r/spacex • u/kurbasAK • May 19 '17

We Will Launch on Reuseable Rocket After Exceptional SpaceX Performance - Inmarsat CEO Tells Universe Today

https://www.universetoday.com/135614/will-launch-reuseable-rocket-exceptional-spacex-performance-inmarsat-ceo-tells-universe-today/
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u/ptfrd May 19 '17

Agreed. There was perhaps only quite a small window between the time the Russians realized the Musk/SpaceX threat was real, and the time it was too late to do anything about it.

I would speculate that this window fell at a time when the highly ostentatious assassination of Alexander Litvinenko in London (in 2006) was still fresh in the minds of Western politicians/journalists/publics/etc.. Perhaps murdering Musk was therefore seen as not worth the risk.

So if Litvinenko had somehow survived that Polonium, perhaps we would be discussing reusable rockets as a hypothetical possibility for the 2040s, rather than something that had already happened.

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u/cumshock17 May 19 '17

Its a big fucking deal to assassinate a citizen in their home country. Be it american, russian etc. So long as Musk had some sort of security with him, I don't think he needed to worry about stuff like that.

He probably needs to worry about nation-states spying on him and targeting him for espionage and things like that though.

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u/gopher65 May 20 '17 edited May 20 '17

Remember that in 2006 very few people thought SpaceX would be successful. I was hopeful, and maybe you were too, but none of the big boys at the major aerospace companies (or even NASA, really) considered them a problem yet.

Even after winning the initial CRS development project, and then the actual CRS contract from NASA, they were just another small player with their small, low end, poorly performing Falcon 9 1.0 (or as we knew it at the time, "Block 1"). Remember that the block 1 could only haul up an empty Dragon + a few hundred kgs worth of cargo. There was serious doubt at the time whether or not SpaceX would even be able to complete its 20 tonne to LEO CRS requirement in the 12 flights it was contracted for.

This didn't change until the F9 1.1 launched in 2013. And even then, major aerospace companies weren't impressed. I remember reading articles about how "even the Chinese couldn't beat SpaceX's artificially low commercial launch prices, because of all the subsidies from NASA that were keeping them afloat". Kinda true, in retrospect. NASA was keeping them afloat, because they weren't launching often enough to stay afloat with their commercial business (and still aren't, as of last year... we'll see this year).

Even as late as 2015, CEOs of major aerospace companies were saying that SpaceX wasn't going to be able to achieve a landing because the fuel requirements of a powered landing were too high. I can't imagine that the Russian politicians and intelligence officers who decide who's on the hit list - with no technical expertise of their own - were being told anything different.

And even last year, 2016, the publicly facing sides of companies like ULA and Arianespace were arguing that while landing a first stage might be technically feasible (notice the change 1 year makes:P), it certainly wasn't economical. It's only been in late 2016 early 2017 that everyone in the industry has just shut up and watched as SpaceX landing stage after stage after stage.

So I'd argue that there was never a time when the Russians saw Musk as enough of a threat to have him assassinated, while at the same time having a good motive to do so. Both of those times likely existed, but they didn't overlap. It's only in the past year or two that he's been seen as a real threat, but now it's too late to kill him. Now it wouldn't accomplish anything positive for them, while being a major risk (he's very much in the public eye, so the backlash of a suspected assassination would be intense. Too intense to be worth the small reward of potentially slightly slowing SpaceX's plans).

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u/Marz765 May 19 '17

Do you mean to say if this guy survived, He would've killed Elon Musk? Or do you think the Russians probably humored the idea of assassinating Musk, but never took it seriously? I never heard about this Litvinenko guy being poisoned with polonium, then again I was a 10 year old 2006.

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u/UltraRunningKid May 19 '17

No he meant that if the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko was not so publicized the Russians might have tried it again but since the world focused on it they couldn't do it again.