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phyrros t1_j6huo4f wrote

>Lol if he (his company) can revolutionize space travel with a pet project... that's pretty damn good.

Absolutely - it is just not visionary. For somethign to be visionary i has to be novel 6 somewhat non-trivial . Musk literally just said "I will show it those aeronautic engineers!!" and then paid money for people to develop concepts.

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Nice and dandy, not visionary.

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PS: No,- spaceX existing isn't critical for the USA, it is symptomatic for the neo-liberal USA. Pushing development to private companies with hidden subventions is simply a suboptimal solution.

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fodeethal t1_j6hwa7q wrote

I appreciate the rebuttal and I'm sorry for continuing a semantics debate... but....

Does it not require a vision to believe you can not only enter, but revolutionize an existing 'cutting edge' industry?

I guess it depends on how close other firms were to implementing or even considering vertical landing and recovery technology.

To my knowledge, SpaceX shifted the paradigm of space logistics. (Obviously not without help of established industry tech and experts)

In conclusion, I believe that to be at least somewhat visionary.

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phyrros t1_j6hzejb wrote

>I guess it depends on how close other firms were to implementing or even considering vertical landing and recovery technology.

Aside of i being done in the 50s by russians and NASA having a working prototype ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X

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But I meant a completely different point: Do look at the acomplishments in the 50s/60s and you will see the actual inventors/engineers being lauded for their visionary ideas. And now look at the last 20 years and you will see the managers/CEOs being lauded for the visionary ideas of their engineers.

So:

>Does it not require a vision to believe you can not only enter, but revolutionize an existing 'cutting edge' industry?

If I would believe that Elon Musk did any part of development I could accept "visionary" (somehow..) but as it is Musk seems to have about nothing to do with the development of SpaceX except being a posterboy for money. And no, this isn't what I call visionary because kids since the 19th century dreamed of flying to Mars....

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