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NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

(www.cnn.com)
404 points voxleone | 5 comments | 21 Oct 25 12:58 UTC | HN request time: 0.005s | source
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radu_floricica ◴[21 Oct 25 13:53 UTC] No.45655837[source]▶
I'm not really sure if keeping a strict schedule has any real relevance here, outside maybe PR and politics. Starships will drop the cost to other bodies in the same way Falcon dropped the cost to orbit. Why would anyone want to invest in a technology and a project that will be obsolete by the time it's implemented?
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saubeidl ◴[21 Oct 25 14:05 UTC] No.45655981[source]▶
That is assuming Starship succeeds. Elon's track record hasn't exactly been stellar as of late.
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1. ecshafer ◴[21 Oct 25 14:20 UTC] No.45656170[source]▶
Wasn't Elon kind of treated like a child to be distracted and kept at arms length at Spacex? He is apparently really really good at fundraising, marketing and publicity (well he used to be anyways). But the stories that have come out of Tesla, and Paypal and SpaceX seem to me like the people actually running the show have tried to distract him as much as possible, and any of his actual decisions have been awful. I recall a story from PayPal's early days where he wanted to swap the servers to windows, and then he got canned as the CEO.
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2. terminalshort ◴[21 Oct 25 19:01 UTC] No.45660108[source]▶
When something goes wrong a one of Elon Musk's companies, it's clearly his fault. When something goes right, it's because he isn't actually running the company. Schrodinger's CEO!

But let's pretend for a minute that you're right and all Elon Musk does is hire great people that then do all the work building the company for him and keep him at arms length doing nothing. The skill to hire like that alone still puts him in the top 0.01% of CEOs.

3. electriclove ◴[21 Oct 25 20:30 UTC] No.45661277[source]▶
If believing these things makes you feel better, great.
4. peterfirefly ◴[21 Oct 25 21:05 UTC] No.45661696[source]▶
The one about PayPal and a switch to Windows isn't all wrong.
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5. radu_floricica ◴[22 Oct 25 06:23 UTC] No.45665490{3}[source]▶
Yep, he was wrong about that one. He was also 20 something, I think.