The Space Thread

Fortunately, SpaceX has another voice: president Gwynne Shotwell, who has boatloads of industry goodwill and is much less publicly extravagant than Elon Musk. If he is the mind behind the company, she is its legs: the person who fought for all the contracts and made sure that the company became a viable business as opposed to a frat house for techbros or whatever.

She is so essential in fact that losing her would probably hurt more than losing Musk as far as SpaceX's ability to earn new business. She has held herself above the accusations of misconduct at the company and has issued strong internal memos encouraging employees to report incidents. However, it is hard to believe that she would not be at least aware of, if not complicit in, some of these practices, like the mid-air massages.

While I lack the ability to read minds, at least until my Neuralink is installed, to me this smells of an accommodation: Shotwell will let the boys blow off some steam as long as she gets to run the business the way she thinks it should be run. I can only imagine the tension that must be present right now in meetings between her and Elon.

Edited by Fighteer on May 20th 2022 at 11:59:23 AM

That would just make her an accomplice.

Please stop bringing up the Neuralink, even in jokes. It's a really horrifying and non-functional piece of technology that is literally impossible at this stage of our understanding of neurobiology and I think it's an incredibly inappropriate topic for jokes and it's absolutely not something that can be held up as a success or a good idea.

And yeah, if she knew about it and didn't do anything, she can easily be held liable. "boys will be boys"/"let them blow off steam" has been the justification to allow a ton of really fucking horrible things for decades or centuries. It's not at all a viable excuse or justification.

Edited by Zendervai on May 20th 2022 at 12:04:52 PM

Like I said, it's just speculation. We have no insider knowledge of that relationship.

And I'm not going to take your bait on Neuralink. You are operating on no more direct information than I am. Until we see more information about it, all we have to go on is dubious reporting. In the meantime I will joke whenever I like, thank you very much. There is also a forum topic for brain-machine interfaces.

Edited by Fighteer on May 20th 2022 at 12:11:51 PM

I would ask "What is wrong with Neuralink?" but that's off-topic, and we have a thread for that already.

If Space "X" the company was complicit, then Space "X" the company needs to pay the price, whatever that is.

Edited by DeMarquis on May 20th 2022 at 12:19:02 PM

Well, if we're speaking objectively, the report contains no legally actionable claims and nobody has as yet filed any sort of lawsuit or criminal charge, other than whatever may already be pending. So unless somebody sues, there will be no direct consequences.

The more important effects would be on SpaceX's reputation and thus its ability to earn business and/or funding. In particular, its ability to win government contracts may be hampered by a reduced "governance" score stemming from this or other scandals.

Consumer action is largely meaningless: what are people going to boycott? Starlink? There is far more demand for that than supply right now. SpaceX is in a dominant market position such that people looking to launch payloads have almost no other meaningful options.

Maybe these issues could affect some of its permitting for Starship operations, but I doubt it.

If the question is: what can we do about it, the answer is: basically nothing.

I find Musk pretty reprehensible myself and I dislike Fighteer's insistance on defending him but there's no need for the personal attacks.

While I would generally agree with you, I'm also seeing a bunch of pages that basically consist of "people try to talk about something, Fighteer comes in and starts arguments with people to defend Musk". Clearly simlpy talking isn't doing much, so I figured talking to the man himself might do something. It's not like the moderation is asking him to stop and clearly he doesn't seem interested in moderating himself.

But fair enough, I'll back out. No fair of me to interrupt the discussion. My initial point remains, though; if Fighteer wants to keep joking about Neuralink, he should at least be fair and accept people talking about what they think of Musk. Hardly fair otherwise.

I have not thumped or banned anyone. We are having a discussion. That is what people do. It is not much of a discussion if only one side is represented; then it's a circle-jerk. If you have a problem with my position, you can debate it civilly, or you can leave.

Edited by Fighteer on May 20th 2022 at 1:09:16 PM

It's also not a discussion when one side refuses to acknowledge and engage the other side's arguments. At that point all you're doing is yelling at people, Fighteer.

So how about Boeing's Starliner, eh? I hear that's in orbit and going to dock with the ISS tonight.

There have been reports that some of the maneuvering thrusters experienced issues during the orbital insertion burn yesterday and shut down early. We seem to be waiting for an official briefing on that, but all I'm seeing right now on Twitter is "I heard this" and "I heard that", even from reputable sources.

Edit: There's supposed to be a go/no-go decision for ISS approach at 18:30 UTC (2:30 PM EDT) today, but that's fifteen minutes away and we've heard nothing. Silence is not good.

Edited by Fighteer on May 20th 2022 at 2:17:07 PM

Houston Mission Control has reportedly given Starliner a "go" for approach to the International Space Station, indicating that any concerns over thruster performance are not significant enough to cause a scrub.

I still don't see a direct livestream for the docking but at the very least it will be covered by NASA Live. It is currently scheduled for 23:10 UTC (7:10 PM EDT).

NASA: Webb Nearly Set to Explore the Solar System

NASA reports that the Webb telescope has completed another commissioning goal: tracking a moving object. In this case it was a main-belt asteroid. It continues to be on track to start scientific observations around July.

I could certainly make an argument that Musk is not particularly fit to run Space "X" at this point. The man is a PR nightmare, and his little stunts with crypto and Twitter and the SEC are certainly not doing his companies any favours either.

Being a loud, outspoken celebrity genius is great when you have a startup, where such behaviour can get you a spotlight and public interest. It's not so great when you have to be the CEO of a big company, where stability and levelheadedness are much more important, to say nothing of being able to behave sufficiently professionally to not run afoul of certain business rules and regulations, like on stock trading and contract law.

I do wonder if part of this whole Twitter adventure is just Musk being bored at being a CEO sometimes. Part of it does feel like him craving a fresh challenge in need of a novel solution he can throw himself at (quite apart from his ability to actually pull it off).

There's the question of his behavior in general and of this specific incident, which happened in 2016. Not that it should matter when it occurred, of course, but given his denial and the lack of any other evidence, it's a "he-said, she-said" situation. It will only be litigated in the court of public opinion.

Either way, I and many other people heartily wish he'd chill and worry about running his companies.

Edited by Fighteer on May 20th 2022 at 3:21:34 PM

I don't know if that really counts as a denial.

Yeah, he's never actually said he didn't do it. It's all "if I did do it, she'd be able to describe these intimate details!" That's not the same thing, especially given the NDA.

Edited by Zendervai on May 20th 2022 at 3:25:12 PM

He has tweeted several direct denials, covered here. Again, though, I'm not here to play judge. The behavior is unacceptable but I have no way of independently fact-checking any of these claims.

Edited by Fighteer on May 20th 2022 at 3:26:22 PM

Somehow his denials wound up digging a bigger hole. Because, 1) immediately jumping to accusing it of being primarily a political hit-piece because of the left being so mean to him, and 2) demanding details of his body. Yes, I'm sure anyone harrassed that way wants to remember it in detail. >_>

Like I said, the facts hardly matter here. It's the behavior that creates and exacerbates the problem. And I agree that his behavior is improper even if he is correct about it being a hit piece.

Edited to add: NASA Live has begun coverage of Starliner's approach to the ISS.

Edited by Fighteer on May 20th 2022 at 3:41:13 PM

The problem is that he called attention to the accusation before the accusation broke out. Even if he is innocent, he’s handling it completely wrong.

He’s turned “Elongate” into a meme and is cracking jokes, and his followers are eating it all up.

Not all. I've seen some folks breaking with him on Twitter and more doubting. It's very interesting to look at how those people align themselves; the farther right they lean and/or the more they believe that the establishment has it in for Musk, the more they are sticking up for him.

I think that's kind of expected. One recurring thing you get a lot is that the left is generally a lot less prone to hero worship. It happens, but for most people on the left, when asked about Greta Thunberg, for example, the reaction is mostly "yeah, she's cool" or something along those lines and that's about it.

It's really unsettling a lot of the time because you'll get people on the right making a huge deal about claiming or cancelling one of the left's "idols" and half the time, the response is "yeah, we think they suck, too." but the people crowing about it seemingly don't notice the complete lack of outrage or reaction. (This happened with, of all people, Bill Maher.)

Musk was never really that big a darling on the left (Keeping Tesla a luxury brand for so long was a sticking point) and so when he started getting really obnoxious, it wasn't difficult at all for most of that crowd to move on. Most of his ardent followers now can easily be identified as in the libertarian or right-wing crowds, he lost most of the left a while ago.

Uh, to be clear, he had fans on the left and people liked him, but him getting active on social media is what did him in there. Oh, and his refusal to consider normal public transit really did him in with the people who really care about fixing congestion and transit problems.

Edited by Zendervai on May 20th 2022 at 3:59:43 PM

We can talk about the Tesla thing in the EVs thread, but in a nutshell, his approach of going high-to-low in terms of price was the only possible way for a startup without extensive financial backing to operate, and the only way to get people to pay attention was to offer a better product than anyone else had. That means it's going to cost more. Established automakers may be able to offer more affordable cars because they can afford to eat the margins, but that is not something a startup can do. Teslas are far from the most expensive EVs on the market now, anyway.

Portions of the left have been remarkably, even fanatically antagonistic toward Tesla for no obvious reasons other than that Elon Musk got wealthy from it and that it didn't unionize, which I have to say is one of the biggest missed opportunities in the last decade. We Could Have Avoided All This. But again, it's a topic for a different thread.

Edited by Fighteer on May 20th 2022 at 4:19:21 AM

I think that anger has more to do with a more general anger at American billionaires who hold a disproportionate amount of the nation's wealth, often at the expense of their employees' wages, and at the resulting wealth disparity.