Starship is not yet reusable but they have the MVP and a fantastic position to iterate forward.
-- they have an orbital launcher with the largest diameter cargo bay
-- larger sats have bigger antennas and bigger PV area and more bus power. this scales as diam^2
-- 26 x Starlink v3 ~40-65 tons to LEO
-- every launch generates revenue, locks out the orbit for competitors.
-- they can launch more volume, more mass and cheaper than anyone else by a large margin
-- the design is validated - things will work
-- there is technical debt, issues but the rocket did the job
Caveats
-- timelines for full reusability are optimistic etc
-- there will be other issues in scaling to launching gigawats into orbit
-- cooling will have to be
-- Musk might go Full Villan mode before the thing works
[meta] I really didn't like that other negative comment getting voted to the top.
Looks like it's made by someone who never worked in a bigco.
For every bigco I worked, at any time there were hundreds if not thousands of open issues.
You could list them and try arguing the company is about to fail and you'd scare people who don't know better.
It's the judgement of the severity of the issue that matters not #no_of_issues.
And if there were 0 issues would our job exist?
[edit] getting the formatting right is very hard, maybe we could get a preview / TinyMCE ?
geokon 12 hours ago [-]
The issue is that there is ultimately a limited market for having access to space. SpaceX's business model is premised that if you make access cheap enough that there will be a market for multiple launches a day. But to me demand seems very finite? You can make it 10x cheaper or 50x and it sort of doesn't matter.
There just isn't much to do in space. You have:
- Telecommunications.. Can scale only so much. Starlink is cool. Compared to Iridium it's way way cheaper. But demand is .. modest? It seems to only beats fiber on the ground in special situations
- Telescopes looking up. This is limited by science budgets that aren't going to change much.
- Telescopes looking down. Those people have infinite budgets and already have all the satellites they'd want. If you're not in NATO then can't depend on SpaceX anyway - so they're not capturing that market.
- Tourism. Vomiting for several hours in zero-G will be a thrill for some for a bit, but I don't see this being a huge industry. Maybe on par with basejumping or something.
- Mining.. seems impractical scifi.. premised on wanting to build huge structures in space - but again, for what goal ultimately?
It's sort of like if you made access to Antarctica 100x cheaper. It'd be great, but it's hard to imagine it's going to suddenly open up a ton of demand.
But I'd love to hear counter arguments :)
paulus_magnus2 11 hours ago [-]
Indeed SpaceX is boiling multiple oceans at the same time and betting the timing will align.
-- SpaceX is building a starship factory, not just starship. The market won't deliver enough demand, they need to create their own
-- V3 Starlink constellation targets 100k sats. With 50 sats per flight (100t to orbit) you need 2000 flights to build constellation and then 400 flights per year to replace sats after 5y lifespan.
-- There was that idea of ballistic human travel but this is unlikely to materialize
-- There also was solarsat/powersat where solar power is beamed from space and if you massaged your math the right way the numbers were ~promising
-- AI saves the day. We "need" 1mln AI sats. That solves the demand and justifies the spending. for now
librasteve 9 hours ago [-]
the demand for bandwidth is infinite… this used to mean copper -> fibre, but it’s that squared for orbital bandwidth, as they lower and close up the sat formation, the antenna gets smaller and the data rate gets faster … I think Musk killing all terrestrial telcos is quite likely
perilunar 9 hours ago [-]
> the demand for bandwidth is infinite
Is it really? Our brains have a limited bandwidth, and there's no need of more than a small multiple of that per person.
testing22321 12 hours ago [-]
> Telecommunications.. Can scale only so much. Starlink is cool. Compared to Iridium it's way way cheaper. But demand is .. modest? It seems to only beats fiber on the ground in special situations
It is not designed to compete with finer.
Go somewhere truly remote and see how it’s changing the world very quickly. I’ve seen it first hand in Arctic Canada, Australia and North Africa. Before starlink the best they had was dialup. Now they video chat family and doctors, do school online and so much more. Easily a few billion people will use it.
You also forgot about AI data centres in orbit, on which SpaceX have pegged virtually all their valuation in.
fluidcruft 1 days ago [-]
> Locks out the orbit for competitors
I swear to God LinkedIn would describe taking a shit in a public park this way. The West Coast is out of their damn minds.
rkagerer 21 hours ago [-]
Could you elaborate on your counterpoint?
Genuinely interested. How does or doesn't an existing satellite constrain other operators from desirable orbits? Is it irrelevant because many satellites can share the same orbit at different phase angles (i.e. satellite train), and there are more than enough similar orbits to go around? How many spacecraft would it take to actually be a concern (accounting for attrition from end-of-life ones going out of service, and the point of crowding where diminishing spatial/temporal buffers available for the collision avoidance adjustments needed to practically maintain your desired orbit become too risky).
fluidcruft 17 hours ago [-]
To elaborate: the park is a shared resource and people don't want to picnic next to dog shit. Suppose you have a dog that shits in the park significantly faster than other dogs. LinkedIn/California types would celebrate the dog's ability to stake claim to the entire public park (as progress as the commuter I replied to has done) without even a smidgen of self-awareness they are stealing from the commons.
ggreer 15 hours ago [-]
I don't think that analogy really maps, as nothing else is in those orbits, nor have those orbits ever been used by anyone. Is it really a park if nobody has ever set foot in it? Orbits seem more analogous to claiming land for a homestead. By being the first to stake your claim and do useful work on the land, you become the owner.
Also Starlink V3 orbits are at 330–370km, which is below pretty much everything else in space. Atmospheric drag is high enough that without ion thrusters, satellites will deorbit in a couple years. If SpaceX doesn't keep launching stuff, it will self-clean and allow others to use it.
fluidcruft 13 hours ago [-]
It's not about the analogy, it's about what the original commenter spun about shitting out satellites fastest to claim orbital space and deny it to others as some sort of laudable SpaceX competitive advantage.
rlt 14 hours ago [-]
Plus, VLEO (<400km) is only really economical at scale with Starship, or at least Falcon 9. Without SpaceX no one would be using it anyway.
7e 1 days ago [-]
The biggest issue is payload. Right now they’re launching with very light payloads, way less than the Saturn V or even the Falcon. Definitely short of their goals. They’ve never demonstrated a real payload weight. Until this happens their progress is illusory and a skeptic would claim their engines can’t take a real launch payload weight.
ggreer 22 hours ago [-]
Today's launch was the 3rd largest payload ever put in orbit (52 tons). Only Skylab (77 tons) and Buran (80 tons) exceed it.
Zigurd 3 hours ago [-]
That is a completely un skeptical estimate of the payload capacity: were the satellites fully fueled? If they carried a 50% load of fuel that would knock off half a ton from each satellite. Was the upper stage fully fueled, including the fuel needed to return to where it was launched? If not, there's enough fudge in the numbers that the actual payload capacity could be zero, if not for scavenging weight from other parts of the mission plan.
Is skepticism warranted? At least they didn't call it Fully Satellite Deploying.
chasd00 22 hours ago [-]
> skeptic would claim their engines can’t take a real launch payload weight.
full duration full throttle burns of Raptor3 are common and I'm pretty sure a part of qc for each new engine anyway. Payload weight doesn't strain the engines, once they're throttled at 100% then they're throttled at 100% no matter how much or how little payload there is.
Polizeiposaune 1 days ago [-]
The Starlink V3 sats launched today are much bigger and heavier than the Starlink satellites they've been launching on Falcon. Even if they fit within the Falcon fairing, they'd be too heavy to launch on F9.
ButlerianJihad 22 hours ago [-]
> a real launch payload weight
Their engineers understand mass, and how to distinguish it.
trencedamp 1 days ago [-]
Is nobody concerned about putting things in a ship that explodes every other time they launch it
jfoster 1 days ago [-]
Falcon 9 used to do that when being tested.
They push them to the limits in testing/development to make them reliable in production.
Starship still in testing/development.
jltsiren 18 hours ago [-]
Falcon 1 had a few failures, but Falcon 9 was successful from the beginning. Early SpaceX played it safe, because they couldn't afford to lose big expensive rockets. The only explosion after launch happened on flight 19.
There were many explosions when SpaceX was trying to figure out how to land the booster safely. But those were after the booster had already completed the actual paid mission.
spwa4 21 hours ago [-]
Or you could do it like every other rocketry startup: either succeed first time or go bankrupt. Hell, occasionally they go bankrupt after succeeding at their first flight.
People here act like SpaceX is the only or the best rocket startup. That trial-and-error is somehow the superior design strategy and that that is responsible for SpaceX's success.
In reality, of course, SpaceX's only real distinguishing feature is how much they blow up and how they keep getting funding despite financial analysis after financial analysis saying "this will never work, it's a loss". But no worries! Starlink will fix it! Except ... when calculating Starlink profits they're ... also negative. Starlink caused a huge boost in SpaceX funding, while losing money. How do you do that?
In my personal experience, creating a company that runs at a loss results in losing money. I guess SpaceX makes it up on volume?
SpaceX's secret is dollars. Investor dollars. The amount of money Musk has (frequently literally) more than the funding of EVERY other private rocket startup COMBINED.
QuiEgo 21 hours ago [-]
SpaceX has some absurd majority of the launch market. Because their rockets work.
I won’t comment on the finances, but their technical success is self-evident.
luke5441 20 hours ago [-]
2025 SpaceX launches carried payloads from outside customers only 43 times. Most of it from US govt. The launch market it simply tiny and not growing much.
Luckily SpaceX pivoted the narrative just in time to be an AI company, not a Space company. We'll see what the next narrative will be, if any.
spwa4 20 hours ago [-]
My point was that working rockets is not exactly a good explanation for SpaceX's success.
Rocket Lab Electron works
Galactic Energy Ceres-1 works
Virgin Orbit LauncherOne rocket works
Astra Rocket 3.3 works (no relation to OpenAI)
Firefly AerospaceAlpha works
And this is disregarding that of course these are hardly the only kind of organization with working rockets. Did you know a rocket startup with working rockets was forced into bankruptcy for fear it might give Congo access to ballistic rockets?
... What makes the difference for SpaceX is investor money, not engineering excellence. In fact most of the above companies got to orbit on their first try, no blowing up rockets and hundreds of millions of dollars required.
mmustapic 20 hours ago [-]
No, Spacex is different because of engineering. By being able to reuse rockets they can launch frequently (every week?). By launching frequently they can measure and improve the rockets, so reliability goes up and price down.
9 hours ago [-]
spwa4 8 hours ago [-]
Really? Do you realize how insane it is what you're saying? A "fully loaded" cost for a Falcon launch, including the cost of development and of course the debt SpaceX took on to get here, comes an eye-watering 2.9 BILLION dollars per launch (just shy of double the space shuttle's cost). Of that debt, Musk spent about 100 million per launch on materials, employees, development, ... and kept 2.8 billion per launch for himself and his investors (that's why it's such brilliant financial engineering, also that's how you become a trillionnaire). To just keep it's current valuation, SpaceX needs something close to 2000 launches per year, indefinitely, more than double their current pace. That market doesn't exist. There aren't enough people to pay for launching satellites to launch that many rockets. And ... that's disregarding that SpaceX has competitors that are ~2 years behind and don't have SpaceX debt load, and should be able to launch whatever you want in about 2 years at half SpaceX's $/kg.
Several of the already named startups had rockets that are reusable. You act like SpaceX is the origin, or the first working example of the idea of reusable rockets. They are not, and they are not a little bit short of that standard, but a reusable rocket flew to Space and landed over 60 years ago. SpaceX is an accounting/finance accomplishment, not an engineering accomplishment.
At this point in time, both Europe (Arianespace) and China (CASC) have bet money they can duplicate the effort, Europe at less than 1% of the money SpaceX spent. Of course they usually go to a little over 2 times their planned budget. In other words, should come out below 2.5% the budget SpaceX spent ... (but does that matter given that SpaceX is not profitable?)
The whole space shuttle program (where SpaceX got half its employees I might add) is not just an attempt at making reusable rocket motors work. It's a successful attempt at making reusable rockets work first try, in 1981 (first motor reuse 6 months later, same year).
The engines on the orbiter could be, and regularly were, reused. This was done on its first ever launch (and second, obviously). The first 3 engines that launched the first Space Shuttle Orbiter were reused. Now how's that for engineering? A class above SpaceX, with 50 years older tech?. Obviously those engines landed. And even the Space Shuttle program over it's entire life (30+ years) lost less engines to everything than SpaceX lost designing it's rocket before launching it's first rocket to orbit.
If you allow for pure demonstration flights you could even say the first demonstration of a reusable rocket launching to space (ie. above the 100km line) was NASA X-15 flight 90, by Joseph A. Walker on 19th July 1963. Joseph Walker landed that engine, and reused that very engine to do it again, by the way. Of course, that wasn't into orbit.
And one of the startups had a reusable rocket at its first ever launch too. All these efforts had problems. Yes NASA did this first try, but very expensively. The startup did it cheaper than SpaceX did (and it wasn't remotely close), but wasn't able to continue (lack of money). You could complain their rocket was way smaller, and didn't make it to orbit (made it to space though).
Critically, SpaceX engineering still falls into the "not good enough" category, as mean as that is to say. It does not have the kg/$ performance the market demands, and SpaceX is only destined for bankruptcy. Plus, given their debt load, it really can't take that long (let's say a decade, tops). Let me explain. There is a clear commercial standard, from the Iridium days. Replacing 4000 satellites in orbit every 5 years, forever, on the income you can get from such a network from subscriptions, is not commercially viable with SpaceX technology. And you could say, the math is clear: cheap enough only seems achievable with a "spaceplane" design, launching from an airstrip. That was the motivation for the Space Shuttle program, but they couldn't make that work. SpaceX uses 12000 satellites btw, so not only do they not solve the Iridium problem, they make it harder for themselves.
And despite your comment asserting the opposite, SpaceX isn't even trying (the cost curve "Spaceship" is on does not reach commercial viability, not that it would even matter given the debt load SpaceX has)
Oh and when it comes to Musk's usual promises vs performance? You know who launched a spaceship to Mars and who didn't? Blue Origin did. SpaceX did ... not.
There is no engineering axis, other than perhaps eventual scale, where SpaceX wins on the engineering.
And of course, Trump is really helping to destroy SpaceX by making it clear to Europe that access to SpaceX is contingent on Trump's seemingly somewhat unstable mood.
jve 9 hours ago [-]
> when calculating Starlink profits they're ... also negative
Their growth is insane. The operating income (not revenue which is double digits, but irrelevant) in 2025 was 4,4B and with the growth they have, they are profiting multiple billions a year.
spwa4 3 hours ago [-]
And you don't understand what's wrong there?
First "breakeven cash flow" does not equal profit. But that's just Musk, as the CEO (and thus accountable for financial statements he makes to the SEC), cannot actually say profit.
More generally, never believe any kind of financial engineer when they say this. It's bullshit. Guaranteed. Why? Simple: if it was true, they would never tell you. They would take a shovel and put their own money in, they would charge large banks to let them put their money in (yes, seriously). They'd literally charge other rich people money to let them put their money in ... You would hear about it 20 years after the fact in an interview done after retirement, and only then.
Specifically, what's wrong here Starlink pays for it's own launches in stock (they pay by issuing stock to SpaceX). If you think about it, that's creating money out of nothing:
SpaceX holds Starlink debt, and counts that as assets (as a positive amount)
Starlink issues and "succesfully" sells shares to SpaceX, and counts that as income (as a positive amount)
So you see what's happening here: these are two positive numbers, but ... obviously have to sum to zero! After all if I buy an ice cream from you for 5$ the change in my assets and the change in your assets has to sum to zero (-5$ for me, +5$ for you = 0$ for both of us together). Not for SpaceX and Starlink. SpaceX gives rocket launches to Starlink and the sum of both their assets is billions!
If you look at actual cash flow, Starlink's last quarter was 4.4B operating income, minus 2.4B depreciation and amortization, minus 4.17B capital expenditures. How do you calculate the company worth? Easy capital expenditures are zero (because they "convert" capital to goods, which can be resold, except of course they can't really).
So for "total assets" on the financial statements that's 4.4B - 2.4B PLUS 4.17B per year.
For actual cash or resources, it's obviously 4.4B - 2.4B - 4.17B or MINUS 2 billion per year.
Which one is true depends on whether SpaceX can succesfully sell Starlink's shares at the internal valuation they're using. Obviously the safe accounting value is the one with the minus sign. Or to put it differently: Starlink has "increased in value" by 2 billion, so investors (for now SpaceX) need to give it 2 billion to continue operating.
dwaltrip 11 hours ago [-]
The exploding rockets were all test launches. SpaceX is pretty good at launching rockets successfully:
> Rockets from the Falcon 9 family have a success rate of 99.57% and have been launched 703 times over 16 years, resulting in 700 full successes, two in-flight failures [...], one pre-flight failure [...], and one partial failure [...]. The active version of the rocket, the Falcon 9 Block 5, has flown 633 times successfully and failed once [...], resulting in a 99.84% success rate.
Probably, but I assume it would depend on price differentials and payload. Something like constellations of multiple identical satellites could plan to tolerate losses. One-offs like space telescopes not so much.
rlt 14 hours ago [-]
No, and if you are you’re not familiar with how SpaceX operates.
rurban 1 days ago [-]
Not as long as they'll put people in this ship.
haaz 1 days ago [-]
99.9% of spacex rocket explosions are controlled experiments where they intentionally push the rocket past it's limit or try out new and unproven designs. Once they get the design down it's pretty reliable.
testing22321 23 hours ago [-]
> explodes every other time they launch it
FUD is not helpful. You’re wildly exaggerating.
I get you need the stock price to go down, but facts that are so easily verified make it clear you’re a shill.
Out of the 14 starship flights to date, 4 experienced explosions that scattered debris and were bad. (Flights 1, 2, 7, 8)
trencedamp 4 hours ago [-]
I don't own any stock and I don't care about stock prices.
You've pointed out 4 of 14 starship flights experienced explosions, and this was to argue AGAINST my comment that every other one explodes. Internet actually says 5 failures out of 14 but let's say 4. Thats one in every 3.5 launches explodes, so far. Would you put on a spacesuit and get in one? I just find it harder and harder to buy that this thing is going to bring people to the moon in one piece, whatever about a million new starlink satellites or server farms in space or whatever
There are a lot of angry comments here talking about how I don't understand the company and they're super successful, and it's true that falcon 9 has a very low failure rate. But starship has a very high one and I don't think Im out of line to say that.
I'm sure people who raised concerns about the cybertruck were also yelled at about how great the other Tesla vehicles are, and damn if this thing doesn't feel like the cybertruck of space
s08148692 50 minutes ago [-]
It's literally made from the same steel so yeah cybertruck in space vibes
Cybertruck seems like a pretty good electric truck though if you're into that kind of styling, if you can find the signal in the noise of biased reviewers one way or another (I'm european so I have no real personal experience or care)
But I digress.
Lets wait until its no a prototype before declaring it a failure. I for one hope its a great success, as I hope all new technology is successful - but I'm an optimist
testing22321 2 hours ago [-]
It’s a test campaign to find the limits. They tested to failure on purpose.
Give it time, just like Falcon 9.
oska 13 hours ago [-]
Just as a FYI I would have upvoted yr comment (from grey) if it hadn't had the second line in it
(The first and third lines were fine)
prodigycorp 1 days ago [-]
Distillation: Stream starts in about 1hr. Payload is 26 starlink v3 satellites.
Launch window is 8:15 AM to 9:30 AM eastern time.
Superheavy will land 7min after launch. Starship lands 9hrs post launch.
Edit: Both will be splashdowns (originally said they'll be caught)
The live channel has some video of recovery of the last starship which is pretty cool - it remained floating so they crawled up and removed some of the tiles to see how they performed, and actually reinstalled a few of them for the upcoming flight. So this mission will actually see some of the tiles flying for a second time.
> Both expected to be caught by chopsticks. Will be a first for Starship.
SpaceX's flight profile says both are splashdowns?
prodigycorp 1 days ago [-]
Article must be wrong.
> During operational flights, SpaceX plans to bring both Super Heavy and Ship back to the launch pad, where they'll be caught by the tower's "chopstick" arms. The company has already done this three times with Super Heavy but has not yet attempted it with Ship.
timroman 1 days ago [-]
That is operational flights, today’s is still a test. Splashdowns today.
1 days ago [-]
raverbashing 1 days ago [-]
> Payload is 26 starlink v3 satellites.
F9 fits how many?
xoa 1 days ago [-]
>>Payload is 26 starlink v3 satellites.
>F9 fits how many?
Zero. Starlink v3 is too big for the F9 payload fairing. It's not just a matter of mass, the diameter and overall volume is important as well. In terms of performance, last I read they're supposed to add 1 Tbps of capacity each, so assuming they all work the first time all 26 would be around 10x the network addition of a full F9 v2 Mini launch. But the larger antennas would have other advantages beyond sheer bandwidth, and they'll be able to start getting more serious about direct to cell.
dzhiurgis 16 hours ago [-]
> 1 Tbps of capacity each
1000000 mbps / 50 mbps per Starlink customer * 80$ per month * 12 months * 26 satellites = $500M revenue per year added per launch.
raverbashing 6 hours ago [-]
Yes but I think the launch was more than that :)
consensus1 15 hours ago [-]
Really even more since almost nobody actually uses 50 mbps bandwidth continuously
dzhiurgis 14 hours ago [-]
IDK how much they oversell it but also single sat probably is maxxed out for that location only, so all constellation is held back by single sat (tho there are usually few you can connect to).
bayarearefugee 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Good4boothee 1 days ago [-]
29 v2 satellites (around 4 times lighter than v3)
bluecalm 1 days ago [-]
Yeah and v3 has 10x downlink capacity and 20x uplink capacity of the v2.
billfor 1 days ago [-]
I think somebody on the livestream said 60x capacity over Falcon.
motionlessveloc 1 days ago [-]
Ship will also have to be outfitted with a life-support system ahead of crewed missions, which could be coming relatively soon. For example, NASA picked Ship to the be the first crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program, which aims to land people on the moon for the first time in 2028 on the Artemis IV mission.
Don't worry, there is absolutely no chance this will happen in 2028. There are many detailed takedowns of why the "Human Landing System" schedule is preposterous, but here's HN's idlewords:
There is (2 minutes before Flight 14, maybe it changes in 10 minutes) low chance, but not no chance.
> This would be an ambitious but achievable cadence for Starship, particularly if the tanker Starships didn’t have to be reusable, and could be made without a heat shield or control surfaces. Just how much time SpaceX has to reach this cadence is an interesting question, since right now NASA and SpaceX are locked in a game of chicken around who can commit to the least realistic timeline. But it probably has to get in gear by early 2027.
This is good evaluation. A launch every week in 2027 is ambitious, but not impossible.
tonyhart7 1 days ago [-]
"A launch every week in 2027 is ambitious, but not impossible."
I don't think a week is enough to gather data and fix subsequent launch
davidmurdoch 1 days ago [-]
They already leap frog fixes and improvements based on previous flights on all their launches.
bpodgursky 1 days ago [-]
The last few missions have been successful at the primary objectives so there's not necessarily a pressing need to fix anything before the next launch.
newsclues 1 days ago [-]
Depends on what the issue is, but you don't need to apply fixes to the next launch. You test them when you can, which may tax a few launches.
CipherText 23 hours ago [-]
[dead]
cubefox 1 days ago [-]
The official (completely unrealistic at this point) 2028 target is probably kept because Donald Trump's term ends in January 2029.
rokkamokka 1 days ago [-]
One can only hope
pbkompasz 1 days ago [-]
They could probably generate one with an AI model and he would believe it. No on e in his inner circle contradicts him anyway.
rswail 1 days ago [-]
Don't you know that it's called "Super Intelligence" or SI now because Artificial sounds fake?
His lordship announced this to the world at the UN.
32187 1 days ago [-]
Surely AI stands for "American Intelligence"! Renaming incoming, Google will comply first.
holt62 1 days ago [-]
What an incredible feat of engineering, even if it doesn't make orbit. Just getting that much mass off the pad is mind-boggling.
GuB-42 1 days ago [-]
It certainly is, but my mind is more boggled by the Saturn V that did it 60 years ago. Space launch technology feels like it had a 30 year gap, as in, nothing significant happened between the Space Shuttle and the Falcon 9. And now, we are just catching up. Not just SpaceX, there is also Blue Origin, Rocketlab,... and everything that's happening in China.
An by the way, the whole point of Starship is not just doing it, it is doing it cheaply (by space standards). The whole reusability thing is part of it, and so is the "assembly line" approach that lets SpaceX treat their experimental rockets like fireworks. If the goal was just to lift a lot of mass off the ground, it is not even a great design, reusability in particular is costly in terms of payload capacity.
Gareth321 1 days ago [-]
It's incredible to witness what humanity is capable of when pushed to our limits and appropriately motivated. The space race was in many ways a civilizational and existential fight for the U.S. The innovations this spurred in a relatively short span of time (and the risks the astronauts took) are numerous and impressive. I sometimes wonder that if in the absence of adversity, humans tend towards comfort and security and stability. Maybe that's obvious. Maybe most people with full bellies, warm homes, and physical security just aren't motivated to work 16 hour days for years on end and risk lives.
I suppose we should be grateful that SpaceX has found and collected enough of these crazy people in one place on this mission.
GuB-42 1 days ago [-]
One thing that made me realize the scale of the Apollo project was the "rubber room". This is a bunker connected by a slide to the launch pad. It was designed as an emergency escape in case of an imminent explosion.
At a normal scale, that would be a major construction project.
At Apollo scale, it is an anecdote. Its purpose is to maybe save a few people in the unlikely scenario where an explosion gives enough advance warning to be able to use the slide, but not enough to be able to just drive away. It also goes to show that the program was anything but reckless.
GrinningFool 1 days ago [-]
On a smaller scale, driving through the mountains and seeing the tunnels where we said "screw it, we're going through" is also pretty amazing.
SoKamil 1 days ago [-]
Maybe that’s the Great Filter?
Gareth321 1 days ago [-]
An interesting theory. Intelligence tends towards entropy in the absence of exciting stimuli. Maybe life on Earth has just been so besieged over the eons that it has forced us to progress to where we are. Once we reach [Wall-E levels of comfort and abundance,](https://corporalculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/walle...) we're doomed. Maybe we're already seeing this with the fertility crisis.
Schiendelman 1 days ago [-]
The reusability is what made the rest of these investments possible. Musk is annoying, but you have to give him credit for it.
bakies 22 hours ago [-]
Could just give credit to the engineers working on it
Schiendelman 18 hours ago [-]
Sure, but the engineers didn't decide on and fund that priority.
tonyhart7 1 days ago [-]
"nothing significant happened between the Space Shuttle and the Falcon 9"
well US government found new toys (proxy war) instead of space
blisterpeanuts 15 hours ago [-]
I think the '90s was a missed opportunity. The U.S. was (mostly) at peace, had a lot of tax revenue flowing in, and should have built a safer replacement for the Space Shuttle.
Instead, we continued to rely on a flawed, expensive, and dangerous system to build and supply the ISS. Then, we tragically lost another Shuttle and crew in early 2000s.
cameldrv 1 days ago [-]
If you get the chance to see it in person, it's an experience. The best way I can describe it is that looking from Isla Blanca beach, it looks like a skyscraper sitting on the pad, and then, the impossible happens -- the skyscraper lifts off into the sky.
benj111 1 days ago [-]
Well considering the point of it is the make orbit, it would be a bit useless if it didn't.
Would HN describe a huge program that didn't do the thing it was designed to do a "feat of engineering"?
s08148692 1 days ago [-]
Yes. The Starship program is pushing the limits of engineering, if it fails today it doesn't make it unimpressive
I'd also consider the attempts at fusion energy to be very impressive engineering projects even though none have them have yielded a stable source of fusion energy
dgellow 1 days ago [-]
Could someone give me a eli5 of what makes that launch impressive compared to other rocket launches?
dghlsakjg 1 days ago [-]
It’s the largest, heaviest rocket ever, with double the thrust of the last record holder, and it is the first one that is supposed to be reusable.
It’s a lot of records that just got broken.
dgellow 1 days ago [-]
Thanks for actually answering
mchusma 1 days ago [-]
I think for a sense of scale if this works as the SpaceX team wants, they will be able to launch more mass to orbit in a single day than all payloads ever before 2022 (rough math). And at a cost roughly 1/100th the prior average.
atonse 1 days ago [-]
Also getting to "orbit" is a huge feat, because you need to be going over 17,500 mph (28,000 km/h), get into a designated orbit, and in this case, they're also deploying starlink satellites.
This rocket is the largest rocket ever made by humans, and the largest to even reach orbit, which is insane considering it's by a private company and not a national space program.
jryle70 19 hours ago [-]
Full reuse. Both Superheavy (booster) and Starship (the spaceship). Especially Starship. It has never been been done (don't say Shuttle).
Falcon 9 achieved reusable 10 years ago. Other rockets have only started getting there recently. Starship is a big step forward.
mvlipwig 1 days ago [-]
36 full flow staged combustion engines all working is no easy feat
Retric 1 days ago [-]
It’s big.
bonesss 1 days ago [-]
Blowing something up so hard it almost gets into space is a feat of engineering, even if all it does is rain debris from ahigh.
Symmetry 1 days ago [-]
They seem to have reached near-orbit with one vacuum engine failing. Lets see if they decide to go all the way to orbit or if the failure causes an abort.
thomasfromcdnjs 1 days ago [-]
Confirmed, orbit!
Hell yeah, that was the longest 10 minutes.
motionlessveloc 1 days ago [-]
Abort confirmed :(
Update: Or maybe not? They're reviewing the status now.
Update 2: Go for orbit!
Update 3: Orbital insertion complete!!
Update 4: First Starlink satellites successfully deployed!
billfor 1 days ago [-]
What was interesting is how short the single engine burn was to bring it from suborbital to orbital. It was just a few seconds. I'm not even sure I saw the altitude change.
rtkwe 1 days ago [-]
Orbital insertion burns do not have to change the current altitude, their only required role is purely about adding speed to the orbit bringing up the altitude of the orbit's periapsis (lowest point of the current orbit) from inside the atmosphere to roughly the current altitude (or above).
philistine 1 days ago [-]
Yup, Kerbal teaches you that very quickly. At the right spot in an orbit, the difference between touching water and infinite falling is very small.
rtkwe 1 days ago [-]
Yeah it's a great way to learn a small bit of the unintuitive aspects of spaceflight. Though real launches follow a much more refined trajectory than most KSP but yeah the basic steps are still the same, though often blended together IRL due to limits on deep throttling and available relights for real rocket engines (though with mods you too can experience the need to do that in KSP, along with fun problems like ullage burns to settle fuel).
_moof 21 hours ago [-]
Altitude doesn't change (much) at the point where an orbit raising maneuver is performed. It increases the altitude of the rest of the orbit, with the greatest change ~180 degrees later.
If you'll excuse some poor ASCII art:
_______
______ / \
/ \ / \
burn here -> * O | result: | O |
in elliptical \______/ \ /
orbit \_______/
bakies 1 days ago [-]
You should try out Kerbal Space Program you'll learn all about it. The rocket is perpendicular to the ground so the burn adds speed, and altitude on the other side of the orbit.
accrual 1 days ago [-]
I haven't watched the footage yet, but if they were already at apopasis (highest point in orbit), orbital insertion would primarily raise the periapsis (lowest point) on the other side of the planet, so very little altitude change would be seen. It would be mostly an increase in velocity.
codeulike 1 days ago [-]
I think the mission was deliberately designed to get to just-below-orbit, have a decision point, and then proceed to orbit. So thats why it was a short burn. Because just-below-orbit is safer if anything goes wrong, they had a little pause.
edit: Also, Orbit is mostly a sideways speed thing rather than a height thing. The aim is to be "going sideways so fast that even though you are falling, you keep missing"
But yeah, they had a big decision to make in those few minutes between engine cutoff ang insertion burn.
1 days ago [-]
fakwandi_priv 1 days ago [-]
I’m a bit saddened this thread has so little activity, 55 comments as of posting, here even though there are half a million people watching the spacex stream. Just watching the launch, the amount of technology and people involved is incredible.
Prompting claude 5.5 has more appeal it seems.
trentnix 1 days ago [-]
I'm watching in awe and not worrying about the malcontents that can't leave their politics at the door and celebrate genuine achievement.
TkTech 1 days ago [-]
This is ballistics weapons technology, being progressed by a country that can't stop missile striking people, who has recently declared its intent to heavily weaponize space, whose leader has recently "claimed the moon", who is actively declaring its desire to annex its own allies, done by a corporation whose profits will be almost exclusively concentrated in a very small group of the already-wealthy in a country with horrific wealth disparity.
The V-2 was also a technological achievement. Doesn't mean the UK was cheering it on.
rafram 1 days ago [-]
Starship wouldn't be a very effective missile IMO.
chasd00 22 hours ago [-]
> Starship wouldn't be a very effective missile IMO.
that's putting it mildly, a war where ICBMs are used would be over before they could get the road closed to roll Starship and a booster to the pad...
fragmede 21 hours ago [-]
Though, for point of reference, the biggest Soviet ICBM, the SS-18, could lift about a 9 ton payload for a 20 megaton nuclear explosive warhead. The minutemen iii's have 1 ton payload. Starship has shown today that I can do, call it a 60 ton payload.
That's a whole lotta MIRV capacity.
redox99 1 days ago [-]
Cryogenic propellants alone are a deal breaker for this application.
kibibu 1 days ago [-]
Depends which alpha version of Full Self Driving it has installed.
1 days ago [-]
dzhiurgis 16 hours ago [-]
By itself no, but parking bunch of ballistic sats / hypersonic vehicles in orbit for 10th the price of enemy is attractive. A lot of strategy in war is not just capability but logistics and cost. And US has been particularly bad at keeping costs at bay.
parineum 1 days ago [-]
Imagine re-useable missiles though...
/s because the Internet is crazy.
pigpop 1 days ago [-]
Not as crazy of an idea as it sounds. A bomber that could fly as fast as a missile and orbit the planet allowing it to deliver a payload and then return and land would be a useful technology. Might be a preferable way of delivering "Rods from God" style kinetic impactors since it wouldn't involve keeping an armed satellite in orbit where it could be targeted.
Ntrails 1 days ago [-]
> This is ballistics weapons technology
It's like a thousand different technologies, some ancient some relatively new. I don't precisely delight in my new space overlords, but I can still wonder at the enormous object being launched into space!
dzhiurgis 16 hours ago [-]
Oh please stop it, you don't need to make it even more attractive.
inglor_cz 1 days ago [-]
Calm down. V-2 was a missile whose very design intent was to kill people.
If Starship ever kills people, it will be a disaster, but not intent.
This will help grow Starlink. Plenty of people are already enjoying their Starlink connection in places where the previous provider had either absurdly low quality for high price, or where connectivity was not a thing at all.
I for one am happy that kids living in remote villages can now access online schools and sick people can consult their problems at least with some online doctor. Sailors are pretty happy too.
TkTech 1 days ago [-]
All rocket development is weapons development, which is why ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) classifies rocket and space tech as sensitive national security items and is why foreign nationals can't even work on Starship. The entire US space program was funded for military development in the first place.
The difference between Starship and a missile designed to kill people is a simple swapping of the payload. More realistically given vehicle costs, its an ideal heavy lift platform for cheaply placing other weapon vehicles into orbit - a stated goal of the current administration.
> This will help grow Starlink. Plenty of people are already enjoying their Starlink connection in places where the previous provider had either absurdly low quality for high price, or where connectivity was not a thing at all.
Plenty of people are also using Starlink to wage war, and its already become political as access is provided and removed at whim.
I love space. I love space technology. I work on a game set in space. I am not enthusiastic about notorious individuals having the will and capability to mass-weaponize space.
inglor_cz 1 days ago [-]
Almost every technology can be used to wage war. But not all war activities are evil. I am happy that the Ukrainians can use Starlink to defend themselves against a brutal aggressor and preserve sovereignty of their country.
"The difference between Starship and a missile designed to kill people is a simple swapping of the payload."
If you insist on this worldview, you will always be miserable around every technological development out there. Just imagine what can be done with mRNA or maybe 3D printing.
"I am not enthusiastic about notorious individuals having the will and capability to mass-weaponize space."
I am pretty sure that militarization of space will be a decision of governments, not Musk himself. He is not rich enough to be able to build an actual orbital army and not get arrested.
Unless by a "notorious individual" you mean Trump or Xi... in which case, there isn't much new under the sun, because governments have weaponized space since the very beginning.
What I feel is positive is the civilian use of the technology. The military use will always be there, but the civilian use needs better and cheaper tech, which is what Starship is. Some medications could be produced in the orbit for example, and with enough launch capacity, they could be produced for the entire planet at once.
dzhiurgis 16 hours ago [-]
> I for one am happy that kids living in remote villages can now access online schools and sick people can consult their problems at least with some online doctor.
It is going to be truly amazing for a lot of small communities around the world. I don't want to deny this game changing technology at all.
But given how much of us westerners are beginning to loathe screens and internet (or social media for no good reason), I wonder how this "lets connect everyone" movement changes?
p.s. the biggest sleeper is that v3 finally enables mass direct-to-cell feature. "Villagers" won't need special terminal anymore - even the cheapest android smartphone will be able to get online. There's even been a quiet campaign on X to enable direct-to-cell capability in Iran during protests, so imagine what sort of societal changes this can pull off.
inglor_cz 9 hours ago [-]
I think we are bound to have a sinusoidal relationship with tech: "oh it is wonderful" - "actually it damages people" - "if we mitigate XYZ it is still wonderful" etc.
jimkleiber 1 days ago [-]
The challenge is launching things into orbit is politics, aka how humans should organize society.
So it's hard to leave that out. It's genuine achievement and it's politics, both.
pigpop 1 days ago [-]
That doesn't make much sense, a previously private corporation (which just recently went public) is achieving economical launch to orbit and has made continual progress on that front over decades while politics has both worked for and against them. To me, that is a refutation of "launching things into orbit is politics" especially when you compare the very politically entangled incumbents' launch cadence and capacity.
jimkleiber 1 days ago [-]
Orbit is a global public commons, how is it not a political issue? It can be a political issue AND an engineering marvel, regardless of what other organizations are doing
AustinDev 1 days ago [-]
Is it the public commons if you can't reach it?
jimkleiber 23 hours ago [-]
Plenty of programs from many places can reach orbit, im not really sure what you're talking about. And yes. It still is, unless a sole individual can claim ownership of a global orbit, which i imagine even some of the most capitalist-minded people would find absurd.
So the US owns the moon? Or does Neil Armstrong?
I'm a bit sassy today just kinda tired of certain arguments.
AustinDev 22 hours ago [-]
The US does own the moon for all practical purposes, or we did until we gave up our capacity to reach it.
jimkleiber 21 hours ago [-]
Well it soothes me to know that the people who actually took us to the moon didn't have such territorial obsessions:
> Some Americans anticipated possible controversy over planting the United States flag on the Moon, since the Outer Space Treaty prohibited territorial claims to any extraterrestrial body. Since it was made clear the United States had no intention of making a territorial claim to the Moon, no serious controversy materialized. Four months after the Apollo 11 landing, the United States Congress passed a bill in November 1969, which was signed into law by President Nixon, stating:
> The flag of the United States, and no other flag, shall be implanted or otherwise placed on the surface of the moon, or on the surface of any planet, by members of the crew of any spacecraft ... as part of any mission ... the funds for which are provided entirely by the Government of the United States. ... this act is intended as a symbolic gesture of national pride in achievement and is not to be construed as a declaration of national appropriation by claim of sovereignty.
Maybe with a more expansionist attitude we'd already have a moon base.
jimkleiber 19 hours ago [-]
Perhaps Russia might also have one and we could bomb each other up there.
Pros of expansionism can also come with cons.
marcusverus 1 days ago [-]
This is nonsense, obviously, but is a perfect validation of his point. Well done and enjoy the show!
DauntingPear7 1 days ago [-]
Everything is political, even your stance that it isn’t
baggy_trough 1 days ago [-]
A ridiculous claim. The cry of an infant is political? My houseplant? Fixing a buffer overflow?
jimkleiber 1 days ago [-]
Not everything but way more things than most people want to admit because so many of us have collapsed "political" into meaning "partisan."
1 days ago [-]
bix6 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
varjag 1 days ago [-]
For all very real SpaceX achievements there's certain Musk fatigue if you haven't noticed. He's done enormous job to sour people on the idea of becoming multiplanetary species.
aaron695 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
themgt 1 days ago [-]
Speaking as a crab in a bucket, for all the very real WorldX achievements there's a certain Muskcrab fatigue if you haven't noticed. He's done enormous job to sour fellow crabs on the idea of leaving this bucket.
rtkwe 1 days ago [-]
The biggest issue is the whole idea of colonizing Mars or anywhere else as a backup runs into a couple major issues. 1) These backups are going to be extremely dependent on Earth for supplies because the alternative is replicating a tiny version of the whole planet's industrial base which will only make economic sense if transporting goods between these locations is extremely expensive, which is something that makes setting them up in the first place also prohibitively expensive. 2) Any technology that makes Mars/Space/etc survivable also makes it possible for an Earth based civilization able to survive basically any calamity up to the death of the Sun.
pigpop 1 days ago [-]
To your first point: yes, that's the whole idea and it's been the same playbook for any colony from the Americas to Australia. Mars is a much bigger challenge but our technology has advanced enough to make this possible. Let those who would dare risk their lives to achieve something great do so. If you don't want to participate then you don't have to, this isn't a national or international project so you can safely sit it out.
To your second: there are calamities for which a second self-sufficient planet would be necessary. A large asteroid impact would utterly wreck the global industrial base which is highly dependent on international trade and specialization of resource extraction and manufacturing in different regions of the world, having an independent backup on a different planet is one of the few ways to hedge against this. You could argue that every country on earth be fully self-sufficient and then maybe they could survive but that seems like a much bigger task since you'd be building multiple completely independent civilizations instead of just one. Guarding against another global pandemic is another and being out of range of nuclear weapons and their fallout is a third.
rtkwe 1 days ago [-]
The point on the first is the offworld colony is not a backup if it cannot be self sufficient and requires critical materials from Earth. Colonies like Australia also weren't meant or built to be self sufficient, they were extractive, extending the military reach of the British Empire and bringing in resources to make it rich. If the goal is a "backup" civilization it needs to be self sufficient for a long period to allow it to "restore" to Earth...
> A large asteroid impact would utterly wreck the global industrial base which is highly dependent on international trade and specialization of resource extraction and manufacturing in different regions of the world
That's economic collapse not extinction level collapse, space based mining might help with that but it's not the kind of event that actually makes a self sufficient
> Guarding against another global pandemic is another
This kind of presumes a very low level of travel and trade between Earth and Elsewhere which is extremely unlikely per problem 1 and the fact they'll need some economic reason to exist, at the very least they'll have to make money to buy the necessary items from Earth they cannot produce locally.
> being out of range of nuclear weapons and their fallout is a third.
This goes back to the actual thing I was talking about even a heavily bombed out Earth is hundreds of times easier to survive on than Mars or any given asteroid. Hence any tech that makes those places survivable make even the most damaged Earth also survivable.
pigpop 1 days ago [-]
I'm not saying it wouldn't take one or two hundred years to become fully independent for the necessities to survive on its own. I don't see that as an argument against it, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago after all. I don't think restoring civilization to Earth is a primary goal either. The primary goal is having a technological civilization survive the destruction or fall of the one on Earth. If a Martian colony is sufficiently robust and wealthy enough to send physical aid to Earth after a disaster then that's great but if it can only look after itself then its still achieved its purpose.
Global economic collapse due to an asteroid or nuclear war might not cause human extinction but it would mean a very large regression in our technological capacity. That could endure for hundreds if not thousands of years. Maybe we would never fully recover, people argue that point based on all of the easy to access resources having already been exploited though I have more faith in humanity's ingenuity. The role of a Mars colony in this scenario isn't to send iron ore to Earth, it's to maintain high technology and continue moving forward.
The risk of a pandemic becoming interplanetary is much lower than the risk of international spread. Travel between Earth and Mars is necessarily constrained by their orbits with a window opening only every 26 months. Most travel would likely be uncrewed cargo and when people do make the trip there would be strict quarantine measures taken (this is already done with current crewed launches to orbit and there is established history of immigration being subject to quarantine). Most importantly, the trip to Mars takes much longer than the incubation period of any disease likely to cause a pandemic so the disease will have run its course by the time the ship reaches Mars and they can decide what to do at that point (at the extreme they may resupply it and send it back but that's probably not necessary in most cases).
rtkwe 23 hours ago [-]
> wouldn't take one or two hundred years to become fully independent for the necessities to survive on its own
My concern is the incentives and economics that make it possible for them to exist, principally (relatively) cheap launch and transit costs, preclude it ever being economical to invest the resources required to ship say modern chip lithography equipment out to the new colonies rather than them continuing to buy them from Earth. Or the alternative, they get treated like pre-revolution US colonies and are intentionally kept dependent by restrictions on imports and tech exports in order to provide a market for the mother civ to sell into. And this time instead of being in a verdant land full of resources the colonies are on baren rocks dependent on the mother country for critical life support supplies so the capture and dependency are magnified and much stronger.
pigpop 19 hours ago [-]
I guess I just don't see the need to ship something like a modern chip lithography machine? When the colony is first getting established they don't need to be making 2nm chips, there's only so much of that equipment that they would want for their own uses and they could get by without it just fine. There's something like a Maslow's hierarchy of needs for equipment that they would want from Earth starting with the most essential equipment for building habitation, power generation, growing food and extracting and recycling oxygen and water. Mars is a frontier not a new subdivision so the people who would settle there need food and shelter instead of laptops and TVs. Even after basic needs are met it would make more sense to figure out how to produce all of the tooling and manufacturing equipment you need locally instead of trying to ship everything, that's what self-sufficiency really means: you can produce not just the end products but all of the raw materials and machinery needed to create those end products. That's not to mention the biggest reason to make everything locally would be that it has to work in Martian gravity, there are a lot of manufacturing processes that would need to be redesigned for that. I don't deny that they would be dependent on Earth at first but there isn't any way around that since the whole idea is to move part of humanity from Earth to Mars. That doesn't make independence impossible though.
I don't really see the point in arguing against it. If a private company and private individuals want to try to colonize Mars then what does it have to do with anyone else? You can't cling on to their legs and scream "don't go!" It all just seems to be in the same vein as that famous headline saying man will never fly.
rtkwe 16 hours ago [-]
That's the level of tech the colony will need to replicate if it's going to be truly self sufficient for anything other than short periods which it would be to fulfill it's purpose as an actual "backup" in the situation it's trying to restore a broken earth it's going to need chips to put in all sorts of things. For a tiny example look at how long the shockwaves of minor delays in chip availability from various floods in Taiwan or the Suez blockage have caused issues and imaging them just not being available.
Yes it wouldn't be the first step on establishing them but it is the kind of things it would need to be truly self sufficient. Chips are in practically every thing today already, it's a critical supply component to do anything other than simply surviving.
soco 1 days ago [-]
I bet an underlying thought is that we crabs will have to finance the entire Mars colony adventure through taxes and incentives and subsidies and whatnot.
leoc 1 days ago [-]
There's also some concern for what life will actually be like for any poor sods actually stuck on Mars. Between the harsh conditions and what we know about the aspiring Emperor Musk of Mars, it's likely to make the Sea Org look like Butlin's.
Relatedly there are questions about why the whole project seems to assume that it's much more important to preserve the human species, like a celebrated breed of dog, than to protect the lifespans (ideally, healthy lifespans) and welfare of individual human beings, questions which unfortunately can also probably be answered with reference to Musk personally: https://youtu.be/-VfYjPzj1Xw?t=18 .
There's also the wrinkle that if it's viable to send settlers and adequate resupply to Mars, then it's probably much easier and more straightforward to send a few nuclear warheads on their own one-way trip, so the whole premise that a Martian colony wouldn't be struck in a full-scale nuclear war on Earth seems shaky. Now a Martian colony dug in deep under the surface might be relatively safe, but that brings up again the question of whether it wouldn't just be better to build a far-flung network of underground settlements on Earth and/or have submarines loitering in the Antarctic Ocean in shifts.
qzw 1 days ago [-]
What if I told you every bucket within about 4 light years of us is known to have no water, no air, and hot/cold as hell? And even the worst part of the current bucket is better than any other bucket we know of?
KyleTheDev 1 days ago [-]
Speaking as a bucket who, within, holds many crabs, I think the crabs inside me could make me (the bucket) MUCH nicer than any of these other, more desolate, buckets nearby. Instead of investing untold wealth into navigating towards these far off buckets that currently are full of holes, and cannot house crabs, it would be much cheaper to make me (the bucket the crabs are in) very nice for all of the crabs.
It's silly to me that some crabs are working on trying to leave the nice bucket (me, where all the crabs are) for some shoddy bucket far far away. All because they don't want to fix the bucket they have at hand.
delichon 1 days ago [-]
A lot of us black pilled crabs want to fix the bucket but feel that the hole punchers are winning.
KyleTheDev 1 days ago [-]
Crab bucket, but it's us forcing people to invest in making earth nicer instead of destroying it for momentary profit. We could call this movement 'Human Earth'.
qzw 1 days ago [-]
I was all for going multi-planet until I realized the second part of the plan was “and fuck the planet we’re on now.” I’m afraid the second part is coming along much faster than the first.
indoordin0saur 1 days ago [-]
How is that the second part of the plan?
qzw 1 days ago [-]
Spending 100s of millions to help elect people who believe that climate change is not real, and who enact policies to delay and roll back what little the U.S. has done to reduce emissions.
pavlov 1 days ago [-]
Their plan calls for inaction towards issues that are making this planet increasingly worse for humans.
pigpop 1 days ago [-]
Elon is the world's biggest stan (who is actually doing things rather than just talking about it) for solar power and electrification of transport, how is that a call for inaction?
indoordin0saur 1 days ago [-]
A funny thing I like to do with people like this is point out the fact that Elon has perhaps done more than any person in history to get humans off of fossil fuels. And then when they sputter in disagreement I always like to ask who they'd propose instead. If they have any answer at all they inevitably give the name of a person who just demands that someone else do something (e.g. an activist or media figure), never actually someone who has put their time, effort and money into building a better system.
qzw 1 days ago [-]
Ok I’ll play, but you’re not going to like the answer: Xi Jinping. Putting aside all the valid criticisms of China under Xi, the scale at which they’ve embraced electric car and solar energy puts anything Tesla has done to shame. We’re talking more solar and wind capacity added in one year than the U.S. has in total. And China has done more to lower the cost of solar panels and batteries than anyone else while dominating global production. None of it would be possible without an intentional national policy.
indoordin0saur 23 hours ago [-]
Nice job. Best answer I've heard. I think Musk is still a better candidate for fighting global warming, as China has also done an enormous amount of polluting, burning of coal, etc. But I'm not really sure how it nets out. It could totally be that Xi's the most culpable for polluting the planet, rather than saving the planet.
maxglute 23 hours ago [-]
Rough napkin math: current annual PRC solar output lifetime production displaces / prevents 40billion barrels of oil. ~100mbd per day... i.e. basically GLOBAL oil usage. So every year, PRC solar printing enough solar to replace 1 year of oil use over their life time (assume 20% capacity factor / substitution method / equivalent work efficiency). For reference global LNG is 70mbd, global coal 100mbd equivalent. PRC industry scaled at producing 80 billion barrel equivalent of solar (not enough battery scale to absorb right now)... i.e if there's enough demand / ability to adopt PRC can basically produce enough renewable to eventually displace 2/3 global fossil use if demand steady (it's not). If one attributes solar industrial policy to Xi, like this stupid game to play but if were to play it, Xi's renewable industrial policy alone will prevent doubling of global fossil use at current adoption pace. This just solar, excludes other renewables and eventual nuclear export. The net is extremely easy, global energy demand increases as billions develop, and PRC is almost solely responsible for making sure high % of generation is renewable and not fossil, on global scale.
TLDR in this hypothetical, it's just Xi on an 100 story podium, no one else is even in the building. Unless we eventually credit someone for portable fusion, i.e. 60% of global oil used in transport that can't be displaced at utility scale energy solutions, and one credits Xi for MIC2025/PRCEV/battery then no one will ever even dethrone Xi.
indoordin0saur 20 hours ago [-]
> TLDR in this hypothetical, it's just Xi on an 100 story podium, no one else is even in the building. Unless we eventually credit someone for portable fusion, i.e. 60% of global oil used in transport that can't be displaced at utility scale energy solutions, and one credits Xi for MIC2025/PRCEV/battery then no one will ever even dethrone Xi.
Ehhhh, I'd say he's not in some league of his own. Xi is also industrializing with fossil fuels and China became the planet's largest producer of CO2 under his leadership and he's been outsourcing dirty industries abroad, particularly to Africa. I'd give more credit to people lower-down the totem pole in China, who are leading the charge for clean energy such as Wang Chuanfu, but he's very explicitly following in Elon's footsteps.
It's also a little wild to discount pollution already produced in previously unseen amounts while crediting to them hypothetical future reductions. Last year China had it's highest CO2 emission ever, and even with solar it's possible that their CO2 output will increase.
maxglute 16 hours ago [-]
He literally sets / signs off on industrial policy, others follow, This not malaria/polio/smallpox where one can attribute credit and proliferation to X team, and Y policy. PRC aggregate renewable spans 100s of sectors and programs etc, only sensible for credit to flow up to the big man. If one wants to split hairs, can also credit Hu who did indigenous innovation and renewable act, but execution and magnitude increase in industrial capacity expansion realized under Xi. Like literally no one else has stamped and enable industrial policy across sectors to displace current/future emission on order of magnitude of PRC renewable. World power demand is going to increase magnitude via simple 50% percent of world developing... MIC2025 essentially single handedly shifting future curve towards renewable from fossil. Teslas will never displace more emissions than whole of PRC renewable/ev etc. Elon simply is not in the running for global scale renewable adoption and emission displacement. No one is.
> possible that their CO2 output will increase.
Immaterial if CO2 increases, only useful geopolitical metric is historic per capita emission relative to development level and PRC is low for country blasting through capex heavy capital accumulation phase, i.e. PRC setting standard for low relative per capita emission development. Xi 2012-2026 did ~30% global emissions, ~10-15% global historic for ~20% of population. As long as PRC stays under 20% global historic and maintains above 50th percentile development (use whatever proxy indicator, per capital income PPP etc), they are under emitting / developing efficiently relative to energy use. AKA PRC developing more for less unit of emission. The alternative is not developing which frankly stupid argument/position. For reference US/Europe ~45% historic emission for 10% of global pop. On balance PRC currently grossly under emitting vs historic developmental baseline.
sensanaty 1 days ago [-]
Sure, I guess if we ignore the fact that he's spent and continues to spend unfathomable amounts of money on politicians who are very publicly pro fossil fuels and climate change denialists, and does shit like opening data centers powered by the largest gas generators on the planet.
nancyminusone 1 days ago [-]
Tesla makes batteries and battery powered cars, which are indifferent of energy source. They do make some solar panels, but are a minor player not even in the top 10 by shipped capacity worldwide. But chineese companies like LONGi Solar and JinkoSolar aren't "one guy" (even though they ship 50x what Tesla does), so I guess they don't count.
Dig1t 1 days ago [-]
Assuming you are talking about climate change: isn’t Tesla doing more than anyone to electrify everything and help fix the problem?
The plan definitely does not call for inaction towards other issues.
qzw 1 days ago [-]
I believed this at one point as well, but that’s not happening anymore. Tesla became what it is while leaning on generous electric car rebates that drastically reduced prices of their cars (especially when leasing), not to mention the millions in carbon credits that other car makers paid to it that was basically another subsidy. Then once Tesla achieved economies of scale and paid off the early fixed costs, he no longer supported subsidies for electric vehicles. That’s pretty classic pull-up-the-ladder-behind-you behavior. The net effect is a drop in overall electric car growth and the scaling back of electric car development by many of Tesla’s competitors.
Dig1t 16 hours ago [-]
His competitors already have economies of scale, they are incumbent carmakers that build tens of millions of cars every year.
Volkswagen has a market cap of 40B, why do they need to government subsidies to build a new car?
If you truly care about wide-scale EV adoption above all else, why not advocate for opening up western markets to Chinese EVs? The availability of a 10k EV would do far more for adoption than giving taxpayer money to billion dollar megacorps.
baggy_trough 1 days ago [-]
Like pioneering the first excellent electric car?
imtringued 7 hours ago [-]
Elon Musk's idea to colonize Mars isn't to build the most efficient in-space architecture. It's to brute force his way with one way trips to Mars using a massive amount of reusable Starships to repeatedly refuel another Starship that is poorly adapted for inter-planetary travel.
The "rocket CO2 doesn't matter" argument is based on the fact that nobody has reusable rockets right now, so the fuel expenditure is bounded by the cost of the rocket. Elon Musk wants to switch that equation on its head. Meaning e.g. $100 million launch costs no longer means $10 million fuel costs and $90 million rocket costs, it now means 5x $10 million rocket costs and 5x $10 million fuel costs, i.e. 5x more fuel used with the same budget and that fuel is going to emit CO2.
One Starship launch produces 3500 tons. Now repeat this to 1000 Earth to Mars launches. That includes at least 10 tanker launches per ship. Meaning at least 10000 launches per year. That equates to 35 million tons of CO2 for something that has no direct benefit to earth.
If he scaled down his Mars colony ambitions to 10 Earth to Mars launches per year people might turn a blind eye to it.
boonzeet 1 days ago [-]
It probably doesn't help that it's mid working day for a large portion of the world, on a Monday as well.
We've been watching in the office though. There's been a lot of interest in it.
inglor_cz 1 days ago [-]
Czechia has a state holiday (St. Wenceslas), so people are watching :)
robertlagrant 1 days ago [-]
Very excited. Watching it with my wife. So glad it didn't have to end early.
Shank 1 days ago [-]
I think there are so many more mission objectives for success, e.g., still in payload deploy. I think we've already reached a lot of milestones with this launch, but there's still a lot of satellites to go at the time of writing. I'm so used to these failing that I'm holding my breath until everything is done.
1 days ago [-]
rini17 1 days ago [-]
Hard to get sincerely engaged when the genuine achievement is surrounded by insanity like mars colonization or gigawatt datacenters in orbit, both in a decade. Oh and I even saw spacex touted as anti-DEI success story...
dylan604 1 days ago [-]
It's an early AM launch. Alarm clocks on the west coast haven't gone off yet
what_hn 1 days ago [-]
It's 6:30am here in CA, didn't get any indication it was going to be this early until I just saw this.
dylan604 1 days ago [-]
The launch window has been known for quite some time. Maybe you confused the timezone?
bakies 1 days ago [-]
rocket to orbit isn't that impressive. should have been 14 flights ago. Artemis SLS went to the moon in 1
orangecat 1 days ago [-]
Yes, clearly we should be using our stockpile of SLS rockets to launch satellites and go to the moon.
bakies 1 days ago [-]
these satellites are junk anyway - and starship can't go to the moon lmao
natch 1 days ago [-]
Reusability is harder.
1 days ago [-]
maxglute 22 hours ago [-]
There's been so many mid tests, I think activity would pick up if one of the flight tests put everything together, launch, orbit, catch etc even with elon fatigue.
small_model 1 days ago [-]
There is a cadre of left wing Elon haters on HN. Ruins every thread related to Tesla/SpaceX, just emotional posts about their hatred of Elon, pretty sad really given Elon arguably works within the pinnacle of tech.
qwerpy 23 hours ago [-]
If this were any other space company it’d be on the front page with glowing praise. But it’s Elon’s company and the launch was a success, so it’s buried down on the fourth page or so currently. I expect this out of general population social media but it’s sad to see hacker news become like this.
Instead, we have such important news like "Nissan's third generation e-POWER powertrain" and "MongoDB CEO resigns to join Meta" and a fridge magnet to greet us on the front page.
chasd00 22 hours ago [-]
My favorite headline so far "SpaceX's Starship reaches orbit for the first time, then returns early and blows up in a fiery explosion" - livescience.com. So many people when faced with a SpaceX success just can't stand it. It's getting comical.
nutjob2 1 days ago [-]
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small_model 1 days ago [-]
Ecce exemplum
nutjob2 9 hours ago [-]
Tu quidem es
AJMaxwell 1 days ago [-]
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chinathrow 1 days ago [-]
Don't expect any sympathy for a guy who said if Trump lost, he'd be in jail. At least not from me.
NooneAtAll3 1 days ago [-]
> so little activity, 55 comments
???
marcusverus 23 hours ago [-]
The utter banality of constantly improving launch tech is, in its own way, just another testament to the great work being done by SpaceX.
abcd_f 1 days ago [-]
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ViewTrick1002 1 days ago [-]
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zpeti 1 days ago [-]
> nazi bent
please elaborate with quotes
mcculley 1 days ago [-]
I think the use of “nazi” is simply sloppy thinking, but if you are genuinely interested in problematic quotes from Musk, he posts to Twitter very often.
philipallstar 1 days ago [-]
It's less sloppy and more a sign of a pretty dangerous contagion that's spread widely.
mvlipwig 1 days ago [-]
I could elaborate with a photo if you'd like
jens__jensen 1 days ago [-]
Please elaborate bis anti-fascist stance parent seems to miss with quotes
totallymike 1 days ago [-]
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baggachipz 1 days ago [-]
I used to watch every spacex launch. I was enamored with the company and what they're accomplishing. After the election and The Salute, well. I just haven't watched one launch since. I've just completely lost interest, which is a total shame. I still watch NASA launches but they don't scratch the same itch those spacex ones did.
I just don't care to watch what an AI company run by a nazi does. One of the biggest heel turns in human history.
tavavex 1 days ago [-]
I agree with you. I knew his ventures had issues long before this, but his foray into the far-right has completely turned me and everyone I know off from all of them. They almost became another arm of the US government. Something to be feared and not appreciated or be excited for.
It's telling that the sibling comments that reply to your relatively detailed one are kneejerk thought-terminating one-line accusations of mental illness - as if anything you've said is insane or untrue. To them, not liking Elon is literally unconscionable.
baggachipz 1 days ago [-]
I can only assume astroturfing or trolling or both. Glad to know I'm not alone.
small_model 1 days ago [-]
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marcusverus 1 days ago [-]
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unrented7977 1 days ago [-]
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fluidcruft 1 days ago [-]
I mean... I'm watching it. What's there to say? Who wants to argue with Musk/Trump/detractors and their bots.
newsclues 1 days ago [-]
"Prompting claude 5.5 has more appeal it seems."
Only a certain type of person likes hard challenges, and many people are content chasing what is easy.
It's why everyone wants to work on software instead of hardware. Doing hard things is hard, and most people are incapable or unwilling to do the hard things. Prompt engineering is great for lazy morons.
Good4boothee 1 days ago [-]
If it isn't human landing on Moon/Mars then I can wait for weekly space news write-up on Ars Technica.
317070 1 days ago [-]
Does someone know where to watch the official livestream? The internet is so swarmed with all the recasters I cannot find the official stream anymore...
My experience however is that NASASpaceflight provides an overall better coverage than the official stream, only recasting when they don't have camera angles themselves (Such as when the ship is in space or during reentry)
rswail 1 days ago [-]
I got them but with a 10 second delay compared to the spacex feed, which was irritating but meant I could flip between the "official" commentary and NASASpaceflight.
There was a bit of snark from the SpaceX guy Dave about whether or not the go/no-go decision had been made and not to listen to "other broadcasters" and he was right.
But the NASASpaceFlight guys are the right kind of nerds to be commentating, because they don't have to keep up the "steel jawed rocketman" image and can just geek out on the launch.
petterroea 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, the NSF cast quality is more amateurish, and certain cast members aren't that good at doing live casting. But it's nice listening to like minded people. And their camera shots are beautiful.
ButlerianJihad 22 hours ago [-]
> can just geek out on the launch
They can also speculate wildly, and pass along abundant rumors, and shill for lots of donations and subscriptions and hard-sell the merch. They can promote extra fan videos in their subscription-only sections. They can bloviate over and over just to fill the airwaves, like they're on a 120-minute podcast with 10 minutes of useful script. They are the "new media" that is beloved in 2026 and anointed to usurp the mainstream media of CNN, New York Times, and television.
"NASASpaceFlight" is a misleading name if I ever saw it, because they are neither the National Aeronautics & Space Administration, nor the National Science Foundation. At least "The Launch Pad" and TLP are not pretending that way.
One of them has finagled their way into placing their own cameras around the launch sites of Kennedy and/or Cape Canaveral. So they do have their own views on the ground. They have not been permitted on-base by the USSF at Vandenberg or elsewhere.
Source: I've been banned from the two top third-party rebroadcasters. Good riddance.
natch 1 days ago [-]
The X video stream is flawless.
LunicLynx 1 days ago [-]
They have a stream on their page starting 40min before launch.
Also can recommend the restream of everyday astronaut Tim Dodd
sebzim4500 1 days ago [-]
Yeah but it's just a white-labelled version of the X stream with all its warts.
ETA: Sorry this was ambiguous, I'm complaining that the stream on spacex.com uses x.com, whereas there used to be a much better stream through youtube.com
LunicLynx 1 days ago [-]
Which warts? I mean if you dislike Space X, what do you expect to get from it at all?
sebzim4500 1 days ago [-]
The streams are great, I just wish they were streamed on youtube like they used to be.
joachimma 1 days ago [-]
That's the opposite of the criticism that was levelled at him, during earlier launches, when he was preferring his own cameras even though they only caught fog.
hdgvhicv 1 days ago [-]
That’s sounds perfect. No “commentators” no “own angles”, no “buy our merch”, no whining about “my crappy blackmagic camera may have been damaged”
I use to watch the nasaspaceflight and everyday astronaut streams but the official one is best for the actual launch. The other two are good for the commentary because if you ask a question in the chat they’ll sometimes answer it.
Status update: It launched. Looks very good so far. At nearly 100km altitude four minutes in, most engines nominal. Superheavy separated successfully.
Inspiring to watch, really.
asgr 1 days ago [-]
7km/s, 26 sattelites currently deploying - super impressive!
wffurr 1 days ago [-]
I tuned in at T+11 just in time to hear the announcer talking about splashdown in the Indian ocean and that they weren't going to orbit today, followed immediately by saying the team is still considering options and trying to find a way to get to orbit. We'll see what happens.
T+22: Go for orbit!
Gareth321 1 days ago [-]
Watching that take off is breathtaking. I've been a space nerd since a little kid and I cannot believe how cool this is. Fuck yeah!
DarmokJalad1701 1 days ago [-]
This was such a long time coming!
misiti3780 1 days ago [-]
Why arnt they doing a tower catch ?
Polizeiposaune 1 days ago [-]
They're being careful because they don't want to wreck their launch pad.
On the previous flight, they were going for the same ocean soft landing as this flight, but several engines on the booster failed to start during the landing burn (reportedly due to ice clogging propellant feed). Had this crash not happened they likely would have tried for a tower catch today.
They want to be sure the mitigation for this failure worked before they put the pad & tower at risk.
bell-cot 1 days ago [-]
Towers are expensive. Boosters are cheap. And the reliability metrics on low-serial-number Raptor 3's don't make the modest benefits worth the risk.
misiti3780 1 days ago [-]
I would have thought both were kinda expensive.
bell-cot 1 days ago [-]
In one sense, yes. But Elon's PoV is "I have a big Booster factory, I'm a trillionaire, and my unit cost is under $50M." Vs. fixing a smashed Tower (and surrounding launch infrastructure) would likely cost him months.
ksec 1 days ago [-]
I remember all the Twitter account that keep saying Starship isn't physically / scientifically possible.
I am so looking forward to a successfully launch today.
small_model 1 days ago [-]
Same with data centres in space, "Noooooo it cant work, heating in space, blah blah" same people, will never achieve anything in life as they only see limits.
nixon_why69 1 days ago [-]
Different category of doubts. It's unreasonable to say starship can't work in a world where the Saturn V did work.
For datacenters in space to work, they have to solve a bunch of unsolved problems and be more economical than datacenters in earth.
Gareth321 1 days ago [-]
To be fair, radiators in space doesn't require any new technology. It's a very well understood problem. The best method is infrared radiators. Cooling is just a function of how large the surface area of the radiators, their heat, and the cooling required.
Where I think you're correct is that typical AI data centers require a LOT of cooling, and to achieve this at scale would require enormous radiators. So large that it's hard to square the business case given current launch costs. I've read a lot of research in this space and it looks like the much more realistic use cases (at least at first) will be sub-processing. Meaning processing data already in space. These could be telemetry, Starlink, tracking, telescopes, logistics, military, GPS, weather, deep space missions, first-response, alerts, etc. In particular, applications which require lower latency.
There are also other applications which are less cost sensitive. For example, applications which might be banned on Earth, or at risk of espionage, attack, or intrusion.
If we want to make typical AI data centers in space to be economical, we need launch costs to drop to under $200/kg. Interestingly, [Starship could reduce costs down to $67/kg.] Even lower with >9 launch cycles. (https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/rocket-developers-used...) This would make the business case *extremely* attractive.
nixon_why69 1 days ago [-]
Great comment and I agree with all of it except you're describing an expanded starlink rather than "datacenters in space". There are definitely workloads that benefit from being in space but that's different from being an economical place to put a rack of H200s doing training or inference.
Dissipating that much heat in the first place would be a first, you also need a butt ton of power so maybe you can shade your giant radiators with giant solar panels, but all of this needs to unfold from something launch-packaged.... AND be cheaper than just plugging them in on earth.
Gareth321 1 days ago [-]
I agree on all points. That said, we're seeing a lot of preparatory activity from many places. SpaceX, Google, Starcloud, Blue Origin, Cowboy Space, Orbital Compute, Odyssey, and China’s ADA Space/Zhejiang Lab. SpaceX and Blue Origin have filed plans for huge orbital compute constellations. Google is developing TPU-equipped satellites under Project Suncatcher. Starcloud has already flown an Nvidia H100 in orbit. China’s ADA Space has also launched a small network of AI-compute satellites. A lot of very smart and very rich people are making big bets in this space.
We're still a few years away, but I suspect this is going to happen fast, starting with the edge/low latency compute.
small_model 1 days ago [-]
Starlink already does this. Goalposts will be carried to next place once the first orbital data centre is serving tokens.
nixon_why69 1 days ago [-]
Starlink is "networking in space". The compute, power, and heat stories are minor compared to the networking benefits. Different story than making compute cheaper in space.
laughing_man 1 days ago [-]
A better comparison would be Starlink, which had a bunch of unresolved problems and had to be more economical than existing satellite internet providers.
mlyons1340 18 hours ago [-]
computers in space are a well solved problem. Can you explain what is still unsolved?
andsoitis 1 days ago [-]
> For datacenters in space to work, they have to solve a bunch of unsolved problems and be more economical than datacenters in earth.
One interpretation is they're all delusional.
Another is that Musk showed the way and others now see it too.
inglor_cz 1 days ago [-]
"It's unreasonable to say starship can't work in a world where the Saturn V did work."
Most of the doubts were economical as well. Saturn V was extremely expensive, its per-unit cost could be expressed in still-human-readable fractions of the entire US GDP. Starship should be several orders of magnitude cheaper while providing more capabilities.
We did. It’s marketing and is unlikely to evolve into something real
senordevnyc 1 days ago [-]
Totally, just like all the haters of the Hyperloop!
1 days ago [-]
dgellow 1 days ago [-]
You’re right, I’m just back from the city, took no time and was so cheap thanks to the hyperloop. Next week I go to Asia, I think I will use the rocket transport system Musk announced a few years ago. It’s so nice how my Tesla is making me so much money while I’m traveling, offering taxi service to everybody around. Next will I will get the add-on to have it join the Tesla compute fleet - it’s free compute if you think about it, given the solar roof is generating the energy! Might even get one of those humanoid robot to replace me at work. Just hope it’s not raining too much, my cybertruck steel plates are rusting a bit. Also, my kids are really enjoying their summer camp at the Mars colony!
senordevnyc 7 hours ago [-]
It’s funny how the people calling Musk’s skeptics “cowards” for doubting him have nothing to say to any of this, they just angrily downvote. They know it’s true. You didn’t even list a third of his broken promises and bullshit.
CrimsonRain 1 days ago [-]
Limits are security. Dont have to do this, don't have to risk that, no need for uncertainty, anxiety won't kill the weak confused mind...you can't fail if you never try (big brain!). That's the type. It is called cowards ;)
1 days ago [-]
andsoitis 1 days ago [-]
Huge congratulations to the SpaceX team!
cbogie 1 days ago [-]
go for orbit!!!
themgt 1 days ago [-]
The next step is to reach beyond the bounds of Earth’s orbit. I’m excited to announce that we are working with our commercial partners to build new habitats that can sustain and transport astronauts on long-duration missions in deep space. These missions will teach us how humans can live far from Earth – something we’ll need for the long journey to Mars.
The reporter who covered the moon landing for The New York Times, John Noble Wilford, later wrote that Mars tugs at our imagination “with a force mightier than gravity.” Getting there will take a giant leap. But the first, small steps happen when our students – the Mars generation – walk into their classrooms each day. Scientific discovery doesn’t happen with the flip of a switch; it takes years of testing, patience and a national commitment to education.
When our Apollo astronauts looked back from space, they realized that while their mission was to explore the moon, they had “in fact discovered the Earth.” If we make our leadership in space even stronger in this century than it was in the last, we won’t just benefit from related advances in energy, medicine, agriculture and artificial intelligence, we’ll benefit from a better understanding of our environment and ourselves.
Someday, I hope to hoist my own grandchildren onto my shoulders. We’ll still look to the stars in wonder, as humans have since the beginning of time. But instead of eagerly awaiting the return of our intrepid explorers, we’ll know that because of the choices we make now, they’ve gone to space not just to visit, but to stay – and in doing so, to make our lives better here on Earth.
- Barack Obama, "America will take the giant leap to Mars", October 2016
1 days ago [-]
metalman 1 days ago [-]
planned 6 orbits, 10hr's in space
the load of satelites will deploy 10x the banwidth of a single falcon launch making the economics of this venture rather startling for any 'competition'.
if they nail the deploy, relights, and soft landings, it will time for everybody to rethink everything *
* keep in mind they are already tinkering with on orbit fuel tranfer technology, which will lead to routine bunkering *
other things, like doing visual condition inspections of every ship in orbit means there experience base grows at a rate that other companys litteraly cant imagine.
thinkingtoilet 1 days ago [-]
How can you compare the economics of it if you just have the bandwidth and not the cost?
Not a fan of Elon Musk at all, but SpaceX is damn impressive. Watching these key launches always makes me emotional for our species and what we can accomplish together.
ritualdevin 1 days ago [-]
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aaron695 1 days ago [-]
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phrazerkrane 1 days ago [-]
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Quitschquat 1 days ago [-]
SpaceX is a master lesson in over promising and under delivering
marcusverus 1 days ago [-]
SpaceX deserves a higher caliber of hater. This low effort hate is unworthy.
Quitschquat 23 hours ago [-]
We're all kinda tired at this point.
cubefox 24 hours ago [-]
He is not polite, but he is not wrong either. Originally, the first orbital flight test should have happened years ago. There have been many delays, though Starship is still years ahead of the competition.
1 days ago [-]
bell-cot 1 days ago [-]
At their bleeding edge, yes. Further back - their Falcon launch system is delivering far more reliably, frequently, and economically than any other launch system on Earth.
And that I've heard, actual buyers of launch services are perfectly aware of that distinction.
reco98gg 1 days ago [-]
I find curious the Starship business ROI discussed here mentions almost exclusively Starlink and the moon.
Putting weapons in orbit seems a very likely goal, given the attitude of the current US leadership.
They felt confident enough to recently acknowledge publicly their existence:
Not just US - plenty of other countries will want to do the same, and there are only going to be a couple of countries with cheap payload capability.
indoordin0saur 1 days ago [-]
China launched some classified mission just last week which was quite possibly weapons for disabling other satellites.
Zigurd 1 days ago [-]
Having an impossible critical path will be the demise of the starship project. Too many things have to work that cannot be tested out of order. Too many of those things that needed to work years ago still don't. And those are the easy ones.
The items I'm listing here are just a subset of the critical path, and each milestone along the way will take months, optimistically, and years more realistically. To the point that starship won't be relevant to moon missions or any commercial use by the time it does what it needs to do to even partially fulfill the plans for it:
It needs to meet payload specifications. Currently it is off by a factor of two, which sounds doable until you realize the spec is 100 tons, and they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system.
It needs a launch cadence fast enough so that refueling doesn't take 15 separate starship tankers. Currently it would take years to refuel one single starship to make a one-way trip to the moon.
There's just a minor milestone on the way to that launch cadence: catching both stages.
Once both stages are reliably caught after a mission, refurbishment needs to be minimal. Proving that out will take several missions.
This is a simplified list of items on the critical path, but reaching each of these items has risks, and if those risks prove to be problems to solve, then each of those problems has a list of tasks and tests associated with it.
Some people think very highly of Elon for proposing technologically elegant solutions. But he's got a really big blind spot for the project management implications.
NitpickLawyer 1 days ago [-]
I'm saddened by this comment being upvoted a lot on this site. I'm a space nerd from EU and have been watching SpX since they were launching from an atol. This comment is the epitome of clueless negativity, wrapped in an umbrella of big words and a list of things that are neither important nor factually correct.
Nothing listed in this comment is going to lead to "the demise of the starship project". And nothing listed there is original. We've heard it time and time again, when F9 was ready to launch, when F9 was ready to land, when F9 did land (bbbut they have to do it constantly), when F9 managed the first re-use (they need to do it at least 10 times so it's worth it) and so on and so forth.
They've now launched AND landed >600 times already. Let's just say they know what they're doing.
Anyway, for a bit of context: the current first orbital flight, with 26 satellites deploying right now, is adding the same amount of Starlink bandwidth as 10+ F9 launches. Let that sink in and re-do whatever cost/opportunity and "management" spiels you need to do. One flight > 10x F9 flights.
That alone justifies the Starship. The rest is the cherry on top.
Zigurd 1 days ago [-]
"That alone justifies..."
...keeping whatever project that should've been put to sleep months ago alive. Most people reading this have been on a software development project that fits this pattern of ignoring massively missed milestones and hoping to catch up. That's often accompanied by isolated economic arguments that are fragments of what started out as a coherent business case that can no longer be supported.
tim333 1 days ago [-]
>should've been put to sleep months ago
The thing works and is launching satellites? And if they just continue as is it'll be the lowest cost per Kg to space?
Seems quite successful even if the moon landing doesn't happen.
DarmokJalad1701 13 hours ago [-]
> Most people reading this have been on a software development project that fits this pattern of ignoring massively missed milestones and hoping to catch up.
And some of us work in the industry that is in the form it is today, as big as it is today, majorly due to the one company alone. The one that puts more mass into orbit every year than any other entity in the world - nation states included.
As for "massively missed milestones" - it is easy to predict milestones when you are making CRUD apps in React. Not so when building the largest rocket that has ever existed, and making it fully reusable.
> coherent business case that can no longer be supported.
Lol. They operate the most successful and most profitable rocket in history, and they are confident enough that they have stopped taking bookings for it. And they just demonstrated a system that can bring the cost down another 1 or 2 orders of magnitude with nearly zero competition even close to them. No coherent business case indeed.
timschmidt 1 days ago [-]
They've reached orbit, and at the time of this comment are preparing to deploy Starlink sats. Which means they've successfully closed the economic development loop for the Starship program. Falcon 9 can't launch Starlink v3, only Starship can. They've already demonstrated successful booster catch. Even if they discard Ship in the ocean after every launch they're no worse off than with Falcon 9 (which also discards it's upper stage).
They'll ramp falcon flights down quickly. Ramp up Starship launches just as quickly. And in a couple years time we'll have a blooper reel like this one but larger by 10x: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ
Edit: Starlink deployed.
state_less 1 days ago [-]
I'm glad they gathered the courage to go for orbit and launched these v3 satellites so they can test real deployment of starlink v3. A bit of a cliffhanger for a few moments there. The starlink v3 direct-to-cell coverage will be a big upgrade when it comes online, allowing users without a terminal to use the constellation. And the laser based inter satellite communication is a big upgrade to how v3 can communicate. The catch, landing and recovery of both stages will be big next steps.
SpaceX knows that pulling the risk out of system is the ask here and they continue to progress and push their limits and capabilities, which is a healthy sign for the US space industry and more broadly for technical progress worldwide.
estearum 1 days ago [-]
Now the goalposts for Starship is just whether it can put Starlink into orbit?
You seem to be suggesting that Starship just needs to self-fund its own development, and then the question of whether that development leads somewhere desirable/valuable is de facto answered or irrelevant. Why would that be the case?
chasd00 22 hours ago [-]
If Starship can self-fund its own development then there's no reason for it to be cancelled, it's making money and an asset to SpaceX. The only way to absolutely guarantee no desirable/valuable outcome of the program is to cancel it. So i would say the question of whether that development leads somewhere desirable/valuable is now irrelevant (from a financial survival perspective). The only direction for the value of Starship to go now is up.
Don't forget, there are no politicians involved here. No election cycle for teams to switch and cancel the other side's work out of spite. SpaceX is only beholden to its shareholders.
estearum 20 hours ago [-]
I am jealous of your world of no opportunity cost! Simpler place, it seems.
DarmokJalad1701 13 hours ago [-]
Indeed, it is simpler when the beancounters who can't see past the next quarter are not in charge.
estearum 6 hours ago [-]
Opportunity cost is not exclusively a financial concept. For example, the opportunity cost of smart people working on Facebook Ads is immense, despite probably actually being one of the best-remunerated things they could do.
It's still not really clear where any of this SpaceX stuff goes besides "rockets cool and scifi planetary settlement cool". Planetary settlement is an absolutely dogshit idea that doesn't survive first contact with any reality.
timschmidt 1 days ago [-]
> Now the goalposts
Milestones. Engineers deal in milestones. Goalposts are for sportsball.
estearum 1 days ago [-]
So reply to the immediately following sentence that asks you to connect the milestone to the next.
timschmidt 1 days ago [-]
Frankly that sentence doesn't make much sense. Would you mind rephrasing your question?
estearum 1 days ago [-]
> You seem to be suggesting that Starship just needs to self-fund its own development, and then the question of whether that development leads somewhere desirable/valuable is de facto answered or irrelevant. Why would that be the case?
Reply please.
timschmidt 1 days ago [-]
Yes, that's the sentence that doesn't make much sense. Would you mind re-stating your question?
estearum 1 days ago [-]
Your comment says Starlink deployability makes Starship economically sustainable.
Starship's goals are not merely to be "economically sustainable." SpaceX investors are not investing in a marginally more efficient Starlink deployment system.
You seem to be suggesting that it's a foregone conclusion that from here (economic sustainability via Starlink) that Starship will achieve its much grander ambitions. Is this what you're suggesting? And if so, evidenced by what?
timschmidt 1 days ago [-]
> Starship's goals
Rockets don't have goals. People do. Rockets have features like payload capacity, thrust, cost/ton to orbit, reusability, etc. On which Starship seems to be doing excellently compared to... everyone else.
> SpaceX investors are not investing in a marginally more efficient Starlink deployment system.
IDK what any given investor's rationale is without asking them, and neither do you. Groups, like rockets, are not possessed of singular will.
> You seem to be suggesting that it's a foregone conclusion that ... Starship will achieve its much grander ambitions.
You seem to be the only one who's said such a thing. However, since you bring it up, I will point out that engineering is a process, akin to science, and success merely takes enough determination and resources to keep trying. SpaceX seem to repeatedly demonstrate the determination, and successfully launching Starlink with Starship provides the resources.
I see what they've achieved already, and expect them to continue applying the same process. I'm not sure how far they'll go. But it's a fun ride already. I trust the process. I'm a fan of the process. You and I get to have this conversation because science and engineering work, rockets fly because science and engineering work. I'm not sure how one would even attempt to argue otherwise.
estearum 1 days ago [-]
> Rockets don't have goals. People do.
Cute but it's quite obvious I'm referring to the Starship program. And no, the payload continues to fall and is now not even remotely close to being able to achieve the program goals on pretty much any timeline at all.
> IDK what any given investor's rationale is without asking them, and neither do you. Groups, like rockets, are not possessed of singular will.
No you can actually infer from the revenue multiple that the market is pricing quite a bit more than "slightly cheaper Starlink." Of course you can play stupid if you want, because playing not-stupid would require your opinions to confront reality, but it's a very transparent play.
> I see what they've achieved already, and expect them to continue applying the same process. I'm not sure how far they'll go. But it's a fun ride already.
Uh huh....
Okay so we went from "Starship is a successful program because Starlink makes it economically sustainable" to "I don't care or know what Starship is trying to do, I don't care or know how successfully they're doing it, but rocket go up is a fun ride already."
The history of Starship is one of continuously lowering the ambitions and slowly climbing towards the new, lower ambition. Arguably fine, but it's frankly beyond delusional to be acting like this is some inexorable march towards Mars (which is literally no longer a goal at all anymore, because they can't do it with Starship).
It started at 100 tons of payload to Mars. Now the goal is 200 tons to LEO, with only 35-50 tons being demonstrated today.
timschmidt 24 hours ago [-]
> Cute but it's quite obvious I'm referring to
Comfortable with your own loose wording, but lawyering over others. I see.
> And no, the payload continues to fall and is now not even remotely close to being able to achieve the program goals
Payload was also much lower on early Falcon 9's. Virtually every rocket family is a family and not one model because they get stretched, engines get added and tweaked, etc. Reduced payload capacity is a boring, normal, and expected situation for early production design. Same goes for planes. What you see as failure is an initial qualified engineering milestone. It seems to me that you must understand the concept of iteration. It also seems like you think 50T to LEO is not incredible in and of itself.
Perhaps you are the sort of person who is unhappy at weddings?
This mindset that because something which is under development is not finished yet, it has failed or is failing, can only come from someone who has never made anything themselves. The misunderstanding is so complete. I suppose it's a mindset some folks have to unlearn to help themselves.
> "Starship is a successful program because Starlink makes it economically sustainable" to "I don't care or know what Starship is trying to do, I don't care or know how successfully they're doing it, but rocket go up is a fun ride already."
These are your constructions and do not accurately reflect anything I've said. It seems like you're just looking for arguments and not genuine understanding. I won't give you any more argument. Good evening.
estearum 24 hours ago [-]
You are continuing to ignore the actual stated goals of the program have been cut back over and over and over. You are acting as if they have held ambitious goals and are marching towards them. The program is clearly not working as they intended or else they would not be cutting their goals.
And no, despite their continuous cutting back on ambition, it's still obviously a remarkable program absolutely chock full of amazing achievements. That does not mean the program is a success or is situated to be a success, which is what the original comment was talking about that you "rebutted" by stating they've achieved an intermediate milestone.
panick21_ 1 days ago [-]
Now the point of economic sustainability was always putting Starlink into orbit. That's something people in the space community have said from the beginning.
And both the booster and the Starship itself have proven that they can get back to ground mostly intact. So its not like they are only working on 'getting to orbit'. And clearly it is leading something desirable if the have proven that they can basically land the second and first stage, something nobody else has ever achieved.
Question how fast they can make the turn around are still there along with other question. But once you can repeatably launch you can improve much faster as they did with Falcon 9. And you can do more and more tests in shorter time, accelerating development.
maxdo 1 days ago [-]
This post feels like written by a QA. This is their first semi operational flight . In its current state starship is a reason to be proud by any nation . It pushed science forward with cost and payload size never possible before . That’s only current state .
Raptor 3 has its only 3rd flight . That’s why the payload is “only” ~50t. Just for the reference, it’s already one of the most capable rocket in the world as of today , and even with partial reusability it has future.
They clearly doing rolling improvement , rollout and testing of many components of different readiness. Otherwise they will never ship anything.
peab 1 days ago [-]
I'm sure you also thought falcon was going to fail, Tesla would never work out, and Twitter would collapse after Elon bought it.
Zigurd 1 days ago [-]
Reusable falcon 9 boosters are an informative history: how many years did it take to successfully land a falcon 9 booster? Scale your expectations appropriately.
SenHeng 1 days ago [-]
But it happened still.
panick21_ 1 days ago [-]
That's a bad comparison. Falcon 9 wasn't developed to be reusable. And it it didn't actually take that long. Also Starship has already proven that Starship booster can land. And Starship itself has cleanly landed on the ocean.
There is still a question about turnaround time, but just comparing the state now to early Falcon 9 is not accurate.
snarfy 1 days ago [-]
Cybertrucks, solar roofs and SolarCity failed just the same.
marcusverus 1 days ago [-]
Cybertruck? The best selling electric truck on the market?
Oh, it's only the second best selling electric truck on the market. What a massive failure.
kg 1 days ago [-]
It sold so well that Musk had to have SpaceX buy up millions and millions worth of unsold inventory.
rTX5CMRXIfFG 1 days ago [-]
i personally wanted those to work (except Twitter, i believe social media is net net bad for society)... and yet i don't feel the need to jerk him off with my hands
oblio 1 days ago [-]
Musk also has FSD, the Boring Company, Tesla Solar Roof, Cybertruck, Hyperloop, etc.
Let's stop pretending he's God.
peab 1 days ago [-]
FSD is on the path of being incredibly successful. You really have to try it, if you haven't already.
Boring Company is also on the path to being successful, it's just not advertised much.
Solar roof - yes, this one I would mark as a failure.
Cybertruck - they're still selling, so not a failure. But not as great as originally promised.
Hyperloop - this could still come after boring company succeeds.
Nobody is saying he's god. But maybe, he understands engineering better than some commenters on HN, that's all.
oblio 1 days ago [-]
> Boring Company is also on the path to being successful, it's just not advertised much.
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!? It's a marketing gimmick with lower transport capacity than a horse and buggy (and similar travel speed!) that's distracting cities like Vegas and Nashville from actual public transit.
It's an abject failure.
> If you were to take what should be public transportation planning and turn it into a neoliberal nightmare, this is exactly what you would get".
> Hyperloop - this could still come after boring company succeeds.
If my grandma had wheels, she'd be a bycicle.
Also, my guess is that you guys are all American. For the kind of money they're investing they could just start an automous train/tram company and the environment and humanity would be much better off.
peab 1 days ago [-]
Ah yes - a company is such a failure that it recently raised 3 billion dollars at a 23 billion dollar valuation?
If it's successful, their boring machine will tunnel 10x faster and 10x cheaper than competitors, and it will be the one making new tunnels for all sorts of trains.
oblio 24 hours ago [-]
That just says Musk is a good company salesman. Speaking of which, I can't find news about this funding round (found it; turns out there is a lot of dumb money out there). Plus Musk is famous for shady company operations (SolarCity being acquired by Tesla at an inflated price to pay off his family).
Last I read about them their tunnel boring tech wasn't revolutionary, it was just smaller diameter tunnels.
blisterpeanuts 16 hours ago [-]
Typically, tunneling involves abandoning the tunneling machine underground because it's too difficult and expensive to retrieve. The Boring Company's innovation was to find a way to retrieve the machine inexpensively, thus significantly reducing the cost of tunneling.
They also operate the machines remotely, so that humans are not risking their lives underground.
Tunnels are a good thing. They cut across a city without paving over more greenery. They will reduce surface traffic.
ronnier 1 days ago [-]
Fsd is amazing. I use it daily, it completely changed my daily drive in that I don’t. All of my driving is now on fsd, I sit back and chill while the car takes me to my destination.
peab 1 days ago [-]
The craziest part about FSD is that people still think it doesn't work.
The fact that you can pay the average price for a car, and get a car that fully drives itself today, is mind boggling.
totallymike 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
1 days ago [-]
oblio 1 days ago [-]
We have truly lost the plot, oh well, once you make something part of your identity, reason won't take it out.
qwerpy 1 days ago [-]
Yeah seriously. Saw a Rivian parked with all kinds of anti-Elon accessories: custom license plate, anti-Elon bumper sticker AND a anti-cybertruck sticker. Was fun to park my cybertruck next to it and take some joke photos but in retrospect I should probably keep my distance from unhinged people like that.
albatross79 15 hours ago [-]
Lol, you bought a cybertruck?
qwerpy 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah it’s awesome! Can’t think of a better, safer vehicle for an active family. Charges for free from my roof solar. Carries all the large toys. Best of all it drives itself anywhere I need to go, it’s like I have my own driver.
toasty228 1 days ago [-]
Conveniently ignoring every of his failed projects, a timeless classic
orangecat 1 days ago [-]
Noted failure Babe Ruth struck out 1330 times, which was a record that lasted until Mickey Mantle failed even harder.
ronnier 1 days ago [-]
Failure is a part of life and is one aspect of our growth as humans. If one has never failed then one has probably never attempted to do much in life.
toasty228 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
inglor_cz 1 days ago [-]
As far as space goes, there isn't any. The closest is Falcon Heavy, which turned out much more complicated and expensive than originally expected. But it flies.
indoordin0saur 1 days ago [-]
> they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system
In it's current test iteration they are overengineering many parts and opting for heavier, cheaper versions since currently the ship gets thrown away each time. One example are the grid fins. On Falcon 9 they are made of titanium, but on Starship they are steel probably because it's just easier to work with and why put in extra effort for something that will end up in the gulf? If they just swap in titanium grid fins they'll save 3 tons in the weight of the booster and even more fuel since that extra weight won't be getting carried up.
s08148692 1 days ago [-]
If people didn't try things just because they were hard we'd all be ploughing fields right now
Zigurd 1 days ago [-]
If people didn't recognize when projects became impossible to complete, Lotus Modern Jazz would've shipped in the last year.
timschmidt 1 days ago [-]
For something impossible to complete, it sure seems to be deploying a lot of Starlink satellites.
kg 1 days ago [-]
Is deploying starlink satellites the end goal of Starship?
bryanlarsen 1 days ago [-]
Deploying starlink satellites is the milestone that makes a viable project. Even if it fails on all remaining goals, it will continue flying regularly.
timschmidt 1 days ago [-]
And it's amazing how much easier it is to test and iterate when you're making regular flights.
timschmidt 1 days ago [-]
Putting Starlink sats in orbit is the economic engine that pays for Starship development and infrastructure build-out. You really think you get to skip straight to the end goal without establishing a way to fund it?
usrbinbash 1 days ago [-]
Uh huh.
Gentle reminder that Saturn 5 worked pretty much eprfectly on its maiden flight.
timschmidt 1 days ago [-]
Saturn V was the culmination of a loooooong development history which included many rockets in the same family (hence the V), and some spectacular RUDs.
marcusverus 1 days ago [-]
This comparison would make sense if we'd been giving Elon 5% of the federal budget like we did to the Apollo mission.
plqbfbv 1 days ago [-]
> Gentle reminder that Saturn 5 worked pretty much eprfectly on its maiden flight.
Yeah, except it costed 12x per-flight, ran at 30x/kg, and wasn't reusable. So not exactly the same thing.
usrbinbash 5 hours ago [-]
Remind me again, how many orbital refuelings will it take to make starship reach the moon?
dreamcompiler 1 days ago [-]
And it sent 3 people to the moon and brought them back with no refueling.
60 years ago.
jve 1 days ago [-]
That's an incredible achievement. But you seem to be ignoring the goals of Starship program - to make economically viable and reusable means of space transportation.
It's like after Jobs unveils iPhone to the world you'd comment that, meh, we could make telephone calls more than 100 years ago?
inglor_cz 1 days ago [-]
Saturn V worked well, but we seem to be forgetting that Apollo 1 killed three astronauts on Earth and Apollo 13 almost killed another three in space.
dreamcompiler 1 days ago [-]
I never forget either. Both were failures of the command/service module design, not the rocket.
inglor_cz 1 days ago [-]
True, but ultimately Saturn V + Apollo was a stack intended to fly together, much like Booster + Starship. Both have/had to be reliable as a whole, with disastrous consequences if not. We can praise Saturn's V reliability, but it is just a part of the entire project, and it makes sense to judge the entire project as well.
inglor_cz 1 days ago [-]
Gentle reminder that the Apollo project was eating about 0.5 percent of the entire US GDP yearly. That buys a lot of engineers and other capacity.
An equivalent of this would be about 160 billion USD a year today, and Starship is definitely at least an order of magnitude, perhaps two, cheaper than that.
DarmokJalad1701 14 hours ago [-]
> or any commercial use
As it stands today - Starship Flight 14 just deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites, 52 tonnes total. At around $110M marginal per launch, that is about $2.1M per tonne. A Falcon 9 at $30M carrying 15 tonnes is about $2M per tonne. So even as a fully expendable rocket, Starship is already basically in Falcon 9 cost-per-ton territory.
> and they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system.
Or increase performance in the engines and elsewhere. Falcon 9 Block 1 was 9000kg to LEO. The Block 5 that is flying now is 22000 kg to LEO. It's not magic. They already have a path forward with Raptor 4 and other improvements.
> needs a launch cadence fast enough so that refueling doesn't take 15 separate starship tankers
They don't need to launch special tanker missions for a depot. Their goal is to start launching Starlinks and AI inference sats en-masse. Once they demonstrate on-orbit fuel transfer, the easiest way is to fill the depot during normal missions. They can cut out some payload from specific flights to carry excess fuel and top off the depot. The sheer scale of their other flights is enough to keep it full. It is infrastructure that they need for higher energy missions. I doubt they are going to launch 15 dedicated flights just to fill up the tank.
> just a minor milestone on the way to that launch cadence: catching both stages.
They can hit massive cadence even fully expending every Starship, still work out kinks with reusability in the process and still make a profit off of Starlinks given their pace of production.
And given what they have shown so far, I think they are going to try to catch both in the next 2-3 flights barring unforeseen issues.
> Once both stages are reliably caught after a mission, refurbishment needs to be minimal
Nope. Even a cadence of once a week means that by the time they have 10+ launch pads up (in LA+FL+TX), they can be launching once a day if not more frequently. Their rate of production can already sustain that. What's missing is fuel source which will get built out in Louisiana.
> really big blind spot for the project management implications
Lol. The guy got partially reusable rockets and human rated spacecraft working at a cadence unheard of in the aerospace industry. Quite the accomplishment with such a blind spot for the project management!
Zigurd 3 hours ago [-]
This mindset kills projects. Even worse it prevents capital allocation to productive projects by keeping dead projects as zombies walking around consuming resources. This happens in software development all the time on projects that are months to years late yet every status meeting shows incremental progress. Usually it takes some kind of specific crisis like a customer walking away from a product in development to get senior management involved enough to ask whether a project actually converges on completion. You can also see how that kind of clarity is not obtainable here.
Now that the most recent test flight is complete, we can see a glaring hole in the optimistic projections: everyone is celebrating that an orbital insertion was possible even with an engine out on the upper stage, and multiple engines failed to light on the booster when it ran a simulation of a return to launch. It's nice that the mission did not fail due to failed engines. But it also means that it will likely take years of further development to attain rapid reuse.
This person is living in the same days of future past when people didn't utterly dismiss the PowerPoint Mars colony. We now know better, and even the stans have limited themselves to touting an oversized rocket for orbital launches.
jve 1 days ago [-]
I wonder how this type of comment would apply to software development world where something innovative is being built, currently not ideal but the devs would just look at it: Meh, it doesn't do X, it doesn't do Y, it does Z worse and it doesn't send email!
Maybe AI applies here - from a few years of supercharged intellisense to builds stuff on its own. But even here I don't remember such a skepticism some folks are aiming at Starship.
It's like running into R&D department and just pointing out at the flaws/not implemented features while you iterate on your product. Annoying.
Zigurd 1 days ago [-]
AI and the success of agentic coding is an excellent example. It works because validation is external to the AI coding process. If it had to validate itself it wouldn't work. Luckily, humans created a lot of tools to validate the work of humans. If your use case doesn't match the characteristics of agentic coding, don't expect the same success. That kind of serendipity is rare when conditions for it are good, and the conditions for serendipity around rockets is never that good.
motionlessveloc 1 days ago [-]
Starship's commercial viability rests almost entirely on whether it can orbit Starlink satellites more cheaply than Falcon. Falcon is around $3000/kg, Starship was promised at $100/kg, I doubt even Elon believes that number but it does mean they have plenty of buffer and cutting capacity from 50T to 100T is not the end of the world.
I agree that the Human Landing System plan for the moon is a shitshow, but it's almost a distraction for SpaceX at this point, and it would not surprise me if the whole program gets axed by whoever comes after Trump.
Zigurd 1 days ago [-]
The problem is not that they are not meeting their payload spec, or that they have not demonstrated in orbit refueling.
The problem lies in the relationship of those two milestones: if you can't meet payload, it takes way too many starships to refuel, no matter how well the fuel transfer works.
Every dead project demonstrates progress every week, right up until the day it is canceled.
inglor_cz 1 days ago [-]
It won't get axed, the race with China is on.
estearum 1 days ago [-]
Its commercial viability (not program success) depends on Starlink launch, sure. But also: that depends on Starlink's viability and value.
Selling sub-fiber Internet access into a globe increasingly covered in fiber is a silly long-term value proposition.
Maken 1 days ago [-]
Starlink is just the civil version of Starshield. As long as the US Army needs unrestricted internet access across the globe Starlink will continue to exist.
estearum 1 days ago [-]
I didn't doubt that Starlink will continue to exist.
Schiendelman 1 days ago [-]
Is it? I think you might think differently if you challenge yourself to calculate the total addressable market for Starlink.
Zigurd 1 days ago [-]
The elephant in the Starlink business model room is the fact that terrestrial wireless keeps getting cheaper and faster. To be a good Starlink customer you need to be prosperous enough to afford it, while being far enough away from an urban center to have little or no chance of being served by terrestrial wireless services.
That's a very special TAM to begin with, and the harsh part is that it shrinks over time.
Schiendelman 1 days ago [-]
As a product manager, I can tell you you're making a mistake in the way you're thinking about this. If you actually try calculating it, you'll figure it out.
estearum 1 days ago [-]
Makes sense. Product Management seems to attract the economically illiterate.
estearum 1 days ago [-]
The vast majority of that market is too poor to afford Starlink and as soon as they're not, their top priority will be to invest the capex to replace it with the vastly superior terrestrial modalities.
Schiendelman 1 days ago [-]
Their top priority? Compared to what?
estearum 1 days ago [-]
Compared to spending large amounts of money on shitty space-internet?
bluecalm 1 days ago [-]
Starlink has about 13 million subscribers today and makes around 500$/year net on average per subscriber.
It's still growing fast and will get faster and more reliable. You will also be able to use from your phone quite soon.
It can very realistically get to 100 million subscribers which is going to generate 50 billion/year of profit. They have 0 competition in that space. Even if they make half of that it's still a 1 trillion dollar company right there.
You are saying "sub-fiber" but Starlink will likely be faster for long round trips once enough new gen satellites are deployed.
That comes before the whole datacenters in space conversation.
chasd00 21 hours ago [-]
> You will also be able to use from your phone quite soon
This, I think, is a much bigger deal than a lot of people realize. A global telephone provider that works in the middle of the ocean or in the middle of the dessert or pretty much anywhere on the planet. The simplification to international travel alone would be worth switching.
estearum 20 hours ago [-]
Yeah I'll totally spend more than 0 seconds of my life and $0 switching telephony providers so that I can have connectivity when I'm ... checks notes ... in the middle of the ocean.
Huge huge untapped market of people just like me.
bluecalm 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah you are not the target demographic.
I buy e-sims all the time, have 2 plans from two different countries and I am already thinking about buying Starlink mini (waiting for the new device) because I am often in regions with terrible coverage.
So let's call it 50-50?
fragmede 21 hours ago [-]
Apple is currently doing this via Globalstar's satellites for sos messaging.
fragmede 21 hours ago [-]
Amazon Leo has already launched almost 400 satellites, with expected service 2027 so there's one competitor approaching in that space.
xoa 1 days ago [-]
>Selling sub-fiber Internet access into a globe increasingly covered in fiber is a silly long-term value proposition.
Wow, that's so amazing estaerum, you've figured out how to get photonic-bandgap (hollow core) fiber to transoceanic airlines and ships, as well as drones, and satellites in orbit!? Would you mind sharing any hints on this great breakthrough you've made?
...or did you just sorta somehow completely ignore the whole "terminals can be mobile" aspect of Starlink, as well as latency of free space optical vs conventional fiber?
estearum 1 days ago [-]
The market for airlines, ships, drones, and satellites is - quite obviously - nowhere near large enough to justify Starship lmao
80% of the Starlink subscriber base is fixed points and that will grow.
xoa 22 hours ago [-]
>The market for airlines, ships, drones, and satellites is - quite obviously - nowhere near large enough to justify Starship lmao
The only thing that's "quite obvious" is that you're not merely incredibly, confidently ignorant, you're also so deeply uncurious you can't even be bothered to take 30 seconds to check your priors. Starlink's present annual revenue is $11.3 billion with $4.4 billion in income on that. The total global civil aviation (commercial airline) fleet size is over forty thousand aircraft [0]. Expand that to general aviation including business jets etc and it grows to something like half a million. Starlink actually publishes their general aviation plan pricing [1], which for CA is going to be one of the top two plans that don't have data limits and thus $12500 or $20000 per aircraft. From what I can find international flights account for something like 20-30% of all flights, and maybe 5-10% are intercontinental. But plans are per aircraft per month, and plenty of airliners use the same plane to fly across a continent and then also fly intercontiental, which would still need the highest plan. So using a 90/10 split that'd be an average of $13500/plane, for a TAM of $6.7 billion per year just for CA and maybe another $1-4 billion for GA (which is a lot more complicated to reason about). And the profit margins there are going to be high.
So JUST aviation, not even touching on maritime or everything else mobile, has the potential at present market size to approach the entire current revenue of Starlink by itself. And they have barely even gotten started with cellular, or doing other stuff like Earth sensing with the sats that bigger, higher power birds makes more feasible.
You claim it's "quite obvious" mobile applications don't justify Starlink. It's not any such thing.
>80% of the Starlink subscriber base is fixed points and that will grow.
You need a lot more than 5x the residential plans at $55/month to approach $10-20k/month. Of course, some of those fixed points are business/enterprise customers on higher priced plans, but those customers are likely to be using Starlink already (as we are) as part of a redundancy plan alongside fiber, so your original argument about spreading fiber is perfectly irrelevant to those users anyway.
The question of whether "portable Starlink" (the aviation/maritime++ category we're talking about) justifies Starship's existence is whether the marginal increase in payload capacity or efficiency of Starship over Falcon produces a marginal increase in "portable Starlink" profit that's multiples beyond the amortized development cost and the launch costs of Starship.
Given that Starlink's entire enterprise is probably loss-making if it had to pay for its own launch capacity (it currently pays SpaceX Space $0 and is accounted for just in hardware depreciation, so frontloads profit and all the costs are incurred in coming years)... the answer is almost certainly no.
And for what it's worth, the one aircraft I've been on with Starlink Internet was (by a gigantic margin) the worst in-flight wifi experience I've had in 10 years. I'm curious how much of cost-savings it is over the current alternatives. I hope it's a lot because there's a long road between here and whenever I'd willingly buy a seat on a Starlink-connected flight again.
xoa 19 hours ago [-]
>Ah, I see you're very confused.
Nah, that'd be you, as well as a very insufferable asshole.
>The question of whether "portable Starlink" (the aviation/maritime++ category we're talking about) justifies Starship's existence is whether the marginal increase in payload capacity or efficiency of Starship over Falcon produces a marginal increase in "portable Starlink" profit that's multiples beyond the amortized development cost and the launch costs of Starship.
And it clearly does, as I showed you. It's not even close, they're constrained on capabilities not demand right now. Starship total dev cost has been about $15 billion. Access to even a tiny piece of the global cellular market justifies that.
>Given that Starlink's entire enterprise is probably loss-making if it had to pay for its own launch capacity (it currently pays SpaceX Space $0 and is accounted for just in hardware depreciation, so frontloads profit and all the costs are incurred in coming years)... the answer is almost certainly no.
Speaking of "lmao", now you're resorting to make believe.
>And for what it's worth
Nothing, in your case. I'm also being kind to you and only talking about the fundamental thing it does that fiber can never do, vs your hilarious suggestion that fiber will rollout worldwide to everyone on the planet in or even in the US in the foreseeable future. I don't think the US has even reached 50% fiber coverage yet.
estearum 18 hours ago [-]
> Starship total dev cost has been about $15 billion. Access to even a tiny piece of the global cellular market justifies that.
Similarly I can justify developing a $15 billion pizza oven because the pizza industry is $250 billion. And are you even reading the words in front of you? The question is the marginal improvement in their ability to serve that unmet demand via Starship versus Falcon. You said literally nothing about this question and still haven't. Do you understand the question?
> now you're resorting to make believe.
Describing SpaceX's accounting practices and Starlink's actual launch costs is... make believe? Very substantive response.
> I'm also being kind to you and...
I didn't claim fiber will roll out to everyone on the planet, or even everyone in the US. I said the Starlink market is clearly shrinking, and Starlink's success will ironically accelerate that shrinkage because people who get access to shitty Internet are far, far more motivated to get good connectivity than people who have no connectivity at all.
And sure, let's assume fiber hasn't reached 50%. Even broadband is a vastly superior experience to Starlink. You can disprove this by showing me any evidence of a substantial number of people who have access to fiber or broadband and opt to use Starlink as their primary ISP. I would guess this set is approximately null, as someone who ordered Starlink for his house and then filed an FCC complaint to get fiber brought out to it instead. I would have to have been literally braindead to use Starlink.
netdur 1 days ago [-]
The OP will go on or not, I don't need to think high or low of Mask
inglor_cz 1 days ago [-]
"Currently it is off by a factor of two, which sounds doable until you realize the spec is 100 tons, and they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system."
You can probably prolong the stack, exactly as they did with Falcon. Also, Raptor 3 is more powerful than previous models, and I would expect future Raptor 4 to add some oomph as well.
"But he's got a really big blind spot for the project management implications."
Uh, isn't Starbase evidence to the contrary? They can produce rockets and rocket engines faster than anyone else in the world. And Raptor unit cost is ridiculously low for a liquid rocket engine.
small_model 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 16:56:05 GMT+0000 (UTC) with Wasmer Edge.
-- they have an orbital launcher with the largest diameter cargo bay
-- larger sats have bigger antennas and bigger PV area and more bus power. this scales as diam^2
-- 26 x Starlink v3 ~40-65 tons to LEO
-- every launch generates revenue, locks out the orbit for competitors.
-- they can launch more volume, more mass and cheaper than anyone else by a large margin
-- the design is validated - things will work
-- there is technical debt, issues but the rocket did the job
Caveats
-- timelines for full reusability are optimistic etc
-- there will be other issues in scaling to launching gigawats into orbit
-- cooling will have to be
-- Musk might go Full Villan mode before the thing works
[meta] I really didn't like that other negative comment getting voted to the top. Looks like it's made by someone who never worked in a bigco. For every bigco I worked, at any time there were hundreds if not thousands of open issues. You could list them and try arguing the company is about to fail and you'd scare people who don't know better.
It's the judgement of the severity of the issue that matters not #no_of_issues. And if there were 0 issues would our job exist?
[edit] getting the formatting right is very hard, maybe we could get a preview / TinyMCE ?
There just isn't much to do in space. You have:
- Telecommunications.. Can scale only so much. Starlink is cool. Compared to Iridium it's way way cheaper. But demand is .. modest? It seems to only beats fiber on the ground in special situations
- Telescopes looking up. This is limited by science budgets that aren't going to change much.
- Telescopes looking down. Those people have infinite budgets and already have all the satellites they'd want. If you're not in NATO then can't depend on SpaceX anyway - so they're not capturing that market.
- Tourism. Vomiting for several hours in zero-G will be a thrill for some for a bit, but I don't see this being a huge industry. Maybe on par with basejumping or something.
- Mining.. seems impractical scifi.. premised on wanting to build huge structures in space - but again, for what goal ultimately?
It's sort of like if you made access to Antarctica 100x cheaper. It'd be great, but it's hard to imagine it's going to suddenly open up a ton of demand.
But I'd love to hear counter arguments :)
-- SpaceX is building a starship factory, not just starship. The market won't deliver enough demand, they need to create their own
-- V3 Starlink constellation targets 100k sats. With 50 sats per flight (100t to orbit) you need 2000 flights to build constellation and then 400 flights per year to replace sats after 5y lifespan.
-- There was that idea of ballistic human travel but this is unlikely to materialize
-- There also was solarsat/powersat where solar power is beamed from space and if you massaged your math the right way the numbers were ~promising
-- AI saves the day. We "need" 1mln AI sats. That solves the demand and justifies the spending. for now
Is it really? Our brains have a limited bandwidth, and there's no need of more than a small multiple of that per person.
It is not designed to compete with finer. Go somewhere truly remote and see how it’s changing the world very quickly. I’ve seen it first hand in Arctic Canada, Australia and North Africa. Before starlink the best they had was dialup. Now they video chat family and doctors, do school online and so much more. Easily a few billion people will use it.
You also forgot about AI data centres in orbit, on which SpaceX have pegged virtually all their valuation in.
I swear to God LinkedIn would describe taking a shit in a public park this way. The West Coast is out of their damn minds.
Genuinely interested. How does or doesn't an existing satellite constrain other operators from desirable orbits? Is it irrelevant because many satellites can share the same orbit at different phase angles (i.e. satellite train), and there are more than enough similar orbits to go around? How many spacecraft would it take to actually be a concern (accounting for attrition from end-of-life ones going out of service, and the point of crowding where diminishing spatial/temporal buffers available for the collision avoidance adjustments needed to practically maintain your desired orbit become too risky).
Also Starlink V3 orbits are at 330–370km, which is below pretty much everything else in space. Atmospheric drag is high enough that without ion thrusters, satellites will deorbit in a couple years. If SpaceX doesn't keep launching stuff, it will self-clean and allow others to use it.
Is skepticism warranted? At least they didn't call it Fully Satellite Deploying.
full duration full throttle burns of Raptor3 are common and I'm pretty sure a part of qc for each new engine anyway. Payload weight doesn't strain the engines, once they're throttled at 100% then they're throttled at 100% no matter how much or how little payload there is.
Their engineers understand mass, and how to distinguish it.
They push them to the limits in testing/development to make them reliable in production.
Starship still in testing/development.
There were many explosions when SpaceX was trying to figure out how to land the booster safely. But those were after the booster had already completed the actual paid mission.
People here act like SpaceX is the only or the best rocket startup. That trial-and-error is somehow the superior design strategy and that that is responsible for SpaceX's success.
In reality, of course, SpaceX's only real distinguishing feature is how much they blow up and how they keep getting funding despite financial analysis after financial analysis saying "this will never work, it's a loss". But no worries! Starlink will fix it! Except ... when calculating Starlink profits they're ... also negative. Starlink caused a huge boost in SpaceX funding, while losing money. How do you do that?
In my personal experience, creating a company that runs at a loss results in losing money. I guess SpaceX makes it up on volume?
SpaceX's secret is dollars. Investor dollars. The amount of money Musk has (frequently literally) more than the funding of EVERY other private rocket startup COMBINED.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competitio...
I won’t comment on the finances, but their technical success is self-evident.
Luckily SpaceX pivoted the narrative just in time to be an AI company, not a Space company. We'll see what the next narrative will be, if any.
Rocket Lab Electron works
Galactic Energy Ceres-1 works
Virgin Orbit LauncherOne rocket works
Astra Rocket 3.3 works (no relation to OpenAI)
Firefly AerospaceAlpha works
And this is disregarding that of course these are hardly the only kind of organization with working rockets. Did you know a rocket startup with working rockets was forced into bankruptcy for fear it might give Congo access to ballistic rockets?
... What makes the difference for SpaceX is investor money, not engineering excellence. In fact most of the above companies got to orbit on their first try, no blowing up rockets and hundreds of millions of dollars required.
Several of the already named startups had rockets that are reusable. You act like SpaceX is the origin, or the first working example of the idea of reusable rockets. They are not, and they are not a little bit short of that standard, but a reusable rocket flew to Space and landed over 60 years ago. SpaceX is an accounting/finance accomplishment, not an engineering accomplishment.
At this point in time, both Europe (Arianespace) and China (CASC) have bet money they can duplicate the effort, Europe at less than 1% of the money SpaceX spent. Of course they usually go to a little over 2 times their planned budget. In other words, should come out below 2.5% the budget SpaceX spent ... (but does that matter given that SpaceX is not profitable?)
The whole space shuttle program (where SpaceX got half its employees I might add) is not just an attempt at making reusable rocket motors work. It's a successful attempt at making reusable rockets work first try, in 1981 (first motor reuse 6 months later, same year).
The engines on the orbiter could be, and regularly were, reused. This was done on its first ever launch (and second, obviously). The first 3 engines that launched the first Space Shuttle Orbiter were reused. Now how's that for engineering? A class above SpaceX, with 50 years older tech?. Obviously those engines landed. And even the Space Shuttle program over it's entire life (30+ years) lost less engines to everything than SpaceX lost designing it's rocket before launching it's first rocket to orbit.
If you allow for pure demonstration flights you could even say the first demonstration of a reusable rocket launching to space (ie. above the 100km line) was NASA X-15 flight 90, by Joseph A. Walker on 19th July 1963. Joseph Walker landed that engine, and reused that very engine to do it again, by the way. Of course, that wasn't into orbit.
And one of the startups had a reusable rocket at its first ever launch too. All these efforts had problems. Yes NASA did this first try, but very expensively. The startup did it cheaper than SpaceX did (and it wasn't remotely close), but wasn't able to continue (lack of money). You could complain their rocket was way smaller, and didn't make it to orbit (made it to space though).
Critically, SpaceX engineering still falls into the "not good enough" category, as mean as that is to say. It does not have the kg/$ performance the market demands, and SpaceX is only destined for bankruptcy. Plus, given their debt load, it really can't take that long (let's say a decade, tops). Let me explain. There is a clear commercial standard, from the Iridium days. Replacing 4000 satellites in orbit every 5 years, forever, on the income you can get from such a network from subscriptions, is not commercially viable with SpaceX technology. And you could say, the math is clear: cheap enough only seems achievable with a "spaceplane" design, launching from an airstrip. That was the motivation for the Space Shuttle program, but they couldn't make that work. SpaceX uses 12000 satellites btw, so not only do they not solve the Iridium problem, they make it harder for themselves.
And despite your comment asserting the opposite, SpaceX isn't even trying (the cost curve "Spaceship" is on does not reach commercial viability, not that it would even matter given the debt load SpaceX has)
Oh and when it comes to Musk's usual promises vs performance? You know who launched a spaceship to Mars and who didn't? Blue Origin did. SpaceX did ... not.
There is no engineering axis, other than perhaps eventual scale, where SpaceX wins on the engineering.
And of course, Trump is really helping to destroy SpaceX by making it clear to Europe that access to SpaceX is contingent on Trump's seemingly somewhat unstable mood.
No.
Starlink profits are positive since 2023: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1720098480037773658
Their growth is insane. The operating income (not revenue which is double digits, but irrelevant) in 2025 was 4,4B and with the growth they have, they are profiting multiple billions a year.
First "breakeven cash flow" does not equal profit. But that's just Musk, as the CEO (and thus accountable for financial statements he makes to the SEC), cannot actually say profit.
More generally, never believe any kind of financial engineer when they say this. It's bullshit. Guaranteed. Why? Simple: if it was true, they would never tell you. They would take a shovel and put their own money in, they would charge large banks to let them put their money in (yes, seriously). They'd literally charge other rich people money to let them put their money in ... You would hear about it 20 years after the fact in an interview done after retirement, and only then.
Specifically, what's wrong here Starlink pays for it's own launches in stock (they pay by issuing stock to SpaceX). If you think about it, that's creating money out of nothing:
SpaceX holds Starlink debt, and counts that as assets (as a positive amount)
Starlink issues and "succesfully" sells shares to SpaceX, and counts that as income (as a positive amount)
So you see what's happening here: these are two positive numbers, but ... obviously have to sum to zero! After all if I buy an ice cream from you for 5$ the change in my assets and the change in your assets has to sum to zero (-5$ for me, +5$ for you = 0$ for both of us together). Not for SpaceX and Starlink. SpaceX gives rocket launches to Starlink and the sum of both their assets is billions!
If you look at actual cash flow, Starlink's last quarter was 4.4B operating income, minus 2.4B depreciation and amortization, minus 4.17B capital expenditures. How do you calculate the company worth? Easy capital expenditures are zero (because they "convert" capital to goods, which can be resold, except of course they can't really).
So for "total assets" on the financial statements that's 4.4B - 2.4B PLUS 4.17B per year.
For actual cash or resources, it's obviously 4.4B - 2.4B - 4.17B or MINUS 2 billion per year.
Which one is true depends on whether SpaceX can succesfully sell Starlink's shares at the internal valuation they're using. Obviously the safe accounting value is the one with the minus sign. Or to put it differently: Starlink has "increased in value" by 2 billion, so investors (for now SpaceX) need to give it 2 billion to continue operating.
> Rockets from the Falcon 9 family have a success rate of 99.57% and have been launched 703 times over 16 years, resulting in 700 full successes, two in-flight failures [...], one pre-flight failure [...], and one partial failure [...]. The active version of the rocket, the Falcon 9 Block 5, has flown 633 times successfully and failed once [...], resulting in a 99.84% success rate.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...
FUD is not helpful. You’re wildly exaggerating.
I get you need the stock price to go down, but facts that are so easily verified make it clear you’re a shill.
Out of the 14 starship flights to date, 4 experienced explosions that scattered debris and were bad. (Flights 1, 2, 7, 8)
You've pointed out 4 of 14 starship flights experienced explosions, and this was to argue AGAINST my comment that every other one explodes. Internet actually says 5 failures out of 14 but let's say 4. Thats one in every 3.5 launches explodes, so far. Would you put on a spacesuit and get in one? I just find it harder and harder to buy that this thing is going to bring people to the moon in one piece, whatever about a million new starlink satellites or server farms in space or whatever
There are a lot of angry comments here talking about how I don't understand the company and they're super successful, and it's true that falcon 9 has a very low failure rate. But starship has a very high one and I don't think Im out of line to say that.
I'm sure people who raised concerns about the cybertruck were also yelled at about how great the other Tesla vehicles are, and damn if this thing doesn't feel like the cybertruck of space
Cybertruck seems like a pretty good electric truck though if you're into that kind of styling, if you can find the signal in the noise of biased reviewers one way or another (I'm european so I have no real personal experience or care)
But I digress.
Lets wait until its no a prototype before declaring it a failure. I for one hope its a great success, as I hope all new technology is successful - but I'm an optimist
Give it time, just like Falcon 9.
(The first and third lines were fine)
Launch window is 8:15 AM to 9:30 AM eastern time.
Superheavy will land 7min after launch. Starship lands 9hrs post launch.
Edit: Both will be splashdowns (originally said they'll be caught)
https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1qxvvenMPMQxB
https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14
SpaceX's flight profile says both are splashdowns?
F9 fits how many?
>F9 fits how many?
Zero. Starlink v3 is too big for the F9 payload fairing. It's not just a matter of mass, the diameter and overall volume is important as well. In terms of performance, last I read they're supposed to add 1 Tbps of capacity each, so assuming they all work the first time all 26 would be around 10x the network addition of a full F9 v2 Mini launch. But the larger antennas would have other advantages beyond sheer bandwidth, and they'll be able to start getting more serious about direct to cell.
1000000 mbps / 50 mbps per Starlink customer * 80$ per month * 12 months * 26 satellites = $500M revenue per year added per launch.
Don't worry, there is absolutely no chance this will happen in 2028. There are many detailed takedowns of why the "Human Landing System" schedule is preposterous, but here's HN's idlewords:
https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/how-should-we-think-about-...
> This would be an ambitious but achievable cadence for Starship, particularly if the tanker Starships didn’t have to be reusable, and could be made without a heat shield or control surfaces. Just how much time SpaceX has to reach this cadence is an interesting question, since right now NASA and SpaceX are locked in a game of chicken around who can commit to the least realistic timeline. But it probably has to get in gear by early 2027.
This is good evaluation. A launch every week in 2027 is ambitious, but not impossible.
I don't think a week is enough to gather data and fix subsequent launch
His lordship announced this to the world at the UN.
An by the way, the whole point of Starship is not just doing it, it is doing it cheaply (by space standards). The whole reusability thing is part of it, and so is the "assembly line" approach that lets SpaceX treat their experimental rockets like fireworks. If the goal was just to lift a lot of mass off the ground, it is not even a great design, reusability in particular is costly in terms of payload capacity.
I suppose we should be grateful that SpaceX has found and collected enough of these crazy people in one place on this mission.
At a normal scale, that would be a major construction project.
At Apollo scale, it is an anecdote. Its purpose is to maybe save a few people in the unlikely scenario where an explosion gives enough advance warning to be able to use the slide, but not enough to be able to just drive away. It also goes to show that the program was anything but reckless.
well US government found new toys (proxy war) instead of space
Instead, we continued to rely on a flawed, expensive, and dangerous system to build and supply the ISS. Then, we tragically lost another Shuttle and crew in early 2000s.
Would HN describe a huge program that didn't do the thing it was designed to do a "feat of engineering"?
I'd also consider the attempts at fusion energy to be very impressive engineering projects even though none have them have yielded a stable source of fusion energy
It’s a lot of records that just got broken.
This rocket is the largest rocket ever made by humans, and the largest to even reach orbit, which is insane considering it's by a private company and not a national space program.
Falcon 9 achieved reusable 10 years ago. Other rockets have only started getting there recently. Starship is a big step forward.
Hell yeah, that was the longest 10 minutes.
Update: Or maybe not? They're reviewing the status now.
Update 2: Go for orbit!
Update 3: Orbital insertion complete!!
Update 4: First Starlink satellites successfully deployed!
If you'll excuse some poor ASCII art:
edit: Also, Orbit is mostly a sideways speed thing rather than a height thing. The aim is to be "going sideways so fast that even though you are falling, you keep missing"
near-orbit was planned, they just had to burn longer. It's in the timeline: https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14
But yeah, they had a big decision to make in those few minutes between engine cutoff ang insertion burn.
Prompting claude 5.5 has more appeal it seems.
The V-2 was also a technological achievement. Doesn't mean the UK was cheering it on.
that's putting it mildly, a war where ICBMs are used would be over before they could get the road closed to roll Starship and a booster to the pad...
That's a whole lotta MIRV capacity.
/s because the Internet is crazy.
It's like a thousand different technologies, some ancient some relatively new. I don't precisely delight in my new space overlords, but I can still wonder at the enormous object being launched into space!
If Starship ever kills people, it will be a disaster, but not intent.
This will help grow Starlink. Plenty of people are already enjoying their Starlink connection in places where the previous provider had either absurdly low quality for high price, or where connectivity was not a thing at all.
I for one am happy that kids living in remote villages can now access online schools and sick people can consult their problems at least with some online doctor. Sailors are pretty happy too.
The difference between Starship and a missile designed to kill people is a simple swapping of the payload. More realistically given vehicle costs, its an ideal heavy lift platform for cheaply placing other weapon vehicles into orbit - a stated goal of the current administration.
> This will help grow Starlink. Plenty of people are already enjoying their Starlink connection in places where the previous provider had either absurdly low quality for high price, or where connectivity was not a thing at all.
Plenty of people are also using Starlink to wage war, and its already become political as access is provided and removed at whim.
I love space. I love space technology. I work on a game set in space. I am not enthusiastic about notorious individuals having the will and capability to mass-weaponize space.
"The difference between Starship and a missile designed to kill people is a simple swapping of the payload."
If you insist on this worldview, you will always be miserable around every technological development out there. Just imagine what can be done with mRNA or maybe 3D printing.
"I am not enthusiastic about notorious individuals having the will and capability to mass-weaponize space."
I am pretty sure that militarization of space will be a decision of governments, not Musk himself. He is not rich enough to be able to build an actual orbital army and not get arrested.
Unless by a "notorious individual" you mean Trump or Xi... in which case, there isn't much new under the sun, because governments have weaponized space since the very beginning.
What I feel is positive is the civilian use of the technology. The military use will always be there, but the civilian use needs better and cheaper tech, which is what Starship is. Some medications could be produced in the orbit for example, and with enough launch capacity, they could be produced for the entire planet at once.
It is going to be truly amazing for a lot of small communities around the world. I don't want to deny this game changing technology at all.
But given how much of us westerners are beginning to loathe screens and internet (or social media for no good reason), I wonder how this "lets connect everyone" movement changes?
p.s. the biggest sleeper is that v3 finally enables mass direct-to-cell feature. "Villagers" won't need special terminal anymore - even the cheapest android smartphone will be able to get online. There's even been a quiet campaign on X to enable direct-to-cell capability in Iran during protests, so imagine what sort of societal changes this can pull off.
So it's hard to leave that out. It's genuine achievement and it's politics, both.
So the US owns the moon? Or does Neil Armstrong?
I'm a bit sassy today just kinda tired of certain arguments.
> Some Americans anticipated possible controversy over planting the United States flag on the Moon, since the Outer Space Treaty prohibited territorial claims to any extraterrestrial body. Since it was made clear the United States had no intention of making a territorial claim to the Moon, no serious controversy materialized. Four months after the Apollo 11 landing, the United States Congress passed a bill in November 1969, which was signed into law by President Nixon, stating:
> The flag of the United States, and no other flag, shall be implanted or otherwise placed on the surface of the moon, or on the surface of any planet, by members of the crew of any spacecraft ... as part of any mission ... the funds for which are provided entirely by the Government of the United States. ... this act is intended as a symbolic gesture of national pride in achievement and is not to be construed as a declaration of national appropriation by claim of sovereignty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Flag_Assembly
Pros of expansionism can also come with cons.
To your second: there are calamities for which a second self-sufficient planet would be necessary. A large asteroid impact would utterly wreck the global industrial base which is highly dependent on international trade and specialization of resource extraction and manufacturing in different regions of the world, having an independent backup on a different planet is one of the few ways to hedge against this. You could argue that every country on earth be fully self-sufficient and then maybe they could survive but that seems like a much bigger task since you'd be building multiple completely independent civilizations instead of just one. Guarding against another global pandemic is another and being out of range of nuclear weapons and their fallout is a third.
> A large asteroid impact would utterly wreck the global industrial base which is highly dependent on international trade and specialization of resource extraction and manufacturing in different regions of the world
That's economic collapse not extinction level collapse, space based mining might help with that but it's not the kind of event that actually makes a self sufficient
> Guarding against another global pandemic is another
This kind of presumes a very low level of travel and trade between Earth and Elsewhere which is extremely unlikely per problem 1 and the fact they'll need some economic reason to exist, at the very least they'll have to make money to buy the necessary items from Earth they cannot produce locally.
> being out of range of nuclear weapons and their fallout is a third.
This goes back to the actual thing I was talking about even a heavily bombed out Earth is hundreds of times easier to survive on than Mars or any given asteroid. Hence any tech that makes those places survivable make even the most damaged Earth also survivable.
Global economic collapse due to an asteroid or nuclear war might not cause human extinction but it would mean a very large regression in our technological capacity. That could endure for hundreds if not thousands of years. Maybe we would never fully recover, people argue that point based on all of the easy to access resources having already been exploited though I have more faith in humanity's ingenuity. The role of a Mars colony in this scenario isn't to send iron ore to Earth, it's to maintain high technology and continue moving forward.
The risk of a pandemic becoming interplanetary is much lower than the risk of international spread. Travel between Earth and Mars is necessarily constrained by their orbits with a window opening only every 26 months. Most travel would likely be uncrewed cargo and when people do make the trip there would be strict quarantine measures taken (this is already done with current crewed launches to orbit and there is established history of immigration being subject to quarantine). Most importantly, the trip to Mars takes much longer than the incubation period of any disease likely to cause a pandemic so the disease will have run its course by the time the ship reaches Mars and they can decide what to do at that point (at the extreme they may resupply it and send it back but that's probably not necessary in most cases).
My concern is the incentives and economics that make it possible for them to exist, principally (relatively) cheap launch and transit costs, preclude it ever being economical to invest the resources required to ship say modern chip lithography equipment out to the new colonies rather than them continuing to buy them from Earth. Or the alternative, they get treated like pre-revolution US colonies and are intentionally kept dependent by restrictions on imports and tech exports in order to provide a market for the mother civ to sell into. And this time instead of being in a verdant land full of resources the colonies are on baren rocks dependent on the mother country for critical life support supplies so the capture and dependency are magnified and much stronger.
I don't really see the point in arguing against it. If a private company and private individuals want to try to colonize Mars then what does it have to do with anyone else? You can't cling on to their legs and scream "don't go!" It all just seems to be in the same vein as that famous headline saying man will never fly.
Yes it wouldn't be the first step on establishing them but it is the kind of things it would need to be truly self sufficient. Chips are in practically every thing today already, it's a critical supply component to do anything other than simply surviving.
Relatedly there are questions about why the whole project seems to assume that it's much more important to preserve the human species, like a celebrated breed of dog, than to protect the lifespans (ideally, healthy lifespans) and welfare of individual human beings, questions which unfortunately can also probably be answered with reference to Musk personally: https://youtu.be/-VfYjPzj1Xw?t=18 .
There's also the wrinkle that if it's viable to send settlers and adequate resupply to Mars, then it's probably much easier and more straightforward to send a few nuclear warheads on their own one-way trip, so the whole premise that a Martian colony wouldn't be struck in a full-scale nuclear war on Earth seems shaky. Now a Martian colony dug in deep under the surface might be relatively safe, but that brings up again the question of whether it wouldn't just be better to build a far-flung network of underground settlements on Earth and/or have submarines loitering in the Antarctic Ocean in shifts.
It's silly to me that some crabs are working on trying to leave the nice bucket (me, where all the crabs are) for some shoddy bucket far far away. All because they don't want to fix the bucket they have at hand.
TLDR in this hypothetical, it's just Xi on an 100 story podium, no one else is even in the building. Unless we eventually credit someone for portable fusion, i.e. 60% of global oil used in transport that can't be displaced at utility scale energy solutions, and one credits Xi for MIC2025/PRCEV/battery then no one will ever even dethrone Xi.
Ehhhh, I'd say he's not in some league of his own. Xi is also industrializing with fossil fuels and China became the planet's largest producer of CO2 under his leadership and he's been outsourcing dirty industries abroad, particularly to Africa. I'd give more credit to people lower-down the totem pole in China, who are leading the charge for clean energy such as Wang Chuanfu, but he's very explicitly following in Elon's footsteps.
It's also a little wild to discount pollution already produced in previously unseen amounts while crediting to them hypothetical future reductions. Last year China had it's highest CO2 emission ever, and even with solar it's possible that their CO2 output will increase.
> possible that their CO2 output will increase.
Immaterial if CO2 increases, only useful geopolitical metric is historic per capita emission relative to development level and PRC is low for country blasting through capex heavy capital accumulation phase, i.e. PRC setting standard for low relative per capita emission development. Xi 2012-2026 did ~30% global emissions, ~10-15% global historic for ~20% of population. As long as PRC stays under 20% global historic and maintains above 50th percentile development (use whatever proxy indicator, per capital income PPP etc), they are under emitting / developing efficiently relative to energy use. AKA PRC developing more for less unit of emission. The alternative is not developing which frankly stupid argument/position. For reference US/Europe ~45% historic emission for 10% of global pop. On balance PRC currently grossly under emitting vs historic developmental baseline.
The plan definitely does not call for inaction towards other issues.
Volkswagen has a market cap of 40B, why do they need to government subsidies to build a new car?
If you truly care about wide-scale EV adoption above all else, why not advocate for opening up western markets to Chinese EVs? The availability of a 10k EV would do far more for adoption than giving taxpayer money to billion dollar megacorps.
The "rocket CO2 doesn't matter" argument is based on the fact that nobody has reusable rockets right now, so the fuel expenditure is bounded by the cost of the rocket. Elon Musk wants to switch that equation on its head. Meaning e.g. $100 million launch costs no longer means $10 million fuel costs and $90 million rocket costs, it now means 5x $10 million rocket costs and 5x $10 million fuel costs, i.e. 5x more fuel used with the same budget and that fuel is going to emit CO2.
One Starship launch produces 3500 tons. Now repeat this to 1000 Earth to Mars launches. That includes at least 10 tanker launches per ship. Meaning at least 10000 launches per year. That equates to 35 million tons of CO2 for something that has no direct benefit to earth.
If he scaled down his Mars colony ambitions to 10 Earth to Mars launches per year people might turn a blind eye to it.
We've been watching in the office though. There's been a lot of interest in it.
Instead, we have such important news like "Nissan's third generation e-POWER powertrain" and "MongoDB CEO resigns to join Meta" and a fridge magnet to greet us on the front page.
???
please elaborate with quotes
I just don't care to watch what an AI company run by a nazi does. One of the biggest heel turns in human history.
It's telling that the sibling comments that reply to your relatively detailed one are kneejerk thought-terminating one-line accusations of mental illness - as if anything you've said is insane or untrue. To them, not liking Elon is literally unconscionable.
Only a certain type of person likes hard challenges, and many people are content chasing what is easy.
It's why everyone wants to work on software instead of hardware. Doing hard things is hard, and most people are incapable or unwilling to do the hard things. Prompt engineering is great for lazy morons.
Edit: https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14
My experience however is that NASASpaceflight provides an overall better coverage than the official stream, only recasting when they don't have camera angles themselves (Such as when the ship is in space or during reentry)
There was a bit of snark from the SpaceX guy Dave about whether or not the go/no-go decision had been made and not to listen to "other broadcasters" and he was right.
But the NASASpaceFlight guys are the right kind of nerds to be commentating, because they don't have to keep up the "steel jawed rocketman" image and can just geek out on the launch.
They can also speculate wildly, and pass along abundant rumors, and shill for lots of donations and subscriptions and hard-sell the merch. They can promote extra fan videos in their subscription-only sections. They can bloviate over and over just to fill the airwaves, like they're on a 120-minute podcast with 10 minutes of useful script. They are the "new media" that is beloved in 2026 and anointed to usurp the mainstream media of CNN, New York Times, and television.
"NASASpaceFlight" is a misleading name if I ever saw it, because they are neither the National Aeronautics & Space Administration, nor the National Science Foundation. At least "The Launch Pad" and TLP are not pretending that way.
One of them has finagled their way into placing their own cameras around the launch sites of Kennedy and/or Cape Canaveral. So they do have their own views on the ground. They have not been permitted on-base by the USSF at Vandenberg or elsewhere.
Source: I've been banned from the two top third-party rebroadcasters. Good riddance.
Also can recommend the restream of everyday astronaut Tim Dodd
ETA: Sorry this was ambiguous, I'm complaining that the stream on spacex.com uses x.com, whereas there used to be a much better stream through youtube.com
They are already live and have a lot of background discussion, unlike the official SpaceX stream.
And it's SpaceX, not ESA, sadly.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=fmkHjDeECps
Also hosted directly on SpaceX website:
https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14
Inspiring to watch, really.
T+22: Go for orbit!
On the previous flight, they were going for the same ocean soft landing as this flight, but several engines on the booster failed to start during the landing burn (reportedly due to ice clogging propellant feed). Had this crash not happened they likely would have tried for a tower catch today.
They want to be sure the mitigation for this failure worked before they put the pad & tower at risk.
I am so looking forward to a successfully launch today.
For datacenters in space to work, they have to solve a bunch of unsolved problems and be more economical than datacenters in earth.
Where I think you're correct is that typical AI data centers require a LOT of cooling, and to achieve this at scale would require enormous radiators. So large that it's hard to square the business case given current launch costs. I've read a lot of research in this space and it looks like the much more realistic use cases (at least at first) will be sub-processing. Meaning processing data already in space. These could be telemetry, Starlink, tracking, telescopes, logistics, military, GPS, weather, deep space missions, first-response, alerts, etc. In particular, applications which require lower latency.
There are also other applications which are less cost sensitive. For example, applications which might be banned on Earth, or at risk of espionage, attack, or intrusion.
If we want to make typical AI data centers in space to be economical, we need launch costs to drop to under $200/kg. Interestingly, [Starship could reduce costs down to $67/kg.] Even lower with >9 launch cycles. (https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/rocket-developers-used...) This would make the business case *extremely* attractive.
Dissipating that much heat in the first place would be a first, you also need a butt ton of power so maybe you can shade your giant radiators with giant solar panels, but all of this needs to unfold from something launch-packaged.... AND be cheaper than just plugging them in on earth.
We're still a few years away, but I suspect this is going to happen fast, starting with the edge/low latency compute.
Tough problem, however it is notable that after SpaceX, there are now several other companies with similar plans, including Google: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/technology/google-suncatc...
One interpretation is they're all delusional. Another is that Musk showed the way and others now see it too.
Most of the doubts were economical as well. Saturn V was extremely expensive, its per-unit cost could be expressed in still-human-readable fractions of the entire US GDP. Starship should be several orders of magnitude cheaper while providing more capabilities.
I don't doubt Starship, BTW. Great project.
The reporter who covered the moon landing for The New York Times, John Noble Wilford, later wrote that Mars tugs at our imagination “with a force mightier than gravity.” Getting there will take a giant leap. But the first, small steps happen when our students – the Mars generation – walk into their classrooms each day. Scientific discovery doesn’t happen with the flip of a switch; it takes years of testing, patience and a national commitment to education.
When our Apollo astronauts looked back from space, they realized that while their mission was to explore the moon, they had “in fact discovered the Earth.” If we make our leadership in space even stronger in this century than it was in the last, we won’t just benefit from related advances in energy, medicine, agriculture and artificial intelligence, we’ll benefit from a better understanding of our environment and ourselves.
Someday, I hope to hoist my own grandchildren onto my shoulders. We’ll still look to the stars in wonder, as humans have since the beginning of time. But instead of eagerly awaiting the return of our intrepid explorers, we’ll know that because of the choices we make now, they’ve gone to space not just to visit, but to stay – and in doing so, to make our lives better here on Earth.
- Barack Obama, "America will take the giant leap to Mars", October 2016
works beautifully
And that I've heard, actual buyers of launch services are perfectly aware of that distinction.
Putting weapons in orbit seems a very likely goal, given the attitude of the current US leadership.
They felt confident enough to recently acknowledge publicly their existence:
https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cmn07yjqg5rwo
The items I'm listing here are just a subset of the critical path, and each milestone along the way will take months, optimistically, and years more realistically. To the point that starship won't be relevant to moon missions or any commercial use by the time it does what it needs to do to even partially fulfill the plans for it:
It needs to meet payload specifications. Currently it is off by a factor of two, which sounds doable until you realize the spec is 100 tons, and they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system.
It needs a launch cadence fast enough so that refueling doesn't take 15 separate starship tankers. Currently it would take years to refuel one single starship to make a one-way trip to the moon.
There's just a minor milestone on the way to that launch cadence: catching both stages.
Once both stages are reliably caught after a mission, refurbishment needs to be minimal. Proving that out will take several missions.
This is a simplified list of items on the critical path, but reaching each of these items has risks, and if those risks prove to be problems to solve, then each of those problems has a list of tasks and tests associated with it.
Some people think very highly of Elon for proposing technologically elegant solutions. But he's got a really big blind spot for the project management implications.
Nothing listed in this comment is going to lead to "the demise of the starship project". And nothing listed there is original. We've heard it time and time again, when F9 was ready to launch, when F9 was ready to land, when F9 did land (bbbut they have to do it constantly), when F9 managed the first re-use (they need to do it at least 10 times so it's worth it) and so on and so forth.
They've now launched AND landed >600 times already. Let's just say they know what they're doing.
Anyway, for a bit of context: the current first orbital flight, with 26 satellites deploying right now, is adding the same amount of Starlink bandwidth as 10+ F9 launches. Let that sink in and re-do whatever cost/opportunity and "management" spiels you need to do. One flight > 10x F9 flights.
That alone justifies the Starship. The rest is the cherry on top.
...keeping whatever project that should've been put to sleep months ago alive. Most people reading this have been on a software development project that fits this pattern of ignoring massively missed milestones and hoping to catch up. That's often accompanied by isolated economic arguments that are fragments of what started out as a coherent business case that can no longer be supported.
The thing works and is launching satellites? And if they just continue as is it'll be the lowest cost per Kg to space?
Seems quite successful even if the moon landing doesn't happen.
And some of us work in the industry that is in the form it is today, as big as it is today, majorly due to the one company alone. The one that puts more mass into orbit every year than any other entity in the world - nation states included.
As for "massively missed milestones" - it is easy to predict milestones when you are making CRUD apps in React. Not so when building the largest rocket that has ever existed, and making it fully reusable.
> coherent business case that can no longer be supported.
Lol. They operate the most successful and most profitable rocket in history, and they are confident enough that they have stopped taking bookings for it. And they just demonstrated a system that can bring the cost down another 1 or 2 orders of magnitude with nearly zero competition even close to them. No coherent business case indeed.
They'll ramp falcon flights down quickly. Ramp up Starship launches just as quickly. And in a couple years time we'll have a blooper reel like this one but larger by 10x: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ
Edit: Starlink deployed.
SpaceX knows that pulling the risk out of system is the ask here and they continue to progress and push their limits and capabilities, which is a healthy sign for the US space industry and more broadly for technical progress worldwide.
You seem to be suggesting that Starship just needs to self-fund its own development, and then the question of whether that development leads somewhere desirable/valuable is de facto answered or irrelevant. Why would that be the case?
Don't forget, there are no politicians involved here. No election cycle for teams to switch and cancel the other side's work out of spite. SpaceX is only beholden to its shareholders.
It's still not really clear where any of this SpaceX stuff goes besides "rockets cool and scifi planetary settlement cool". Planetary settlement is an absolutely dogshit idea that doesn't survive first contact with any reality.
Milestones. Engineers deal in milestones. Goalposts are for sportsball.
Reply please.
Starship's goals are not merely to be "economically sustainable." SpaceX investors are not investing in a marginally more efficient Starlink deployment system.
You seem to be suggesting that it's a foregone conclusion that from here (economic sustainability via Starlink) that Starship will achieve its much grander ambitions. Is this what you're suggesting? And if so, evidenced by what?
Rockets don't have goals. People do. Rockets have features like payload capacity, thrust, cost/ton to orbit, reusability, etc. On which Starship seems to be doing excellently compared to... everyone else.
> SpaceX investors are not investing in a marginally more efficient Starlink deployment system.
IDK what any given investor's rationale is without asking them, and neither do you. Groups, like rockets, are not possessed of singular will.
> You seem to be suggesting that it's a foregone conclusion that ... Starship will achieve its much grander ambitions.
You seem to be the only one who's said such a thing. However, since you bring it up, I will point out that engineering is a process, akin to science, and success merely takes enough determination and resources to keep trying. SpaceX seem to repeatedly demonstrate the determination, and successfully launching Starlink with Starship provides the resources.
I see what they've achieved already, and expect them to continue applying the same process. I'm not sure how far they'll go. But it's a fun ride already. I trust the process. I'm a fan of the process. You and I get to have this conversation because science and engineering work, rockets fly because science and engineering work. I'm not sure how one would even attempt to argue otherwise.
Cute but it's quite obvious I'm referring to the Starship program. And no, the payload continues to fall and is now not even remotely close to being able to achieve the program goals on pretty much any timeline at all.
> IDK what any given investor's rationale is without asking them, and neither do you. Groups, like rockets, are not possessed of singular will.
No you can actually infer from the revenue multiple that the market is pricing quite a bit more than "slightly cheaper Starlink." Of course you can play stupid if you want, because playing not-stupid would require your opinions to confront reality, but it's a very transparent play.
> I see what they've achieved already, and expect them to continue applying the same process. I'm not sure how far they'll go. But it's a fun ride already.
Uh huh....
Okay so we went from "Starship is a successful program because Starlink makes it economically sustainable" to "I don't care or know what Starship is trying to do, I don't care or know how successfully they're doing it, but rocket go up is a fun ride already."
The history of Starship is one of continuously lowering the ambitions and slowly climbing towards the new, lower ambition. Arguably fine, but it's frankly beyond delusional to be acting like this is some inexorable march towards Mars (which is literally no longer a goal at all anymore, because they can't do it with Starship).
It started at 100 tons of payload to Mars. Now the goal is 200 tons to LEO, with only 35-50 tons being demonstrated today.
Comfortable with your own loose wording, but lawyering over others. I see.
> And no, the payload continues to fall and is now not even remotely close to being able to achieve the program goals
Payload was also much lower on early Falcon 9's. Virtually every rocket family is a family and not one model because they get stretched, engines get added and tweaked, etc. Reduced payload capacity is a boring, normal, and expected situation for early production design. Same goes for planes. What you see as failure is an initial qualified engineering milestone. It seems to me that you must understand the concept of iteration. It also seems like you think 50T to LEO is not incredible in and of itself.
Perhaps you are the sort of person who is unhappy at weddings?
This mindset that because something which is under development is not finished yet, it has failed or is failing, can only come from someone who has never made anything themselves. The misunderstanding is so complete. I suppose it's a mindset some folks have to unlearn to help themselves.
> "Starship is a successful program because Starlink makes it economically sustainable" to "I don't care or know what Starship is trying to do, I don't care or know how successfully they're doing it, but rocket go up is a fun ride already."
These are your constructions and do not accurately reflect anything I've said. It seems like you're just looking for arguments and not genuine understanding. I won't give you any more argument. Good evening.
And no, despite their continuous cutting back on ambition, it's still obviously a remarkable program absolutely chock full of amazing achievements. That does not mean the program is a success or is situated to be a success, which is what the original comment was talking about that you "rebutted" by stating they've achieved an intermediate milestone.
And both the booster and the Starship itself have proven that they can get back to ground mostly intact. So its not like they are only working on 'getting to orbit'. And clearly it is leading something desirable if the have proven that they can basically land the second and first stage, something nobody else has ever achieved.
Question how fast they can make the turn around are still there along with other question. But once you can repeatably launch you can improve much faster as they did with Falcon 9. And you can do more and more tests in shorter time, accelerating development.
Raptor 3 has its only 3rd flight . That’s why the payload is “only” ~50t. Just for the reference, it’s already one of the most capable rocket in the world as of today , and even with partial reusability it has future.
They clearly doing rolling improvement , rollout and testing of many components of different readiness. Otherwise they will never ship anything.
There is still a question about turnaround time, but just comparing the state now to early Falcon 9 is not accurate.
And the biggest customer is SpaceX: https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-bought-tesla-cybertru...
Let's stop pretending he's God.
Boring Company is also on the path to being successful, it's just not advertised much.
Solar roof - yes, this one I would mark as a failure.
Cybertruck - they're still selling, so not a failure. But not as great as originally promised.
Hyperloop - this could still come after boring company succeeds.
Nobody is saying he's god. But maybe, he understands engineering better than some commenters on HN, that's all.
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!? It's a marketing gimmick with lower transport capacity than a horse and buggy (and similar travel speed!) that's distracting cities like Vegas and Nashville from actual public transit.
It's an abject failure.
> If you were to take what should be public transportation planning and turn it into a neoliberal nightmare, this is exactly what you would get".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegas_Loop
> Hyperloop - this could still come after boring company succeeds.
If my grandma had wheels, she'd be a bycicle.
Also, my guess is that you guys are all American. For the kind of money they're investing they could just start an automous train/tram company and the environment and humanity would be much better off.
If it's successful, their boring machine will tunnel 10x faster and 10x cheaper than competitors, and it will be the one making new tunnels for all sorts of trains.
Last I read about them their tunnel boring tech wasn't revolutionary, it was just smaller diameter tunnels.
They also operate the machines remotely, so that humans are not risking their lives underground.
Tunnels are a good thing. They cut across a city without paving over more greenery. They will reduce surface traffic.
The fact that you can pay the average price for a car, and get a car that fully drives itself today, is mind boggling.
In it's current test iteration they are overengineering many parts and opting for heavier, cheaper versions since currently the ship gets thrown away each time. One example are the grid fins. On Falcon 9 they are made of titanium, but on Starship they are steel probably because it's just easier to work with and why put in extra effort for something that will end up in the gulf? If they just swap in titanium grid fins they'll save 3 tons in the weight of the booster and even more fuel since that extra weight won't be getting carried up.
Gentle reminder that Saturn 5 worked pretty much eprfectly on its maiden flight.
Yeah, except it costed 12x per-flight, ran at 30x/kg, and wasn't reusable. So not exactly the same thing.
60 years ago.
It's like after Jobs unveils iPhone to the world you'd comment that, meh, we could make telephone calls more than 100 years ago?
An equivalent of this would be about 160 billion USD a year today, and Starship is definitely at least an order of magnitude, perhaps two, cheaper than that.
As it stands today - Starship Flight 14 just deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites, 52 tonnes total. At around $110M marginal per launch, that is about $2.1M per tonne. A Falcon 9 at $30M carrying 15 tonnes is about $2M per tonne. So even as a fully expendable rocket, Starship is already basically in Falcon 9 cost-per-ton territory.
> and they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system.
Or increase performance in the engines and elsewhere. Falcon 9 Block 1 was 9000kg to LEO. The Block 5 that is flying now is 22000 kg to LEO. It's not magic. They already have a path forward with Raptor 4 and other improvements.
> needs a launch cadence fast enough so that refueling doesn't take 15 separate starship tankers
They don't need to launch special tanker missions for a depot. Their goal is to start launching Starlinks and AI inference sats en-masse. Once they demonstrate on-orbit fuel transfer, the easiest way is to fill the depot during normal missions. They can cut out some payload from specific flights to carry excess fuel and top off the depot. The sheer scale of their other flights is enough to keep it full. It is infrastructure that they need for higher energy missions. I doubt they are going to launch 15 dedicated flights just to fill up the tank.
> just a minor milestone on the way to that launch cadence: catching both stages.
They can hit massive cadence even fully expending every Starship, still work out kinks with reusability in the process and still make a profit off of Starlinks given their pace of production.
And given what they have shown so far, I think they are going to try to catch both in the next 2-3 flights barring unforeseen issues.
> Once both stages are reliably caught after a mission, refurbishment needs to be minimal
Nope. Even a cadence of once a week means that by the time they have 10+ launch pads up (in LA+FL+TX), they can be launching once a day if not more frequently. Their rate of production can already sustain that. What's missing is fuel source which will get built out in Louisiana.
> really big blind spot for the project management implications
Lol. The guy got partially reusable rockets and human rated spacecraft working at a cadence unheard of in the aerospace industry. Quite the accomplishment with such a blind spot for the project management!
Now that the most recent test flight is complete, we can see a glaring hole in the optimistic projections: everyone is celebrating that an orbital insertion was possible even with an engine out on the upper stage, and multiple engines failed to light on the booster when it ran a simulation of a return to launch. It's nice that the mission did not fail due to failed engines. But it also means that it will likely take years of further development to attain rapid reuse.
This person is living in the same days of future past when people didn't utterly dismiss the PowerPoint Mars colony. We now know better, and even the stans have limited themselves to touting an oversized rocket for orbital launches.
Maybe AI applies here - from a few years of supercharged intellisense to builds stuff on its own. But even here I don't remember such a skepticism some folks are aiming at Starship.
It's like running into R&D department and just pointing out at the flaws/not implemented features while you iterate on your product. Annoying.
I agree that the Human Landing System plan for the moon is a shitshow, but it's almost a distraction for SpaceX at this point, and it would not surprise me if the whole program gets axed by whoever comes after Trump.
The problem lies in the relationship of those two milestones: if you can't meet payload, it takes way too many starships to refuel, no matter how well the fuel transfer works.
Every dead project demonstrates progress every week, right up until the day it is canceled.
Selling sub-fiber Internet access into a globe increasingly covered in fiber is a silly long-term value proposition.
That's a very special TAM to begin with, and the harsh part is that it shrinks over time.
You are saying "sub-fiber" but Starlink will likely be faster for long round trips once enough new gen satellites are deployed.
That comes before the whole datacenters in space conversation.
This, I think, is a much bigger deal than a lot of people realize. A global telephone provider that works in the middle of the ocean or in the middle of the dessert or pretty much anywhere on the planet. The simplification to international travel alone would be worth switching.
Huge huge untapped market of people just like me.
So let's call it 50-50?
Wow, that's so amazing estaerum, you've figured out how to get photonic-bandgap (hollow core) fiber to transoceanic airlines and ships, as well as drones, and satellites in orbit!? Would you mind sharing any hints on this great breakthrough you've made?
...or did you just sorta somehow completely ignore the whole "terminals can be mobile" aspect of Starlink, as well as latency of free space optical vs conventional fiber?
80% of the Starlink subscriber base is fixed points and that will grow.
The only thing that's "quite obvious" is that you're not merely incredibly, confidently ignorant, you're also so deeply uncurious you can't even be bothered to take 30 seconds to check your priors. Starlink's present annual revenue is $11.3 billion with $4.4 billion in income on that. The total global civil aviation (commercial airline) fleet size is over forty thousand aircraft [0]. Expand that to general aviation including business jets etc and it grows to something like half a million. Starlink actually publishes their general aviation plan pricing [1], which for CA is going to be one of the top two plans that don't have data limits and thus $12500 or $20000 per aircraft. From what I can find international flights account for something like 20-30% of all flights, and maybe 5-10% are intercontinental. But plans are per aircraft per month, and plenty of airliners use the same plane to fly across a continent and then also fly intercontiental, which would still need the highest plan. So using a 90/10 split that'd be an average of $13500/plane, for a TAM of $6.7 billion per year just for CA and maybe another $1-4 billion for GA (which is a lot more complicated to reason about). And the profit margins there are going to be high.
So JUST aviation, not even touching on maritime or everything else mobile, has the potential at present market size to approach the entire current revenue of Starlink by itself. And they have barely even gotten started with cellular, or doing other stuff like Earth sensing with the sats that bigger, higher power birds makes more feasible.
You claim it's "quite obvious" mobile applications don't justify Starlink. It's not any such thing.
>80% of the Starlink subscriber base is fixed points and that will grow.
You need a lot more than 5x the residential plans at $55/month to approach $10-20k/month. Of course, some of those fixed points are business/enterprise customers on higher priced plans, but those customers are likely to be using Starlink already (as we are) as part of a redundancy plan alongside fiber, so your original argument about spreading fiber is perfectly irrelevant to those users anyway.
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0: https://statbase.org/datasets/air-rail-and-water-transportat...
1: https://starlink.com/support/article/78b0428b-4546-0b7f-ea45...
The question of whether "portable Starlink" (the aviation/maritime++ category we're talking about) justifies Starship's existence is whether the marginal increase in payload capacity or efficiency of Starship over Falcon produces a marginal increase in "portable Starlink" profit that's multiples beyond the amortized development cost and the launch costs of Starship.
Given that Starlink's entire enterprise is probably loss-making if it had to pay for its own launch capacity (it currently pays SpaceX Space $0 and is accounted for just in hardware depreciation, so frontloads profit and all the costs are incurred in coming years)... the answer is almost certainly no.
And for what it's worth, the one aircraft I've been on with Starlink Internet was (by a gigantic margin) the worst in-flight wifi experience I've had in 10 years. I'm curious how much of cost-savings it is over the current alternatives. I hope it's a lot because there's a long road between here and whenever I'd willingly buy a seat on a Starlink-connected flight again.
Nah, that'd be you, as well as a very insufferable asshole.
>The question of whether "portable Starlink" (the aviation/maritime++ category we're talking about) justifies Starship's existence is whether the marginal increase in payload capacity or efficiency of Starship over Falcon produces a marginal increase in "portable Starlink" profit that's multiples beyond the amortized development cost and the launch costs of Starship.
And it clearly does, as I showed you. It's not even close, they're constrained on capabilities not demand right now. Starship total dev cost has been about $15 billion. Access to even a tiny piece of the global cellular market justifies that.
>Given that Starlink's entire enterprise is probably loss-making if it had to pay for its own launch capacity (it currently pays SpaceX Space $0 and is accounted for just in hardware depreciation, so frontloads profit and all the costs are incurred in coming years)... the answer is almost certainly no.
Speaking of "lmao", now you're resorting to make believe.
>And for what it's worth
Nothing, in your case. I'm also being kind to you and only talking about the fundamental thing it does that fiber can never do, vs your hilarious suggestion that fiber will rollout worldwide to everyone on the planet in or even in the US in the foreseeable future. I don't think the US has even reached 50% fiber coverage yet.
Similarly I can justify developing a $15 billion pizza oven because the pizza industry is $250 billion. And are you even reading the words in front of you? The question is the marginal improvement in their ability to serve that unmet demand via Starship versus Falcon. You said literally nothing about this question and still haven't. Do you understand the question?
> now you're resorting to make believe.
Describing SpaceX's accounting practices and Starlink's actual launch costs is... make believe? Very substantive response.
> I'm also being kind to you and...
I didn't claim fiber will roll out to everyone on the planet, or even everyone in the US. I said the Starlink market is clearly shrinking, and Starlink's success will ironically accelerate that shrinkage because people who get access to shitty Internet are far, far more motivated to get good connectivity than people who have no connectivity at all.
And sure, let's assume fiber hasn't reached 50%. Even broadband is a vastly superior experience to Starlink. You can disprove this by showing me any evidence of a substantial number of people who have access to fiber or broadband and opt to use Starlink as their primary ISP. I would guess this set is approximately null, as someone who ordered Starlink for his house and then filed an FCC complaint to get fiber brought out to it instead. I would have to have been literally braindead to use Starlink.
You can probably prolong the stack, exactly as they did with Falcon. Also, Raptor 3 is more powerful than previous models, and I would expect future Raptor 4 to add some oomph as well.
"But he's got a really big blind spot for the project management implications."
Uh, isn't Starbase evidence to the contrary? They can produce rockets and rocket engines faster than anyone else in the world. And Raptor unit cost is ridiculously low for a liquid rocket engine.