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Cont: Musk, SpaceX and future of Tesla II

dirtywick said:
the best selling electric truck sold about 27k since its launch. the us truck buying public buys ice
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electrek.co

Tesla Cybertruck sales are disastrous

Tesla confirmed that Cybertruck sales are disastrous in the release of its quarterly results. Sales of the controversial electric pickup...
electrek.co electrek.co

estimated having sold 9k to 12k cyber trucks last quarter, down from the previous which despite being the electric truck most used in domestic terrorism, are pretty bad numbers
 
Is this one of the ways Musk's iterative process breaks. For the much simpler Falcon rocket system it was ok. They were carrying much lighter loads and low orbits were the target.

Starship is next magnitude complexity. Fully reusable main stage. Physically much larger and heavier. Far more complex missions and loads. Much more expensive. They have a contract with NASA that's not on target. They don't have an interior. That should be being developed in parallel.
 
dirtywick said:
electrek.co

Tesla Cybertruck sales are disastrous

Tesla confirmed that Cybertruck sales are disastrous in the release of its quarterly results. Sales of the controversial electric pickup...
electrek.co electrek.co

estimated having sold 9k to 12k cyber trucks last quarter, down from the previous which despite being the electric truck most used in domestic terrorism, are pretty bad numbers
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Thanks for following up on that.
That said, there are a few things in that story which I wonder about...

Tesla confirmed that Cybertruck sales are disastrous in the release of its quarterly results.
Sales of the controversial electric pickup truck are stalling a year into the production ramp.

Considering Tesla started production just over a year ago, it’s still early in the Cybertruck program. Some say it’s too early to say if it will be a success, but there’s room to be concerned that it isn’t and won’t be.
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LOL! The "controversial" electric pickup truck? I think the controversy, such as it is, stems from the owner. Other than that, I would argue it is certainly unconventional which might have more to do with its lack of popularity, but the truck itself is not controversial.

Also, I have to wonder if Trump really will take away tax credits for Tesla cybertrucks. I mean, there are reasons why Musk wants to be as far up Trump's posterior as possible, and it isn't because he thinks it is the most noble thing to do.

There’s some hope for Tesla. We just reported that the Cybertruck officially became eligible for the $7,500 US tax credit today, which should help demand.

However, the upcoming Trump administration, backed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, said that they aim to take it away as soon as possible. Therefore, Cybertruck will likely only have access for a few months. It should help boost sales temporarily and until Tesla brings the single motor and cheaper version of the truck.
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i think there are several reasons why musk would also be in favor of taking the tax credits. it hurts competitors more than him because they already have a huge us market share and their competitors are mostly legacy auto getting into ev and the chinese who are going to be tariffed out of the us market anyway. the sales themselves matter a lot less to them than their competitors as well since most of tesla's value comes from new investment rather than actual sales. and finally, elon musk is going to get favorable treatment in any future ev legislation due to his connection to trump. he can probably look forward to something more tesla favorable than a across the board tax credit later on down the line.

my opinion anyway
 
dirtywick said:
i think there are several reasons why musk would also be in favor of taking the tax credits. it hurts competitors more than him because they already have a huge us market share and their competitors are mostly legacy auto getting into ev and the chinese who are going to be tariffed out of the us market anyway. the sales themselves matter a lot less to them than their competitors as well since most of tesla's value comes from new investment rather than actual sales. and finally, elon musk is going to get favorable treatment in any future ev legislation due to his connection to trump. he can probably look forward to something more tesla favorable than a across the board tax credit later on down the line.

my opinion anyway
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I just wonder if somehow Musk and Trump will come up with some kind of nakedly corrupt scheme to keep tax credits on Tesla and not on other car manufacturers. It might be billed as "protectionist" which won't be a dirty word under Trump, and then there will be something about how other US automakers have been bailed out so don't deserve it... I'm sure they will find some way of justifying it, and if they don't they will probably just do it anyway and raise their middle fingers at anyone who complains.
 
i wouldn’t be surprised. undoing biden’s inflation reduction act and then repackaging the spending to favor his buddies and hurt their competitors seems pretty likely.
 
arthwollipot said:
Because they haven't reached a goal that they haven't set?
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In 2020 they had the following goals for Starship with respect to Artemis.

Orbital launch test: Q2 2022
Propellant transfer: Q4 2022
Long duration flight test: Q2 2023
Unmanned lunar landing: Q1 2024
HLS launch: Q1 2025

The deadlines have all passed except the last one and we can be certain that they will not achieve that goal in Q1 2025.

Four goals that should have been achieved by now and they have achieved none of them.

arthwollipot said:
None of those test flights were ever intended to get to orbit.
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Do you think that, back in early 2023 before the first test launch they were expecting not to have achieved orbit by flight 6? Their ambition seems to be somewhat lacking given they are running three years late.
 
jeremyp said:
In 2020 they had the following goals for Starship with respect to Artemis.
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Did you not know that they revised those goals several times before any test launches? Did you look at the stated goals for any of the test launches, or did you just assume that the goal for each launch was the same as the 2020 goals?

There's a difference between an overall strategic goal and the goals of each individual mission.
 
arthwollipot said:
Did you not know that they revised those goals several times before any test launches? Did you look at the stated goals for any of the test launches, or did you just assume that the goal for each launch was the same as the 2020 goals?

There's a difference between an overall strategic goal and the goals of each individual mission.
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It's like the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. They have changed their goals to what is achievable. Their initial schedule is a failure. Starship is not going to be able to be developed with their iterative, see what doesn't blow up approach to development. They haven't demonstrated the ability to transition from a good but relatively simple (compared to Starship) product to something that is an order of magnitude more complex. Musk, their leader, is now dysfunctional and focused on culture wars.
 
a_unique_person said:
It's like the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. They have changed their goals to what is achievable.
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I mean, that's a fair enough statement. Musk has always set unrealistically ambitious goals, and Starship is no exception.

a_unique_person said:
Their initial schedule is a failure. Starship is not going to be able to be developed with their iterative, see what doesn't blow up approach to development. They haven't demonstrated the ability to transition from a good but relatively simple (compared to Starship) product to something that is an order of magnitude more complex. Musk, their leader, is now dysfunctional and focused on culture wars.
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It just seems to me that some people are holding SpaceX to a standard that it's not even holding itself to.
 
arthwollipot said:
I mean, that's a fair enough statement. Musk has always set unrealistically ambitious goals, and Starship is no exception.



It just seems to me that some people are holding SpaceX to a standard that it's not even holding itself to.
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Musk himself set that standard, multiple times. Starship flights are going to replace long distance jet's for passenger travel with 10X economics.

Kennedy set a target of one decade to get to the moon and NASA did it. Musk has had his decade and hasn't achieved orbital flight. Starship started development in 2012.
 
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a_unique_person said:
Musk himself set that standard, multiple times. Starship flights are going to replace long distance jet's for passenger travel with 10X economics.

Kennedy set a target of one decade to get to the moon and NASA did it. Musk has had his decade and hasn't achieved orbital flight. Starship started development in 2012.
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He also hasn't had the funding, political urgency, or public enthusiasm that Apollo enjoyed. Much better to compare SpaceX to its peers in the current environment.
 
He's the richest man on the planet with more billions than NASA spent on Apollo and is bragging about being the first trillionaire.
plus he benefits from 70 years of research and developments since Apollo.

He seems to be following the Russian path. Spectacular displays for the press and his fans rather than any real development.

How much effort was put in to catching that bit of a rocket?
Why?
 
Andy_Ross said:
He's the richest man on the planet with more billions than NASA spent on Apollo and is bragging about being the first trillionaire.
plus he benefits from 70 years of research and developments since Apollo.

He seems to be following the Russian path. Spectacular displays for the press and his fans rather than any real development.

How much effort was put in to catching that bit of a rocket?
Why?
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Any argument that starts with "He's the richest man on the planet'" isn't worth parsing.

SpaceX is a private company currently valued at US$350 billion. Musk owns ~42% of the shares, which makes his portion 'worth' $147 billion. But this isn't like money in the bank or a fixed asset. If he sells too many of those shares he loses control of the company, and if things at SpaceX don't go well they could be worth nothing.

Musk founded SpaceX in 2002. By 2008 he had put all the money he had into it. 3 rockets had failed to launch and If next one also failed the company faced bankruptcy. Luckily for him the 4th Falcon 1 launch was successful, making it the first ever privately developed fully liquid-fueled launch vehicle to successfully reach orbit.

With the Falcon 1 making SpaceX viable, Musk then set about reducing the cost of delivering payloads to orbit by making parts of the rocket reusable. The Falcon 9 reduced launch costs from $50 million to $15 million. This made their services attractive to NASA, who previously had relied mostly on the United Launch Alliance (a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin). SpaceX has reduced NASA's costs to around 10% of the ULA's, making SpaceX their favorate provider and a big win for the taxpayer!

But why did he do this? Did he set out to become rich and famous, or was there some other motivation? In 2001 Musk donated $5,000 to the Mars Society. Then he joined their board of directors and gave another $100,000. But he wanted to do more than just mess around with habitats in the desert, he wanted to actually colonize Mars! So he left the Mars Society and started SpaceX in 2002. In order to do achive his goal he would need rockets that were much cheaper to launch, with faster turnaround and bigger payloads. This is why SpaceX is putting so much effort into 'catching that bit a rocket'. Not to show off, but because something like this will be needed for missions to Mars. They are simply trying to find a viable method of reusing larger rockets.

I think colonizing Mars is a silly idea, and I certainly wouldn't waste any of my own finances (not even $5,000) on such a project. But so long as it has spinoffs I don't mind. Musk developed Starlink to provide cheaper high-speed internet to remote areas. This is SpaceX's main source of income and reason for most of their launches now. Friends of mine who live in a rural area recently got Starlink because it was cheaper, faster and more reliable than what the local tecommunications provider was offering. They are 'fans' because it's doing the job for them - nothing more.

It should be obvious by now that Musk is not motivated by money or fame. Whether it be colonizing Mars, improving communications, getting off fossils fuels or making machines smarter, he always has some vision of a better future through technological advances. If any of us are 'fans' it's because we share those visions. You may disagree on whether his goals are worthwhile, but to suggest that he only does it for 'the press and his fans' rather than any real development is plainly wrong.

So the real question is - why do you do it? Why make up stuff about Musk 'bragging about being the first trillionaire'? Why dismiss everything he and the hard-working people at SpaceX have done as 'benefiting from 70 years of research and developments'? Is it jealousy, wounded pride, partisanship, or just the usual superiority complex of a so-called 'skeptic'?
 
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i mean, he made a lot of money doing that stuff, not sure why any of that is proof he doesn't love money and getting more of it. but, he also sued to have himself considered a founder of tesla and sued to have his giant pay package reinstated after it was found to be illegal, then he moved operations to texas so he can judge shop earlier. not sure how that helps get to mars, but he spent months of his life and a lot of money on doing it. that he could of spent on getting to mars and the environment.

for a guy not motivated by money and fame he sure does go above and beyond in trying to get more of it.

see you can kind of defend musk on some certain things if you want. like, yeah, he does own successful companies. like dittman says, he has a lot of sex. he plays a ton of diablo, pretty good at it, one of the best in the world. he has lots of followers on twitter, he hangs out with a lot of cool guys like trump and joe rogan and trump jr. but when it comes to his character, he's a total scumbag. he's greedy, he lies, and he cheats. so it's better to just call it like it is, stick to the facts.

but even if you ignore all that, he's spent way more of his time in the last 5 years at least focused on social media and politics, some of the most greedy and selfish stuff a person could be involved in.
 
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Roger Ramjets said:
Friends of mine who live in a rural area recently got Starlink because it was cheaper, faster and more reliable than what the local tecommunications provider was offering. They are 'fans' because it's doing the job for them - nothing more.
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Here in semi-rural E TN, StarLink was a godsend until very recently when our local utility ran fiber down our road. And we were hardly alone in having very few options, if any, for reliable internet outside of urban centers.

Musk is, in my opinion, clearly off the rails right now and worthy of contempt. But that shouldn’t detract from his having had the vision to make something like Starlink a reality in spite of huge technological challenges.
 
a_unique_person said:
Is this one of the ways Musk's iterative process breaks. For the much simpler Falcon rocket system it was ok. They were carrying much lighter loads and low orbits were the target.

Starship is next magnitude complexity. Fully reusable main stage. Physically much larger and heavier. Far more complex missions and loads. Much more expensive. They have a contract with NASA that's not on target. They don't have an interior. That should be being developed in parallel.
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They do seem to be still good at pulling the wool over the eyes of idiot journalists: https://www.theguardian.com/technol...ship-rocket-is-beating-nasa-in-the-space-race
 
jeremyp said:
In 2020 they had the following goals for Starship with respect to Artemis.

Orbital launch test: Q2 2022
Propellant transfer: Q4 2022
Long duration flight test: Q2 2023
Unmanned lunar landing: Q1 2024
HLS launch: Q1 2025

The deadlines have all passed except the last one and we can be certain that they will not achieve that goal in Q1 2025.

Four goals that should have been achieved by now and they have achieved none of them.


Do you think that, back in early 2023 before the first test launch they were expecting not to have achieved orbit by flight 6? Their ambition seems to be somewhat lacking given they are running three years late.
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And every single one of those goals has a solution that is widely known and should be easy for SpaceX to implement if they were in any way interested in actually fulfilling their contract.
 
arthwollipot said:
I mean, that's a fair enough statement. Musk has always set unrealistically ambitious goals, and Starship is no exception.



It just seems to me that some people are holding SpaceX to a standard that it's not even holding itself to.
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Well, we are simply doing what NASA should also be doing, holding them to the terms of the contract, which is the standard SpaceX held itself to. SpaceX agreed to do X now they've decided that the contract should only be for a much easier and much lower standard of work.
 
Starship test flight 7 launches in a few days (barring unforseen cancellations of course). It's goal is to deploy ten simulated Starlink satellites, relight the Raptor engines, and splash down in the Indian Ocean. Its goal is not to reach orbital velocity, it is not to perform an orbital fuel transfer, and it is not to make an uncrewed landing on the moon. And anybody who says that Starship has failed because it has not done those things is just lying.
 
arthwollipot said:
Starship test flight 7 launches in a few days (barring unforseen cancellations of course). It's goal is to deploy ten simulated Starlink satellites, relight the Raptor engines, and splash down in the Indian Ocean. Its goal is not to reach orbital velocity, it is not to perform an orbital fuel transfer, and it is not to make an uncrewed landing on the moon. And anybody who says that Starship has failed because it has not done those things is just lying.
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I think that is what you call a strawman.
 
a_unique_person said:
I think that is what you call a strawman.
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Not really.

jeremyp said:
Starship is supposed to get people on the Moon. Apollo did tht. That seems like a reasonable comparison. How is Starship doing compared to Apollo?




I can and do. They've done six test flights of Starship and have failed to reach orbit so far. According to Musk, it's costing about $2 billion a year which is in the same ballpark as SLS. They are years behind schedule.

Yes, I can say they are doing a bad job.



Just because SLS is more expensive and just as late doesn't mean Starship is going well.


I can judge them against their own stated goals and time scales. Starship is going badly.
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The goal of none of those six test flights was to get people to the moon. The goal of none of those six test flights was to reach orbit. Is SpaceX behind schedule? Yes, clearly. But you can't criticise them for not reaching goals that they have not set.

There were ten Apollo missions before anybody got to the moon.
 
arthwollipot said:
Not really.


The goal of none of those six test flights was to get people to the moon. The goal of none of those six test flights was to reach orbit. Is SpaceX behind schedule? Yes, clearly. But you can't criticise them for not reaching goals that they have not set.

There were ten Apollo missions before anybody got to the moon.
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Musk already set much higher goals. The engineers have other ideas. The changes per iteration are small compared to what is required.
 
a_unique_person said:
Musk already set much higher goals. The engineers have other ideas. The changes per iteration are small compared to what is required.
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Those goals were for the SpaceX Starship program as a whole, not for any individual mission.

You would not want to say that Apollo 7 failed because it didn't land humans on the moon.
 
arthwollipot said:
Starship test flight 7 launches in a few days (barring unforseen cancellations of course). It's goal is to deploy ten simulated Starlink satellites, relight the Raptor engines, and splash down in the Indian Ocean. Its goal is not to reach orbital velocity, it is not to perform an orbital fuel transfer, and it is not to make an uncrewed landing on the moon. And anybody who says that Starship has failed because it has not done those things is just lying.
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And they are using Raptor motors from a previous flight, something that has never happened on a NASA rocket, only the space shuttle.
 
a_unique_person said:
I'm damn sure the shuttle had something to do with NASA.
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Yes, and the space shuttle is obviously not a rocket.


a_unique_person said:
The shuttle was also reusable orbital. That's a whole order of magnitude more complex than reusable first stage.
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Not according to the skeptics here at ISF. It's easy, all they had to do is hold itself to terms of a contract. Or something.
 
SpaceX critics in 2017 – "Elon Musk promised me reusable rockets 15 years ago. SpaceX is a failure."

SpaceX 2024:
85% of all mass to orbit.
Booster 1067 completed its 24th launch and recovery.
134 orbital lunches – all other US companies combined managed 20 total.

SpaceX critics in 2025 – "Elon Musk promised Starship would be going to Mars by now. SpaceX is a failure."
 
Bogative said:
SpaceX critics in 2017 – "Elon Musk promised me reusable rockets 15 years ago. SpaceX is a failure."

SpaceX 2024:
85% of all mass to orbit.
Booster 1067 completed its 24th launch and recovery.
134 orbital lunches – all other US companies combined managed 20 total.

SpaceX critics in 2025 – "Elon Musk promised Starship would be going to Mars by now. SpaceX is a failure."
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Hey, I am more than in favour of SpaceX and Tesla.

I reserve the right to criticize him for his far-right politics and anti-democratic intrusion into governments around the western world.
 
If you are referring to the solid rocket boosters, please don't reply to this. Lame.
 
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