Today's huge surprise

[james_davis_nicoll]

Space Poyais dies

Comments

[glaurung]

Elon Musk is, sadly, a true believer in his own bullshit. Hence his boring company, despite everyone who knows any fucking thing about mass transit telling him he's deranged. Hence all this obsession with really huge rockets that can lift enough shit to take him to Mars.

The thing is, spacex is not publicly traded, and so he's had to channel all of that mars-madness into building real rockets that actually work. His company is well on its way to becoming a major player in the international launch market, and unlike all the other space mad billionaires out there, he has actually built a reusable booster system. I am sure that his BFR will, when it finally exits from the prototype stage, be a real rocket that can lift real cargoes into orbit and then land for re-use. Even if it never actually gets used to send people to Mars, he has accomplished something vitally important to all future space endeavours -- he's created a real, working, reusable first stage booster, and looks to be on the way to building another, much larger one. Thereby kicking all the other makers of boosters squarely in the ass. Launch costs are going down, which means space exploration is going to become far more affordable, thanks to his madness.

[mishalak]

He may believe it on some level, but it is also part of his spin machine. Whenever there is bad financial news about Tesla he makes some *big announcement* regarding Mars or shows off some new footage. I suspect he sits on his vaporware stories until he needs one to distract from something else.