Musk is a guy with ton of money and a ton of balls. It would be foolish not to attribute a large part of SpaceX's and Tesla's accomplishments to a guy who has been willing to put it all on the line allowing engineers who would have had no other opportunity to try the things they have tried.
Yeah, and Musk made the news recently poor mouthing about how "Space-X might be going bankrupt". This was after his last stunt claiming he was going to "take Tesla private". The SEC nipped that in the bud..
Musk has never made a promised date for one of his projects. Do I think we could land on mars in 10 years? Well, it currently takes about two years to get there. So, that means, he's (tentatively) going to have to launch in eight years.
If you add the travel time, to the time, (2 plus years), Musk always subtracts from when one of his projects actually comes to fruition, (2 plus years), we're already out to fourteen years. How about if we round that out to something we can turn into a simple fractional equivalent, fifteen years, and say it's gonna take 1 1/2 times more than he's predicting to make it happen. So, fifteen years, maybe? .I figure that at about eight years out, he'll find another TV camera, push back the date, while pretending it's the first time he's talked about going to mars, and rely on the public;s short memory to bail himself out.
Why are you using quotes when I said no such thing?
That's a dumb question by even Quora's standards.
(**) Put that into context against the 98 out of 99 fully successful missions of the French "Ariene 5". But apparently, the European Space Agency doesn't try to "showboat", by recovering spent solid rocket boosters. You can take that up with the fishes.
The last Ariene they drilled was in 1996, with 99 successful missions since. Musk doesn't have anywhere that success rate, with any of his Space-X projects. So, the question should be, "why are you using that vehicle's 25 year old incident, as part of your argument"? And not, "why am I using quotes".
When Musk has 99 Falcons in a row fly successfully, and/or 99 boosters recovered successfully, we can talk again.