Is Elon Musk trying to do too much too fast?
“This raises serious questions about the reliability of the SpaceX launch vehicle,” said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, which receives money from Boeing Co., a SpaceX competitor.  “They are taking this technology to the limits.”<p>Key quote on which the rest of the article appears to be constructed.<p>SpaceX is pushing the technology to the limits on purpose. This is not because they are doing &quot;too much&quot; but because they are doing everything they can to completely change the way rocketry is done.<p>When a Formula 1 car catches fire in the pits, do we call a halt to pressurised fuelling, or find ways to improve the safety of fuelling?<p>When a NASCAR crashes and burns, do we call a halt to car racing, or do we find ways to improve the safety and reliability of racing cars?<p>The simple answer to the &quot;too much too fast&quot; question is &quot;no&quot;. Too much, too fast would be where SpaceX is unable to maintain their progress and makes mistakes they can not learn from.<p>Right now the focus of SpaceX is getting to the point where they can launch, land, relaunch. They will find more ways that quickly fuelling a rocket with supercooled fuel doesn&#x27;t work.<p>Their competitors might simply say, &quot;supercooled propellants are too hard,&quot; and stick to existing performance figures and trusted designs. SpaceX is choosing to do the hard thing because doing the hard thing is how you advance the state of the art.<p>&quot;We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.&quot; — President John F Kennedy, Rice University address.<p>Did NASA try doing too much, too fast? They went from the &quot;four inch flight&quot; of Mercury-Redstone 1 in 1960 to the disaster of Apollo 1 (crew killed in a cabin fire due to high oxygen atmosphere) in February 1967 to success with Apollo 11 in July 1969, with many lessons being learned in the meantime.