this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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Are those examples actually his initiative, or him championing someone else's idea?
Reusing f9, landing F9 on barge, and Stainless steel were his initiatives. The SS one was a particularly hard win for him with a lot of internal push back.
Catching Starship on the chopsticks might have been an idea he heard outside of SpaceX, but that he then championed, again to a lot of internal push back, I'm not 100% about it being an external to spacex idea though.
Edit clarity and below
Those are just examples though. And I'm sure there are times as you suggest that people suggest a difficult idea that he then champions as well.
That he can champion these radical things, his idea or not, is still the key point of his leadership that will be lost.
For example, someone must have suggested they use a full-flow staged combustion fuel cycle for raptor. He had to sign off on that. No one had ever designed and flown a engine like this before. The russians came closest making one, but never flew it. The predecessor to this engine in the 60s or whenever, NASA didn't even think it was physically possible to make until the Russians made it.
The main point is, you need a crazy person to have crazy ideas. Even if 95% of his ideas are shot down, the last 5% are still crazy shit nobody else would thought was possible and never bother to seriously pay some engineers to try it if he wasn't in a leadership position.
Without him, there will be much less crazy, but both the good and bad kind. I fear the day SpaceX just becomes another Boeing.
Seriously, just landing rockets was laughed off as a stupid waste of time by all the industry incumbents just 6 years ago. That was a crazy stupid Elon Musk idea even dumber than the cybertruck at the time, and look where we are now.
Elon founding spacex in the first place had people laughing at him and the thought of him destroying all his wealth.