism that people are just greedy.

We'll just have to wait until Mars I guess.

>>8414775
>>like Beagle 2 used
>Which cost around 120 million dollars
These government programs are run by bureaucrats who measure their importance (and therefore, future career prospects) by the size of the budget they manage, not by the results they achieve.

Besides that, it was part of a much more ambitious mission launched on top of a medium-lift rocket, a Soyuz, not a converted ICBM. While it was relatively small at 33 kg landed mass, they tried to pack a ridiculous amount of science gear onboard, including a tiny tethered rover.

>for the one shot?
That would make it much more expensive, not less. It means they were designing it as if they only got one try. They put a huge effort into making it work (which in this specific example was all the more crushing when it didn't).

They basically need to make multiple copies of everything for testing anyway.

The idea that a much simpler device couldn't be done by a cost-sensitive private entity for a quarter of the money is silly.

>>8414844
>The idea that a much simpler device couldn't be done by a cost-sensitive private entity for a quarter of the money is silly.

Serious enough to get Musk to say the whole project would have cost around 100 million with no return.

Again, neither of us can actually list out every cost it would take to legitimately do the mission past optimistic or pessimistic bullet points.

The idea that a private company can shoe string together a real Mars lander (that wouldn't really be that much cheaper although simpler than the beagle excluding inefficient [which is also in of itself a heavily debatable amount of how inefficient they were, 20x more expensive, 2x more expensive?] government development of the entire mission) and successfully land it on Mars, up to 3 times, for ''about a quarter of his fortune'' is whats really silly.

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im glad he is pushing us forward

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Say what you want about the guy, but I admire his push to advance human spaceflight and he has put his money where his mouth is. He could have lived off his billions when he sold Paypal but he made two very risky ventures and they look like the can pay off.

SpaceX has already advanced booster technology and lower costs while the ULA sat on their ass not innovating because they could charge 200 million a launch.

I really hope they they succeed in their Mars plans.

When is Musk going to endorse Trump

>>8415125
Maybe you should go look up the actual amount of money he got from selling paypal
hint: it wasn't billions.

>>8415010
>tmw USA

>>8410897
>his theory that we live in a simulation is not even worth discussing

this