Has anyone else lost their enthusiasm for SpaceX? I want to be excited for what's going on, but I just can't anymore, much though I love rockets. I mean, I watched, but I was hardly as enthusiastic as I was during the early Falcon 9 days, or even the early BFS days. It was especially hard to see Musk holding the child he's illegally avoiding service for and keeping from his mother.
I wish the boards of SpaceX and Tesla had the guts the board of OpenAI had.
I'm not even that worried about Musk's involvement purely because he just doesn't seem to have anything substantive to do with the company anyway, and hasn't for a loooooong time. Like, SpaceX from an engineering perspective has been doing the right things - and has explicitly not been doing a lot of things Musk said - for a decade or so.
But the working culture and general techbro attitude towards everything is very grating. SpaceX has recently become kind of the anti-aerospace company. Normal rocket companies are actually really environmentally conscious (typically being staffed by a lot of EO people), but SpaceX just fucks up major and rare nature reserves without any mention of it caring. They source their materials from the open market, with a few elements being notoriously from dodgy sources. They have a terrible high-pressure work culture, which from a working hours perspective isn't unheard of (academia isn't great either) but this is a few steps beyond working at NASA or Boeing or ULA.
If your goal is to change the world, but in the process you ruin the world you live on, I don't know if you're really that altruistically trying to do good. Leading by example is the way to go.
Musk is undeniably an asshole (and that is probably going to keep getting worse) but his title of chief engineer is deserved.
He doesn't need to know the most about every single discipline required for SpaceX but he definitely knows enough about each of them to shape the vision and make tough calls. Sometimes he gets those calls wrong but usually not.
As an actual aerospace engineer, he gets a lot wrong or is obviously ignorant of the engineering process behind choosing something. He can bullshit his way through rocket dynamics 101 but that's basically it. This is fine by the way, I don't expect a CEO or somebody so far removed from the process to have any real knowledge on the matter. Every facet of rocket engineering is something you can dedicate your entire life to and still find new stuff, and in a lot of cases the design space is just really large and there is no obvious best way to do something - you just have to work through the details or try stuff.
The thing SpaceX needs to be lauded for, and really the innovation of all innovations here, is that they're
actually doing stuff. NASA, JAXA, ESA, they've all had really good rockets that even rival SpaceX's cost and surpass their safety record - but they don't exist anymore. NASA's and ULA's attempts at a new launch platform has been stymied, for political, funding and actual engineering failure reasons. Meanwhile, SpaceX has been steadily progressing. Still very slow, especially compared to the 50s and 60s, but at least stuff is getting done.
