I think it's a shame that people have bundled Elon into the Bezos / Branson battle. What Musk is doing is far more useful (and has been for a while now) than the measuring contest that's happening between the other two.
Two questions regarding Musk that people should ask more often:
1. If the public money being thrown at SpaceX were redirected, what could NASA (or other private companies) do with it?
2. If the administrators of NASA collected $80B (combined) in salary and bonuses last year, largely from public coffers, would that be considered reasonable?
Isn't the public money being thrown at SpaceX through NASA?
NASA knows exactly what they're buying. They've just become such a bureaucratic, top-heavy, risk-adverse organization (by Congressional design) that it's a better deal to outsource pieces to SpaceX.
They've always outsourced most of their stuff, to Boeing et al. Now they have a company to outsource stuff to that is 10x more efficient and will actually invent new systems.
I would say the difference is fixed-cost vs cost-plus contracts. Paying for the development or paying for the result with less constraints on how it is achieved. Look how hard Boeing has stumbled trying fixed-cost with Starliner.
Except for bigger, better more efficient engines :
Although Raptors are a great achievement, their design if used alone is not made for bigger loads. SpaceX is stacking them now for larger ships. Hopefully the whole system will prove reliable on higher flights, and a different design won't be needed.
I don’t like the endorsement of coups. I’ve seen plenty of other boring ordinary people also endorse coups and other political violence in much the same way as that tweet did, so (sadly) that isn’t a differentiator.
(That said, while I’d like to be part of the first wave of Mars colonists, my concern with his politics make me not want it if he’s in charge of much more than the logistics).
I do believe that most people don't endorse coups. In fact, I suspect most people actively condemn them, or at least most people who actually have an opinion on the matter. His words have the power to swing this in the other direction.
Regardless, even if the proportions are inverted, his words have the power to strengthen the pro-coup numbers, which is not the same as keeping baseline humanity numbers and certainly makes a difference.
In any case, by condemning an entire country of roughly 11 million people to live under the rule of a foreign-backed government against the people's will is always going to be a net negative, regardless of other endeavours.
Since this is a matter of opinion (what's positive, what's negative, how much weight each action has on either direction, etc. is very much subjective), it seems like we simply disagree.
