I don't know about the hatred for Lidar, but he does have a massive superiority complex, i.e. my way or the highway. He will never move away from a camera-only system because he says that you only need cameras, period, end of story. Same as his belief that the best way to test rockets is to launch them knowing that there's a very good chance of catastrophic failure. During the Apollo days, we weren't constantly launching rockets, having them explode, and calling it a success. There's no way in hell he'll admit to major failure nor to his ideas being incorrect.
I’m going to poke on the launching rockets with a chance to blow up.
There are hardware rich programs and hardware poor programs. SLS is a hardware poor program. We’ve launched one successful flight in almost 20 years at the cost of ~ $24B. SLS cannot afford to fail since their are so few engines, tanks, etc and each one costs so much to manufacture.
Starship is hardware rich and has launched eight times although without full success. It was announced in 2012 and has cost $5B-$10B.
The Apollo era Saturn V program cost $256B in current dollars and launched over 30 rockets of various versions of the Saturn rocket without failure over its ~14 year programatic life.
Hardware rich programs let you iterate design a lot faster than hardware poor programs at potentially lower cost. That leads to accepting rocket losses during the testing cycles. It’s not a bad programatic decision.
If you want to develop fast and not lose a rocket then you are looking to pay 10-25X more than either of the current programs.
Another example of "Elon always knows best" syndrome.
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This however is an example of hubris. This end result was entirely foreseeable and not one that required a test to prove.