Tesla in turmoil after Elon Musk smokes marijuana on live show and top executives resign

[MicaelS]

34. I'm a huge Musk fan.

He could paint himself blue and fuck monkeys for all I care.

I do not care about his politics. I do not care about his personal behavior. I care about the fact he is pushing technology to it's limits. I am Pro-Space exploration, including humans, but not the militarization of space.

He has done more for spaceflight than any living human being with his SpaceX corporation. I put him in the top 5 of all time, of those pursuing spaceflight. Since esteemed scientists like Hawking, Sagan and Tyson have said we must expand into space to insure the survival of the human species, I will grant anyone pursuing that goal almost unlimited bad behavior.

Musk and Bezos are really trying to do something. And that is more to say than ANY administration or party has done for a long time.

For too long both parties have not supported spaceflight. Some have claimed the money should be spent on Earth on people, others want to cut NASA's minuscule budget to spend on DOD.

Space Exploration Technologies Corp., doing business as SpaceX, is a private American aerospace manufacturer and space transportation services company headquartered in Hawthorne, California. It was founded in 2002 by entrepreneur Elon Musk with the goal of reducing space transportation costs and enabling the colonization of Mars. SpaceX has since developed the Falcon launch vehicle family and the Dragon spacecraft family, which both currently deliver payloads into Earth orbit.

SpaceX's achievements include the first privately funded liquid-propellant rocket to reach orbit (Falcon 1 in 2008), the first privately funded company to successfully launch, orbit, and recover a spacecraft (Dragon in 2010), the first private company to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station (Dragon in 2012), the first propulsive landing for an orbital rocket (Falcon 9 in 2015), the first reuse of an orbital rocket (Falcon 9 in 2017), and the first private company to launch an object into orbit around the sun (Falcon Heavy's payload of a Tesla Roadster in 2018). SpaceX has flown 14 resupply missions to the International Space Station (ISS) under a partnership with NASA. NASA also awarded SpaceX a further development contract in 2011 to develop and demonstrate a human-rated Dragon, which would be used to transport astronauts to the ISS and return them safely to Earth.

SpaceX announced in 2011 that it was beginning a funded reusable launch system technology development program. In December 2015, the first Falcon 9 was flown back to a landing pad near the launch site, where it successfully accomplished a propulsive vertical landing. This was the first such achievement by a rocket for orbital spaceflight. In April 2016, with the launch of CRS-8, SpaceX successfully vertically landed a first stage on an ocean drone ship landing platform. In May 2016, in another first, SpaceX again landed a first stage, but during a significantly more energetic geostationary transfer orbit mission. In March 2017, SpaceX became the first to successfully re-launch and land the first stage of an orbital rocket.

In September 2016, CEO Elon Musk unveiled the mission architecture of the Interplanetary Transport System program, an ambitious privately funded initiative to develop spaceflight technology for use in crewed interplanetary spaceflight. In 2017, Musk unveiled an updated configuration of the system, now named the BFR, which will be the largest rocket in history and will be fully reusable when it debuts in the early 2020s. SpaceX also plans to launch its first crewed spacecraft, Dragon 2, in April 2019.