Tag: elon musk

@elonmusk has an opportunity to do the funniest thing.

On the one hand: the observation below will absolutely not have any effect. On the other hand: you honestly never know with this guy. And on the gripping hand, if it does unaccountably somehow happen I’m going to be yelled at by various people – including ones I like – every day, for the rest of my natural life.

Alas. Sometimes great art requires as great a sacrifice.

Continue reading @elonmusk has an opportunity to do the funniest thing.

SpaceX back online.

In case you missed it: “Early on Saturday morning, at 1:45 am local time, a Falcon 9 rocket soared into orbit from its launch site at Kennedy Space Center in Florida… after a rare failure earlier this month, this particular Falcon 9 rocket was making a return-to-flight for the company and attempting to get the world’s most active booster back into service.” They had a fifteen day turnaround time in figuring out what was wrong, fixing it, and getting back to a launch schedule. That’s, yeah, pretty fast for non-wartime aerospace*.

Continue reading SpaceX back online.

Starship Launch / Spectacular Explosion April 17th?

…Look, test rockets blow up on the pad all the damn time. Even Elon Musk himself isn’t going to commit to it working on the first try. This is why they had to have FAA approval.

So adjust your expectations. The important thing will be, What do we learn from any oopsies? Failure is just another data point.

The DOOM that came to Twitter.

I was never expecting 75% cuts. 50%, though? Oh, yeah.

Elon Musk plans to cut about 3,700 jobs at Twitter Inc or half of the company’s workforce in a bid to cut costs, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter… Bloomberg also reported that Musk intends to reverse the social media company’s existing work from anywhere policy and will require employees to work from office though some exceptions could be made.

That’s the thing that’s gonna cause heartache, agita, and the rampaging staggers, mind you. Elon Musk apparently does not like work-from-home, these days – and it seems he’s going to be treating his new acquisition the same as the old one. Gonna be interesting to see how that plays out*.

(H/T: Instapundit)

*I’m agnostic on work-from-home. It’s working out all right for my wife’s job, but I don’t think it’s a universal panacea (or disaster).

Musk buys Twitter.

I am not exactly of two minds on this; it’s more like I had two mildly divergent impulses in my response. First one:

.aannnnd here’s the other.

I know, I know. I just couldn’t resist. I’m only flesh and blood!

Tweet of Last September, HA! edition.

Saw this line on Facebook (you’ll know it when you see it), and I had to look up the original Tweets:

Continue reading Tweet of Last September, HA! edition.

See, THIS is what I was expecting out of The Future.

It’s not quite right. Yet. But I don’t think I’m getting a Bradbury or Heinlein-style rocketship – self-contained, easy to refuel, and with a turnaround time in hours – until we get a few more iterations of our engines. Or, hey, a reactionless drive, since I’m blue-skying it. But this would do, for my fifties. This would very well do.

Blue Origins lodges complaint with GAO over SpaceX.

It’s about NASA lunar lander contract: “The protest focuses on the decision to award only one company, SpaceX, the lunar lander contract from a three-way competition. Alabama-based Dynetics also had developed a lunar lander for the contest.” (Via Instapundit) …Look, I like Amazon just fine. Amazon Prime, affiliate revenue, it’s my publisher.

But… Blue Origins is a privately funded spaceflight research organization that brings payloads along for the ride, and SpaceX is an unmanned and manned orbital transport enterprise. I have no doubt (and some hopes) that Jeff Bezos will eventually have an extremely profitable company and a fleet of silver rocketships; it’s just that, in the meantime, we’re trying to get back to the moon before I die of old age. Well, that’s maybe not NASA’s specific rationale – but it absolutely should be. I’d have given SpaceX the contract, too: they’ve got direct experience at this point. That includes, again, manned missions.

Moe Lane