Dan Piemont
@danpiemont · May 29, 2024
As a founder of a launch company, I disagreed with the thrust of this NYT article. I admire SpaceX and welcome their success.
Our goal at ABL is to create fundamentally better launch systems, spread them all over the world, and launch all kinds of new technology that is 10x –
Michael Madrid@buildingMadrid· May 28, 2024"please help, SpaceX is competing too good"
Elon Musk
@elonmusk
Thank you for the thoughtful rebuttal.
To the best of my knowledge, none of the rideshare missions have lost money.
I do hope that rocket companies focus on reusability. That is the fundamental breakthrough needed for humanity to become a spacefaring civilization. Falcon is ~80% reusable and the team is doing incredible work launching every 2 or 3 days.
With extreme effort, Starship will eventually take reusability to ~100%. There are many tough issues to solve with this vehicle, but the biggest remaining problem is making a reusable orbital return heat shield, which has never been done before. The Shuttle’s heat shield required over 6 months of refurbishment by a large team, so was not reusable by any reasonable definition of the word.
This will take a few kicks at the can to solve and requires building an entirely new supply chain for low-cost, high-volume and yet high-reliability heat shield tiles, but it can be done.
04:09 AM · May 30, 2024 · 344.2K views
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