this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2025
255 points (97.4% liked)
Not The Onion
18534 readers
2038 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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.
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.