Latest SpaceX starship launch

[Suff]

To be honest the guy may not be what you think of as a Genius, but he is a very good engineer who uses physics first principles as the basis for his engineering work. He took the position as chief engineer and CTO at SpaceX because nobody "good" would risk their reputation on a start up. He literally had to spend years reading books and understanding the science. Making him a technology leader in the field.

He is able to focus to the exclusion of all else and calculates in his head like a spreadsheet.

It doesn't make him a cute person and it makes him almost impossible to work with him unless you are way ahead of the curve, but it gets things done. For instance the catch. Elon went to the team and said "we're going to catch the booster".

Why did he say this? He'd calculated the 50-60 tonnes saved by not having legs, had worked out that it increased his tonnage to space from 100 to 200 and he had actually done all the base calculations from what they already had from Falcon 9.

Now I don't know what you designate as genius. One of my close friends used to be a space operations manager who managed the team that put Huygens down on Titan. I was at his place and he had scaffolding round the house, they'd knocked his satellite dish and he had lost the signal. Now getting this back is usually a two person job. So I did the dumb bit by grabbing the dish and putting the bracket back to the beginning of the clean score in the metal. This brought one channel back to working.

But looking at the dish, there was a custom aluminium bracket on it with two LNB. That dish looked at two totally different satellites at the same time and the spacing of the LNB created exactly the right angle to receive from two totally different sats. Something, if you ask for it from a company, they will install two dishes for.

As Soon as my friend realised what had happened he worked out which lnb was connected and then pulled out a sheet of paper and calculated how many degrees we would need to move the dish in order to align both LNB to both sats. Because he "knew" the orbital distance of the satellites and the dwell angle between them. I guess that should obvious considering he made the bracket.

Most people would see this as genius. I see it as a very capable person with incredible skills in a specific area.

Some people are just jealous of that and feel threatened by people like that but if you'd worked on his house doing diy stuff as I have you would know he's just a person with a very special skillset and a really nice guy too.