Well perhaps not a disaster, merely another test failure from which SpaceX would have learned, just like they have from the various failures of Flight Test 1-4.

Still it’s interesting to find this out about Flight Test 5:

In the audio, one person, not identified, described an issue with the Super Heavy landing burn where a “misconfigured” parameter meant that spin pressure, presuming in the Raptor engines in the booster, did not increase as expected.

“We were one second away from that tripping and telling the rocket to abort and try to crash into the ground next to the tower,” that person said. That scenario would “erroneously tell a healthy rocket to not try that catch….We had a whole bunch of new aborts and commit criteria that we tried to doublecheck really well, but, I mean, I think our concern was well-placed, and one of these came very close to biting us.”

But what people are also talking about is how this became public; Musk himself released the audio of his rocket engineers having this discussion with him as he was playing a video game:

That’s actually wilder shit than smoking dope during some podcast interview. There must surely be people around the world asking themselves, “Is this how he runs these companies?”, but not believing the answer. But you can’t argue with success, especially $250 billion of success, with perhaps double that to come when SpaceX goes public.

Then there’s this story of another Musk business revolution:

Elon Musk and the team behind xAI have achieved an engineering marvel, setting up a supercluster of 100,000 H200 Blackwell GPUs in a whopping 19 days. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told the story of Elon Musk’s incredible installation prowess with members of the Tesla Owners Silicon Valley on X.

Huang describes Musk’s 19-day escapade with awe and respect, calling the effort “superhuman”. The team at xAI purportedly went from the “concept” phase to full-ready compatibility with Nvidia’s “gear” in less than three weeks. This includes running xAI’s first AI training run on the newly built supercluster as well.

By contrast Huang, whose Nvidia engineers had to work with Musk’s, said a typical data centre would take four years to build: three for planning and one to build.

All of this has got progressive economist Noah Smith wondering if Musk is about to unleash a manufacturing revival and revolution across the USA. Smith is no friend of Trump, nor a supporter of his economic ideas and not impressed by Musk’s support of him, but that doesn’t stop him from giving credit where it’s deserved – even if he does make the comparison, as others have done, with the fictional Tony Stark:

Consider SpaceX. Without this one Musk company, America would be lagging far behind China in the space race. But with SpaceX included, the U.S. is far ahead of China. And SpaceX is a manufacturing powerhouse. Despite doing almost all of its manufacturing in the United States, the company has been able to outmanufacture all of China in its field.

Moreover Musk is not just launching rockets for fun: he’s making money not just from the launches but from what he’s already put up there. SpaceX owns roughly 60% of all active satellites in orbit.

Not that I’m particularly impressed by EV’s – which I think will take a lot more time to replace ICE vehicles than anybody, including Musk, figures, precisely because they’re not as revolutionary as SpaceX’s rockets – but again Musk is beating everybody else:

Noah asks the same question others have asked for at least a decade now: how the hell does Musk do it, and attempts to provide an answer:

The exact specifics are probably impossible to pin down, but the general contours are nothing mysterious. Elon isn’t hyperintelligent or hyper-creative. Most of the engineers at SpaceX or Tesla are probably better at their jobs than he could be. His superpower — according to a bunch of people I’ve talked to in the tech industry — is gathering, motivating, coordinating, and setting goals for human talent.

In that respect he sounds a lot like Steve Jobs, whom Smith surprisingly does not mention in his analysis even as he compares Musk to Henry Ford, Matsushita Kōnosuke and …. Genghis Khan, and Vladimir Lenin?? Which is an even more surprising miss given this comment, which he supports with analysis from two economic studies of founder-CEO companies vs. professional-CEO companies”

In fact, Elon is just the most standout example of this superpower. Economists have long noted that founder-led companies outperform others
…
Founder-CEO firms differ systematically from successor-CEO firms…Founder-CEO firms invest more in research and development, have higher capital expenditures, and make more focused mergers and acquisitions
…
..a 31 percent increase in the citation-weighted patent count before we control for R&D spending and a 23 percent increase in the citation-weighted patent count.

Apple since Jobs died being the classic example: sure, they’re more valuable now, but it’s all on the back of what was created during Jobs’s time as CEO. Can you think of any breakthrough device from Apple under Cook’s leadership?

I did appreciate Smith’s crack at Obama’s stupid “you didn’t build that” comment from years ago, given that in pulling all these threads together entrepreneur’s do indeed “build that”.

Smith does express caveats about all this; having one man with so much power means his mistakes will have more impact (he uses Henry Ford as the example), and Musk’s connections with Putin and the Chinese suggest he can be influenced, possibly by Putin’s history of dead opponents, and certainly by Xi’s implied threats of losing business. Both are organisation men, and that’s a different but no less powerful skill than Musk’s.

The Putin stuff and concerns that maybe Musk isn’t as pro-American as he seems, feels like it’s taking too much from yet another desperate Democrat talking point during this election, but then Noah Smith is a progressive and in any case the points he makes are good, including against the current Administration and his own side vs. MAGA – and he’s certainly opposed to demands that Musk’s security clearence be revoked, arguing that it would accomplish nothing (“America would alienate and lose its most important defense contractor”):

The Biden administration should have worked closely with Musk on supporting his factories here in America so that he would not have had to kowtow to the Chinese; instead, they largely snubbed him.
…
America’s superpower has always been to recruit talented immigrants like Elon Musk and to inspire them to love and fight for their adopted nation….The MAGA movement has clearly decided that if American culture continues to trend in a progressive direction, there won’t even be an America worth defending from outside powers…[But] If the America of the 2020s can’t even inspire immigrants to use their individual talents to guard it against the likes of Xi and Putin, then we have lost our national superpower.

Musk has long talked of his plan to establish a human civilisation on Mars (“I want to die on Mars, just not on impact”) as a backup in case we get hit with another dinosaur comet (an Extinction Level Event or “Ele” as the movie Deep Impact had it). It’s the one idea that ties together his focus:

  • Cheap, reusable rockets and interplanetary spacecraft because he reckons you need a million tons of material to start the colony.
  • Tunnel-boring machines, because they’d have to be underground away from the radiation allowed by Mars’s thin atmosphere and lack of a magnetic field.
  • Electric-powered machines, because there’s no fossil fuels on Mars.

I’m surprised he has not yet jumped into building nuclear power stations faster and better than the status quo, or figuring out orbital solar power stations, because both will be needed on Mars to supply all that electricity.

But he’s also talked about how past civilisations “forgot” how to do things they’d once done well, like the Egyptians building pyramids or the Romans building roads and aqueducts, and how he’s racing against a future where America forgets how to build spacecraft.

It could be that he just wants to escape a USA, and perhaps even a planetary civilisation, before it simply gives up on itself.