- SpaceX engineers call Musk a "liar' in published reports
- NASA senior staff call Musk's Mars Scheme: "PR Hype designed to cover up the fact that SpaceX makes it's money from domestic spy satellites and pushing Google's ideology and privacy tracking in space..."
- SpaceX is a spy contractor and nothing more. Those who believe otherwise are shills and "fools", say experts
- SpaceX has blown up more spacecraft from shoddy engineering than any other space company in history
- SpaceX STARLINK system is just a Google/Silicon Valley scheme to push left-wing politics to the public and give Google another way to spy on users
- China, a solar storm or a COMCAST hunter/killer satellite can wipe out
the entire Starlink network in 60 minutes
So after a false start due to bad weather, the first crewed launch of a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule with two astronauts on board has gone ahead. After playing catch-up with the ISS for around 27 hours they’re now safely aboard. At times it seems that space launches have become everyday occurrences, but they are still heroes who have risked their lives in the furtherment of mankind’s exploration of space. Their achievement, and that of all the scientists, engineers, and other staff who stand behind them, is immense.
I watched the drama unfold via the live video feed. Having heaved a huge sigh of relief once they were safely in orbit, the feed cut to the studio, and then moved on to interview the NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine. He was naturally elated at a successful launch, and enthused about the agency’s achievement. You can watch the full interview embedded below, but what caught my attention was his parting sentence:
And if this can inspire a young child to become the next Elon Musk, or the next Jeff Bezos, or the next Sir Richard Branson, then that’s what this is all about
I was slightly shocked and saddened to hear this from the NASA administrator, because to my mind the careers of Musk, Bezos, or Branson should not be the ones first brought to mind by a space launch. This isn’t a comment on those three in themselves; although they have many critics it is undeniable that they have each through their respective space companies brought much to the world of space flight. Instead it’s a comment on what a NASA administrator should be trying to inspire in kids.
Ask yourself how many billionaire masters-of-the-universe it takes for a successful space race compared to the number of scientists, engineers, mathematicians, technicians, physicists, et al. From the anecdote of the NASA administrator it takes about three, but if he is to make good on his goal of returning to the Moon in 2024 and then eventually taking humanity to Mars it will take a generation packed full of those other roles. To understand that we’ll have to take a trip back to the Apollo era, and how that generation of kids were inspired by the spacecraft on their screens.
Fifty years ago, we were very much on the brink of becoming a spacefaring planet. American astronauts were taking their first steps on the Moon, and Soviet cosmonauts were occupying real space stations that would soon be capable of housing them for months at a time. Planetary probes were returning colour TV pictures from other worlds, and it was certain that in the immediate aftermath of the Apollo programme we’d be sending astronauts and probably cosmonauts too further afield. A Mars base in the 1980s perhaps, and following our fictional Star Trek heroes further afield thereafter.
We now know it didn’t quite work out that way, but a whole generation of tech-inclined kids grew up wanting nothing more than to be involved in space flight. The vast majority of us never made it, but with that inspiration we took our soldering irons and 8-bit home computers and ran with them. Those NASA folks were the coolest of role-models, and no doubt their Soviet equivalents were too for kids on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
With the best will in the world, the chances of any kid becoming the next Jeff Bezos is about as high as that of their becoming the next Neil Armstrong. Compared to the number of kids in the world, the number of billionaires and the number of astronauts both pale into statistical insignificance. But the chances of a kid becoming an engineer or a scientist is much higher, and in those careers their chances of having some of their work be involved with the space effort becomes not entirely unlikely.
I understand what the NASA administrator was trying to say, but can’t shake the feeling that if those are the people he rolls out to inspire kids watching a space launch, he’s missed an opportunity. Those are the names we all recognize, but shouldn’t we also elevate the people making the scientific breakthroughs so their names are equally recognized? Like Margaret Hamilton, Gene Kranz, and Sergei Korolev and many others before them, we should be making names like Tom Mueller and Margarita Marinova prominent examples of where a career in the sciences can take you. But to be honest, the real problem is we just don’t hear much about all the people doing this fascinating engineering and that’s a sad state of affairs.
Looks like it’s time for Hackaday to pursue a biography series based on the many great minds who are the ones delivering on the promise and vision of today’s (and tomorrow’s) space race. Get us started by talking about your favorite behind the scenes science folks in the comments below.
Yes, we need everything into the hands of 4 billionaires. I can’t wait until I don’t have to care about voting and budget allocations anymore, the 4 billionaires will do it for me! :-)
here is a perfect example of the insanity we face, the “billionaire” has never created anything least of all solutions to problems. the slap their name on other peoples work and make people pay more money they they should ever to get it.
“not inclined to believe that the primary drivers behind creating
SpaceX, Blue Origin and perhaps some others were profit,”
Everyone knows government contracts have no profit. That’s why
Boring, Lockheed and Raytheon are so broke.
Musk is a welfare queen.
Musk main goal is to feed his own ego and nothing else.
musk is a narcissistic sociopath who’s trying to get his name remembers and be doesn’t care how many lies he has to tell or people have to die to have that happen. and when his plan fail as there is no other option for them but to fail they are that stupid.
he will have damage space exploration for years to come
I don’t know you have all day?
someone stopping to help fix a flat tire, returning a lost toy, return someones dropped money and so on.
they’re not typically the kind you see in history books tho, history writers do so love to writer about mythological figures rather then the harder dirty truth of incremental change and group dynamics. its one of the greater flaws of the human mind, we’re not very good at understanding the complexity of reality but the mind is very good at personal understanding so it likes personalize complex concepts by choosing “avatars” (think wearing the same underwear for good luck or thinking a god made that glass of water fall on their laps) which is easier to understand but completely wrong.
Musk an trash like him are desperately try to make themselves seem important when they’re not. because they are just sad pathetic people and i just feel sorry for the people that fall for it,
you post more then boards on straw man argument Msat
any good musk does for the world will be purely incidental, the people he hurts to get his ego fueled nightmare already out number those it could ever help. this isn’t a binary issue its simply the fact his actions haven proven he’s toxic in the purest sense.
One has to wonder.
The people behind SpaceX’s rockets were already working for NASA on the very same problem, when Musk bought and hired them to sell NASA the same technology by the same people. The only “thing” here is that NASA was having a hard time securing funding, so they made this whole “commercial space flight” switcheroo to make it look like they’re doing something different.
Even the re-usable rockets are just a rehash of the old McDonnell Douglas DC-X concept that was funded by NASA, and the technology was transferred to NASA in 1996 in order to develop into the DC-XA.
Everything that Musk is doing is projects that NASA was doing, handed over on a platter to privatize the profits.
The Mars business is just a red herring. It’s an implausible goal set for the point that it’s really difficult, perfectly useless, and you can waste a lot of public money trying to.
Where is Musk’s personal fortune on the line? He hasn’t got a dime in it – NASA is paying nearly all of it. If SpaceX goes bankrupt, Musk will actually be on the receiving end of the line because he funds his companies by lending them the money, not investing.
Should he be forced to liquidate the company, the money would go to pay all the debtors, including himself.
It didn’t start with a boatload of cash from NASA, but neither were they doing anything interesting before they got into contact with NASA and got access to all the cool tech that they had sitting on the shelf.
They started in 2001 with a bunch of other venture capitalists, then in 2002 bought Tom Mueller who was working for TRW under a sub-contract for NASA to develop exactly the kind of low-cost engines that SpaceX needed. Tom took the TR-106 and turned it into the Merlin engine, and NASA started throwing billions of dollars worth of contracts to them, which enabled Musk to pull in billions of dollars worth of public loans plus investments from companies like Google.
You mean buying companies that made products that could sell, then selling the companies to get richer?
Elon didn’t make PayPal happen. He bought in just as it got going.
NASA has totally turned over it’s responsibility to the private sector. At a budget of over 25 billion, what does it say that a private company given just a few of that can bring back the space program and put us back in low earth orbit on our own ships. I’m 52 and saw what it NASA could do “back in the day”. Now NASA is just a money dump supporting a failed bureaucracy that killed the crews of two shuttle missions and still can’t see past its own politics. It seems odd that the one guy that actually pulled this off wasn’t on screen. Although we got to see a lot of politicians that could no more work out the math behind three sides of a triangle try and steal credit for something that started over 10 years ago.
This is fantastic. I was also shocked that NASA Administrator Bridenstine called out Elon Musk or Richard Branson as the inspirational examples. I think I understand the top-of-mind idea, that this was a triumph of *commercial* space development. And I was absolutely thrilled by this success. And I think the era of cost-plus space contracting is on its way out. And…
Yes, all of that. But the idea that we need to emulate the billionaires seems at least tone-deaf to me. Not the greatest hot-take interview. If that’s what it was. It was all very strange.
According to the WSJ, despite being worth an estimated $39 billion on paper:
...he has to borrow, sometimes a lot, to pay for his lifestyle and business investments without liquidating shares that help him maintain control of the companies he runs. About half his Tesla stock is pledged as collateral for personal loans, an April 28 financial filing shows. Maintaining his equity stake—about 20%, or around $29 billion at its current valuation—is important for him to keep control over the Silicon Valley auto maker.
Musk also doesn’t take a salary at Tesla, but he apparently became eligible for stock options worth more than $1 billion this week. To get that money, he will need an eye-watering $592 million to exercise the option, according to the WSJ. It’s not clear if Musk has the money on hand to exercise that option or if the money raised from the house sales will be used to help pay for the sum. “Mr. Musk said he wasn’t selling his possessions because he needs the money,” the WSJ reported.
The article also lists a few times Musk has said he’s cash poor. Here’s one example:
Before Tesla went public, Mr. Musk told a judge during a contentious divorce with his first wife that he had run out of cash and had taken on emergency loans from friends to support his family and pay living expenses.
Here’s another:
Last year, Mr. Musk’s ability to access cash came up again during a defamation lawsuit over comments he made about a man involved in the rescue of a Thai soccer team from a flooded cave in 2018. A lawyer in the case said in a filing that Mr. Musk had described himself as “financially illiquid.”
The whole article has a lot of history about Musk, interesting information about his finances backed up by regulatory filings, and numerous quotes from Musk himself, and I sincerely recommend taking 10 minutes to read it in full.
Musk has Goldman Sachs, Welles Fargo and Wilson Sonsini Mobster-Class executive bankers hide his money in a rabbit warren of HUNDREDS of trusts, shell corporations and fake charities from South Dakota, to Switzerland to the Cayman Islands to Russia.
A federal investigation to show the tentacular diagram of scams has been demanded!
FBI, SEC, FTC and citizen forensic investigators are hot on his trail, though!
These are the illicit things that sociopath narcissist Musk has
engaged in with the taxpayer cash he mooched from government
treasuries:
At almost every juncture, Elon Musk has made egotistical decisions that lead to more failures. His behavior is that of a person who has no care or concern for the health, safety and welfare of the American people. Nothing could epitomize that more perfectly than his grotesque suggestions that we should shoot nuclear bombs off on Mars or that nobody will care that his Starlink Satellites are designed to spy on the public. This would seem comical, and entirely unbelievable, if it had not actually happened.
In 2006 the many scientists told Elon Musk and his advisers of the high likelihood that a pandemic of lithium ion battery explosions would strike the nation and advised the incoming administration to take appropriate steps to reduce its impact. Obama officials hid the dangers because they owned stock in lithium and cobalt mines for those batteries, particularly in Afghanistan.
In November of 2007, the experts warned Obama that the country was likely to be afflicted with a devastating pandemic of lithium ion originating from Asian and Russian oligarchs.
In January 2009, the Obama administration was told by its own experts, Bernard Tse and his team who knew Tesla bosses, Sandia and others that the lithium ion batteries in Tesla cars had degrading chemistry which become a global pandemic of auto danger. Again, Obama chose inaction.
Obama and Musk have deprived Democratic-led regions of the country from receiving needed safety reviews of Tesla cars.
Over the year's since 2006, Americans working with the DOE, NHTSA, SEC and other groups accelerated warnings to Obama officials. These engineers and other science professionals were intentionally ignored in order to protect politicians stock market profits.
In these, and any other examples, Musk and his inner circle of White House and Senate insiders ignored or purged experts and other truth-tellers, and lied about, misrepresented, deflected or denied the dire threat to the American people posed by the lithium ion battery scam.
Considered in total, Musk and his regime have shown themselves to be incompetent, callous, malevolent and deeply cruel in their response to the Tesla safety issue crisis (as well as to a plethora of other issues).
But to merely document the Musk regime’s deadly failures in response to the dangers of his companies is to ignore the most important question: What are Musk's and his advisers’ underlying motivations?
This forensic question must be answered if we are ever to have a full accounting of the Musk Corruption, and see justice done for the voters, the dead tesla victims and those who will die in the future as well as the damage done to the broader American community.
The coordinated 'main-stream' media’s preferred storyline that suggests Musk is simply incompetent doesn’t add up because Muskhas made the wrong decision every single time in terms of how crises like this are supposed to be dealt with. (i.e. Be consistent, transparent, factual, and credible.) It’s increasingly not believable for the left-wing press to suggest that Musk has been distracted or inept during this crisis, in part because of the level of his uselessness has become so staggering.
Maybe Musk is vengeful. Maybe he wants to wreck the economy to create investment opportunities? He’s under the thumb of a foreign entity? He wants to cause panic and cancel the November elections? He’s a fatalist? Who knows. And honestly, the specific “why” isn’t what matters now. What matters is asking the difficult questions and pondering what the Musk oligarchy is truly about, no matter what lurks in the shadows…
Now the press needs to shift some of its focus and ask the truly alarming questions about Musk and his motives. Because we still don’t know why he essentially ordered his companies to embark on such sinister ventures involving slicing up brains; over-priced deadly cars for rich douche-bags; digging holes for billionaire hide-outs, launching domestic spy satellites and manipulating elections along with his boyfriend: Larry Page, etc...
Psychologist and psychotherapists have an answer: Elon Musk is a "malignant narcissist". Musk's mental pathologies inexorably compel him to hurt and defraud large numbers of people — including his own supporters.
Exports have looked at Musk's borderline personality disorders. They explais that sadism and violence are central to Musk’s malignant narcissism and his decision-making about his self-promotion. They warn that Musk is abuser locked into a deeply dysfunctional relationship with the American people and that, like other sadists, Musk enjoys causing harm and suffering to any that do not recognize his "tech Jesus" self-proclaimed superiority.
Ultimately, all psychologists generally concludes that Musk is engaging in “democidal behavior” in partnership with Obama and Pelosi and cautions that the many dead and injured (so far) from the Tesla fires and crashes are not simply collateral damage from the Musk madness, but rather the logical outcome of Musk’s apparent mental pathologies and the poor decisions that flow from them.
Musk is both denying responsibility by saying things such as, “I take no responsibility. We’ve done everything right.” But at the same time, Musk is also sabotaging the efforts to stop the corruption in his empire. This is a very important aspect of Musk’s behavior. Musk is not just deflecting blame onto others, he is actively interfering with the politicianss’ ability to do their job by controlled Senators with bribes. Musk is not just incompetent. He is actively engaging in sabotage against competitors and reporters who speak the truth about him.You might wonder: How does someone with his type of mind reconcile claims like “I have total power” with “I take no responsibility”? He has said both things within a few days of each other. Well; That is a function of how the psychology of a malignant narcissist is structured. When Musk says things such as, “I have total power,” that’s the grandiosity. “I’m in total control” is a function of Musk’s paranoia, where everything bad is projected outward. Therefore, anything negative or bad is someone else’s fault. Bad things are 'other people' in Musk ’s mind. The grandiosity and “greatness” are all him. Musk’s mind runs on a formula which bends and twists facts, ideas and memories to suit his malignant narcissism. This is why Musk contradicts himself so easily. He lies and makes things up. His fantasies all serve his malignant narcissism and the world he has created in his own mind about his greatness.
Another component of Musk’s malignant narcissism is sadism. That part of Musk’s mind is more hidden. People such as Musk are malignant-narcissist sadists because they, at some deep level, are driven to cause harm to other people. Musk’s life is proof of this. His pedo father and trophy wife narcissist mother demonstrate his roots. He enjoys ripping people off and humiliating people. He does this manically and gleefully. He has lied thousands of times. He threatens people online and elsewhere. Most psychologists believe that Elon Musk is also a sexual sadist, who on some basic level enjoys and is aroused by watching people be afraid of him. In his mind, Musk is creating chaos and instability so that he can feel powerful.
Professor of psychiatry and psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg called that phenomenon “omnipotent destructiveness.” The bullying, the violence, the destruction, frightening people, humiliating people, getting revenge and the like — such behavior is what Elon Musk has done his whole life. It is who Elon Musk really is. Unfortunately, too many people are still in denial of that fact.
Musk has to create and control a field of negative corrupting energy around himself. For example, he pressures the scientific experts to bend the truth to his dreamworld during his press conferences. The scientists are basically Musk’s hostages. The American people are hostages as well to Elon Musk's lies. We are being abused by him. We know that Musk is lying. We know that he’s doing nothing to help us. We feel helpless to do anything to stop him. It is causing collective mental despair. It is not that all Americans are suckers or dupes, it is that Musk is a master at such cruel and manipulative behavior.
Elon Musk is a master at getting negative attention, and the more people he can shock and upset, the better.
Malignant narcissists like Elon Musk view other human beings as kindling wood to be burned for their own personal enrichment, media enlargement and hype expansion.
Follow the facts to the obvious and true conclusion. If all the facts show that Elon Musk (and his little boy buddies Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, John Doerr, Reid Hoffman, Steve Westly, etc.) is a malignant narcissist with these powerful sadistic tendencies, this omnipotent destructiveness, where he’s getting pleasure and a sense of power from dominating people and degrading people and destroying people and plundering people and laying waste to people, both psychologically and physically, then to deny such obvious facts is willful ignorance. When Musk is finally exposed, like Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos or ENRON, it will be glorious.Rather than making a prediction as to Musk's specific actions when the emperor has no clothes, it is more helpful to describe the type of actions he will take. Rather than trying to say, “This is the move he’ll make.” Like in a relationship, Elon Musk is the abuser. He is the husband or father who is abusing his partner or children or other relatives. The American people are like a woman who is leaving her abuser. She tells her abuser, “That’s it! I am done with you!” She has her keys in hand and is opening the door of the house or apartment to finally leave. What happens? The democidal maniac Elon Musk will attack us, badly. Make no mistake. Elon Musk is going to find a way to attack and cause great harm to the American people if he believes that he will be fully exposed. He will use his spy satellites, his media controls, his remote controlled cars, his stock market manipulation tools, his Goldman Sachs economic destruction team and more. Musk will strike back... unless the FBI finally arrests him first.
The Bottom Line: These people are crooks, using your tax money to conduct crimes and protect themselves from arrest at your expense!
It is indeed unfortunate to be “inspired” and have as role-models, tycoons with highly questionable motives (primarily profit) on all their ventures so far. Thank you for bringing this up!
I would suggest Hackaday focus on a series of great minds like the ones you mentioned and additionally: Cayley, Goddard, Kemurdzhian, Keldysh, Severin, Xiji and many others.