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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
"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.
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.
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.
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.
A better comparison would be Starlink, which had a bunch of unresolved problems and had to be more economical than existing satellite internet providers.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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"
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 \_______/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 $100/kg, I doubt even Elon believes that number but it does mean they have plenty of buffer and cutting capacity from 50T to 100T is not the end of the world.
I agree that the Human Landing System plan for the moon is a shitshow, but it's almost a distraction for SpaceX at this point, and it would not surprise me if the whole program gets axed by whoever comes after Trump.
Starlink is just the civil version of Starshield. As long as the US Army needs unrestricted internet access across the globe Starlink will continue to exist.
The vast majority of that market is too poor to afford Starlink and as soon as they're not, their top priority will be to invest the capex to replace it with the vastly superior terrestrial modalities.
The elephant in the Starlink business model room is the fact that terrestrial wireless keeps getting cheaper and faster. To be a good Starlink customer you need to be prosperous enough to afford it, while being far enough away from an urban center to have little or no chance of being served by terrestrial wireless services.
That's a very special TAM to begin with, and the harsh part is that it shrinks over time.
As a product manager, I can tell you you're making a mistake in the way you're thinking about this. If you actually try calculating it, you'll figure it out.
Starlink has about 13 million subscribers today and makes around 500$/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.
> 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.
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.
>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?
>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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
> 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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Deploying starlink satellites is the milestone that makes a viable project. Even if it fails on all remaining goals, it will continue flying regularly.
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.
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.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
...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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
317070 | 11 hours ago
Edit: https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14
petterroea | 11 hours ago
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)
LunicLynx | 11 hours ago
Also can recommend the restream of everyday astronaut Tim Dodd
sebzim4500 | 10 hours ago
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
joachimma | 10 hours ago
LunicLynx | 10 hours ago
sebzim4500 | 9 hours ago
hdgvhicv | 9 hours ago
cubefox | 10 hours ago
They are already live and have a lot of background discussion, unlike the official SpaceX stream.
philipallstar | 10 hours ago
And it's SpaceX, not ESA, sadly.
natch | 9 hours ago
rswail | 8 hours ago
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 | 7 hours ago
ButlerianJihad | 3 hours ago
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.
stefan_lec | 10 hours ago
https://youtube.com/watch?v=fmkHjDeECps
Also hosted directly on SpaceX website:
https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14
chasd00 | 10 hours ago
andsoitis | 7 hours ago
holt62 | 11 hours ago
benj111 | 10 hours ago
Would HN describe a huge program that didn't do the thing it was designed to do a "feat of engineering"?
s08148692 | 10 hours ago
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 | 9 hours ago
Retric | 9 hours ago
mvlipwig | 8 hours ago
dghlsakjg | 8 hours ago
It’s a lot of records that just got broken.
dgellow | 8 hours ago
mchusma | 8 hours ago
atonse | 7 hours ago
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.
bonesss | 9 hours ago
GuB-42 | 9 hours ago
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 | 9 hours ago
I suppose we should be grateful that SpaceX has found and collected enough of these crazy people in one place on this mission.
SoKamil | 8 hours ago
Gareth321 | 8 hours ago
GrinningFool | 8 hours ago
GuB-42 | 7 hours ago
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.
tonyhart7 | 8 hours ago
well US government found new toys (proxy war) instead of space
Schiendelman | 8 hours ago
bakies | 3 hours ago
cameldrv | 7 hours ago
prodigycorp | 11 hours ago
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
chedabob | 10 hours ago
SpaceX's flight profile says both are splashdowns?
prodigycorp | 10 hours ago
timroman | 10 hours ago
billfor | 9 hours ago
jve | 9 hours ago
raverbashing | 9 hours ago
F9 fits how many?
Good4boothee | 9 hours ago
bluecalm | 7 hours ago
billfor | 8 hours ago
xoa | 7 hours ago
>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.
motionlessveloc | 11 hours ago
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-...
cubefox | 10 hours ago
rokkamokka | 10 hours ago
pbkompasz | 9 hours ago
rswail | 9 hours ago
His lordship announced this to the world at the UN.
32187 | 9 hours ago
ralfd | 9 hours ago
> 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 | 8 hours ago
I don't think a week is enough to gather data and fix subsequent launch
newsclues | 8 hours ago
bpodgursky | 8 hours ago
davidmurdoch | 8 hours ago
metalman | 10 hours ago
thinkingtoilet | 9 hours ago
ksec | 10 hours ago
I am so looking forward to a successfully launch today.
small_model | 9 hours ago
CrimsonRain | 9 hours ago
senordevnyc | 9 hours ago
nixon_why69 | 9 hours ago
For datacenters in space to work, they have to solve a bunch of unsolved problems and be more economical than datacenters in earth.
inglor_cz | 8 hours ago
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.
Gareth321 | 8 hours ago
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 | 8 hours ago
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 | 8 hours ago
We're still a few years away, but I suspect this is going to happen fast, starting with the edge/low latency compute.
newsclues | 8 hours ago
dgellow | 7 hours ago
laughing_man | 8 hours ago
small_model | 7 hours ago
nixon_why69 | 7 hours ago
andsoitis | 7 hours ago
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.
dgellow | 8 hours ago
baal80spam | 9 hours ago
works beautifully
Gareth321 | 9 hours ago
A_D_E_P_T | 9 hours ago
Inspiring to watch, really.
misiti3780 | 9 hours ago
Polizeiposaune | 8 hours ago
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 | 8 hours ago
misiti3780 | 7 hours ago
bell-cot | 7 hours ago
Symmetry | 9 hours ago
motionlessveloc | 9 hours ago
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!
realty_geek | 9 hours ago
thom | 8 hours ago
billfor | 8 hours ago
rtkwe | 8 hours ago
philistine | 8 hours ago
rtkwe | 7 hours ago
bakies | 8 hours ago
accrual | 8 hours ago
codeulike | 7 hours ago
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"
_moof | 2 hours ago
If you'll excuse some poor ASCII art:
thomasfromcdnjs | 8 hours ago
Hell yeah, that was the longest 10 minutes.
jve | 7 hours ago
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.
senordevnyc | 9 hours ago
wffurr | 9 hours ago
T+22: Go for orbit!
cbogie | 8 hours ago
Zigurd | 8 hours ago
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.
netdur | 8 hours ago
peab | 8 hours ago
toasty228 | 8 hours ago
inglor_cz | 8 hours ago
ronnier | 8 hours ago
orangecat | 7 hours ago
Zigurd | 8 hours ago
SenHeng | 8 hours ago
panick21_ | 8 hours ago
There is still a question about turnaround time, but just comparing the state now to early Falcon 9 is not accurate.
oblio | 8 hours ago
Let's stop pretending he's God.
ronnier | 8 hours ago
peab | 7 hours ago
The fact that you can pay the average price for a car, and get a car that fully drives itself today, is mind boggling.
peab | 8 hours ago
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 | 7 hours ago
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.
peab | 6 hours ago
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 | 5 hours ago
Last I read about them their tunnel boring tech wasn't revolutionary, it was just smaller diameter tunnels.
oblio | 7 hours ago
qwerpy | 5 hours ago
rTX5CMRXIfFG | 8 hours ago
snarfy | 8 hours ago
marcusverus | 8 hours ago
jsiepkes | 8 hours ago
And the biggest customer is SpaceX: https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-bought-tesla-cybertru...
marknutter | 7 hours ago
kg | 8 hours ago
motionlessveloc | 8 hours ago
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.
estearum | 8 hours ago
Selling sub-fiber Internet access into a globe increasingly covered in fiber is a silly long-term value proposition.
Maken | 8 hours ago
estearum | 6 hours ago
Schiendelman | 8 hours ago
estearum | 7 hours ago
Schiendelman | 6 hours ago
estearum | 6 hours ago
Zigurd | 6 hours ago
That's a very special TAM to begin with, and the harsh part is that it shrinks over time.
Schiendelman | 6 hours ago
estearum | 6 hours ago
bluecalm | 7 hours ago
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 | 2 hours ago
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.
fragmede | 2 hours ago
estearum | an hour ago
Huge huge untapped market of people just like me.
fragmede | 2 hours ago
xoa | 7 hours ago
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 | 7 hours ago
80% of the Starlink subscriber base is fixed points and that will grow.
xoa | 3 hours ago
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.
----
0: https://statbase.org/datasets/air-rail-and-water-transportat...
1: https://starlink.com/support/article/78b0428b-4546-0b7f-ea45...
estearum | an hour ago
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 | 20 minutes ago
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.
inglor_cz | 8 hours ago
Zigurd | 6 hours ago
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.
timschmidt | 8 hours ago
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.
estearum | 8 hours 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?
panick21_ | 8 hours ago
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.
timschmidt | 8 hours ago
Milestones. Engineers deal in milestones. Goalposts are for sportsball.
estearum | 7 hours ago
timschmidt | 7 hours ago
estearum | 7 hours ago
Reply please.
timschmidt | 6 hours ago
estearum | 6 hours ago
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 | 5 hours ago
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 | 5 hours ago
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 | 5 hours ago
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 | 4 hours ago
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.
chasd00 | 2 hours ago
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 | an hour ago
state_less | 8 hours ago
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.
s08148692 | 8 hours ago
Zigurd | 8 hours ago
timschmidt | 8 hours ago
kg | 8 hours ago
timschmidt | 8 hours ago
bryanlarsen | 8 hours ago
timschmidt | 7 hours ago
usrbinbash | 8 hours ago
Gentle reminder that Saturn 5 worked pretty much eprfectly on its maiden flight.
plqbfbv | 8 hours ago
Yeah, except it costed 12x per-flight, ran at 30x/kg, and wasn't reusable. So not exactly the same thing.
timschmidt | 8 hours ago
dreamcompiler | 8 hours ago
60 years ago.
inglor_cz | 8 hours ago
dreamcompiler | 7 hours ago
inglor_cz | 7 hours ago
jve | 7 hours 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?
marcusverus | 8 hours ago
inglor_cz | 8 hours 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.
inglor_cz | 8 hours ago
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.
NitpickLawyer | 8 hours ago
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 | 8 hours ago
...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 | 6 hours 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.
maxdo | 8 hours ago
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.
indoordin0saur | 8 hours ago
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.
jve | 7 hours ago
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 | 7 hours ago
DarmokJalad1701 | 8 hours ago
fakwandi_priv | 8 hours ago
Prompting claude 5.5 has more appeal it seems.
boonzeet | 8 hours ago
We've been watching in the office though. There's been a lot of interest in it.
inglor_cz | 8 hours ago
dylan604 | 8 hours ago
varjag | 8 hours ago
themgt | 8 hours ago
qzw | 8 hours ago
KyleTheDev | 8 hours ago
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 | 6 hours ago
KyleTheDev | 6 hours ago
rtkwe | 8 hours ago
soco | 8 hours ago
leoc | 7 hours ago
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.
pigpop | 7 hours ago
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 | 7 hours ago
> 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 | 6 hours ago
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 | 4 hours ago
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 | 23 minutes ago
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.
qzw | 8 hours ago
indoordin0saur | 8 hours ago
pavlov | 8 hours ago
baggy_trough | 8 hours ago
pigpop | 8 hours ago
indoordin0saur | 7 hours ago
sensanaty | 6 hours ago
nancyminusone | 6 hours ago
qzw | 5 hours ago
indoordin0saur | 4 hours ago
maxglute | 3 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.
indoordin0saur | 47 minutes ago
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.
Dig1t | 7 hours ago
The plan definitely does not call for inaction towards other issues.
qzw | 6 hours ago
qzw | 6 hours ago
trentnix | 8 hours ago
jimkleiber | 8 hours ago
So it's hard to leave that out. It's genuine achievement and it's politics, both.
marcusverus | 8 hours ago
DauntingPear7 | 8 hours ago
baggy_trough | 8 hours ago
jimkleiber | 6 hours ago
pigpop | 8 hours ago
jimkleiber | 7 hours ago
AustinDev | 6 hours ago
jimkleiber | 4 hours ago
So the US owns the moon? Or does Neil Armstrong?
I'm a bit sassy today just kinda tired of certain arguments.
AustinDev | 3 hours ago
jimkleiber | 2 hours ago
> 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
pigpop | 18 minutes ago
TkTech | 8 hours ago
The V-2 was also a technological achievement. Doesn't mean the UK was cheering it on.
inglor_cz | 8 hours ago
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 | 7 hours ago
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 | 7 hours ago
"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.
Ntrails | 8 hours ago
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!
rafram | 7 hours ago
kibibu | 7 hours ago
parineum | 6 hours ago
/s because the Internet is crazy.
pigpop | 5 hours ago
redox99 | 5 hours ago
chasd00 | 3 hours ago
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 | 2 hours ago
That's a whole lotta MIRV capacity.
robertlagrant | 8 hours ago
what_hn | 8 hours ago
dylan604 | 5 hours ago
Shank | 8 hours ago
Good4boothee | 8 hours ago
newsclues | 8 hours ago
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.
bakies | 8 hours ago
orangecat | 8 hours ago
bakies | 8 hours ago
natch | 5 hours ago
small_model | 8 hours ago
chinathrow | 7 hours ago
qwerpy | 4 hours ago
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 | 2 hours ago
NooneAtAll3 | 8 hours ago
???
fluidcruft | 7 hours ago
rini17 | 7 hours ago
marcusverus | 3 hours ago
maxglute | 2 hours ago
Quitschquat | 8 hours ago
marcusverus | 7 hours ago
cubefox | 4 hours ago
Quitschquat | 4 hours ago
bell-cot | 7 hours ago
And that I've heard, actual buyers of launch services are perfectly aware of that distinction.
asgr | 8 hours ago
reco98gg | 8 hours ago
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
Schiendelman | 8 hours ago
indoordin0saur | 8 hours ago
andsoitis | 7 hours ago
paulus_magnus2 | 7 hours ago
-- 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 ?
fluidcruft | 6 hours ago
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 | an hour ago
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).
7e | 6 hours ago
Polizeiposaune | 6 hours ago
ggreer | 3 hours ago
chasd00 | 3 hours ago
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.
ButlerianJihad | 3 hours ago
Their engineers understand mass, and how to distinguish it.
trencedamp | 6 hours ago
fluidcruft | 6 hours ago
haaz | 5 hours ago
rurban | 5 hours ago
jfoster | 5 hours ago
They push them to the limits in testing/development to make them reliable in production.
Starship still in testing/development.
spwa4 | 2 hours ago
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 | an hour ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competitio...
I won’t comment on the finances, but their technical success is self-evident.
spwa4 | an hour ago
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 | an hour ago
luke5441 | an hour ago
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.
testing22321 | 4 hours ago
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)
themgt | 5 hours ago
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