A conversation with Elon Musk about Starship

What Hacker News said

Recommends simonh · 2019-10 · on “Solving the Wrong Problem (2011)”

The Everyday Astronaut had a great interview with Elon Musk after the Starship presentation a few days ago. They spent a bit of time talking about how much progress the team had made in very little time, and Musk's take was that it took them an awful long time to finally ask the right questions - years. Once they had formulated exactly what they were trying to do and what the actual relevant constraints were, finding the right solutions and making very rapid progress was actually not all that complicated. He talked about the tendency really good engineers have to spend a lot of effort optimising the design of things that shouldn't be there at all. Finally he banged on hard about always quest

Recommends blakes · 2019-10 · on “Are Aerospike Engines Better Than Traditional Rocket Engines?”

Here's an interesting interview the author did with Elon Musk: [this video] Fun to see how interested Elon is with the engineering of rockets, looks like he could talk for days if he had the time.

Recommends jjoonathan · 2020-08 · on “Chrysler's Radical Space Shuttle Design”

Agreed! It's also worth highlighting the bit where he asks Elon Musk: [this video] I've internally asked this question so many times, like, guys, shouldn't we maybe do an aerospike? Musk focused on the high combustion efficiency of traditional combustion chambers, combined with the high efficiency of having two stages, as the reason why they won out. Jettisoning irrelevant fuel-containing mass as you go is great for efficiency and as a bonus it makes it easy to put sea-level-optimized nozzles on the bottom stage and vacuum-optimized nozzles on the top stage.

Cites Tepix · 2019-10 · on “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: 40 years of parody and predictions”

Elon Musk is also a huge fan of Douglas Adams, as he mentioned again in his latest interview with Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut: [this video]

Cites jv22222 · 2019-10 · on “Broken”

> The biggest problem is communication. No one fucking communicates. Elon Musk says something interesting about this here: "Product errors reflect organizational errors." [this video] He's specifically talking about how the product subsystems are effectively mapped out by the product departments and that they should try to interface with each other with minimal constraints. But, my take was that there needs to be a LOT of communication between departments and an ongoing debate between them as well. Edit: The more that I think about it... This might a big reason why Musk companies defy the odds, and why it is so difficult for incumbents to catch up. The over the air updates of Tesla are a good exa

Cites ilkkao · 2019-11 · on “Tesla Cybertruck”

In the end of this video [this video] he is more relaxed that I have ever seen. I don't think there is any acting in his presentations

Cites canada_dry · 2019-11 · on “Tesla Cybertruck”

Thanks, you're right. At the end, when he's talking geek-to-geek - so to speak - his thought process and speech seem much more aligned. [this video]

Cites tim333 · 2019-12 · on “Fast”

Also Gmail 1 day for the first prototype. An an aside I found Musk interesting talking about how they get the Starship type projects to progress quickly: [this video] >And one of the most fundamental errors made in advanced developments is to stick to a design even when it is very complicated, and to not strive to delete parts and processes. etc