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Uranus is such a cool and unique planetary system, can't wait till we go there again!
Graham retweeted
American glass. American metal. American silicon. American batteries. American workers. American everything.
BlueChip is the first American computer in decades. Don't let anyone lie to you and say it can't be done.
Designed in California. Built in America.
In a comment to the FAA, SpaceX says it wants to launch 10,000 times per year.
The FAA asked for input on where to build new spaceports and how to give rocket launches priority in US airspace. They're preparing for 10,000 launches a year by 2035.
SpaceX replied that rockets aren't the bottleneck anymore, the FAA's outdated air traffic processes are. They created their own airspace tool (Cleared) that most major US airlines already get for free.
They also noted that Starbase Louisiana is designed for ~30 launches and reentries PER DAY (!!)
Graham retweeted
Replying to @alexgibneyfilm
Oh, why not.
Haven't had a chance to watch the movie yet but have heard you on a couple of podcasts and find this line of criticism the most confusing.
It's not difficult to find employees across the companies who will talk at length about him making engineering decisions. I've seen this happen at Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink firsthand.
Mostly, though, I tend to think of the companies as being built by the thousands of employees and as group engineering exercises. There are tons of choices that have to be made and things that have to be fixed and resources marshalled. The top end of these tasks has quite often fallen to Musk.
People had pretty much given up on electric cars until Tesla came along. You will argue that Martin and Marc had the idea for Tesla, which is fine. But it would not be a going concern without the engineering fixes that took place to finally get the Roadster over the line and then the tons of choices that turned the Model S into a very surprising success.
This totally revitalized the electric car industry and made it a thing again. It changed the automotive industry worldwide.
Many people made many engineering choices along the way. Musk included. There are just too many stories and anecdotes to deny this.
SpaceX is perhaps the most dramatic example. People had tried and failed to build a commercial rocket company before. They have tried and failed since. Blue Origin and SpaceX started almost the same year, but only one of the two companies has changed the dynamics of the worldwide aerospace industry and our access to space. Many people deserve credit for this, but it's hard to argue that Musk was not the driving force behind a great deal of what SpaceX has achieved. SpaceX had far less resources than Blue Origin.
The engineering accomplishments of SpaceX are pretty nuts. The US aerospace industry would be in terrible shape without them. We'd be unable to put humans in space, behind China on all fronts and very, very slow to do launches.
Space is one of the last manufacturing and engineering strongholds for the US. Is this entirely because of Musk? Certainly not. Did he push the company forward on engineering? Certainly yes.
Neuralink has a great, great deal still to prove. But it took products that were trapped in acamedia and advanced them dramatically. I would argue that this does not happen without the engineering pattern matching Musk has done across these other two industries. He pushed changes on semiconductor, materials, robotics and implant design.
It's important to ask all these other questions about his empire and power and his evolution over time. And you're a tremendous filmmaker.
This will no doubt come off as cheerleading. All I can say is that Elon and I have had a very tumultous relationship, and he's been plenty unkind to me at times. I don't really have a need to speak up here.
Me writing this comes more from a place of confusion than anything else.
The products are all very real, and there's a common denominator across them. It's difficult for me to see them as lucky accidents, particularly when rivals trying to do similar things have struggled so badly.
All of these things are so difficult to build. Like verging on impossible.
Why do you fixate on the engineering thing when there are so many other more real avenues to explore?
Graham retweeted
The moral case for capitalism is that your life belongs to you. Your work, your savings and your plans don’t become somebody else’s property because they have a moving speech about how they’d use them.
Graham retweeted
This graph is about to be absurd. 100,000 tons, even 1 million tons per year in the next decade or 2.
Graham retweeted
SpaceX is so important and relevant to not only spaceflight history but to history that it caused the entire nation of China revaluate their entire space program learning from SpaceX and is now replicating their business and launch models instead of NASA’s.
Graham retweeted
i have been steadily banging the drum on domestic transformer production since 2023, and now, we have resolute grid. the last time an american company fully designed and built these was in the late 80s. so excited to see this come roaring back. incredible work!
They would try. But if SpaceX were destroyed, the future civilizations of the solar system would view history through a Chinese lens, and the Chinese respect SpaceX. So I don’t think Western losers would succeed, because the West itself ends up a backwater in that scenario.
Replying to @Graham_117
The people who would seize SpaceX would have no qualms with rewriting history, either.
Yes, I'm aware that communists fantasize about seizing and liquidating successful businesses and making everyone poorer.
But that wouldn't change what I'm saying. SpaceX has *already* earned an indelible place in spaceflight history by this point, nothing can change that now.
And the sci-fi writers were 100% correct. SpaceX will always be a major part of spaceflight history by this point, even it disappeared tomorrow (which it won't -- in fact its main businesses and technologies aren't close to their full maturity yet).
Craziest first launch of a crewed spacecraft ever. I say "ever" because with advances in automation we're never again going to put crew on the first launch of an unprecedentedly complex, first of its kind spacecraft. Huge respect to Young and Crippen.
Graham retweeted
“Space fans” who don’t understand SpaceX and Tesla’s economics or care about exploration beyond a cute NASA mission every decade can’t comprehend why SpaceX must build an economy in orbit to fund real expansion.
A century from now, they’d still be content launching cute telescopes and LARPing astronomy while humanity remains trapped on Earth. Now, don't get me wrong, I love space science, but science alone isn’t exploration. We have to build.
The original NASA wasn’t filled with men content with scientific missions, but pioneers who dreamed of building civilization among the stars. They tried with everything they had and made it to the Moon with 1960s technology. They’d be ecstatic to see what SpaceX is achieving today.











































