SpaceX just showed us what every day could be like in spaceflight

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/03/in-less-than-24-hours-spacex-launched-3-rockets-and-tested-another/

by BerislavLopac • 2 years ago

77 23 2 years ago

Good leadership

danpalmer• 2 years ago

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. SpaceX's leadership from Gwynne Shotwell has been truly excellent. I've also heard that many other leaders have had to be quite influential in order to steer the company in a productive direction while receiving constant dictats from a major shareholder. I've heard the Starlink group is perhaps a bit of a difficult area where that shareholder has too much influence and that it lacks leadership, but other than that the company sounds well run.

rkangel• 2 years ago

It's also good leadership of an industry by SpaceX. Other companies are following in their trail.

kaliqt• 2 years ago

It's Elon that's doing it.

D13Fd• 2 years ago

He’s getting downvoted because people are reading his comment as “thanks Elon Musk, our conservative hero” rather than “thanks Gwynne Shotwell.” I don’t know how he meant it.

jhgb• 2 years ago

You mean the "major shareholder" who intervened in the Starlink division when progress was going nowhere, and suddenly progress was going somewhere?

On that note, it's funny how some people attribute results to different people depending on whether the results are good or bad, with no consistency at all regarding their responsibility.

carabiner• 2 years ago

It's crazy that he almost became CEO of Apple when Jobs died.

LeonM2• 2 years ago

SpaceX's CEO is Gwynne Shotwell, and she did not almost become CEO of Apple.

mihaaly• 2 years ago

Why to emphasize on leadership alone?

bell-cot• 2 years ago

Looking at the past half-ish century of space launch, good leadership* seems to be the by-far scarcest resource.

It's also possible that honeybadger1 only wanted to make a brief comment. Vs. writing an essay about the myriad causal factors and millions of people who played at least some small role in SpaceX's success.

*Using a "good" != "profit maximizing" convention.

7e• 2 years ago

The progress is driven by the willingness of SpaceX to constantly run at a loss, and take in more cash to incinerate on the regular. This allows it to run bleeding edge but money-losing programs that that other companies considered but rejected. This was also Tesla's model.

SpaceX has had 34, THIRTY FOUR, funding rounds. Usually 3-4 per year. They cannot operate except this way. Most investors and boards would balk at this mode of operation.

It's not good leadership, though. It's easy to spend money that others aren't willing to spend to achieve results that that other companies aren't willing to pay the price for. Progress while being capital efficient is true leadership.

bradgessler• 2 years ago

Wait what? It’s not good leadership because they’re burning lots of cash? How are those two related?

That’s only makes sense in a world where SpaceX stockholders have mandated SpaceX operate at a profit. I don’t think that’s what’s happening—investors know they’re putting money into a highly risky R&D project that could take years to pay off, if ever.

So far they’ve gotten Falcon, Starlink, and Starship out of the deal. I’d say it takes pretty good leadership to achieve those results.

Meanwhile NASA’s Artemus is expected to cost $93b and so far they’ve only had one launch.

johnea• 2 years ago

Well sure, it's gonna be so awesome to have 1,300,000 objects in low earth orbit!

What could go wrong? Launch baby launch...

mlindner• 2 years ago

Well the worst case is a cascade of collisions if everyone gives up trying to avoid debris. But it'd only leave low earth orbit unusable, othernorbits would be still usable.

funcDropShadow• 2 years ago

You just have to navigate to other orbits without passing through lower orbits.

mrlonglong2• 2 years ago

Journalists irritate me greatly when they specify imperial units yet don't always bother to give the metric equivalents. For example 10 million pounds is about 4,500 tons, or roughly 4,500,000 kg. Metric units makes far more sense anyway.

delichon• 2 years ago

Would you enable an algorithm built into the browser, or extension, that standardizes the units to your preference, but lets you see the original value with a click?

I'm hoping we see an ecosystem of such services emerge.

mrlonglong2• 2 years ago

That would be nice,if an extension does that.

SpaceX just showed us what every day could be like in spaceflight

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