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WHEN INSANE ENGINEERING MAKES PERFECT SENSE SpaceX catching a 220-foot rocket with a tower instead of landing legs is the kind of insane engineering that only makes sense when you think about it backwards. Landing legs add about 5% to the vehicle's mass. So instead of putting legs on...

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Mario Nawfal

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33,791 views • 6 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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Elon Musk, 3 years ago: This is banana stuff. It probably won't work the first time. “Instead of putting landing legs on the booster and ship, we are going to catch them with a tower to save the weight of the landing legs. We're talking about catching the largest flying object ever made on a giant tower with chopstick arms. It's like Karate Kid with the fly, but much bigger. This probably won't work the first time. Anyway, this is bananas. This is banana stuff.” Interview with Lex Fridman, 2021
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Elon Musk, 3 years ago: This is banana stuff. It probably won't work the first time. “Instead of putting landing legs on the booster and ship, we are going to catch them with a tower to save the weight of the landing legs. We're talking about catching the largest flying object ever made on a giant tower with chopstick arms. It's like Karate Kid with the fly, but much bigger. This probably won't work the first time. Anyway, this is bananas. This is banana stuff.” Interview with Lex Fridman, 2021

ELON CLIPS

477,255 views • 1 year ago

Elon Musk: Our goal is to fly Starship like an aircraft. “In order to achieve full reusability, everything's got to be perfect. The engines, the structure, the avionics, the choice of propellant. You've got to go to extreme measures for mass optimization, which is why we have the tower catch the rocket. Instead of putting on landing legs, which are heavy, the rocket can simply be caught by the tower. And we haven't achieved full reusability yet, but we do expect to achieve that hopefully later this year with Starship. If you're going to go a step beyond that, which is to make it rapidly reusable such that the rocket lands, it gets caught by the tower, gets put back on the launch stand and can be flown again without any refurbishment or laborious inspection. Like an aircraft. Yeah, this is incredibly difficult. This is the first time that there's ever been a rocket where that is possible. That's what makes Starship so profound.” Source: AI Satellite presentation, SpaceX, June 8, 2026
0:52

Elon Musk: Our goal is to fly Starship like an aircraft. “In order to achieve full reusability, everything's got to be perfect. The engines, the structure, the avionics, the choice of propellant. You've got to go to extreme measures for mass optimization, which is why we have the tower catch the rocket. Instead of putting on landing legs, which are heavy, the rocket can simply be caught by the tower. And we haven't achieved full reusability yet, but we do expect to achieve that hopefully later this year with Starship. If you're going to go a step beyond that, which is to make it rapidly reusable such that the rocket lands, it gets caught by the tower, gets put back on the launch stand and can be flown again without any refurbishment or laborious inspection. Like an aircraft. Yeah, this is incredibly difficult. This is the first time that there's ever been a rocket where that is possible. That's what makes Starship so profound.” Source: AI Satellite presentation, SpaceX, June 8, 2026

ELON CLIPS

19,272 views • 2 months ago

BREAKING: For 10 years the world believed there was one way to reuse a rocket: land it upright on its engines, the way SpaceX does. Today China refused to copy it, and pulled off something SpaceX never managed on a first flight. It caught the rocket instead. The Long March 10B lifted off from Hainan, China this morning, and about 6 minutes later its first stage came back down toward a 25,000-ton ship at sea. It did not land. Hooks on the falling booster snagged a net of tensioned steel wires strung across the deck, the wires riding robotic rails that slid into place to meet it. No landing legs. No touchdown. A rocket plucked out of its own descent by a moving net, on the maiden flight of a brand-new vehicle. No one handed China this. SpaceX guards its rocket tech as “trade secrets”, not “patents”, precisely so it cannot be read and copied. China watched a decade of public flights and then built an entirely different machine to reach the same prize, catching instead of landing, which sheds the heavy legs and spares the fuel a soft touchdown burns to hover. And this was never about cheaper satellites, though it delivers those too, feeding the thousands of birds in China's Starlink rival. Its deeper purpose is the Moon. That booster shares its core with the rocket meant to land Chinese astronauts on the lunar surface by 2030. In the same season, America's own Moon rocket, Starship, has flown 12 times and still has not shown the single maneuver its lunar plan depends on. One flight does not dethrone SpaceX. It has landed hundreds. What ended today is not SpaceX's lead. It is Uncle Sam’s belief that it owns the only road to the Moon. The piece works out which way of coming home actually wins.
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BREAKING: For 10 years the world believed there was one way to reuse a rocket: land it upright on its engines, the way SpaceX does. Today China refused to copy it, and pulled off something SpaceX never managed on a first flight. It caught the rocket instead. The Long March 10B lifted off from Hainan, China this morning, and about 6 minutes later its first stage came back down toward a 25,000-ton ship at sea. It did not land. Hooks on the falling booster snagged a net of tensioned steel wires strung across the deck, the wires riding robotic rails that slid into place to meet it. No landing legs. No touchdown. A rocket plucked out of its own descent by a moving net, on the maiden flight of a brand-new vehicle. No one handed China this. SpaceX guards its rocket tech as “trade secrets”, not “patents”, precisely so it cannot be read and copied. China watched a decade of public flights and then built an entirely different machine to reach the same prize, catching instead of landing, which sheds the heavy legs and spares the fuel a soft touchdown burns to hover. And this was never about cheaper satellites, though it delivers those too, feeding the thousands of birds in China's Starlink rival. Its deeper purpose is the Moon. That booster shares its core with the rocket meant to land Chinese astronauts on the lunar surface by 2030. In the same season, America's own Moon rocket, Starship, has flown 12 times and still has not shown the single maneuver its lunar plan depends on. One flight does not dethrone SpaceX. It has landed hundreds. What ended today is not SpaceX's lead. It is Uncle Sam’s belief that it owns the only road to the Moon. The piece works out which way of coming home actually wins.

Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡

2,629,861 views • 1 month ago

Starship’s bellyflop landing is engineering on another level. Instead of landing like a normal rocket, Starship intentionally descends sideways, using its body and four flaps to control drag, attitude, and direction through the atmosphere That maneuver slows the vehicle without wasting as much propellant. Then, at the last second, it relights its Raptor engines and snaps upright for landing. It may look like chaos but it is actually a precise fusion of aerodynamics, flight software, and propulsion, one of the boldest landing maneuvers ever built in aerospace.
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Starship’s bellyflop landing is engineering on another level. Instead of landing like a normal rocket, Starship intentionally descends sideways, using its body and four flaps to control drag, attitude, and direction through the atmosphere That maneuver slows the vehicle without wasting as much propellant. Then, at the last second, it relights its Raptor engines and snaps upright for landing. It may look like chaos but it is actually a precise fusion of aerodynamics, flight software, and propulsion, one of the boldest landing maneuvers ever built in aerospace.

SMX 🇺🇸

43,534 views • 4 months ago

Elon Musk: When I first suggested catching Starship's booster, people thought I lost my mind. “If you can move mass [from the rocket] to the ground site, it's better to move mass to the ground site. That's why we took legs off the booster and just have the tower catch it. It sounds mad. I know it sounds insane. When I suggested that, people thought I lost my mind, and maybe I have. It might take a few kicks at the can, but we'll get it right.” Interview with Everyday Astronaut, August 7, 2021
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Elon Musk: When I first suggested catching Starship's booster, people thought I lost my mind. “If you can move mass [from the rocket] to the ground site, it's better to move mass to the ground site. That's why we took legs off the booster and just have the tower catch it. It sounds mad. I know it sounds insane. When I suggested that, people thought I lost my mind, and maybe I have. It might take a few kicks at the can, but we'll get it right.” Interview with Everyday Astronaut, August 7, 2021

ELON CLIPS

990,574 views • 1 year ago

Elon Musk Elon Musk : Engineering is the closest thing to being a wizard in the real world “I guess I think of myself as a technologist or engineer. And I seem to have some skill in developing new technologies of various kinds. And when I was a kid, my favorite book was The Lord of the Rings. And I loved Gandalf. And it's like, well, what's the closest thing to being a wizard in the real world? And I think that engineering is kind of like that. It's like you make new technologies that didn't exist before. So, engineering technology that is magic. As Arthur C. Clarke would say, 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.'”
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Elon Musk Elon Musk : Engineering is the closest thing to being a wizard in the real world “I guess I think of myself as a technologist or engineer. And I seem to have some skill in developing new technologies of various kinds. And when I was a kid, my favorite book was The Lord of the Rings. And I loved Gandalf. And it's like, well, what's the closest thing to being a wizard in the real world? And I think that engineering is kind of like that. It's like you make new technologies that didn't exist before. So, engineering technology that is magic. As Arthur C. Clarke would say, 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.'”

Beanie👾

35,777 views • 8 months ago

ELON: “IT’S AN HONOR TO WORK WITH THE BEST ROCKET ENGINEERING TEAM EVER ASSEMBLED” “It’s like this, if this was a video game, it’s set to maximum difficulty, but not impossible. That’s where we are. It’s not as though others ignored the concept of reusability, they just concluded that it was too difficult to achieve. We’ve been working on this for a long time at SpaceX, and I’m the chief engineer of the company. We have an extremely talented engineering team, the best rocket engineering team ever assembled. It’s an honor to work with such incredible people.” Source: Elon Musk SpaceX
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ELON: “IT’S AN HONOR TO WORK WITH THE BEST ROCKET ENGINEERING TEAM EVER ASSEMBLED” “It’s like this, if this was a video game, it’s set to maximum difficulty, but not impossible. That’s where we are. It’s not as though others ignored the concept of reusability, they just concluded that it was too difficult to achieve. We’ve been working on this for a long time at SpaceX, and I’m the chief engineer of the company. We have an extremely talented engineering team, the best rocket engineering team ever assembled. It’s an honor to work with such incredible people.” Source: Elon Musk SpaceX

Mario Nawfal

1,116,695 views • 9 months ago

Elon Musk was asked about the most inspiring moments of his life, and his answer perfectly captures the wild journey of building the future from scratch. Beyond the birth of his kids, he points to the very first production Tesla Roadster. Think about that: they started out not even knowing how to make a car, and suddenly they had a fully legal, regulatory-approved vehicle on the road. From the huge relief of getting a SpaceX rocket into orbit and actually landing it back down, to the mind-blowing "magic" of a car driving you from home to work completely on its own—it’s a powerful reminder that the impossible is just an engineering problem waiting to be solved.
1:19

Elon Musk was asked about the most inspiring moments of his life, and his answer perfectly captures the wild journey of building the future from scratch. Beyond the birth of his kids, he points to the very first production Tesla Roadster. Think about that: they started out not even knowing how to make a car, and suddenly they had a fully legal, regulatory-approved vehicle on the road. From the huge relief of getting a SpaceX rocket into orbit and actually landing it back down, to the mind-blowing "magic" of a car driving you from home to work completely on its own—it’s a powerful reminder that the impossible is just an engineering problem waiting to be solved.

Ian Miles Cheong

11,535 views • 4 months ago

Elon Musk breaks down the first-principles math that told him rockets were massively overpriced "How much should a rocket cost? The typical approach people take is they look historically at what rockets cost and assume any new rocket must be similar to the prior cost" "A first-principles approach: you look at the materials the rocket is made of. Aluminum, copper, carbon fiber, steel. What are the constituent elements, how much do they weigh, and what's the material price per kilogram? That sets the actual floor on what a rocket can cost" "Then you realize the raw materials of a rocket are only maybe 1 or 2% of the historical cost of a rocket. So the manufacturing must necessarily be very inefficient"
1:54

Elon Musk breaks down the first-principles math that told him rockets were massively overpriced "How much should a rocket cost? The typical approach people take is they look historically at what rockets cost and assume any new rocket must be similar to the prior cost" "A first-principles approach: you look at the materials the rocket is made of. Aluminum, copper, carbon fiber, steel. What are the constituent elements, how much do they weigh, and what's the material price per kilogram? That sets the actual floor on what a rocket can cost" "Then you realize the raw materials of a rocket are only maybe 1 or 2% of the historical cost of a rocket. So the manufacturing must necessarily be very inefficient"

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28,509 views • 9 days ago

ELON: PEOPLE THOUGHT I LOST MY MIND “If you can move mass [from the rocket] to the ground site, it's better to move mass to the ground site. That's why we took legs off the booster and just have the tower catch it. It sounds mad. I know it sounds insane. When I suggested that, people thought I lost my mind. Maybe I have. It might take a few kicks at the can, but we'll get it right.” Interview with Everyday Astronaut, 2021
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ELON: PEOPLE THOUGHT I LOST MY MIND “If you can move mass [from the rocket] to the ground site, it's better to move mass to the ground site. That's why we took legs off the booster and just have the tower catch it. It sounds mad. I know it sounds insane. When I suggested that, people thought I lost my mind. Maybe I have. It might take a few kicks at the can, but we'll get it right.” Interview with Everyday Astronaut, 2021

Mario Nawfal

46,720,728 views • 1 year ago

"Welcome to Starbase, Texas. This is a city. It's actually legally a city that, thanks to the hard work of the SpaceX team, we built out of nothing and is now a gigantic rocket manufacturing system. We're actually in a public highway, so you can come and visit and drive down the road and see the epic hardware. So I think this is the first time that a rocket development program has actually been on a public highway." 一 Elon Musk
1:05

"Welcome to Starbase, Texas. This is a city. It's actually legally a city that, thanks to the hard work of the SpaceX team, we built out of nothing and is now a gigantic rocket manufacturing system. We're actually in a public highway, so you can come and visit and drive down the road and see the epic hardware. So I think this is the first time that a rocket development program has actually been on a public highway." 一 Elon Musk

DogeDesigner

91,713 views • 7 months ago

Paul Buchheit tells the story of Elon Musk’s talk at Google before the first SpaceX launch When asked about the common denominators of founders who build $100 billion companies, Gmail creator Paul Buchheit gives the following response: “There is this obsessive focus. There’s almost an irrationality in some of these founders. The example that comes out as like the most insane version of it is probably Elon Musk.” Paul recalls how Elon gave a tech talk at Google around 2003 - after he had started SpaceX, but before they had done the first rocket launch. Someone asked what Elon would do if the rocket explodes when it launched, and Elon replied: “Well, I have enough money for three launches, so I hope one of them succeeds.” The first three launches blew up too and SpaceX only barely scraped together enough money for a fourth launch that ultimately succeeded. Paul comments: “If that fourth rocket hadn’t worked, there would be no SpaceX and Elon would be bankrupt. That is insane. I would not take all of my money and plow it into some harebrained rocket scheme. That’s a level of irrational that is I think wonderful.” Video source: Y Combinator (2018)
1:06

Paul Buchheit tells the story of Elon Musk’s talk at Google before the first SpaceX launch When asked about the common denominators of founders who build $100 billion companies, Gmail creator Paul Buchheit gives the following response: “There is this obsessive focus. There’s almost an irrationality in some of these founders. The example that comes out as like the most insane version of it is probably Elon Musk.” Paul recalls how Elon gave a tech talk at Google around 2003 - after he had started SpaceX, but before they had done the first rocket launch. Someone asked what Elon would do if the rocket explodes when it launched, and Elon replied: “Well, I have enough money for three launches, so I hope one of them succeeds.” The first three launches blew up too and SpaceX only barely scraped together enough money for a fourth launch that ultimately succeeded. Paul comments: “If that fourth rocket hadn’t worked, there would be no SpaceX and Elon would be bankrupt. That is insane. I would not take all of my money and plow it into some harebrained rocket scheme. That’s a level of irrational that is I think wonderful.” Video source: Y Combinator (2018)

Startup Archive

53,521 views • 9 months ago

🇺🇸 ELON: WE BUILT A ROCKET CITY FROM NOTHING SpaceX literally incorporated their launch site as a city and put it on a public road. You can just drive by and watch them build Starships. That's wild... “This is a city that we built out of nothing thanks to the hard work of the SpaceX team. It’s now a gigantic rocket manufacturing system. We’re actually on a public highway, so you can come and visit and see the epic hardware. I think this is the first rocket development program ever on a public highway.” Source: Department of War Elon Musk
0:58

🇺🇸 ELON: WE BUILT A ROCKET CITY FROM NOTHING SpaceX literally incorporated their launch site as a city and put it on a public road. You can just drive by and watch them build Starships. That's wild... “This is a city that we built out of nothing thanks to the hard work of the SpaceX team. It’s now a gigantic rocket manufacturing system. We’re actually on a public highway, so you can come and visit and see the epic hardware. I think this is the first rocket development program ever on a public highway.” Source: Department of War Elon Musk

Mario Nawfal

93,474 views • 7 months ago

ELON: I APPROVE NEARLY ALL SPACEX ROCKET DESIGN DECISIONS “I'm actually the chief engineer of SpaceX, so I've signed off on pretty much all the design decisions. And so, if there's something that goes wrong with that vehicle, it's fundamentally my fault. So, when I see the rocket, I see all the things that could go wrong and the things that could be better. And the same with the Dragon spacecraft. Other people will say, oh, this is a spacecraft or a rocket, and that looks really cool. I've like a readout of these are the risks, these are the problems. That's what I see. It's not what other people see when they see the product.” Source: Interview with Lex Fridman, December 2021
0:49

ELON: I APPROVE NEARLY ALL SPACEX ROCKET DESIGN DECISIONS “I'm actually the chief engineer of SpaceX, so I've signed off on pretty much all the design decisions. And so, if there's something that goes wrong with that vehicle, it's fundamentally my fault. So, when I see the rocket, I see all the things that could go wrong and the things that could be better. And the same with the Dragon spacecraft. Other people will say, oh, this is a spacecraft or a rocket, and that looks really cool. I've like a readout of these are the risks, these are the problems. That's what I see. It's not what other people see when they see the product.” Source: Interview with Lex Fridman, December 2021

Mario Nawfal

838,205 views • 9 months ago

ELON: SOMEONE HAS TO SOLVE ROCKET REUSABILITY — WHETHER IT’S SPACEX OR SOMEONE ELSE “The cost of the fuel and oxygen on a Falcon 9 is 0.3% of the cost of the rocket. So, it's a very tiny number. It's very similar to an airplane. How much does it cost to fuel up an airplane, and how much does it cost to buy an airplane? They're very different things. If humanity is ever to expand beyond Earth and establish a self-sustaining base on another planet, it's critical that we solve this problem. Whether it's SpaceX or someone else, someone has to solve the problem, and we can have a hundred-fold reduction in the cost of spaceflight. That's what SpaceX has been trying to do, and really that's been the goal since the beginning of the company. So far, I've not been very successful in that regard, but I think we have a handle on it. We've got a design that closes in the simulations. If we can build that thing, it should work.” Source: SXSW, March 2013
0:58

ELON: SOMEONE HAS TO SOLVE ROCKET REUSABILITY — WHETHER IT’S SPACEX OR SOMEONE ELSE “The cost of the fuel and oxygen on a Falcon 9 is 0.3% of the cost of the rocket. So, it's a very tiny number. It's very similar to an airplane. How much does it cost to fuel up an airplane, and how much does it cost to buy an airplane? They're very different things. If humanity is ever to expand beyond Earth and establish a self-sustaining base on another planet, it's critical that we solve this problem. Whether it's SpaceX or someone else, someone has to solve the problem, and we can have a hundred-fold reduction in the cost of spaceflight. That's what SpaceX has been trying to do, and really that's been the goal since the beginning of the company. So far, I've not been very successful in that regard, but I think we have a handle on it. We've got a design that closes in the simulations. If we can build that thing, it should work.” Source: SXSW, March 2013

Mario Nawfal

2,652,416 views • 1 year ago

🇺🇸 BEZOS SHARES BLUE ORIGIN'S ROCKET LANDING PERFECTLY ON A SHIP AT NIGHT! Jeff Bezos posted a super exciting 30-second video of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket's main bottom section making a smooth landing on a special boat in the ocean after dark. With its 7 powerful engines firing just right to stick the landing. This happened during a recent launch on November 13 that sent NASA's space probe to Mars, and it's their first time successfully bringing back and reusing a big rocket like this. Source: Jeff Bezos
0:27

🇺🇸 BEZOS SHARES BLUE ORIGIN'S ROCKET LANDING PERFECTLY ON A SHIP AT NIGHT! Jeff Bezos posted a super exciting 30-second video of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket's main bottom section making a smooth landing on a special boat in the ocean after dark. With its 7 powerful engines firing just right to stick the landing. This happened during a recent launch on November 13 that sent NASA's space probe to Mars, and it's their first time successfully bringing back and reusing a big rocket like this. Source: Jeff Bezos

Mario Nawfal

228,437 views • 9 months ago

$RKLB New Peter Beck interview today on Bloomberg: Does SpaceX's dominance threaten Rocket Lab? "No, I don't think so. The reality is SpaceX is a space company, but also very much an AI company and a bunch of other things as well. Rocket Lab is a very squarely focused pure play space company. I think it draws investors into the sector. And when they go looking, Rocket Lab is really the clear number two with respect to launch frequency and those kinds of things. So no, I'm not too worried about that.” "So do you find yourself complementary to SpaceX? Or are you in direct competition with Elon Musk?" "In some cases we are in direct competition, but also very complementary. We are an end-to-end space company. We're the second most frequently launched US rocket in the world behind SpaceX, so the rocket bit is competitive. But two-thirds of our business is building satellites and spacecraft and supplying components to the rest of the space industry. So in that sense, not really a competitor at all."
1:13

$RKLB New Peter Beck interview today on Bloomberg: Does SpaceX's dominance threaten Rocket Lab? "No, I don't think so. The reality is SpaceX is a space company, but also very much an AI company and a bunch of other things as well. Rocket Lab is a very squarely focused pure play space company. I think it draws investors into the sector. And when they go looking, Rocket Lab is really the clear number two with respect to launch frequency and those kinds of things. So no, I'm not too worried about that.” "So do you find yourself complementary to SpaceX? Or are you in direct competition with Elon Musk?" "In some cases we are in direct competition, but also very complementary. We are an end-to-end space company. We're the second most frequently launched US rocket in the world behind SpaceX, so the rocket bit is competitive. But two-thirds of our business is building satellites and spacecraft and supplying components to the rest of the space industry. So in that sense, not really a competitor at all."

ValueOverPrice

51,421 views • 2 months ago