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[+] -7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (5 children)
  • [–] 11 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    If you said this a decade ago, sure. But at this point there have been so many examples of musk misunderstanding fundamental concepts in areas that he likes to pretend to be an expert on that he doesn't get benefit of the doubt. The dude is only good at being rich and bullying people. He has no engineering acumen, be it software, vehicles, or spacecraft.

    He's good at repeating things that smart people have told him, but as soon as he is asked to think rather than simply regurgitate, he's useless.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago*

    Eh, maybe that's fair. Especially this:

    doesn’t automatically mean he’s never been an engineer.

    Maybe he was quite knowledgeable... On the other hand, I thought his old 'Mars Colonization' talk was bonkers too. I can't remember what year it started, but it sounded like he had little understanding of the impracticality.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

    He still is involved with engineering things, people just want to think he's not so they can think less of him.

    E.g with Starship it was his decision (that he had to convince everyone on) to use stainless steel for Starship. If I recall correctly, his current focus is on the raptor engine.

    So far SS seems to have been working well for them, with the ship surviving some brutal re-entries even with missing heat shield tiles.

    This is the progress they're making on Raptor. And for anyone that doesn't know, Raptor are the first Full-Flow Staged Combustion Cycle (FFSCC) engines ever flown. A lot of the reductions you're seeing between the engines is from moving to 3D printing all those channels within the tubes.

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