This was an amazingly successful launch. No one, not even Musk, thought this would be as successful as it was.
Several firsts:
1) The most powerful rocket in mankind’s history cleared the tower.
2) The launch pad held up under the largest thrust ever attempted.
3) This flight lasted four minutes!
5 of the rockets did not fire in this vehicle. It still made it as far as it did.
VERY IMPRESSIVE!!!!!!!!!!!
Elon Musk is my hero. He will be thought of in the same manner as Edison, Tesla, the Wright Brothers, Einstein, Newton, and so on. He is one of the most impressive men of our age.
My sentiments as well. Like him more every day
He is absolutely worthy of being included among that group. As for those ridiculing what they ignorantly believe is a “failure”, SpaceX is following the same development philosophy as they did with Falcon 9; rapid testing of prototypes and iteration of improvements based upon what goes wrong until arriving at a highly reliable final product. Falcon 9 exploded many times, among other early results, and yet now it is by far the safest and most reliable rocket ever devised. It is BECAUSE of the mishaps during development and testing that the final product ends up being so reliable. By that point, they’ve already experienced, in real life, not in a computer simulation, the most likely things to go wrong and redesigned the vehicle to avoid them.
That approach seems chaotic to outsiders, but I think in the end it’s a better way to go than what an organization like NASA does, where they try to predict everything that could happen and build the flight hardware based upon those predictions, with very limited test flying before going into service. That seems riskier to me. If not for Elon Musk and SpaceX, NASA would still not have any way to transport astronauts to and from the ISS. It’s phenomenal what they’ve achieved.
Even Musk admits that most people would not want to have his brain. It’s in constant motion. See this link:
Go to 10:38 in the video.
I can somewhat relate to him, my mind never shuts down except when I sleep. My relief is reading, something I’m addicted to others say. In second grade I was reading high school books. People around me think it’s odd that I can consume so much but to me it’s normal.
Laz, he's going to be the Founding Father of Mars. He's going to land in one of the first sorties and unveil a Universal Constitution of Mars that will shock people out of their socks and drive an exodus to the Red Planet. That is History².