this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2025
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I will say it again:
Musk is not an engineer. E.g. he has not played Kerbel Space Program.
He demonstrably does not understand the tyranny of the rocket equation, and how obscenely uneconomical getting anything to, and doing anything in, space is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
Geoengineering is something worth seriously discussing (and TBH I hope he draws attention to it), and "solar shades" are theoretically neat, but this is not the way. Not with the trajectory of launch tech we have.
But he could get so much richer if he had a government contract to launch 100 trillion sun shade satellites.
Right!? Why is this even a discussion!? We have a chance to make sure the world’s first trillionaire is an (naturalized) American! You legitimately cannot put a price on that! /s
"Kerbal"
I hate this accusation. It is demonstrably false and reeks of a “No True Scotsman” fallacy. He knows a lot more about rockets than you… or at least he did during the Falcon 9 days. Watch any technical interview with him from ~5 years ago and he can very clearly explain why they made the engineering decisions they did.
That being said, his involvement in the development has obviously stopped because he can barely put together a coherent sentence about Starship these days.
Just because he’s the most dangerous fascist on the planet right now doesn’t automatically mean he’s never been an engineer.
If you said this a decade ago, sure. But at this point there have been so many examples of musk misunderstanding fundamental concepts in areas that he likes to pretend to be an expert on that he doesn't get benefit of the doubt. The dude is only good at being rich and bullying people. He has no engineering acumen, be it software, vehicles, or spacecraft.
He's good at repeating things that smart people have told him, but as soon as he is asked to think rather than simply regurgitate, he's useless.
I think that’s essentially the same thing I said, just a slightly different timeline. You can see the man’s understanding of rockets deteriorating over the years just by comparing the technical interviews he’s done against each other.
We have overwhelming evidence of this documented on YouTube for everyone to see.
I've heard that real software engineers had to re-write or fix all of his code even back when he was working on paypal.
Eh, maybe that's fair. Especially this:
Maybe he was quite knowledgeable... On the other hand, I thought his old 'Mars Colonization' talk was bonkers too. I can't remember what year it started, but it sounded like he had little understanding of the impracticality.
being able to regurgitate and discuss the basic points of a design does not mean that you have a good understanding of everything behind it
He still is involved with engineering things, people just want to think he's not so they can think less of him.
E.g with Starship it was his decision (that he had to convince everyone on) to use stainless steel for Starship. If I recall correctly, his current focus is on the raptor engine.
So far SS seems to have been working well for them, with the ship surviving some brutal re-entries even with missing heat shield tiles.
This is the progress they're making on Raptor. And for anyone that doesn't know, Raptor are the first Full-Flow Staged Combustion Cycle (FFSCC) engines ever flown. A lot of the reductions you're seeing between the engines is from moving to 3D printing all those channels within the tubes.
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Sorry, but no.