
Elon Musk Shows off the Dragon Capsule, Back From Space (video) - thenextcorner
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/06/14/2032230/elon-musk-shows-off-the-dragon-capsule-back-from-space-video
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confluence
Cue comments about how Elon Musk is doing so much more with his money than
everyone else, and how SpaceX/Tesla Motors/SolarCity are so much more valuable
than anything else.

Cue complaints about how no one works on hard problems any more, and that
everyone is just chasing
instagram/facebook/twitter/groupon/zynga/social/local/mobile.

Forget that Elon Musk started an advertising/publishing company in 1995-1997,
intelligently riding the bubble, and then created X.com (a more complex
Mint.com), which he then merged with Confinity to create PayPal (from where he
was essentially fired - unfortunately).

Forget that battery tech wasn't useful enough until just over 5 years ago (not
nearly dense/cheap enough), and how we needed the massive production increases
in laptop battery production for Tesla to make sense. Also forget that NASA
had 0 use for SpaceX until the Space Shuttle program was shutdown - which is
curiously lined up with the COTS program. Also forget that Solar panels
required massive production gains thanks to China which only occurred within
the past 5 years. Finally, ignore the fact that he would never have been able
to do anything without the money from a stupid email payments thing.

Big problems are awesome. Little problems are better.

Everyone starts small. Even Elon (a personal hero of mine and a man I deeply
respect).

Start on new small things, work hard, and TIME your entry/exit with extreme
precision. Malcolm Gladwell says a lot of things which are "truthy", but his
Outliers book was right on the money.

"Big things have small beginnings"
(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB52xyaY4kk>).

~~~
carbocation
Your core message was pretty fantastic, and with a different tone it could be
even better, and better received.

~~~
confluence
Felt like I had to get it off my chest. My sincere apologies for the ranty
tone everybody.

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erikpukinskis
As a decade-long reader of Slashdot, who transitioned almost completely to HN
several years ago, it's remarkable how good the visible comments on /. seem
after a long absence.

On discussions of sufficient size, because of the depth-first nature of HN I
almost inevitably bail out around the 2000 pixel mark. I just don't want to
wade through that much garbage, and that's about as much space as it takes for
HN threads to devolve into a pointless tête-à-tête these days.

I think when I switched to HN, there basically _weren't worthless comments_ ,
but those days appear to be over. The transition here wasn't noticeable, but
going back feels like a breath of fresh air.

~~~
vidarh
I'd suspect the current state of Slashdot is helped by Slashdot not being the
"in" thing anymore too. A lot of the noise-makers have moved on, or aren't
finding the site in the first place any more.

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Nevaeh
Thank you. It's such a refreshing sight as just 3 months ago, Elon was visibly
quite disappointed in this video:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJnW7vtqaf4&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJnW7vtqaf4&feature=related#t=11m40s)

2 months later, the Dragon successfully docked with the space station.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjuvIlskUf4#t=7m20s> Just look at Elon's
excitement at the 9:36 mark of this video as well as all of SpaceX employee's
enthusiasm. This was truly a huge success despite the challenging odds.

Looking forward to the future Grasshopper mission. Perhaps it will fail at its
first few attempts just like the Falcon1, but with Elon's determination and
his excellent team of engineers, I believe they can do it. They have already
proven themselves during the darkest times in SpaceX history. Skip to [38:30]
to hear it from Elon himself. [http://www.bloomberg.com/video/73460184-elon-
musk-profiled-b...](http://www.bloomberg.com/video/73460184-elon-musk-
profiled-bloomberg-risk-takers.html) And his reaction after Falcon9
successfully launched on the very first try. [39:12] All that hardship and
pain, totally worth it.

We will be victorious, indeed.

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rwhitman
Weirdly enough the thing I'm fixated on in this video is the fact that he's
meeting with NASA at a press event dressed in a t-shirt.

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dhughes
When did Slashdot get TV?

~~~
kristopolous
yeah, that's totally the biggest news here for me. Is there actually a decent
half hour video program of technology news that's not just a beauty pageant
for new consumer electronics?

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someperson
> beauty pageant for new consumer electronics

That's a good way to describe it. There's been a lot of crappy 30 minute tech
shows, with CNET TV (has local versions produced in suprisingly many
countries) being the latest one I've been exposed to (and one of the worst.)

The same was once true of game-review shows. But in Australia at least, the
show "Good Game" (and the for-kids spinoff "Good Game Spawn Point") have
completely amazed me with it's quality and the hosts being the kind of people
who would watch the show.

Sorry for the long-winded post, but I find it hard to articulate the huge
shift that happens going from a technology show that's basically shows paid-
for advertising to ones that are GOOD.

I hope somebody can make the weekly 20-30 minute show that I crave, but can't
articulate :)

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mkramlich
This video reminds me of another of Elon's strengths, beyond just a technical
mind and an entrepreneurial mind: he's very well-spoken, and he's very
charismatic -- and it comes off as very natural, so it helps to close the gap
with his audience whenever he speaks. He doesn't come off as some egghead
academic or engineer -- though clearly he can think like one. Instead he talks
like he's a friend speaking casually and calmly, off-the-cuff, with a mixture
of what you might call British-style humility. But backed by confidence and a
sense of persistance. One of his repeated phrases across many interviews is
that he's determined to make X thing happen, and he's confident he can, that
they can. If they can't make something happen the first time perfectly out of
the gate, then they'll learn, adjust and try again until they do.

He probably has a one-in-a-million combination of both a strong technical
mind, a strong business sense, and strong personal charisma. There are a ton
of folks out there that have maybe one of those things, and rarely two, but
it's extremely hard to find all three. Plus he scored big early with Zip2 and
PayPal. Arguably this fourth thing -- a huge war chest to draw from, beginning
in the late 90's or so -- has made him even more rare. Indeed, a Tony Stark of
his age.

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wissler
Don't miss seeing the animation toward the end of the video.

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minikomi
The first instance of that landing would be quite something to witness!

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frankydp
I would drive any distance to see a vstol landing of an suborbital or orbital
vehicle. Talk about game changing.

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mkramlich
Agreed. If you'd like to cheat and get a sneak preview of what it could be
like, at least the last leg, go dig up the Armadillo Aerospace videos of their
capsule VTOL launch/land successes. As a thumbnail argument, if we've seen
Armadillo do just the VTOL launch/land part, and we've seen SpaceX do the
rocket launch & parachute splashdown part, it's not hard to imagine the
engineering equivalent of smooshing those two solution spaces together into a
single entity which can accomplish both.

I will be as giddy as a lunch table of teen girls at recess when I see SpaceX
pull this off.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Armadillo, Blue Origin, and Masten (and the DC-XA before them) have all been
working on rocket powered VTVL flights and have done sub-scale test flights.
It's a technology that just plain makes sense, especially now that computers
are so cheap and so fast. Perhaps in 20 or 30 years it will be so common and
routine that a lot of people will think it's a natural part of spaceflight and
wonder how it could possibly be done any other way.

