Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "DEBUNKING MUSK - TED Talk 2022 Pt 2/4" video.

I'm an aerospace engineer. I work in industrial automation, control systems and robotics. Like so many people Elon relies on people confusing what they see coming out of Hollywood and what's actually feasible. He's not the first, Elizabeth Holmes copied the 1 drop blood testing in Gattaca. David Icke copied his lizard people from the original TV series 'V.' Musk just copies what ever is convenient at that moment. Some of the water from air scammers copied Uncle Owen from Star Wars. As an engineer its incredibly frustrating these days to see what so many people do. I'm grateful to the debunkers for at least trying to set the record straight. Even when the debunkers get something wrong (and they do sometimes) they are at least trying to properly inform people. On one hand YouTube and the rest of social media are great on the other they are a curse that's plaguing society with so much crap and garbage its now almost impossible to fix what needs fixing.
8
@zpettigrew Go look up Patrick Boyle here on YT. He's a fund manager who does a channel and listen to what he says about Musk. He's as monotone bland as a person can be but his assessment is as hilarious as it is brutal.
4
@commonsenseskeptic Great point. I did aerospace engineering at U. Illinois where Eberhard went and from an engineering point Musk is a clown. BUT he's also a clown who can identify technology that he can exploit. Occasionally he picks a real genuine winner like he did it at Paypal, did it with SpaceX and did it with Tesla. I know you don't think too highly of Gwynne Shotwell because she works for Elon and a couple of her comments have been Elon like. You pointed out that she made a comment about that rockets won't be considered truly reusable until we can use them like aeroplanes. You were quite right that's totally unrealistic for the types of rockets now in use, but did you know that XCOR built a rocket powered aircraft for the proposed rocket racing league that flew 7 times in one day. I think XCOR was a company a smarter version of Jeff Bezos should have bought for the expertise and experience. So going back to Gwynne Shotwell's comment. Its easy to read it (as her being part of Elon enterprises) as "this is what we'll be doing next week" except she doesn't promise that she's just pointing out what it would mean to be truly reusable. Further if I was grading SpaceX I'd give them a C or C+. They have built Falcon up to man rated and they have got Crew Dragon working. They are resupplying the ISS and swapping crews at the ISS. BUT in reality they have taken 20years to do an upgraded version of Apollo. Is it better than Apollo? ABSOLUTELY. Its reusable carries and extra body and compared to Soyuz at $90M USD per seat to $70M USD for 4 seats its a massive saving in cost. But Falcon is still only a C+ at best. Its got some innovation but its not ground breaking. HOWEVER compare to everyone else is magic. Sierra and others have been doing development for decades, promising the universe and going not much of anywhere. If you consider how much money Boeing has had spoon fed to them by congress they should have, built a moon base, landed on Mars and be ready for the first manned mission to Jupiter by now. On the normal A to F scale Boeing are somewhere south of G. The only reason they might get an F- is that at least the last attempt at Starliner wasn't a complete failure. Don't get me started on SLS, that's going to go down as one of the worst conceived and managed engineering projects in history. The idea of reusing space shuttle tech was sound but NOTHING after that point was sound, sensible, rational, logical, reasonable, justifiable or much anything else.
1
@commonsenseskeptic If you want to do a debunk of Jeff Bezos claim of moving all of the heavy industry like iron ore processing into Low Earth Orbit. LET ME KNOW. FYI - I met Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) in 2002 and he told me to look at Helium-3. I wanted to discuss satellite servicing and he said no the majors wont let you and go look at He-3. He-3 meant mining on the moon so being Australian I went off to our mining industry for some experience building and operating mines. By chance we were in the process of building lots of new mines to feed the Chinese beast. I have worked in iron ore and metallurgical coal and NOBODY is ever taking that stuff into low earth orbit unless they develop Star Trek matter transportation. Just go and do the basic high school level science math and calculate the kinetic energy of 2 billion tons of iron at 7kilometers per second. Then compare that much energy to Hiroshima and work out how much energy you need to BURN OFF in the upper atmosphere bringing that much down from LEO. Yes it will freak you out, but not as much as some other stuff.
1