I might have been lacking coffee when I wrote my first comment 🙂 I re-wrote it in a later comment.

SpaceX and the other big space companies wouldn’t exist without NASA and/or the military. NASA have sent quite some money towards SpaceX - I think NASA is quite satisfied with their investement.

You can find videos with him discussing rocket engines in details - he’s spent years working together with a lot of brilliant car and rocket engineers. He (again, not alone, of course) somehow managed to build a successful car company and a successful Space company. Both things are by all accounts very difficult. Not likely to be done by a stupid person.

I fully agree he’s a jerk and I would never want to work for him, but that doesn’t mean he’s stupid or that I can’t be impressed by what SpaceX has achieved.

Yes, I’m fully aware of it. Very cool, but it never got any further than the prototype stage AFAIK - SpaceX made it work and has lowered the price to orbit considerably and the rest of the industry is scrambling to catch up.

Scientists are really looking forward to Starship because of the incredible potential it provides. If SpaceX manages to get it working, it’ll likely change space exploration in a massive way. I find that quite exciting.

Of course he didn’t do it himself, but according to people that actually worked closely with him, he’s not exactly stupid and actually knows quite a bit about both.

Why he’s behaving so stupidly and handling Twitter so badly, I have no idea - he’s really a jerk.

I have added an update to my previous post. I think we just misunderstand each other.

Of course there are people believing all kinds of crazy shit, like the Earth being flat. I don’t see how that is relevant?

Von Braun was amazing.

Okay, trying to say it in another way: I don’t think many people thought SpaceX had much chance of success or becoming basically the #1 in the industry, far ahead of everyone else.

I don’t buy your sci-fi argument. Do people also think time travel will be possible?

I’ll try to formulate my comments better in the future - English isn’t my native language.

I have no idea whether hyperloop is impractical/impossible to build and no intention of defending Elon Musk, but nobody thought landing a rocket was possible and SpaceX has since made it seem like a simple and easy thing. Starship seems completely bonkers to me too, but I wouldn’t be surprised if SpaceX ends up completely changing space exploration with it.

Edit: I wrote “nobody” in my comment, clearly some did, but my point was that the rest of the industry clearly didn’t expect them to have any success.

Will take years before we get rid of Lightning here. The wife have an iPhone 13 mini and she’ll likely keep that until it dies.

I also don’t understand how anyone can be offended by this. Keeping YT running no doubt is quite expensive.