Back in 2018, Elon Musk made headlines for launching his Tesla Roadster into space.

Three years later, it is currently orbiting the Sun.

A waste of a perfectly good Roadster? Rather, a clever move to make engineers cool again:

https://samoburja.com/how-elon-musk-is-making-engineers-cool-again/

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When examining the exceptional and the powerful, nearly everyone underestimates how reasonable their actions are.

What is often denounced as whimsy or waste is often a wise investment to solve a real and difficult problem, otherwise opaque to us.

2/n

If not a Tesla Roadster, the rocket’s payload would otherwise have been a piece of space junk.

Instead, the test payload was used as a work of art and promotion.

The stunt promoted not only SpaceX, but Tesla too, Musk himself, and human achievement in space in general.

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Launching a piece of junk into space would have achieved the technical objective of the launch, but a mission to Mars is not merely a technical project.

It is a social project, and to get people to work on a Mars mission, those people will need to be allocated acclaim.

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Musk brought attention to his rocket launch, thus increasing the status of the engineers both who built the rocket and who built the car.

This incentivizes work on the Mars mission as much as money does. We can expect many more such stunts before humanity colonizes space!

5/n

Elon Musk shows potential as someone who might eventually transform the social technologies on which civilization runs. A great founder. To read more on that check out this thread:

https://twitter.com/SamoBurja/status/1322225349766324225

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