In the Apple TV series For All Mankind is an alternate history show that posits the What If? of a different space race, and past, if Russia landed on the moon first. One of the early episodes features the fall out as Wernher von Braun’s further Nazi associations are found out by newspapers. One of the characters in the show that he mentors has to deal with the full fallout of processing their emotions about it.
I rewatched the show recently, and that episode came out in 2019. This time it landed differently in 2025.
It makes sense, 2019 was when I started to truly understand how Musk had turned into the Henry Ford of 100 years later (Ford was historically famously pro-Nazi).
Just the year earlier, the whole Thailand story of a daring SCUBA rescue of young boys trapped in a cave as the waters rose was followed live by the whole world. This was the first time I saw Musk insert himself into a historical event and I began to realize Musk suffered from the assumption that success in one field meant they viewed themselves as brilliant in all.
It’s an easy mistake to make. I often point out to my students that in the US, it’s assumed wealth equates to deep intelligence. It hurts too much to think that wealth can come to less hard-working, less intelligent people than ourselves. That means we also believe competence should extend across fields.
But it doesn’t.
Each field, the more technical it is, requires years of training to understand its unique ins and outs.
There’s a funny meme that gets at the truth of this. Someone who said “When Elon talked electric cars, I wasn’t a car expert, I assumed he knew what he was doing. Same for rockets. But then he got into code and started saying things that made me realize he had no idea what he was talking about.”
I know enough about SCUBA to see that Musk was like the Silicon Valley submarine ‘experts’ that recently died underwater because they ignored every single expert that said their design would kill someone: supremely confident.
Like billionare Steve Jobs, clearly someone who you would normally think was smart, smartest man in the room, right? But when he got cancer, he wasted months and months, critical time he could have been fighting it, trying to juice the cancer away.
Until we admit rich people aren’t smart, we’ll continue making this mistake.
I made it.
I assumed someone who ran a company was smart.
But having watched enough con-man documentaries, I know the truth is, in Silicon Valley, you just need to be convincing. Hell, I’ve done enough freelance work to see it up close. Like the Silicon Valley individual that wanted to hire me to write a secret expose about how even rich Europeans were secretly poor “because they couldn’t even afford a car. They act rich, but the CEO of a company I just met in Denmark rode the bus to our big finance meeting!”
Dude was serious. We went in circles for ten minutes while I tried to explain a system of public transport for all elements of society.
Did not process.
It took me a while to see it, and 2019 was the last time I wasn’t feeling conflicted but curious to see what SpaceX would do.
It’s been years since I’ve watched a launch live. Or cheered it on.
I’ve been obsessed with rocket launches since I first saw one on a TV. The idea of space. Seeing what’s out there. Going boldly.
It’s soured for me.
And I hate that.
Another little piece of youthful optimism and joy ground out.
But, illegitimi non carborundum, right? I’ve been following some other space access fun through Ars Technica’s great coverage.
It’s just hard to avoid coverage of Space X while doing so. It’s just going to be like that for a while.
I spotted this interesting article about Space X here, saying the physics of the Starship don’t work:
The previous version of Starship had major fuel delivery issues, causing engines to fail repeatedly, and SpaceX has made the situation worse by trying to solve this problem in the long term! This is the complete opposite of iterative design, and despite what Musk says, it’s a gargantuan setback (read more here).
But why has SpaceX failed to solve this problem? Well, it’s because of the bane of any rocket scientist: physics.
Landing the Super Heavy Booster is a far, far easier task than landing the Starship from orbit.
The Super Heavy Booster weighs 160 tonnes dry, doesn’t make it to space, and its peak speed is only roughly 4,600 mph. Meanwhile, Starship has a dry mass of around 150 tonnes, makes it to space, and reaches an orbital speed of at least 17,500 mph. This means that during landing, Starship has over 13.57 times the kinetic energy of the Booster! And that doesn’t account for the fact that Starship carries significantly more propellant during landing than the Booster.
I’m not a rocket scientist, but I am curious to see if the writer here is correct.