Daniel

To understand most things Musk says, you have to understand that engineers are born, not made. You have to understand that he has always been an engineer and pretty much nothing else. And you have to understand that 99% of an engineer's job isn't to create a thing... it's to teach ourselves how to create a thing. So when he says cooling in space is "easy", that doesn't mean what normies mean by "easy", which is "doesn't take a lot of resources, time, or expense". He means what engineers mean by "easy", which is "contains no unsolved problems". You take in X amount of energy, you know it's all gonna end up as heat, you know that to radiate X amount of heat you need Y amount of radiator. It's all just math. If you build a satellite that takes in 2X energy, you need 2Y radiator. There's no unsolved problem, here. There's nothing to figure out. You know the answer. You just have to design the layout. If you're been beating your head against "how land booster" and "how make engine not boom" and "how make rocket lighter" for years, this is like drawing stick figures by comparison. So if guy comes along and says "vacuum is a near-perfect insulator", which is both technically true and completely irrelevant, of course Musk is gonna call guy a retard. Because guy has just revealed that he doesn't understand the basic nature of the problem, or of the design conversation. The only significance that "vacuum is a near-perfect insulator" has is that it means you can't do cooling in space the same way you would on Earth. Well, duh. We've known that since we first understood what space is. And we've successfully dealt with that challenge since the very first times we put things in space. Fusion containment is hard. Rocket engines are hard. New AI capabilities are hard. Cheap and reliable manufacturing at scale is hard. Estimating costs and schedules is hard. Waste heat is not hard.