I think its very important that leftists understand how engineering works. You are never going to control the means of production if you or your friends don't understand how engineering works.

Ownership of the means of production means becoming project managers and engineers!

@tlalexander Eh what? :D *Owning* the means of production means literal ownership in the financial sense, not having sth. assigned to you as the theme of your work as an employee ("product owner" is a term from schemes for managing employees, they own nothing).

Owning the means of production means being the factory owner, the shareholder - who get income from them just because they own them, not because they do any work - in this example being the fucking Elongated Muskrat himself.

@tlalexander (*) And yes, that thing exploding means that is was a failure, they made a bet to get away with less engineering, so they can arrive faster at the stage where they no longer need to pour absurd amounts of money into engineering and instead get absurd amounts of money for just owning the rocket that others pay to use. And the lost that bet and now need to pour lots more money into engineering first.

@aekis_projects
Regarding the means of production: owning a factory is not a passive job. Listen to Richard Wolff - the point is that the people who do the labor also make decisions about how to manage the organization. If we can't understand what engineering tests are success or failures, we can't properly manage our own enterprises.

People can enjoy whatever they want. But as an aspiring engineering communicator I will call out errors in engineering understanding.

The last rev of my farm robot PCBs caught on fire. Was that a failure? I don't think so. I am trying to do welding, programming, PCB design. I go well beyond certainty of design. I am bound to have some things break. That's not failure, that's finding out what doesn't work.

@aekis_projects
I want to drive this one point home a little more.

SpaceX has always taken the approach of design fast and test the whole system. This leads to some explosions but you save a lot of money on R&D and fabrication by doing it this way. Look at Falcon 9. No one ever made a reusable rocket and now they have a bunch of rockets that have been reused 15 times. They absolutely blew up some rockets in the process but clearly the Falcon 9 design program was a resounding success.

They are not losing the bet. The long run costs are still less than the NASA approach of overdesign and test in the lab to high hell. That produces very expensive per unit rocket costs. The SpaceX approach is faster and cheaper even if some things go boom.

@tlalexander Owning a factory doesn't need to be a job at all, one can inherit or buy one, let CEOs, accountants and lawyers do all the managing and still passively earn some profits while chilling on a boat.
Sure people working there can influence its operations, but at the end of the day, they still don't own it, they don't get the profits.

That's a different topic from enabling people to start their own factories without having wealth first, which I think is more what you wanted to get at?

@aekis_projects
I just wanted to clarify, in my original post when I said "leftists need to understand...", the "leftist" part is important. I was referring to the Marxist concept of "worker ownership of the means of production". A key feature of that system is that the people who work in factories also collectively own the factories. Richard Wolff calls this "worker self-directed enterprise". The benefits of the system are wide ranging, but the point is there are no passive owners sitting back on a boat. The workers also manage and run the factories. So they have to understand factory operations and engineering. Many people today fantasize about worker ownership without realizing they will need to understand engineering management.

@aekis_projects
The reason I think it is so important for me to call out this misunderstanding is that worker ownership of the means of production would solve many serious social problems. (If you're unfamiliar with this, I can recommend a great lecture on the subject).

So when people see SpaceX blow up a prototype rocket and then call them a failure, they are misunderstanding how SpaceX has chosen to do development.

And if we cannot actually understand how businesses operate successfully, we will never see a future where the workers take over industry. I would see that as a tragedy, and so I seek to educate those who misunderstand what is happening.

@tlalexander Ahh yes, ok, now I get you! Your point is that *after* the means of production would be seized from capitalists, the workers would own the places they work and run them collectively, that makes total sense, agree.
To me such "revolutions" are firmly in the realm of the hypothetical, not going to happen in any one(s) lifetime - right now capitalist ownership is a fact and can only be chipped away at the edges. And to me this effective chipping is (practical) leftism, I didn't think

@tlalexander of (theoretical) revolutionary dreamers, with those in mind your post makes sense. (But then again, they are dreams, dreams don't need to be realistic, their purpose is to inspire practical, small actions in a certain direction, not to ever be realized fully themselves.) So that was my misunderstanding, you weren't talking about becoming project managers in the now existing capitalist structures (how I read it), but in future worker owned structures. Makes sense :D

@tlalexander But where we fundamentally disagree is in our views on SpaceX. You view SpaceX as a successful company doing great engineering, by using a particular development method. And if workers would take over they would continue to run it with that method, because the method is superior. Which, yes, if viewed in isolation & from a narrow technical angle, is an understandable assumption.

But: Technology and engineering are not. neutral. They do not exist in isolation and any view on them

@tlalexander not considering their broader context, politically, socially, environmentally, is fundamentally flawed and possibly dangerous.

Earlier you compared SpaceX to NASA, stating that SpaceX method results in much fewer per unit costs for rockets. That is a flawed comparison, because the two are completely different entities. NASA is a government agency, which gets a bunch of money and a goal from politicians and is expected to spend all of that money while working towards that goal.

@tlalexander SpaceX is a private company, who's purpose is to make it's owner money. If it does not make money the company looses it's reason to exist. They make money by launching rockets, and the cheaper the rockets are to launch, the more money they make. So unit costs matter to them, a lot. But they do NOT matter to NASA, because NASA does not need to make money, they need to achieve a political goal, and if expensive rockets do so that's fine.

@tlalexander You can't compare these two entities on a metric only relevant to one of them.

In much of the same way, you can't compare their engineering approaches. NASA's is this way because the political goal set for them mandates it. In big parts this goal is influenced by historic failures and the political desire to prevent them from happening again. This is incompatible with making money, sure, but again, that concept is not applicable to them in the first place.

@tlalexander SpaceX does not run on a superior method of engineering. In fact, I'd exaggerate and say they don't run an engineering method at all. They run on a hypercapitalist business model, driven by the greed & the dangerous, far-right "longtermism" ideology of it's owner, based on extraction of resources from the environment and the public (aka the commons), complete disregard for the law/regulations, the privatization of profit and the externalization of costs and damage.

@tlalexander This externalization, not anything they actually do, is precisely what allows them to look successful in isolation.

This business model, not their engineering - their owner, not their engineers (as is uniquely publicly visible often times), drive their technical decisions.
When they blow up a rocket because they didn't build an adequate launch site - despite their engineers knowing fully well they needed one - for no other reason than to avoid appropriate

@tlalexander regulatory oversight, that is not a engineering method, that is a failure, even when looking just at the company in isolation. When they avoid appropriate oversight and massively impact the environment and the people that were there before they decided to build their launch site (I posted a number of links about that here: https://chaos.social/@aekis_projects/110248288031791376), that is a massive failure when viewed in context.

@tlalexander In a reply to someone else you mentioned them launching hundreds of rockets a year as an example of them being successful, which is a thought that horrifies me. Because when viewed in context (Sam Lawler posts a lot about that, e.g. https://mastodon.social/@sundogplanets/110216466196775068) it might be the biggest failure in the history of human spaceflight. Technology is not neutral, it cannot be viewed in isolation, it's consequences must be considered. Especially from an anti-capitalist perspective.

@tlalexander Which is also why in my opinion, SpaceX as the embodiment of hypercapitalism & it's owners dangerous, far-right ideology would never continue to exist doing business the way they do (extract from the commons, privatize profits, externalize costs and damage to the commons) under any hypothetical scenario of superseding capitalism. They are in no way a role model for worker's coops, or if fact anyone, on how to run a business in a responsible way and should not be promoted as such.

@aekis_projects Hi, thank you for responding. I have had a busy few days so it took me some time to get back to this.

I guess I just want to say it seems like there is a lot of misunderstanding of my meaning here. Which is okay, this is a limited medium.

I don't think leftists will ever take over capitalist industry. I think we will have to build our own independent industry mostly from scratch. That work must begin ASAP, and will require a great deal of engineering (few machine tools are open source and proprietary technology is a dead end) so leftists must understand engineering. Yes, this is a revolutionary view, but one that starts small and starts today. This is the basis of my work with the farming robot.

@aekis_projects When I say SpaceX is successful, I mean this in a narrow sense. I mean they have set many ambitious engineering goals in their history and have mostly succeeded at reaching them, even when experts predicted failure.

With Starship they have set the goal of eventually building a working system, while moving quickly and blowing up a few things along the way as the system matures. By their own standards, they are succeeding.

So when people online say they are failing because their rocket blew up, it is hard for me to see how that could be true. Since their very first rocket they have always blown things up a few times before something works. I do not see how this time would be any different. Explosions are not failure to them.

@aekis_projects As far as the engineering method. I am not saying it is superior period. NASA's method is fine for NASA. But if you want to have a rapidly reusable rocket with a low per-unit cost, then yes this method is in my view more likely to produce that result.

Now, is launching lots of rockets a good idea? Or a policy failure? In this discussion I have attempted to steer clear of that question. I am trying to make the narrow claim that SpaceX is not failing to achieve their own engineering goals. Whether those goals are worthwhile is something I think I am not equipped to discuss. I am biased. I grew up in a spaceflight family since childhood. I want to believe. It's a good question, but not one I am well suited to discuss.

@aekis_projects As far as socializing costs and privatizing profits - this is kind of an odd point because NASA does not actually build rockets, and historically NASA has given way more funding to Boeing, ULA, Aerojet Rocketdyne, and Northrop Grumman than they have to SpaceX, even in just the last ten years. All spaceflight is government subsidized, and I am under the impression that SpaceX is using far less government money than the other players. Their low cost approach is saving taxpayers money!

I have waited my whole life for someone to lower the cost of space exploration enough to see an expansion of that work. To move our work to the moon and planets. Only a large and fully reusable rocket can do this. And SpaceX is leading the way.

@aekis_projects From my view, with all the dreams, I have had, it is hard to say whether this goal is worthwhile.

But what I can say is that if you have an engineering goal of building human cities on the Moon or Mars, you're going to need a huge payload to orbit capability. Not just per launch but per year. And NASA, through their partners Boeing, ULA, Northrop Grumman, and Aerojet Rocketdyne, has not even remotely delivered that with SLS - a rocket which will launch once every few years at best, at over $2 billion per launch.

The only organization with a clear path to such an annual payload to orbit is SpaceX. And blowing up one rocket is not a sign of failure, it is a milestone on a development process they chose with intention.

@tlalexander I probably won't be able to get back to you before next week, but I wanted to say a quick thanks for the patience to keep the conversation going, quite a while ago that I was last able to have a discussion online of this quality, already gained quite a few valuable insights. Appreciate it!