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You are here: Home / Open Threads / SpaceX Launch

Reader Interactions

106Comments

  1. 1.

    dmsilev

    Elon Musk would be much better off if someone, anyone, changed the password on his Twitter account and didn’t tell him what the new one was.

  2. 2.

    dmsilev

    They’ve started loading the propellant, so weather conditions are still in the “acceptable” band.

  4. 4.

    Cermet

    Musk is an idoit but apparently, knows enough to let people that really understand technical stuff do their thing. Guess that makes him a genius compared to the orange fart cloud.

  5. 5.

    dmsilev

    @leeleeFL: It’s a general statement. For instance, there was the time, during that kids-trapped-in-cave crisis, that he called one of the rescue people “pedo guy”. And that’s just one of many examples.

  6. 6.

    dmsilev

    @Cermet: He hired Gwynn Shotwell to actually run SpaceX. Besides having the perfect last name for the job, she’s also really really good at it.

  8. 8.

    Mike in NC

    @Cermet:

    Musk is an idoit but apparently, knows enough to let people that really understand technical stuff do their thing. Guess that makes him a genius compared to the orange fart cloud.

    Funny how Fat Bastard’s insane musings on drinking bleach or injecting Lysol into your veins went pretty much unreported on by the media. Had Obama said such outrageous things it would have been the subject of endless analysis for several weeks.

  10. 10.

    Elizabelle

    @Baud:   Great idea.  Checking that out now.  Was on the SpaceX youtube that dmsilev suggested.

    WaPost also has a video feed on its website.

  11. 11.

    geg6

    A former space geek during my childhood, I am doing all I can to pay no attention to this.  I was not a fan of the Space Shuttle program, though I do value the research done on the ISS.  But the Shuttle program just kind of sealed, for me, the decline of American ambition.  It was a symbol of that to me.  So I quit seeking out information about the U.S. space program.  I find Space X to be an even more ominous symbol.  I absolutely refuse to pay attention to it.  It’s not an American space program.  It’s Elon Musk’s space program.  And I try to boycott anything oligarchic, monomanic assholes like Musk do.

    Enjoy if you like but I’m out.  Unless you want to spend the whole thread bashing Musk.  That I’d stick around for.

  12. 12.

    Baud

    I’m a bad person, but I wouldn’t mind a one-day weather delay so Trump won’t be there.

    ETA: I didn’t realize my power.

  17. 17.

    Betty Cracker

    @Elizabelle: NASA live stream on YouTube. It’s sunny with some clouds on the left side of Florida. We probably won’t be able to see the rocket if it launches (except on YouTube like everyone else).

  18. 18.

    Elizabelle

    @Baud:   I feel the same. Although he can just run down the coast to Mar a Lago.  Is 143 miles from the Space Center.

    Not like Trump’s presence is required in DC.

  23. 23.

    Elizabelle

    @LuciaMia:   And the capsule too.  Looks Hollywood and Matt Damon-esque.

    It’s been so long since human flight.  (ETA:  As in the space shuttles.  Clearly, we’ve got astronauts up and back to the Space Station.  I am not up on space, much, as you can tell.)

    And scrubbed.

  26. 26.

    Roger Moore

    @Cermet:

    Musk is nowhere near as smart as he thinks he is, but that shouldn’t make you think he’s an idiot.  He has been successful in several different business ventures in very different areas, and that suggests he has some actual business acumen.  My impression is that he has some engineering skill too.

  27. 27.

    Baud

    The short time I was on the NASA channel, they did not feel the need to show Trump. 👍

  29. 29.

    Elizabelle

    We will meet here again Saturday, right?

    Same bat time, same bat channel.  Not.

  32. 32.

    Betty Cracker

    Wish some of that rain would land in our river. If it gets any lower, the cows from the ranch on the other side might decide to stampede through my yard.

  33. 33.

    Martin

    So, i work around a lot of really smart in their discipline people, and as a general rule, the smarter someone is at one particular thing, the less energy and brainpower they dedicate to everything else in their life. There are plenty of exceptions of course, but if you start with the idea that ‘this guy is the best in the world at <insert unbearably obscure thing>, therefore they probably have trouble finding their way home’ and work up from there, you avoid a lot of frustration and disappointment.

    I think of Trump as sort of a molester savant and it does help a bit to come at it from that angle.

    Musk is very good at R&D, that drops off rapidly to production, and falls into a black hole at appropriate social interaction and naming your child.

  34. 34.

    Elizabelle

    @Gin & Tonic:   Was correcting that even as you asked.  Completely forgot about the Space Station.

    @Baud:  All the more reason to watch NASA.

    How strange.  To live in a time of rockets to space, and our idiot in chief won’t even adopt a 17th century solution (a mask) to a pandemic.  Fucker.

  36. 36.

    Baud

    @Martin:

    the smarter someone is at one particular thing, the less energy and brainpower they dedicate to everything else in their life.

    True. I’m very smart when it comes to drafting blog comments.

  37. 37.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @dmsilev:

    Scrubbed. Try again on Saturday.

    So trump will have to cancel his tee time if he wants this photo op?

  38. 38.

    Cacti

    Don’t love the new space suits.

    And Elon Musk should volunteer for the first manned visit to the sun.

  40. 40.

    Benw

    Wait if masks make us wimpy unmanly men, then astronauts are the wimpiest of the weenies with their “helmets” and “spacesuits” and “life support systems”, those libtards

  44. 44.

    Martin

    @Roger Moore: He has really solid engineering design chops. But he fell flat on his face when it came time to move up from building one Tesla to a million.

    And yes, he’s even better at finding market opportunities and having the courage to go all-in after them.

    Steve Jobs was similar in terms of seeing the market opportunity and in his case later in life, having the discipline to steer a failing company toward them. But the guy got pancreatic cancer and tried to cure it with carrot juice, which, well, didn’t work despite the worlds best doctors around him telling him it wouldn’t work.

    It speaks to my often used Venn diagram of assholes and extremely successful people. A large circle of assholes  and  within that a tiny circle of extremely successful people (yes, I know Venn diagrams aren’t to scale, but most people don’t). If you have the kind of drive to reach the top of your field, you  are almost certainly sacrificing all sorts of things and people along the way. I think there are extremely few  counterexamples to this (Obama).

  48. 48.

    MomSense

    Sometime last week, next month, five years ago I think I saw a snippet about the State if California rejecting the name he and Grimes gave to their child.  Did I dream that?

     

    These launches make me think of Alain.  😞

    I’m going to check on my sourdough starter in his honor.

  50. 50.

    cope

    Glad they scrubbed because, 1) Trump was there and, B) in the back of my mind was a worry of launch being pushed for political expediency as per Challenger.  Also, too, it’s raining on me (sorry, Betty) and I would not have been able to see or photograph the launch.  Back to “Grant”…

  52. 52.

    Elizabelle

    For something that WILL launch this afternoon:

    Elizabeth Warren is doing an online town hall about Demand Safe Voting at 5:00 Eastern today.

    http://www.ElizabethWarren.com

    Elizabeth will be joined by Indivisible Co-Executive Directors Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin, Wisconsin Lt. Governor Mandela Barnes, and Voces de la Frontera. They’ll tell us how we can take action in every state to demand safe voting during the pandemic.

  57. 57.

    Ken

    @geg6: But the Shuttle program just kind of sealed, for me, the decline of American ambition.

    Technical ambition, yes. But you must admit that it was a triumph of realpolitik. IIRC components were manufactured in all 50 states and over 300 congressional districts.

  58. 58.

    Sab

    @Betty Cracker: Damn. In Ohio everything is flood stage. I should open up my rain barrels, because regardless of flooding, I expect two weeks from now we will start our new annual summer drought season.

  59. 59.

    Elizabelle

    @trollhattan:   Oh gawd, you’re right.  Glen Musk.  Ewwwww….  sounds like Dollar Store Axe.

    This is Elon’s 6th son.  He had five sons with his first wife (twins, and then triplets), divorce, and then married his second wife twice.

    And now the kid with the unpronounceable or just mysterious  name.

  60. 60.

    Sab

    We have a weird couple in our neighborhood with dozens of rain barrels and also lots of chicckens (urban here.) We didn’t know if they were extreme environmentalists  or normal survivalists until a black ATT salesman came through the neighborhood. They met him at the door with AR15s. I guess that answers that question. Survivalists.

  62. 62.

    Roger Moore

    @Martin:

    I think the idea that most successful people are assholes is one of the great misconceptions.  Monomania can be helpful to success, and it’s certainly possible to get ahead by stepping on the people around you.  But it’s very rare for someone to be extremely successful by themselves.  They get ahead through teamwork, and being nice, or at least tolerable, to the people around you is an important part of fostering teamwork.

  63. 63.

    Elizabelle

    OK.  Looks like Elon’s sons are named Kai, Damian, Griffin, Xavier, and Saxon.  The last one is kinda heading into Palin Baby Name Generator territory.

    His first son, who died in infancy, was named Nevada Alexander.

  64. 64.

    egorelick

    I suspected it would be cancelled as soon as I found out:

    1. There was a chance it could be.

    2. Trump and Pence were there.

    Like so many things, it’s just a nudge here or slight bump there that determines the outcome. Enough people fear/hate Trump that launching in his presence was enough to push the decision that way once there was a plausible reason.

  66. 66.

    Roger Moore

    @MomSense:

    Sometime last week, next month, five years ago I think I saw a snippet about the State if California rejecting the name he and Grimes gave to their child. Did I dream that?

    You did not dream it.  The State of California requires all baby names be spelled only with the 26 letters of the standard English alphabet.  They had to change the number in the baby’s name to Roman numerals.

  69. 69.

    Roger Moore

    @NotMax:

    California being California, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there were different rules for names for newborns and those for people who legally change their name later in life.

  70. 70.

    Martin

    @Roger Moore: I agree with that, but even there, you’ll favor colleagues over friends and family and life balance. And I don’t see many of the more successful individual pulling their colleagues up behind them. Somewhat, but someone has to be on top, get the photo op, do the interview, win the prize, etc. There are no relationships in my personal life as bitter as what I see among former colleagues where one career took off at the expense of others.

  72. 72.

    Uncle Cosmo

    Thread no doubt dead (technically, in suspended animation til Saturday) but I want to ask the dissembled multitude here – or at least that fraction who appreciate science fiction:

    When was the last time you read Robert A. Heinlein’s The Man Who Sold The Moon?

    If you haven’t ever read it, or haven’t for boocoo years, you supposedly can get a PDF here (free registration required – I haven’t tried this so don’t come screaming to me if it don’t work).

    Delos D. Harriman is the man in the title, an immensely successful tycoon, whose primary character flaw is his singular passion: in a world where no one has dared fly beyond low Earth orbit, he wants to go to the Moon.

    Harriman is as much like Musk as any character in a novel written 70 years ago has any right to be. He’s more of a businessman, less of a tech guy, but again, animated by a spacefaring passion.

    Heinlein presents D.D. sympathetically, compared with the pennypinching bottom-lined opposition inside his company and without – given the genre and the author, one would expect no less – but anyone older than, say, 18 reading about the old guy going through his machinations might suspect that – like Musk – there may be some, mmm, less than savory stuff afoot behind the scenes. That can happen when inconvenient reality gets in the way of a visionary. Other than that egregious unforced error re the “Pee Dough Guy”, and his push to keep the Tesla plants open, I don’t see much there. I certainly don’t see any drive to oppress, subjugate or immiserate  large swaths of humanity in the pursuit of EVs or Starships.

    And another thing: Let us dispel with the notion that more than a handful of our “captains of industry” deserved promotion above private first class. IIRC there was a study done comparing corporate performance with CEO compensation which found a strong negative correlation – a corp had an especially good year, the success was credited to its CEO who was richly rewarded for it, and next year it reverted to the mean, because the previous year’s outstanding performance had nothing to do with management & everything to do with dumb luck. Which is what most senior management traffics in – everyone wants to be the one holding the bottle when the lightning ambles by & begs to be caught. Most of them are dumb as a box of rocks.

    (Anyhow, put me down as someone who hopes Musk, flaws & all, gets the Starships flying & the Teslas on solid footing & the storage walls working. YMMV)

  73. 73.

    NotMax

    @Roger Moore

    Know for a fact he had the name changed before his son was born, so presumably the kid’s birth certificate includes the exclamation point.

  74. 74.

    Barbara

    @trollhattan: Baby name exhibitionism is not an attractive trait in anyone.  Glen might also hearken to John Glenn — an early astronaut and apparently an altogether wonderful human being.

  75. 75.

    Jeffro

    @Elizabelle: 

    Is he a Prince fan? He could do that unpronounceable glyph for his next kid’s name. That would redeem him ever-so-slightly as a human being.

  79. 79.

    laura

    Unless you want to spend the whole thread bashing Musk.  That I’d stick around for.

    Waves hand🖐 ooh, ooh, call on me! I’m still pretty confident that the new baby with the ×(**@>V£■ name will eventually seek some form of teenage retribution that will be splashed accross all the papers and end up a ripped from the headlines episode of Homicide SVU or SUV. It may also involve space.

  81. 81.

    Another Scott

    @Roger Moore:

    Obligatory:

    JOSEPH TARTARO NEVER meant to cause this much trouble. Especially for himself.

    In late 2016, Tartaro decided to get a vanity license plate. A security researcher by trade, he ticked down possibilities that related to his work: SEGFAULT, maybe, or something to do with vulnerabilities. Sifting through his options, he started typing “null pointer,” but caught himself after the first word: NULL. Funny. “The idea was I’d get VOID for my wife’s car, so our driveway would be NULL and VOID,” Tartaro says.

    The joke had layers, though. As Tartaro well knew, and as he explained in a recent talk at the Defcon hacker conference, “null” is also a text string that in many programming languages signifies a value that is empty or undefined. To many computers, null is the void.

    […]

    Sometimes it’s better not to try to be clever…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  83. 83.

    NotMax

    re: some of the above

    35 Outlawed Baby Names From Around the World

    Out Amir’s way:

    Parents will not be able to call their babies after animals, insects, fruit, vegetables or colours.

    Numbers are also not allowed, so little James Bonds cannot flaunt their 007 status on their ID cards.

    Other restrictions stop parents giving children royal or honorary titles as names or calling their little ones after Japanese cars. Source

  84. 84.

    Sab

    @Barbara: Yes, but he kept flying too late. Why do we let geriatric people fly way past their car licenses getting yanked. Look up James Imhoff, OK

  89. 89.

    Elizabelle

    @Yutsano:   Yeah, I saw that.  Fucker.

    Would not ever happen with a Democratic president.  As the majority of Americans voted for.

  90. 90.

    Baud

    @Yutsano: In this case, I don’t know that he’s wrong, although I also am confident his certification has an ulterior purpose unrelated to the truth.

  92. 92.

    Elizabelle

    @NotMax:   No little Mazda Miata Jones?  That’s harsh.

    I remember a baby in Washington, DC.  Name of Porsche Mercedes. Because she was murdered by her dad.

  93. 93.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Uncle Cosmo: I recall Heinlein approvingly depicts Harriman’s willingness to get other people killed in pursuit of his dream (and lots of space fans today like to grouse about how we don’t hold human life cheaply enough–I keep thinking of that whenever I see the anti-maskers around, and notice that Musk got into the “REOPEN AMERICA” nonsense too).

    There’s also the moment when Harriman realizes he’s going to have to launch over inhabited terrain and his solution is “Clear out Kansas.” I’m not sure this kind of audacity is really a good thing, though Heinlein clearly admires it.

    From a technical perspective, the most interesting thing about the story is the constraints Heinlein gave himself. In his Future History timeline, he’d already established that there are amazing nuclear “X-fuels” that would make a Moon rocket relatively easy to build (more or less what he imagined using in the Destination Moon script). But he seems to have wanted to play without a net and depict something more realistic, so at the outset of the story he has the plant (space station?) that produces the X-fuels blow up so that D. D. Harriman is forced to use chemical rockets. What he describes is pretty close to some designs von Braun and others were throwing around at the time, pretty technically plausible for the era and the genre. It’s one of the few stories about the first Moon flight that even comes close to accurately depicting how gigantic an endeavor it would be.

  95. 95.

    TheOtherHank

    So I went and read Elon’s wikipedia page (which I assume is under 24 hour monitoring by Musk-ovites (?), Elon-ophiles(?), something) to make sure that no untoward edits happen), here’s my tl;dr of it.

    Musk grew up rich in in South Africa (family gold (or maybe emerald) mine). He came to N America for college and graduated with a physics degree. During the 90s dotcom boom he started a company that made what-to-do-when-your-here web pages for newspapers in various cities. This company got bought by Compaq (remember them?) for $300M. Elon took his his share and invested on one of the early online banks. That bank merged with another online bank that had already purchased PayPal. The merged banks basically became PayPal. eBay bought PayPal for $4B. Elon took his share and took over Tesla. After that he took over SpaceX.

    So the only thing he actually did was write some webpage software in the mid to late 90s and cash out at the right time. Everything else is using his money to buy cools toys and then make up things to put on his resume (automotive engineer, rocket scientist, etc).

  96. 96.

    Math in PA

    @Uncle Cosmo:  I’m afraid that he’s basically a corporate egomaniac like many others. There’ve been repeated safety violations on his plants because he doesn’t like yellow, for example. He’s a fairly evil man, willing to prize his particular likes and dislikes above the safety of his fellow human beings, and that doesn’t even get into his tendency to try to shove actual experts out of the way in crisis situations.

  97. 97.

    Yutsano

    @Baud: Right now the Chinese Communist Party has passed the law. Hong Kong is protesting mightily against it. But Hong Kong isn’t quite dead yet. I’m certain it has to do with pleasing President Toadface in some capacity.

  98. 98.

    Cheryl from Maryland

    The launch of SpaceX was foiled by my deceased mother, Bertha, as her namesake, Tropical Storm Bertha caused the weather delay.  She was a fervent Democrat.

  103. 103.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Matt McIrvin: Just FTR, Destination Moon (with RAH as one of the script’s 3 co-authors) is IMO a good deal closer to Rocket Ship Galileo, Heinlein’s first juvenile, from 1947. (I have a library hardback copy on my shelf, otherwise pristine – it was the first novel of his I read, at age 10, & made me a fan for life.) The Galileo was a long-distance chemical “mail rocket” converted to atomic propulsion (fission reactor boiling zinc which was then expelled through the nozzle for thrust).

  106. 106.

    glc

    @Cosmo

    Around 1960, I’d say – just the once. Enjoyed it at the time, but I don’t feel a need to reread it.

    Just read Emma Newman’s Planetfall series, going through the current crop of Hugo nominees.

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