Elon Musk Teases Reddit With Bad Answers About BFR Rocket (reddit.com) 100
Long-time Slashdot reader Rei writes:
On Saturday evening, Elon Musk took questions in a Reddit AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) concerning SpaceX's new design for the BFR (Big F* Rocket). But unlike the 2016 IAC conference where many audience questions seemed to be trolling Musk, this time the tables were turned. Asked why Raptor thrust was reduced from 300 tons to 170, Musk replied, "We chickened out." He responded to a statement about landing on the moon by quoting Bob the Builder, while responding to a user's suggestion about caching internet data from Mars by writing simply "Nerd." A question as to whether BFR autogenous pressurization would be heat-exchanger based, Musk replied that they planned to utilize the Incendio spell from Harry Potter -- helpfully providing a Wikipedia link for the spell.
A technical question about the lack of a tail? "Tails are lame." A question about why the number of landing legs was increased from 3 to 4? "Because 4." After one Redditor observed "This is one bizarre AMA so far," Musk replied "Just wait..." While Musk ultimately did follow up some of the trolling with some actual responses, the overall event could be best described as "surreal".
To be fair, Musk provided some serious answers. (And his final comment ended with "Great questions nk!!") But one Redditor suggested Musk's stranger answers were like a threat, along the lines of "Just wait. It will get way more bizarre than that. Let me finish my whiskey."
Musk replied, "How did you know? I am actually drinking whiskey right now. Really."
A technical question about the lack of a tail? "Tails are lame." A question about why the number of landing legs was increased from 3 to 4? "Because 4." After one Redditor observed "This is one bizarre AMA so far," Musk replied "Just wait..." While Musk ultimately did follow up some of the trolling with some actual responses, the overall event could be best described as "surreal".
To be fair, Musk provided some serious answers. (And his final comment ended with "Great questions nk!!") But one Redditor suggested Musk's stranger answers were like a threat, along the lines of "Just wait. It will get way more bizarre than that. Let me finish my whiskey."
Musk replied, "How did you know? I am actually drinking whiskey right now. Really."
I'm with Elon (Score:2, Funny)
Some of these damn nerds need to be straight up told.
Re: I'm with Elon (Score:2)
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And you have to work on your nitpicking.
We also all know that HIV virus is redundant ... but everyone says so.
Accept the *unspoken* rules of your own language or join a language definition council and change your language.
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Hi Virus!
Please don't infect me.
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Yes "it should" ... but it is not.
Not even in medical magazines.
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Elon Musk needs to work on his grammar. He is smart enough to know that BFR Rocket is redundant.
Some one told him once but he was too busy getting wads of cash out of the ATM machine.
Distraction (Score:2, Informative)
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1) Firings != layoffs
2) Under 2% of a rapidly growing company during performance reviews == "Meh"
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I'm confused. Do you think the company should have fired poor-performing employees earlier, or not at all?
Yes, they're a month behind. Raise your hand if you're actually shocked by this. Anyone? Beuller?
FTFY.
Re:Distraction (Score:5, Informative)
Huh? So poor performance firings should require a detailed public airing of the company's grievances against the employees? And what the heck kind of crappy "layoff" would involve under 2% of the company's employee base?
False. Here's Tesla's official announced production plan [tesla.com]. They're one month off. July was supposed to be around a hundred, August was supposed to be a few hundred, and September 1500. A few hundred were delivered in September. That's one month off.
It's also worth noting that when Model 3 was announced, their initial goal was to start production in late 2017, with no specific numbers for deliveries. They moved the start up by half a year.
Funny, given that people like you keep calling his claims impossible BS, and he keeps delivering the supposed "impossible BS". Do you ever tire of being wrong, or are you always refreshed by the latest opportunity to be even more spectacularly wrong?
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Funny, given that people like you keep calling his claims impossible BS, and he keeps delivering the supposed "impossible BS". Do you ever tire of being wrong, or are you always refreshed by the latest opportunity to be even more spectacularly wrong?
Actually, they HAVE been proven right - time and time again. Musk has never lived up to his promises.
Re:Distraction (Score:4, Insightful)
Funny, I must be hallucinating the former existence of the Falcon 1, the present existence of the Falcon 9, the landing and reuse of Falcon 9s, the success of the Tesla Roadster, the success of the Tesla Model S, the success of the Tesla Model X, and now Model 3 production beginning. Every last one of these things endlessly prophesied to be pipe dreams by a doomed, DOOOOOOMED company. And instead: success and consquering each of their respective markets.
Just like the Model 3 will soon be doing. Whether you like that or not.
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Well, for those keeping score, we've got ever-more-desperate whiny AC bitch getting his ass handed to him: 0, Rei: all the points. I don't know where these Tesla bears keep coming from. Must be from the Masochists Anonymous meetings.
Tasty your tears are; cry more of them you should.
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Huh? So poor performance firings should require a detailed public airing of the company's grievances against the employees? And what the heck kind crappy "layoff" would involve under 2% of the company's employee base?
If you are expressing it in terms of percentage of employees let go in a single event, then it should be a layoff. Companies lay off figures like 2% all the time. Layoffs on the magnitude of 5% are considered big news, but layoffs they never talk about are the norm. Either way it's weird for all of a sudden Tesla to be doing stack-rank style firing without claims of affordability issues, which is generally considered a poor practice in the business world nowadays, especially odd coming from a company pr
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No, it's really not. Musk isn't widely known for being nice and cuddly when it comes to rooting out whatever he thinks to be underperforming in his companies. Even fired Eberhard from Tesla Motors - the very guy who came up with the
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Tesla had nothing to do with PayPal. Musk founded X.com, which later merged with PayPal, which was then called Confinity. Musk then sold off his ownership in PayPal, and then a year later co-founded Tesla.
Tesla's current revenue is roughly similar to PayPal's ($7b vs $10b). If their Model 3 vehicle is successful, it will far outstrip PayPal. If it isn't successful, it won't.
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I have never seen such vehement defense of a public figure - ever.
You not looked at Trump's defenders recently?
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I'm confused. Do you think the company should have fired poor-performing employees earlier, or not at all?
Tesla is on the cusp of trying to prove they have ambitions apart from being a boutique auto company. They are trying to prove to the world they can stand toe to toe with the mainstream auto companies. The production of the Model 3 is their first proof point, so the launch is of critical importance. Generally, companies don't take on the disruption of a bulk firing in that mode. Even when they are taking on more fiscal burden than perhaps they should, they wait until after their make or break moment. T
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It's also worth pointing out that Tesla has 2500 open job positions on their website at the moment.
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Mostly to make 18/hr assembling Tesla 3s in the surly valley. That's not much money if you have to commute, which most of their workers will probably do
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Except for the hundreds of people who have already gotten theirs and have been raving about them over on the forums - and the forum members who continue getting them.
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It may turn out ok in the end, but as yet 'hundreds' is not better than the Model S situation. What observers are waiting for is for Tesla to prove they can do large scale manufacturing, which is a hugely different game than small scale manufacturing, and a necessary competency to have if going up against the major automakers by themselves rather than in partnership.
Being behind is not proof they cannot, but neither is shipping the same volume of Model 3 cars as they have Model S cars proof they can. It'l
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It's all just money from Musk's "get lucky" fortune he collected with PayPal.
He's the Paul Allen of the Internet Generation.
You could also liken him to Howard Hughes in some regards.
Re:Who is being trolled? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're referring to the auto industry loans, Tesla paid them back, with interest, years ahead of time. Unlike part of the Big Three loans. If you're referring to EV subsidies, they're available to any manufacturer, and more to the point were specifically designed to be based on the size of the Chevy Volt's battery pack. It's amusing to see the Big Three struggling against an environment that they crafted.
It depends on what you mean. If you mean, "There are humans involved in stages of the manufacturing process", yes - but more to the point, you're describing every car factory on Earth. If you mean there's no robotic manufacturing, that's [youtube.com] wrong [youtube.com]. If you mean "the factory is not fully set up / tuned and requires more manual labour than it will in the end", no-freaking-duh, that's the very reason for announced S curve production plan. Most manufacturers, for a new line, will set it up and work on it for about half a year before starting sale of their production. This is not the approach Tesla is taking. While the plant is most definitely being set up for massive volumes [electrek.co], they are at present one month behind their planned production level at this point in time, and even that planned level was only two cars per hour.
Nearly half a million people have disagree with you, and put their money behind their disagreement.
Hahahahaha ;)
Sorry, it's just we've heard this constantly for the past decade. And there are no signs that anyone else is taking this seriously, despite their best PR efforts to come across that way. Nobody else is working on similar battery production volumes for any given production year. Nobody else is pouring nearly as much money into production and R&D (100% of Tesla's EV-related spending - excepting that directly dedicated to vehicle production, which earns 25% margins - goes into this. Billions per quarter at present). The competitors are literally missing a "0" at the end of their investment figures from what they need to be investing. Nobody else is even remotely close on fast charging networks, the key differentiating factor that actually lets you do long trips in your vehicle. The closest announcement - VW's network (forced on them by CARB) - will not even get close to what Tesla has today when it's done, let alone the scale of Tesla's network by that point in time.
It's funny watching all of the people who see concept cars announced, compare them to Tesla's offerings today, and saying "See, Tesla is about to face serious competition!" Because, again, we've seen this for a decade, but more importantly, it expresses a profound ignorance about how concept cars work. What you see presented as a concept car does not make it to production like that. Regardless of what the company says. They're not designed to be affordable to build, to meet crash standards, to be remotely efficient, and on and on. Most never go to production at all. When they do, they look radically worse (here was the concept Volt [hgmsites.net], for example), perform worse, and are priced worse. And they only try to sell them where there's pressure on them to sell EVs. Take the Bolt, for example. Go to a Chevy dealership in a ZEV state and there will be Bolts on the lot, and they'll actually push them. Go to one in a non-ZEV state, and the situation is reversed. Go to most
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Sorry, it's just we've heard this constantly for the past decade. And there are no signs that anyone else is taking this seriously,
Nissan is pretty much neck and neck with Tesla for units sold per year of pure electric vehicles, Admittedly GM and Ford are currently lagging, though in part because fuel prices fell, chilling the market for EV a bit.
I will say I can't readily find any numbers in terms of dollars invested so I've no idea wheter you are right or wrong about being so optimistic about Tesla's spending in absolute terms, but measuring by percentage is a very incomplete metric, better to compare dollar to dollar (which can get
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While operating in a vastly larger market segment. The fact that Tesla sells about as many cars per year but theirs are three times the price is not a fact that's to Nissan's favour.
Conversion EVs - even factory conversion - are terrible. EVs need to be designed from the ground up as EVs. Otherwise you're just throwing away range, stability
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Nissan is pretty much neck and neck with Tesla for units sold per year of pure electric vehicles
Yeah, I have a Leaf and it's a great car for the price I paid for it and what I want to do with it. But Tesla is keeping pace with it just with their luxury cars - if (as I expect) the Model 3 ramps up you can expect Nissan and the others to be left in the dust next year. I think Nissan is being quite clever in their slow battery upgrades, keeping their toe in the low end of the market, but that's not going to get them to have any great jumps in numbers.
I don't doubt that the others will catch up to some ex
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No TLDR for us after that wall-o-text?
You've been quite a holster this afternoon.
Do you have vested stock options?
Way overblown (Score:5, Interesting)
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. The nice thing there being a much higher level of technical questions were asked, but it did serve to alienate a lot of the /r/space community who probably isn't used to hearing about deep throttling ratios of methalox engines, etc.
If one is claiming to like space things, one shouldn't get annoyed if one then has someone else go and ask a more technical question; if people get alienated by that then it is their own damn fault.
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Re:Way overblown (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot has a contingent of users (particularly ACs, but others as well) who will take any opportunity to bitch about Elon Musk and everything he does. You can see it in the comments to this story, where people are making Tesla's setbacks out to be massive failures, or suggesting that the entire company is some kind of grand con job to absorb government money. They seem immune to arguments that Tesla has ultimately delivered what it promised, or that SpaceX has been quite successful with its launches and landings.
This story is comment-bait, I think, to stir up these pointless arguments in an effort to drive ad impressions. The summary is misleading and needlessly disparaging. Though the story is only two hours old, the comment count is already near the median number for every older story still on the front page. That counts as a win for the operators of the site, who are motivated in part by generating site traffic.
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This story is comment-bait
A story is a story is a story.
As I'm only on Reddit one a year, I like to see this kind of cross posts. If you don't then "stop falling for the comment bait: and don't comment".
the comment count is already near the median number for every older story still on the front page
I would love if people stoped mixing up average with median.
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I liked the way Musk was name dropped in a recent episode of Star Trek: Discovery as a great historical figure. His current day haters must have felt great, having the opportunity to hate the new ST series *and* Musk all in one go. :D
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This story is comment-bait, I think, to stir up these pointless arguments
Yes, and it was most certainly submitted by the Russians to stir discontent in the West!
In other news, Redditors whine at turnabout (Score:3, Insightful)
They can't take what they dish out. What a surprise. ...yet Musk provided serious answers after having a little fun. He didn't have to provide real answers, but even doing that hurt the precious snowflakes' feelings.
Geez, What have we come to?
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They can't take what they dish out. What a surprise. ...yet Musk provided serious answers after having a little fun. He didn't have to provide real answers, but even doing that hurt the precious snowflakes' feelings.
Where do you see that people had their feelings hurt? Muskâ(TM)s comments, both serious and joking, were highly upvoted or even gilded.
Stupid summary (Score:5, Insightful)
I read through the AMA. Musk answered all of the top level questions in significant detail. He did add a quip here and there. For example his comment about chickening out, which was followed up by a couple of paragraphs about the difficulty of deep throttling engines and the benefits of having multiple engines for failure tolerance.
The only exception I noticed was when some nerd said "you can't land on the moon with a 3 MN engine" and Musk said "yes you can - Bob the Builder." Seems fair to me.
Re:Stupid summary (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a space systems engineer (i.e rocket scientist). Of course you can land on the Moon with a 3 MN engine. You just require a 1.5 MN landed weight and 50% throttle capability. The throttle capability is to adjust landing deceleration to make a 0 m/s @ 0 elevation stop. Given the Moon's surface gravity, 1.5 MN --> 900 ton landed mass. That's a *big fucking landed mass* by NASA standards, but that idea is built in the BFR's name.
If you want to do a suicide burn and higher landing acceleration, the landed mass goes down. For example, 1.3 Earth gravities (which is the Earth takeoff acceleration) works out to 235 tons landed mass given 3 MN full thrust. With a fast landing, you would throttle *down* from max thrust to meet the landing condition. That's a more reasonable landed mass, but still pretty big.
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You don't have to have a 50% throttle capacity even in that situation; you can hoverslam land it. Of course, hoverslam landing without a pad would be risky to say the least...
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Yes. The statement in the AMA was silly. Musk dignified it with a humorous response.
The raptor engines are supposed to throttle to 20%, and elsewhere in the AMA Musk discussed a 1.3 minimum TWR for landing. They've cut the per-engine thrust down to 1.5 MN, but want to have two engines running for redundancy, so still 3 MN max. Which gives you around 285 tonnes (I think). Dry mass of the ship is 85 tonnes, So you'd want to aim to land with at least 200 tonnes of fuel and cargo, fuel being enough to take
Misleading Slashdot Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:It was alright (Score:4, Interesting)
I've noticed that "better metallurgy" often seems to be the go-to solution in Musk's companies - use more exotic/expensive alloys in key areas in order to save a lot of money down the road, and developing the experience working with these alloys. Part of the same thing behind Boring Company, for example - rather than simple, passively cooled steel cutting discs, they plan to use high temperature / high strength alloys and actively cool them. They'll still have to replace then, and the replacements will cost a lot more, but that's nothing compared to the amount of cost savings involved in being able to run the cutting head many times faster.
to be fair... (Score:2, Informative)
To be fair, Musk provided some serious answers.
This mischaracterizes the whole thing. Musk provided serious answers as a followup to almost every one of his quips. The serious answers were insightful, usually a full or several full paragraphs with meaty details suitable for the audience, and honestly impressive that a CEO could do that off the top of his head. Many CEOs have no idea about the technical details of their own company. Musk can speculate intelligently about the nature of an interplanetary packet network and answer questsions about metal
Re:to be fair... (Score:4, Informative)
The serious answers were insightful, usually a full or several full paragraphs with meaty details suitable for the audience, and honestly impressive that a CEO could do that off the top of his head.
There's a reason Elon Musk self-identifies as SpaceX's Chief Designer more frequently than he self-identifies as CEO. He's making very technical decisions after learning and understanding the ramifications of the options. He has a physics degree, which alone makes him a far cry from most MBA CEOs today, who choose among technical options they literally can't understand based on how much they like the person presenting them.
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He has a physics degree, which alone makes him a far cry from most MBA CEOs today, who choose among technical options they literally can't understand based on how much they like the person presenting them.
Not to go completely against the grain here, but some intelligent people actually choose to go into business and get an MBA. Many even get one after already being successful in a technical field, as they need business bonafides in order to make upper management.
I know several CSCI BSs/MAs with MBAs, and I am sure there exist some Physics PHDs with MBAs.
Hell, my Physics teacher in college was a brilliant SOB but didn't even go to college until he was 35. Spent 18 years as a manual laborer first. He would a
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Elon's doing pretty well. He has gotten a lot less per real world result than the other guys, to the point where if he's bidding, they drop out...
Do I need to name names and show budgets here? Does Elon get the import/export bank to loan his customers money to buy his products on our back?
The subsidy line-whine is getting pretty old in light of the facts.
This post is a disgrace/bullshit (Score:1)
Many others are saying the same. If you read the AMA, you'll see that his pattern was to first reply with a playful troll, and then spend the next few minutes typing an actual thoughtful answer in reply to his troll comment. He was just playing around. This post is COMPLETE MISINFORMATION. A disgrace.
Thanks, Elon Musk (Score:1)
Thanks, Elon Musk, the answer to trolling is trolling.
Those were placeholder answers. (Score:5, Informative)
OP seems a bit disingenuous. For every one, he followed up minutes later with a more fleshed out and responsive answer. It seems obviously to me that his original comments were markers to track which ones he wanted to come back to.
Elon Musk is not your average CEO (Score:3)
Musk was clearly being nonchalant with the audience, not disrespectful or insulting.
But the anti-Musk brigade will never be satisfied no matter what. So, take it as you please.
Laughing all the way to the bank (Score:1)
All those millions from NASA are plumping up his dividends and his bonus so he can go to sizes where no yacht has been before.
US taxpayers give NASA billions, NASA gives SpaceX millions, SpaceX pays out bonuses and uses some of it to try and reinvent the last 50 years of space exploration by smashing rockets into the ground and occasionally into the water. If NASA asks nicely SpaceX uses some of it to buy Russian rockets which it uses to launch payloads for NASA.