From what I've read, the booster was intentionally being tested to its limits — an explosion isn't necessarily unexpected. They weren't aiming to catch it, it was being ditched in the ocean. Whether this counts as a "true" booster failure depends on exactly what failed.
They planned to complete the landing burn but it looks like the booster exploded at the beginning of the landing burn so I wouldn't say it was completely successful.
Sure, but this test was basically "let's see if we can put this thing under enormous stress to simulate a worst case scenario and find out if it survives or not"
Exactly. They're still exploring limits and failure modes. Hence the effort to re-fly a used booster on an aggressive trajectory when they have multiple newer revisions ready to go. Looking forward to the first launch with Raptor 3.
Also really can't understate the importance of Starlink in the development program. Apollo jettisoned parachuting return capsules from the interstages so that engineers could get camera footage from inside the rocket during launch. SpaceX just gets an RTSP stream (or something similar).
It's the original definition of "pushing the envelope." You start with a known flight envelope, then push a little past that. Sometimes you learn that the real envelope is bigger than you thought. Other times you find that the envelope is exactly where you thought it was.
I notice I mis-typed and should have said you can't overstate the importance of Starlink on the development program. And I agree with you about pushing the envelope. It was really interesting to hear that they were planning on testing an engine-out scenario with this booster by lighting one of the middle 10 engines and two centers. If they can pull that off, they'll have a measurable increase in fault tolerance over Falcon 9.
We don't know all the things they did to the Booster, but among them were deliberately not igniting some engines as well as taking a more aggressive angle-of-attack on descent (the rocket is a fairly effective lifting body, as it turns out!).
There may be more things, but between those two I think the latter was a bigger problem. It would have gotten hotter and more physically stressed. And then weakened to the point to where re-igniting the engines caused it to fail.
They also used a new hot-staging maneuver, where the gases were directed out one side so that it flipped more rapidly in the other direction. It was a really fast flip! A rocket the size of a small skyscraper turning 90 degrees in just a few seconds. That could have jarred something loose, too.
Hopefully we find out in the post-mortem. SpaceX doesn't typically give the public as much detail as we'd like, but they're pretty good at sharing the high-level reasons why something failed.
What was unexpected was the lack of images during the booster reentry. And I don't know where this "exploded on impact" comes from - no evidence of this so far, that I noticed. It feels more like it didn't make it to the water in one piece.
Yeah they were pretty clear about intending to fly it until it broke up so that they could understand how hard of a turn they could make in the future without it going splat into the tower.
From what I could gather from the commentary, they were pushing the limits of the booster's control capability. But the booster exploded on engine ignition. They are separate aspects, though they may be related. The commentators also sounded like they were not expecting a failure at that stage. So, concerns may be warranted.
An explosion can be fine, but the details really matter. The yardstick here is whether this iteration was better than the last, and the pace of progress if so.
I don't think this flight reassured anyone that the Starship program is making the improvements we'd expect.
I was watching Everyday Astronaut's feed and he seemed a little bummed. I don't follow SpaceX launches closely enough to know, but when they plan to "fail on purpose" do they not mention it ahead of time?
Of all people, I would expect him to know this sort of information ahead of time, although maybe the booster failure was planned but he was bummed about some some of the other things that didn't work well.
He was bummed about starship losing attitude control and failing to deploy the Starlink mockup satellites. Starship made it further than the two previous flights and progress is progress but being bummed is understandable.
Many spaceflight fans struggle to distinguish between F9 and Starship and think success with one guarantees another. Go back and read what Fred Brooks writes about second systems. The super heavy booster is extremely impressive, particularly the raptor engines and control systems. Their engineers need to be commended for that alone. The weight is questionable and it isn't clear how much the performance is compromised but its still a very impressive vehicle and future engine refinements are going to help.
The second stage remains a huge concern. The economics of Starship are predicated on cheap, rapid second stage reuse. That huge multi engine second stage is a lot more expensive than the F9's disposable single engine second stage. Creating a robust, rapidly reusable thermal management system for orbital re-entry is an unsolved problem. I don't believe anyone, including SpaceX has a solution.
With time and huge amounts of money they can iterate through the other problems and likely do a controlled re-entry and recovery with the second stage but the vehicle isn't going to be close to reusable. It is a massive problem and I think it makes a fiction of the entire program and turns it into a money pit.
If you piece the system out though. The engines, the control systems etc, there is a lot of good stuff there for another system. I think the Mars colonisation BS worked well to inspire the troops and raise money and political interest but they seem to be in a corner with this design. It is looking very possible this system will never enter commercial service.
2025: watching live footage from a doomed spaceship as it tumbles out of control through its own vented gases, all tinged red, as a synth soundtrack plays.
(The soundtrack was on the X.com stream, seems cut from this link.)
AFIAK no one has ever done an exhaustive analysis of the provenance of all that stock footage.
This is an example of someone chasing it down. I don't think it's been done for all the Saturn V launches (Apollo 4 thru the last Skylab launch). That would be a big ask.
As a kid growing up in the 70's it was perfectly normal to see a documentary about Apollo 11 where they throw in the Apollo 4 Stage 2 ring separation like it was no big deal. The awareness of all these subtle differences is a recent development.
And also starting at 0:43 in that clip is the rocket that explodes, an Atlas-Centaur on its maiden flight on May 8, 1962. It was the Centaur upper stage that failed, but I believe we see the Atlas booster engines tumbling.
The important part of this flight was not the booster but the Starship. Last two launches failed in a similar fashion a short time after separation. SpaceX will be in hot water if this launch is not showing some progress in that regard.
This flight's failure is a great example of why doing a full orbit is a bad idea. It's quite close to orbital velocity but keeping it just short ensures it will re-enter in the predicted zone even if they lose control (as they did today).
Vectors are location independent, so theoretically any velocity with sufficiently high speed would be orbital velocity even if it was pointed directly at the planet, no?
For that matter, any velocity is orbital velocity, since at sufficient distance it would exactly perfectly counteract earth's gravitational field. Assuming there aren't any other gravitational fields out there to interfere.
No, not at all. This is flight 9. Flights 3-6 had a complete Starship suborbital trajectory with 5-6 landing softly in the ocean. On 7-8 Starship exploded before SECO. On 9 it kind of got as far as 3.
Those leaks, debris ejection and the (mild) loss of attitude control seem to have started right after SECO. And that isn't very surprising because engine shutdown can cause huge disturbances (shock) in the engines and related plumbings. (I know this sounds contrary to intuition). So I wouldn't consider that milestone as a success, unless it emerges that those problems were unrelated to SECO or any other engine operation.
That could very well be the case. I can't be certain. However, it's also a well-known problem in engine design. High flow rate fluid lines like propellant lines are often protected against fluid hammers. That may come in the form of a gas reservoir to absorb the pressure spike (sort of like surge suppression capacitors in electronic circuits) or as a check valve connected to a re-circulation path (like snubber/flyback diodes in electronic circuits).
The reason why I said it sounds counterintuitive is that I suspect that the flame extinction inside the combustion chamber also causes strong mechanical shocks. However, I don't know how that works and I could be mistaken.
Yeah, sure, huge success as always. I fully understand the iterative nature of this, but they honestly seem to be hitting some roadblocks on the design of this ship.
I don’t think people are questioning the feasibility of Starship’s core design.
However the program has been in development for quite a while (well over a decade) and seems to have a lot of internal issues. Be that poor management, scope creep, or whatever the process looks flawed.
> However the program has been in development for quite a while
No longer than other rocket programs. The speed of development is frankly mind blowing considering it's scale. Regulatory hurdles seem to be the biggest delaying factor. Which goes a long way toward explaining Musk's political activities AFAICT.
> and seems to have a lot of internal issues. Be that poor management, scope creep, or whatever the process looks flawed.
It seems like you're making the mistake of equating SpaceX's hardware-rich development philosophy (i.e. just fly it and see what happens) to NASA's check-it-ten-times-before-flight risk-averse methodology. Different approaches. Russia followed the former, much like SpaceX, and Soyuz is second only to Falcon 9 in number of launches. Arguably, more can be learned, more quickly, and for lower cost following the hardware-rich approach. You just have to deal with the optics and armchair rocket engineers declaring every launch a failure until they aren't.
Saturn V development started in January 1962. Starship development started sometime before 2018. Generously, we can say SpaceX has been developing it for at least 6 years at this point. By the same point, January 1968, the Saturn V had launched, orbited the Earth, and simulated a trans-lunar injection. In December 1968 the Saturn V launched astronauts onboard Apollo 8 to fly around the Moon.
So it is getting tough to say that Starship development is proceeding fast compared to other projects.
Is it SpaceX philosophy or specifically Starship development philosophy? Because the development of the Falcon seemed to follow a pretty standard path. First they had three failures and two successes with the Falcon 1, and then they scaled up to Falcon 9, which worked on the first attempt.
The work towards booster landing and reuse was more iterative, but it was a special case. They had to be careful with the changes, because they were testing in production. The first priority was always delivering the payload. But once the booster had done its job, it was available for experiments.
Elon's spoken at length about the choice between design philosophies since the early days of Falcon. I'd submit that trashing Falcon 1 after the first successful flight to build Falcon 9 is an example of exactly that. Part of Falcon's success so early on was due to the choice of intentionally simple systems - a single pintle injector in the Merlin engine, RP1 propellant which is well understood, lots of relatively safe choices. And lots of work with the grasshopper test vehicles. But on flight 1 of Falcon 9 they flew Dragon. Flight 6 used hardware revision 1.1 and was the first to attempt a propulsive return. Flight 9 added landing legs. They made changes to basically every flight until Block 5 with flight 54.
Starship is the biggest rocket ever attempted, with uncommon propellant, most advanced engine cycle and it is designed to be fully reusable. Falcon was safe retreading of known ground comparatively.
> Korolev was not a scientist, not a designer: he was a brilliant manager. Korolev's problem was his mentality. His intent was to somehow use the launcher he had. [The launcher was called N1]. It was designed in 1958 for a different purpose and with a limited payload of about 70 tons.] His philosophy was, let's not work by stages [as is usual in spacecraft design], but let's assemble everything and then try it. And at last it will work. There were several attempts and failures with Lunnik [a series of unmanned Soviet moon probes]. Sending man to the moon is too complicated, too complex for such an approach. I think it was doomed from the very beginning.
> The speed of development is frankly mind blowing considering it’s scale
It’s been in some level of development for well over a decade. Back in 2018 they changed the idea from using carbon composites to stainless steel and renamed the project Starship but in no way can you call it a fast process.
> hardware-rich development philosophy
If it was actually working it’s a perfectly viable strategy, but it seems to be slowing things down.
> It’s been in some level of development for well over a decade. Back in 2018 they changed the idea from using carbon composites to stainless steel and renamed the project Starship but in no way can you call it a fast process.
How long did the last fully reusable superheavy lift rocket take to develop? There's never been one you say? Right. So you have no metric for measurement. The closest equivalent: SLS is flying hardware who's design originated in the 60s, and Blue Origin began development 24 years ago.
Starship is developing at light speed by comparison to anything approaching it's size.
Still think it's happening slowly? Feel free to build one yourself in less time. I'll wait.
Starship can trace its development back to the 1920’s seeing as the team leveraged that research, if you’re going to use such a meaningless definition including USSR projects as a legacy here Starship loses simply because of the much later launch date.
Because you’re obviously trying to deflect from a lost argument. Starship has clearly been mismanaged and nothing you’ve suggested has actually countered that core issue.
Well, I've provided plenty of links and facts. You've provided your unique opinions, little else, and seem wholly unaware of the development history of these vehicles you claim to know better than rocket engineers about.
Even if I use your example and timeline:
Shuttle: 1968 (project announced) - 1981 (first launch): 13 years
Starship: 2012 (project announced) - 2022 (first launch): 10 years
Starship's several years ahead of Shuttle development.
Hilarious conversation. Thanks for providing laughs for the evening.
The difference here is that STS-1 achieved orbit and flew 37 times around the earth, while Starship flight 1 didn't even explode correctly after failing to keep its designated path. Starship has yet to achieve orbit, in fact, in 2025 - passing the 13 year mark of STS-1.
And note that the actual shuttle that was launched in 1981, the Columbia, went on to conduct 27 more successful missions (until its tragic end many years later). So it was already successfully reusable from its first test flight (with the known caveats around cost of refurbishment).
> with the known caveats around cost of refurbishment
Only the orbiter was refurbishable (not fully and rapidly reusable like Starship - booster reuse was demonstrated today), which took 6 months, and cost $2 Billion per launch.
The whole Starship development program is slated to cost about as much as 5 Shuttle launches.
Again, feel free to point to any rocket of the size and reusability of Starship which is further along in development or has developed faster. None exist.
> Nearly 50 year old technology is generally inferior to modern equivalents <
Feel free to counter the points being addressed rather than attack a straw man. Obviously if Starship was strictly worse there’d be no point in trying to develop it.
Suggesting a modern preproduction car is better than a Fiat Argenta from the early 80’s isn’t a recommendation, same deal with Starship.
Yeah, well, apparently neither was Shuttle. RIP Challenger and Columbia and crews.
No fatalities with Dragon yet, thankfully. It seems to me that Dragon and Shuttle are much more directly comparable. Falcon 9 throws away it's second stage, which is still less than Shuttle did. And Dragon requires a similar level of refurbishment to Shuttle. Shuttle could carry 27,000kg to LEO whereas Falcon 9 can carry 22,800kg to LEO.
Starship is slated for 200,000kg to LEO. It's in an entirely different class.
The aspect of Starship I find craziest - it's lack of launch abort system at this stage of development - was a problem Shuttle suffered it's whole life. And Shuttle didn't have the engine redundancy of Starship or Falcon 9.
If we were comparing two projects in 2025 I would absolutely agree.
Except SpaceX is spending ~2 billion dollars per year which on the surface is well below the space shuttle (though not that far), but modern aerospace projects have massive advantages over these early programs so simple inflation calculators don’t really capture the cost changes well.
> It’s been in some level of development for well over a decade. Back in 2018 they changed the idea from using carbon composites to stainless steel and renamed the project Starship but in no way can you call it a fast process.
Relative to the less ambitious Space Shuttle and New Glenn projects, it seems to be progressing at good pace. They already demonstrated landing and reflight of the lower stage, and it does seem likely that they will land the upper stage this year.
They have succeeded in all parts of the flight plan on different missions. So the concept is proven out, but they just need to improve reliability to string it all together.
They successfully performed the first Starship lower stage reflight, which was previously only achieved by Falcon 9 (and other suborbital rockets which are much smaller).
I'm rooting for SpaceX because no one else in the world is even attempting to do what they're doing.
Every single time SpaceX has set a goal, there were detractors who claimed they would never accomplish it. And along the way, there were plenty of failures that almost proved the detractors right. But every time--so far at least--SpaceX persevered and eventually succeeded.
When SpaceX decided to re-use their boosters, most people thought they were idiots. They would never be able to do it, and even if they did, it would never make financial sense. Even today, SpaceX is the only company to fly with "flight-proven" boosters, but no one is skeptical anymore. Almost every new launch vehicle, including several Chinese ones, are designed to be re-usable.
When SpaceX decided to build the Falcon Heavy, with 27 first-stage engines, many people thought it would fail. "Remember the N1," they said, which was doomed from the start because they could never get all its engines to work together. But the Falcon Heavy worked and gave us those indelible views of twin boosters landings.
When SpaceX decided to build Starlink, many people thought it was crazy. 5,000 satellites!? Are you crazy? How are you going to manufacture, much less launch that many satellites? Today they have 7,500 working satellites and they are literally launching more twice a week. Starlink has changed the communications satellite industry (there are at least 3 serious competitors).
I remember the first Starship launch, when 5 of its 33 engines failed almost immediately. Skeptics thought the Raptor engine was dead on arrival. Too complicated compared to the proven Merlins and way too unreliable to power Starship. They will never get it to work. And yet, in later flights, all 33 engines worked perfectly all the way to ascent. No one worries about the booster anymore.
When I first heard they were going to catch a returning booster at the launch tower I thought they were mad. I thought that was a long-term plan that might happen sometime in 2030, after they refined the system. But no, they went ahead and caught it on Flight 5. Since then they have caught two other boosters and have reflown one in Flight 9.
People who don't follow the space industry don't yet realize how revolutionary Starship it. It is not just the largest rocket in history; its crazy goal is to be able to launch, land, and then launch again with minimal refurbishment and minimal cost.
If all they wanted to do is launch something to orbit and discard the rocket, SpaceX could have done it on their first flight with a much less ambitious design. The reason it's taking so long (and will continue to take so long) is because their ultimate goal is something no one has come close to achieving: a rocket that can be reused like an airliner.
Musk once quipped that SpaceX is good at turning 'impossible' into 'late'. It's true that they have missed almost every single deadline they have ever set. But it's also true that the things SpaceX has done were once deemed to be impossible.
And that's why I'm rooting for them, no matter how many ships they blow up.
F9 was on paper conservative tech, seen as technically possible, but operationally difficult / economically not feasible for startup. Starship pushing so many boundaries, it is indeed revolutionary, many critics thinks it's a technical moonshot. I want it to work, but I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't, or very, very late.
Empirically, you're right. Starship has taken much longer than F9 just to reliably put something in orbit.
What I don't know--because I'm not in the field--is whether that's because of design complexity (size, need for header tanks, etc.) or because the Starship team is not as tight (larger team, weaker leaders, distracted Musk).
It was conservative in that IIRC the criticism against F9 at the time, landing/1st stage reuse was seen as technically feasible, but economically not. VS criticisms of starship (even before people starting hating on Elon)... it's not technically impossible, but Starship stacked with multiple F9 resuable tier generation leap in requirements. It's another level of difficulty in terms of undertaking.
IMO economically, F9 + starlink pretty good business model. Starship + _____? It's not Moon or Mars. IMO once DoD gives SpaceX a few 100 billions in Golden Dome contracts, starshipwill start to seem much more viable / inevitable once it's fate is tied to strategic space weaponization. On topic DoD, let's not forget there's probably trillions $$$ of wasted technically feasible / moonshot prototypes from US MiC over the decades. Starship might end in that pile, but I'm optimistic it won't be, not because space but weapons in space.
> IMO economically, F9 + starlink pretty good business model. Starship + _____?
I think the best business model is Starship + Starlink. Starship can launch a lot more and larger satellites than Falcon 9.
I wouldn't bet on other big Starship customers, defense spending, space tourism, Mars plans etc. Those are highly speculative. But satellite Internet has a clear use case and a huge market.
That's a separate evolution though. The original/basic F9 was (by the standards of the time) an economically viable rocket without first stage reusability.
People rooting against SpaceX are just rooting against Musk TBH. That's why all these launches have so much negativity these days. And these people are very online. But viewed through a neutral lens, it's a clear positive for humanity that these rockets are being developed. I wouldn't let the online discourse put a bad taste in your mouth.
It's probably impossible to get a neutral take on Musk or any of his companies' operations anymore. The guy's a lightning rod for the extremes of both sides. There is too much breathless, gushing fandom (OP's comment), too much negative detraction and belittling, and very little actual neutral engineering talk that happens in any of these forums.
It's a shame to me because I don't really give a damn about the guy, I just like space and think rockets are cool, but we have a situation where a potentially revolutionary rocket is being overshadowed by the CEOs antics to the point that people are rooting for the rocket to fail. It's tragic, in a way.
> through a neutral lens, it's a clear positive for humanity that these rockets are being developed
Musk's cuts at USAid have caused an ongoing humanitarian crisis and some 300,000 deaths, mostly children[0]. I think if you're coming from a neutral, utilitarian point of view then SpaceX's role in this atrocity outweighs any realistic estimate of benefit to humanity.
I guess by that line of thinking, everyone who has ever been involved with Musk has a "role in the atrocity". Everyone who ever bought a Tesla, everyone who ever used PayPal. Now that I think about it... SpaceX launches US government satellites... and the US is a democracy... that means every single person in the US is culpable. Thank you for opening my eyes, I hate everyone and everything now.
I should also say that HN is much more positive on SpaceX than, e.g. ArsTechnica. There’s no point in reading the comments over there. At least here the criticism of SpaceX is interesting and well-thought-out (usually).
In general, the opinion on SpaceX among space enthusiasts seems to be overall very positive, and it is usually only people who are not very interested in space that comment negatively on SpaceX -- but only since Musk got involved with the Republicans. Or at least that's the case on Ars Technica, which tends to be pretty partisan.
Ah, yes, of course. I wasn't trying to make quite the esoteric point. More specifically that currently, if starship succeeds, it will be good business for SpaceX and enable them to launch many more satellites around earth at a cheaper cost but greater scale. I don't think this will be much of a positive for humans in general (beyond the current state).
Now if the lofty goals of enabling Mars and Moon habitation come to fruition, I would take a different view. For now I consider achieving that goal to be science fiction, but hopefully that changes in my lifetime.
At about 0:39 a pressurized tank of something does a whimsical loop-de-loop into the plume of fire and it's hard not to feel like the little guy is just having so much fun.
It only requires an account if you access it from a phone. Using desktop and there's no issue (which is better anyway as most phones can't display 4K content).
Maybe I missed it but when the booster was supposed to land or begin the landing burn it was lost by the cameras so it probably impacted somewhere other than where it was supposed to land.
Booster was not intended to be recovered. They said before launch they were intentionally testing how far they could push it until it exploded so they knew what the true limits are.
The commentary gives me the impression that the booster didn't fail due to the reasons they were expecting it to. I think that they were expecting a successful engine relight and an eventual destruction due to loss of vehicle control.
It lost attitude control not all that long after the engines cut off, so it didn't reenter under control, heat shield first -- but it was under control while the engines were running.
orbital mechanics puts bounds on where the parts that survive reentry will land (inside the declared danger zone).
SpaceX is, for many of us, what made many of us (myself included) not realize what a raging moron Elon Musk was and is for the longest time. I've come to believe that SpaceX succeeded in spite of Elon, not because of him. Whoever is really in charge has probably built an organization that is designed to insulate itself from Elon's influence.
And Falcon 9 is an unmitited success, to be sure. SpaceX basically owns the launch market because of it.
But eventually the chickens come home to roost and I really wonder if Starship will be the downfall of SpaceX. Let me explain.
Commercial space launches to LEO are SpaceX's bread and butter. There are over 100 a year now and whatever the cost of refurbishing used Falcon 9 first stage boosters is, I think the volume of launches (even if you exclude the induced demand from Starlink launches) has locked in an economic advantage for commercial launches for the next 10-20 years, in a similar way the 747 did for Boeing in the commercial aviation market. It's just that dominant.
But you have to ask what problem Starship solves. SpaceX already has a heavier launch capability (ie Falcon Heavy) but there's little demand for it. There have been 11 Falcon Heavy launches total AFAICT. So what is Starship going to launch? You might say that there will be new payloads once the launch capability exists.but we've simply seen no evidence of this thus far.
Starship is more complex, specifically the Raptor engines. You have two cooled propellants instead of one (because of coking with Merlin engines). In-orbit refueling is going to take so long to prove and perfect for some of the stated goals.
And Starship just isn't designed to land on things with a human crew. If a Starship booster lands on Moon (or Mars, which will never happen), your astronauts are 40 meters in the air. This is... far from ideal.
The US government simply won't allow SpaceX to fail. It's a national security issue. So I guess this doesn't matter. And it may be that the Falcon 9 cash cow props the company up from any number of boondoggles.
If Starship reaches its reliability and cost targets, it will lower the LEO payload cost per kg significantly but that's a lot of ifs and a ton of investment. But if you're not sending up a huge payload, you just don't need that. Starlink is fairly unique in being such a large constellation on similar orbits that you can launch them on a single orbit. Launching multiple satellites in vastly different orbits is not something a single rocket can do.
Starship is going to launch the next gen Starlink satellites which SpaceX desperately needs to get in the air as with 5 million subscribers their service is being over saturated around the world. Especially in the developing world and many other places where Starlink hands down beats terrestrials offerings.
In terms of Elon's contribution, you couldn't be more wrong. It was Elon's decision to pursue Starlink - a business model that had bankrupted all previous companies that attempted it. Elon's decision to pursue reusability which made Starlink feasible. Elon's decision to fire all the upper management of Starlink when the program wasn't going well - and in under a year of that decision had completely redesigned satellites in orbit. And now it's Elon's decision to pursue Starship that is a money furnace, but if it pays off Starlink 3.0 could bring in an order of magnitude more money than it does now.
The same high risk, high reward methodology with a good dose of micro-management is how he's brought six distinct companies to multi billion dollar valuations. And how he's succeeded despite the incessant reporting of his or his companies imminent failure.
High risk high reward doesn't always pay off. Sometimes you gotta swallow a Cybertruck, or a $44 bln Twitter acquisition, or a high-margin Nvidia-fuelled AI datacenter, or a political lobbying shitstorm. All of which fall squarely in the lap of Mr. Musk as the adamant leader pulling the strings.
If you're correct and Elon is to be credited with these administrative successes, then turnabout is fair play in assessing his entirely unnecessary business strategies. Let's not fool ourselves into thinking Tesla would be undervalued if Elon hadn't bought Twitter. I heard the "underrated genius" shtick when Jobs died, and then every subsequent biography echoed his personal struggles and failures he hid to prop up his cult of personality.
Twitter is once again worth $44 billion which arguably was an inflated price at the time of purchase. Tesla is a trillion dollar company. xAI is reportedly at $120 billion.
Idk man, big picture, I see nothing, but success with the media focusing on just the speed bumps along the way
- Ousted from Paypal for pure incompetence. Made money anyway from vested stock riding the dot-com bubble;
- Bought his way into Tesla then engaged in historical revisionism to paint himself a "founder". Tesla is a weird company because it defies any fundamentals. It seems to be valued between $500k and $1M per car sold in a year, which is just ludicrous. Tesla, as a company, has only survived by government largesse, be they carbon tax credits or the DOE loan in the late 2000s that saved Tesla from bankruptcy.
The only thing propping up Tesla now is import bans on Chinese EVs. Tesla isn't a car copmpany or an energy company. It's a proxy for investing in Elon directly. When Elon's relationship with the administration inevitably sours, Tesla's fortunes will sink as well. European Tesla sales have already dropped ~50% due to brand damage. The admin has cancelled an EV credit program that Tesla relied upon.
- SpaceX. This is a success. I still contend SpaceX succeeded in spite of Elon, not because of him;
- SolarCity. Failure. This became a recurring trend as SolarCity ended up owing a lot of money to SpaceX so the Tesla buyout was basically Elon using one of his companies to rescue another of his companies that owed a ton of money to yet another of his companies;
- Twitter. This one is hilarious because he completely overpaid for it. It seems like he was goaded into buying it by Peter Thiel and tried to get out of the deal until the Delaware Chancery Court forced him to complete the sale. By all accounts its lost 70-85% of its $44B purchase price. Elon ended up raising a bunch of money for xAI and basically used that to buy out his bad investment in TWitter, which for anyone else would be corporate fraud on a massive scale.
And what does Elon do all day anyway? Because it seems all he does is pretend to be a gamer and tweets nonstops. When does he actually manage any of these companies? In fact, his tweeting actually hurts his companies, Tesla in particular.
I'm honestly surprised there's still anyone who clings to the myth of Elon given all the evidence we have to the contrary.
Electric cars are mainstream now. Reusable rockets are real. Twitter won an election and spawned XAI. Elon is the richest man in the world. Yeah bro, he's a moron. Sure.
Tesla was almost bankrupt when Musk went to the Department of Energy Loan Office and said he had an investment from Mercedes to get $465 million dollar loan to save the company. That singular act was why you even hear about Elon today. Without the loan, he would not have gotten the Fremont factory and project WhiteStar would have been dead.
Without that loan, Musk couldn't use his wealth to reinvest into SpaceX and also would have had a damaged reputation and credibility. SpaceX would have survived, but it's development would have been much much slower. You wouldn't have Falcon Heavy and Starlink, and Starship today.
So thank your government folks for creating both the electric vehicle market and private space market! Without the government creating these markets, there would be no richest man Musk today. So thank the ATVM program authored by Senator Stabenow and NASA's COTS program. The point here is to illustrate the huge amount of power the government has to pick winners and losers. That it is the government that creates markets to play in and money to play with.
Reading this comment gave me flashbacks of every time a non-engineer bean counter rug-pulled the funding from an almost complete project because they didn't understand or trust the engineering process.
Falcon Heavy is intended for flying payloads that are very large or required very high energy orbits. For smaller payloads, Falcon 9 is more cost-effective, which is why SpaceX uses it for Starlink currently.
However, if Starship works, it will drastically reduce cost to orbit and become the workhorse for basically all launches.
>SpaceX is, for many of us, what made many of us (myself included) not realize what a raging moron Elon Musk was and is for the longest time. I've come to believe that SpaceX succeeded in spite of Elon, not because of him. Whoever is really in charge has probably built an organization that is designed to insulate itself from Elon's influence.
Sorry to shatter your illusions, but Musk is SpaceX's founder, CEO, and chief engineer. He has a physics degree from Penn and was admitted to an engineering graduate program at Stanford but worked in Silicon Valley instead, where he made the fortune that he used to finance SpaceX.
Musk's biographer tweeted the pages from his book <https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942> discussing how in late 2020 Musk suggested, then insisted against considerable opposition from his engineers, that Superheavy be caught with chopsticks instead of landing on legs like Falcon 9.
Also according to the book, Musk is the person who suggested and, against considerable opposition from his engineers, insisted on Starship switching to stainless steel instead of carbon fiber <https://x.com/richardprice100/status/1728106606616015097>.
(Hint: Musk was right and his engineers were wrong. Both times.)
PS - if you bring up Gwynne Shotwell, look up what a chief operating officer is responsible for (and not responsible for, relative to the CEO).
First, I couldn't care less what his biographer said. These aren't statements made under oath. The biographer isn't even a journalist. They're a propagandist. It's meaningless.
For many people, they think Elon is smart until he starts speaking about a topic you know and then you realize what a narcissistic moron he is. Like I already knew he was a moron but when he started talking about my area of expertise (software engineering), oh boy, it was way worse than I had imagined, specifically in the wake of his Twitter takeover.
It's endlessly fascinating to me how many people desperately cling to the myth of meritocracy, either because they align with the politics of the myth's purveyors or that they simply want to believe that their hard work will be rewarded.
A cursory examination of Elon's history exposes just what an incompetent moron he is. For example, his disastrous run at Paypal [1].
As for going to Penn and Stanford, so? George W. Bush went to Havard and Yale. So did Ten Cruz. Donald Trump bought his way into UPenn (Wharton, specifically). Roughly a third of these colleges are "legacies" or otherwise people buy their way in.
Summary: launched to the point that starship separated successfully. The booster appears to have exploded on its landing burn. They never intended to catch this booster but they didn't expect it to explode during the landing burn. Starship meanwhile got all the way to SECO, which is farther than the previous two missions. They were not able to open the pez-dispenser door to launch the starlink dummies. Some time after that it became clear that starship was tumbling out of control. They did not attempt to relight the engines. Reentry was uncontrolled.
One important additional detail is that the Starship started shedding debris (both inside and outside) and tumbling slowly, right after SECO. A leak also seems to have developed at the same time - which would explain the gradually worsening tumble rates. Leaks are unfortunately difficult to distinguish from intentional venting, if you're unfamiliar with the venting scheme. However, it's more or less surely a leak(s), especially given that the same were not observed in previous flights.
That I've heard of, Elon's Jeckyll/Hyde issues have been well-known at SpaceX for twoish decades. Employees (not just engineers) who couldn't look past those would self-select out over that same time frame.
Flipside, people who prioritize working for an actual, high-functioning rocket company have been self-selecting in to SpaceX over the past decade or so.
Reason 2: Consider SpaceX's Falcon 9 record in terms of flight pace, total mass delivered, etc. This gives ample reason for optimism that Starship will ultimately work... though the flight test record of Starship so far has been notably spotty.
SpaceX does not seem inclined to give up anytime remotely soon, is bringing in tremendous cash flow via Starlink and has nearly unlimited ability to raise capital. Musk presumably has enough influence in Washington to keep the FAA on board... and that is the only permission they need to keep trying as long as it takes.
Not trying to diminish SpaceX overall success and innovation - I still remember watching live the first landing of the Falcon 9 - had tears in my eyes.
Oh man, couldn’t disagree with this more strongly. SpaceX make an effort to be pretty transparent about what they’re trying to achieve and what constitutes failure. FSD is vapourware; SpaceX has been successfully launching and landing - now catching - rocket first stages for years. This is quality stuff.
I will bite - Tesla has been selling, for the past 10 years, cars that were supposedly becoming Fully Self Driving 'before the end of the year' for the past 10 years straight.
Let's say somebody bought it 5 years ago, then sold his car last year. From his perspective - was it vaporwave or not ?
Some day, it will work of course. There are other companies operating robotaxi on scale for quite a long time already. It's just not that day yet, not for Tesla at least.
Sure, but I'm talking about the tech, not the buyers who got screwed. Saying that FSD is vaporware because it is not available for a lot of Tesla owners is like saying that Waymo is vaporware because it is only launched in certain cities.
> software or hardware that has been advertised but is not yet available to buy,
for me, if I would've bought a Tesla, it would be vapourware for sure: Elon advertised it every chance he got and gets (this summer we will have it!), people bought it because of that and it's not there: that's vapourware.
I see what you mean, but I guess it depends on your definition of vapourware. I don’t think whether it’s publicly available is determinative. That fact that it’s called “full self-driving”, combined with the claims made about (let alone the money taken for it), and the length of time taken, render it vapourware for me. Duke Nukem Forever was the platonic vapourware, until it released as a complete product, at which point it ceased being vapourware. I don’t think anyone believes that FSD is the finished article, and those last few percent are critical where human lives are at risk. But I can see that reasonable minds may differ. It’s not a precise term.
> Feels like FSD for the past 10 years all over again (this time funded directly by US taxpayers).
Neither SpaceX nor Starship is subsidized in any way. SpaceX does have a contract for providing a Starship-based lander for Artemis's HLS, but that is (as with all other SpaceX government contracts) paid based on benchmarks and/or final delivery.
From what I've read, the booster was intentionally being tested to its limits — an explosion isn't necessarily unexpected. They weren't aiming to catch it, it was being ditched in the ocean. Whether this counts as a "true" booster failure depends on exactly what failed.
They planned to complete the landing burn but it looks like the booster exploded at the beginning of the landing burn so I wouldn't say it was completely successful.
Sure, but this test was basically "let's see if we can put this thing under enormous stress to simulate a worst case scenario and find out if it survives or not"
Exactly. They're still exploring limits and failure modes. Hence the effort to re-fly a used booster on an aggressive trajectory when they have multiple newer revisions ready to go. Looking forward to the first launch with Raptor 3.
Also really can't understate the importance of Starlink in the development program. Apollo jettisoned parachuting return capsules from the interstages so that engineers could get camera footage from inside the rocket during launch. SpaceX just gets an RTSP stream (or something similar).
It's the original definition of "pushing the envelope." You start with a known flight envelope, then push a little past that. Sometimes you learn that the real envelope is bigger than you thought. Other times you find that the envelope is exactly where you thought it was.
I notice I mis-typed and should have said you can't overstate the importance of Starlink on the development program. And I agree with you about pushing the envelope. It was really interesting to hear that they were planning on testing an engine-out scenario with this booster by lighting one of the middle 10 engines and two centers. If they can pull that off, they'll have a measurable increase in fault tolerance over Falcon 9.
is igniting the engine pushing the envelope though?
We don't know all the things they did to the Booster, but among them were deliberately not igniting some engines as well as taking a more aggressive angle-of-attack on descent (the rocket is a fairly effective lifting body, as it turns out!).
There may be more things, but between those two I think the latter was a bigger problem. It would have gotten hotter and more physically stressed. And then weakened to the point to where re-igniting the engines caused it to fail.
They also used a new hot-staging maneuver, where the gases were directed out one side so that it flipped more rapidly in the other direction. It was a really fast flip! A rocket the size of a small skyscraper turning 90 degrees in just a few seconds. That could have jarred something loose, too.
Hopefully we find out in the post-mortem. SpaceX doesn't typically give the public as much detail as we'd like, but they're pretty good at sharing the high-level reasons why something failed.
ITAR unfortunately limits what can be publicly released.
>SpaceX doesn't typically give the public as much detail as we'd like
It gives magnitudes more details than anyone else.
What was unexpected was the lack of images during the booster reentry. And I don't know where this "exploded on impact" comes from - no evidence of this so far, that I noticed. It feels more like it didn't make it to the water in one piece.
Yeah, the video doesn't show it hitting the water at all. It looks like it exploded earlier on in the descent.
Yeah they were pretty clear about intending to fly it until it broke up so that they could understand how hard of a turn they could make in the future without it going splat into the tower.
From what I could gather from the commentary, they were pushing the limits of the booster's control capability. But the booster exploded on engine ignition. They are separate aspects, though they may be related. The commentators also sounded like they were not expecting a failure at that stage. So, concerns may be warranted.
An explosion can be fine, but the details really matter. The yardstick here is whether this iteration was better than the last, and the pace of progress if so.
I don't think this flight reassured anyone that the Starship program is making the improvements we'd expect.
I was watching Everyday Astronaut's feed and he seemed a little bummed. I don't follow SpaceX launches closely enough to know, but when they plan to "fail on purpose" do they not mention it ahead of time?
Of all people, I would expect him to know this sort of information ahead of time, although maybe the booster failure was planned but he was bummed about some some of the other things that didn't work well.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6tP0il4z64
He was bummed about starship losing attitude control and failing to deploy the Starlink mockup satellites. Starship made it further than the two previous flights and progress is progress but being bummed is understandable.
It was mentioned ahead of time.
it was but it also failed much earlier than expected.
Yea, the super heavy booster was flying a refurbished engine from a previous super heavy flight.
Explosion was probably expected.
(It's actually the entire booster reflying this time; the reflown single engine was in January).
Oh, so it's one of the two boosters they caught with the chopsticks?
Dang, that's actually quite insane.
Shame that block2/block3 starship is such a mess.
The intended goal is to reuse those boosters, more than once, and without requiring weeks of inspection and maintenance.
Many spaceflight fans struggle to distinguish between F9 and Starship and think success with one guarantees another. Go back and read what Fred Brooks writes about second systems. The super heavy booster is extremely impressive, particularly the raptor engines and control systems. Their engineers need to be commended for that alone. The weight is questionable and it isn't clear how much the performance is compromised but its still a very impressive vehicle and future engine refinements are going to help.
The second stage remains a huge concern. The economics of Starship are predicated on cheap, rapid second stage reuse. That huge multi engine second stage is a lot more expensive than the F9's disposable single engine second stage. Creating a robust, rapidly reusable thermal management system for orbital re-entry is an unsolved problem. I don't believe anyone, including SpaceX has a solution.
With time and huge amounts of money they can iterate through the other problems and likely do a controlled re-entry and recovery with the second stage but the vehicle isn't going to be close to reusable. It is a massive problem and I think it makes a fiction of the entire program and turns it into a money pit.
If you piece the system out though. The engines, the control systems etc, there is a lot of good stuff there for another system. I think the Mars colonisation BS worked well to inspire the troops and raise money and political interest but they seem to be in a corner with this design. It is looking very possible this system will never enter commercial service.
2025: watching live footage from a doomed spaceship as it tumbles out of control through its own vented gases, all tinged red, as a synth soundtrack plays.
(The soundtrack was on the X.com stream, seems cut from this link.)
Though they missed an opportunity: Philip Glass (Koyaanisqatsi)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJrtROuQFfk&t=9s
Such a good movie... Do you happen to know which spacecraft this was?
It's very close to Apollo 11 but the match is not precise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUQgBPjGmAQ#t=35
AFIAK no one has ever done an exhaustive analysis of the provenance of all that stock footage.
This is an example of someone chasing it down. I don't think it's been done for all the Saturn V launches (Apollo 4 thru the last Skylab launch). That would be a big ask.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBITROWVcok
As a kid growing up in the 70's it was perfectly normal to see a documentary about Apollo 11 where they throw in the Apollo 4 Stage 2 ring separation like it was no big deal. The awareness of all these subtle differences is a recent development.
And also starting at 0:43 in that clip is the rocket that explodes, an Atlas-Centaur on its maiden flight on May 8, 1962. It was the Centaur upper stage that failed, but I believe we see the Atlas booster engines tumbling.
Official video: https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-...
Its venting gas and yawing again. None of that deploy and re-entry stuff is gonna happen.
The important part of this flight was not the booster but the Starship. Last two launches failed in a similar fashion a short time after separation. SpaceX will be in hot water if this launch is not showing some progress in that regard.
They did make major progress: this is the first time Starship completed SECO and successfully made it into stable orbit.
Unfortunately there was a fuel leak later that caused the craft to spin and made controlled reentry impossible.
There was no stable orbit, the ship was suborbital during the entire flight (as planned).
Really? Wikipedia says they "made it to orbital velocity", and I thought their original plan was to do a full orbit of the Earth before reentry.
This flight's failure is a great example of why doing a full orbit is a bad idea. It's quite close to orbital velocity but keeping it just short ensures it will re-enter in the predicted zone even if they lose control (as they did today).
Orbital velocity but not orbital trajectory.
Velocity is a vector, so it would be more proper to say "orbital speed". But no one does that.
Vectors are location independent, so theoretically any velocity with sufficiently high speed would be orbital velocity even if it was pointed directly at the planet, no?
For that matter, any velocity is orbital velocity, since at sufficient distance it would exactly perfectly counteract earth's gravitational field. Assuming there aren't any other gravitational fields out there to interfere.
No, not at all. This is flight 9. Flights 3-6 had a complete Starship suborbital trajectory with 5-6 landing softly in the ocean. On 7-8 Starship exploded before SECO. On 9 it kind of got as far as 3.
That was Block 1 Starship. Its the first for Block 2 starship.
I wonder if we will have a repeat for all of those problems when we get to Block 3...
Those leaks, debris ejection and the (mild) loss of attitude control seem to have started right after SECO. And that isn't very surprising because engine shutdown can cause huge disturbances (shock) in the engines and related plumbings. (I know this sounds contrary to intuition). So I wouldn't consider that milestone as a success, unless it emerges that those problems were unrelated to SECO or any other engine operation.
> I know this sounds contrary to intuition
Not at all. We have a flexible hose for our tap and the hydraulic hammer smashes it good when you quickly close the water tap
That could very well be the case. I can't be certain. However, it's also a well-known problem in engine design. High flow rate fluid lines like propellant lines are often protected against fluid hammers. That may come in the form of a gas reservoir to absorb the pressure spike (sort of like surge suppression capacitors in electronic circuits) or as a check valve connected to a re-circulation path (like snubber/flyback diodes in electronic circuits).
The reason why I said it sounds counterintuitive is that I suspect that the flame extinction inside the combustion chamber also causes strong mechanical shocks. However, I don't know how that works and I could be mistaken.
Yeah, sure, huge success as always. I fully understand the iterative nature of this, but they honestly seem to be hitting some roadblocks on the design of this ship.
Everything that's never been done before seems un-doable until it's been done. Then it seems obvious and as if it's always been happening.
I don’t think people are questioning the feasibility of Starship’s core design.
However the program has been in development for quite a while (well over a decade) and seems to have a lot of internal issues. Be that poor management, scope creep, or whatever the process looks flawed.
> However the program has been in development for quite a while
No longer than other rocket programs. The speed of development is frankly mind blowing considering it's scale. Regulatory hurdles seem to be the biggest delaying factor. Which goes a long way toward explaining Musk's political activities AFAICT.
> and seems to have a lot of internal issues. Be that poor management, scope creep, or whatever the process looks flawed.
It seems like you're making the mistake of equating SpaceX's hardware-rich development philosophy (i.e. just fly it and see what happens) to NASA's check-it-ten-times-before-flight risk-averse methodology. Different approaches. Russia followed the former, much like SpaceX, and Soyuz is second only to Falcon 9 in number of launches. Arguably, more can be learned, more quickly, and for lower cost following the hardware-rich approach. You just have to deal with the optics and armchair rocket engineers declaring every launch a failure until they aren't.
Saturn V development started in January 1962. Starship development started sometime before 2018. Generously, we can say SpaceX has been developing it for at least 6 years at this point. By the same point, January 1968, the Saturn V had launched, orbited the Earth, and simulated a trans-lunar injection. In December 1968 the Saturn V launched astronauts onboard Apollo 8 to fly around the Moon.
So it is getting tough to say that Starship development is proceeding fast compared to other projects.
Is it SpaceX philosophy or specifically Starship development philosophy? Because the development of the Falcon seemed to follow a pretty standard path. First they had three failures and two successes with the Falcon 1, and then they scaled up to Falcon 9, which worked on the first attempt.
The work towards booster landing and reuse was more iterative, but it was a special case. They had to be careful with the changes, because they were testing in production. The first priority was always delivering the payload. But once the booster had done its job, it was available for experiments.
Elon's spoken at length about the choice between design philosophies since the early days of Falcon. I'd submit that trashing Falcon 1 after the first successful flight to build Falcon 9 is an example of exactly that. Part of Falcon's success so early on was due to the choice of intentionally simple systems - a single pintle injector in the Merlin engine, RP1 propellant which is well understood, lots of relatively safe choices. And lots of work with the grasshopper test vehicles. But on flight 1 of Falcon 9 they flew Dragon. Flight 6 used hardware revision 1.1 and was the first to attempt a propulsive return. Flight 9 added landing legs. They made changes to basically every flight until Block 5 with flight 54.
>but it was a special case
Starship is the biggest rocket ever attempted, with uncommon propellant, most advanced engine cycle and it is designed to be fully reusable. Falcon was safe retreading of known ground comparatively.
> Russia followed the former, much like SpaceX, and Soyuz is second only to Falcon 9 in number of launches.
Yeah, but it failed with more complex rockets (the soviet N1), where it just kept blowing up.
N1 would have worked eventually with enough effort. The larger problem is that Korolev died and his deputy was far less politically capable.
Its questionable if it would have ever worked
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/apollo-moon-khrus...
> Korolev was not a scientist, not a designer: he was a brilliant manager. Korolev's problem was his mentality. His intent was to somehow use the launcher he had. [The launcher was called N1]. It was designed in 1958 for a different purpose and with a limited payload of about 70 tons.] His philosophy was, let's not work by stages [as is usual in spacecraft design], but let's assemble everything and then try it. And at last it will work. There were several attempts and failures with Lunnik [a series of unmanned Soviet moon probes]. Sending man to the moon is too complicated, too complex for such an approach. I think it was doomed from the very beginning.
> The speed of development is frankly mind blowing considering it’s scale
It’s been in some level of development for well over a decade. Back in 2018 they changed the idea from using carbon composites to stainless steel and renamed the project Starship but in no way can you call it a fast process.
> hardware-rich development philosophy
If it was actually working it’s a perfectly viable strategy, but it seems to be slowing things down.
> It’s been in some level of development for well over a decade. Back in 2018 they changed the idea from using carbon composites to stainless steel and renamed the project Starship but in no way can you call it a fast process.
How long did the last fully reusable superheavy lift rocket take to develop? There's never been one you say? Right. So you have no metric for measurement. The closest equivalent: SLS is flying hardware who's design originated in the 60s, and Blue Origin began development 24 years ago.
Starship is developing at light speed by comparison to anything approaching it's size.
Still think it's happening slowly? Feel free to build one yourself in less time. I'll wait.
They’ve taken longer to develop Starship than NASA did with the Space Shuttle.
Space shuttle development can be traced to the Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-20_Dyna-Soar ) which began in 1957, the MiG-105 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-105 ) from 1965, and the Silbervogel project ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbervogel ) from 1941. The space shuttle didn't fly until 1981. Try again.
I’m not sure you’ve really thought that argument through to it’s conclusion.
> the MiG-105 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-105 ) from 1965, and the Silbervogel project ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbervogel ) from 1941.
Starship can trace its development back to the 1920’s seeing as the team leveraged that research, if you’re going to use such a meaningless definition including USSR projects as a legacy here Starship loses simply because of the much later launch date.
> if you’re going to use such a meaningless definition including USSR projects as a legacy here
So you're not even aware of how the shuttle was developed and are just making ill-informed assumptions. Got it.
I’m well aware of the link, but again Starship shares similar links with much older projects.
We can trace them both down to liquid rocket propulsion, but one flew in 1980’s the other is still in R&D.
> I’m well aware of the link
Then why don't you tell us about it?
> Then why don't you tell us about it?
Because you’re obviously trying to deflect from a lost argument. Starship has clearly been mismanaged and nothing you’ve suggested has actually countered that core issue.
Well, I've provided plenty of links and facts. You've provided your unique opinions, little else, and seem wholly unaware of the development history of these vehicles you claim to know better than rocket engineers about.
Even if I use your example and timeline:
Shuttle: 1968 (project announced) - 1981 (first launch): 13 years
Starship: 2012 (project announced) - 2022 (first launch): 10 years
Starship's several years ahead of Shuttle development.
Hilarious conversation. Thanks for providing laughs for the evening.
The difference here is that STS-1 achieved orbit and flew 37 times around the earth, while Starship flight 1 didn't even explode correctly after failing to keep its designated path. Starship has yet to achieve orbit, in fact, in 2025 - passing the 13 year mark of STS-1.
And note that the actual shuttle that was launched in 1981, the Columbia, went on to conduct 27 more successful missions (until its tragic end many years later). So it was already successfully reusable from its first test flight (with the known caveats around cost of refurbishment).
> with the known caveats around cost of refurbishment
Only the orbiter was refurbishable (not fully and rapidly reusable like Starship - booster reuse was demonstrated today), which took 6 months, and cost $2 Billion per launch.
The whole Starship development program is slated to cost about as much as 5 Shuttle launches.
Nearly 50 year old technology is generally inferior to modern equivalents, that hardly an argument that Starship’s R&D process is going well.
Again, feel free to point to any rocket of the size and reusability of Starship which is further along in development or has developed faster. None exist.
> Nearly 50 year old technology is generally inferior to modern equivalents <
Feel free to counter the points being addressed rather than attack a straw man. Obviously if Starship was strictly worse there’d be no point in trying to develop it.
Suggesting a modern preproduction car is better than a Fiat Argenta from the early 80’s isn’t a recommendation, same deal with Starship.
that first launch included a crew, it's 2025 and starship is nowhere near that
Yeah, well, apparently neither was Shuttle. RIP Challenger and Columbia and crews.
No fatalities with Dragon yet, thankfully. It seems to me that Dragon and Shuttle are much more directly comparable. Falcon 9 throws away it's second stage, which is still less than Shuttle did. And Dragon requires a similar level of refurbishment to Shuttle. Shuttle could carry 27,000kg to LEO whereas Falcon 9 can carry 22,800kg to LEO.
Starship is slated for 200,000kg to LEO. It's in an entirely different class.
The aspect of Starship I find craziest - it's lack of launch abort system at this stage of development - was a problem Shuttle suffered it's whole life. And Shuttle didn't have the engine redundancy of Starship or Falcon 9.
golf clap
Yep, you’ve got nothing. Starship even borrows heavily from the shuttle program using a lifting body design etc.
One last link for ya: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection
I’d rather have a coherent debate, but I’ll take a laugh instead.
At least have the dignity of walking away.
I guess we're both laughing then! lol
Comparing a project by a private company to the most powerful government in world history is a little disingenuous
If we were comparing two projects in 2025 I would absolutely agree.
Except SpaceX is spending ~2 billion dollars per year which on the surface is well below the space shuttle (though not that far), but modern aerospace projects have massive advantages over these early programs so simple inflation calculators don’t really capture the cost changes well.
> It’s been in some level of development for well over a decade. Back in 2018 they changed the idea from using carbon composites to stainless steel and renamed the project Starship but in no way can you call it a fast process.
Relative to the less ambitious Space Shuttle and New Glenn projects, it seems to be progressing at good pace. They already demonstrated landing and reflight of the lower stage, and it does seem likely that they will land the upper stage this year.
They keep flying old spaceships they built before flaws became apparent in tests. Presumably it'll get better as they work through the backlog.
They have succeeded in all parts of the flight plan on different missions. So the concept is proven out, but they just need to improve reliability to string it all together.
Why engine cut-off is such a important milestone?
in case you decide you don't want to go to space anymore!
They successfully performed the first Starship lower stage reflight, which was previously only achieved by Falcon 9 (and other suborbital rockets which are much smaller).
I'm rooting for SpaceX because no one else in the world is even attempting to do what they're doing.
Every single time SpaceX has set a goal, there were detractors who claimed they would never accomplish it. And along the way, there were plenty of failures that almost proved the detractors right. But every time--so far at least--SpaceX persevered and eventually succeeded.
When SpaceX decided to re-use their boosters, most people thought they were idiots. They would never be able to do it, and even if they did, it would never make financial sense. Even today, SpaceX is the only company to fly with "flight-proven" boosters, but no one is skeptical anymore. Almost every new launch vehicle, including several Chinese ones, are designed to be re-usable.
When SpaceX decided to build the Falcon Heavy, with 27 first-stage engines, many people thought it would fail. "Remember the N1," they said, which was doomed from the start because they could never get all its engines to work together. But the Falcon Heavy worked and gave us those indelible views of twin boosters landings.
When SpaceX decided to build Starlink, many people thought it was crazy. 5,000 satellites!? Are you crazy? How are you going to manufacture, much less launch that many satellites? Today they have 7,500 working satellites and they are literally launching more twice a week. Starlink has changed the communications satellite industry (there are at least 3 serious competitors).
I remember the first Starship launch, when 5 of its 33 engines failed almost immediately. Skeptics thought the Raptor engine was dead on arrival. Too complicated compared to the proven Merlins and way too unreliable to power Starship. They will never get it to work. And yet, in later flights, all 33 engines worked perfectly all the way to ascent. No one worries about the booster anymore.
When I first heard they were going to catch a returning booster at the launch tower I thought they were mad. I thought that was a long-term plan that might happen sometime in 2030, after they refined the system. But no, they went ahead and caught it on Flight 5. Since then they have caught two other boosters and have reflown one in Flight 9.
People who don't follow the space industry don't yet realize how revolutionary Starship it. It is not just the largest rocket in history; its crazy goal is to be able to launch, land, and then launch again with minimal refurbishment and minimal cost.
If all they wanted to do is launch something to orbit and discard the rocket, SpaceX could have done it on their first flight with a much less ambitious design. The reason it's taking so long (and will continue to take so long) is because their ultimate goal is something no one has come close to achieving: a rocket that can be reused like an airliner.
Musk once quipped that SpaceX is good at turning 'impossible' into 'late'. It's true that they have missed almost every single deadline they have ever set. But it's also true that the things SpaceX has done were once deemed to be impossible.
And that's why I'm rooting for them, no matter how many ships they blow up.
F9 was on paper conservative tech, seen as technically possible, but operationally difficult / economically not feasible for startup. Starship pushing so many boundaries, it is indeed revolutionary, many critics thinks it's a technical moonshot. I want it to work, but I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't, or very, very late.
Empirically, you're right. Starship has taken much longer than F9 just to reliably put something in orbit.
What I don't know--because I'm not in the field--is whether that's because of design complexity (size, need for header tanks, etc.) or because the Starship team is not as tight (larger team, weaker leaders, distracted Musk).
Maybe both.
> F9 was on paper conservative tech, seen as technically possible, but operationally difficult / economically not feasible for startup.
Landing and reusing boosters was seen as highly advanced tech, not at all conservative.
It was conservative in that IIRC the criticism against F9 at the time, landing/1st stage reuse was seen as technically feasible, but economically not. VS criticisms of starship (even before people starting hating on Elon)... it's not technically impossible, but Starship stacked with multiple F9 resuable tier generation leap in requirements. It's another level of difficulty in terms of undertaking.
IMO economically, F9 + starlink pretty good business model. Starship + _____? It's not Moon or Mars. IMO once DoD gives SpaceX a few 100 billions in Golden Dome contracts, starshipwill start to seem much more viable / inevitable once it's fate is tied to strategic space weaponization. On topic DoD, let's not forget there's probably trillions $$$ of wasted technically feasible / moonshot prototypes from US MiC over the decades. Starship might end in that pile, but I'm optimistic it won't be, not because space but weapons in space.
> IMO economically, F9 + starlink pretty good business model. Starship + _____?
I think the best business model is Starship + Starlink. Starship can launch a lot more and larger satellites than Falcon 9.
I wouldn't bet on other big Starship customers, defense spending, space tourism, Mars plans etc. Those are highly speculative. But satellite Internet has a clear use case and a huge market.
That's a separate evolution though. The original/basic F9 was (by the standards of the time) an economically viable rocket without first stage reusability.
It seems it makes more sense to compare Starship to the modern version of Falcon 9, which does support lower stage reuse.
People rooting against SpaceX are just rooting against Musk TBH. That's why all these launches have so much negativity these days. And these people are very online. But viewed through a neutral lens, it's a clear positive for humanity that these rockets are being developed. I wouldn't let the online discourse put a bad taste in your mouth.
It's probably impossible to get a neutral take on Musk or any of his companies' operations anymore. The guy's a lightning rod for the extremes of both sides. There is too much breathless, gushing fandom (OP's comment), too much negative detraction and belittling, and very little actual neutral engineering talk that happens in any of these forums.
Agreed. And unfortunately it's Musk's own fault.
It's a shame to me because I don't really give a damn about the guy, I just like space and think rockets are cool, but we have a situation where a potentially revolutionary rocket is being overshadowed by the CEOs antics to the point that people are rooting for the rocket to fail. It's tragic, in a way.
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I don't root for people that salute like he does (no sure I can saw what's actually called here). Period.
> through a neutral lens, it's a clear positive for humanity that these rockets are being developed
Musk's cuts at USAid have caused an ongoing humanitarian crisis and some 300,000 deaths, mostly children[0]. I think if you're coming from a neutral, utilitarian point of view then SpaceX's role in this atrocity outweighs any realistic estimate of benefit to humanity.
[0] https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=titl...
I guess by that line of thinking, everyone who has ever been involved with Musk has a "role in the atrocity". Everyone who ever bought a Tesla, everyone who ever used PayPal. Now that I think about it... SpaceX launches US government satellites... and the US is a democracy... that means every single person in the US is culpable. Thank you for opening my eyes, I hate everyone and everything now.
I should also say that HN is much more positive on SpaceX than, e.g. ArsTechnica. There’s no point in reading the comments over there. At least here the criticism of SpaceX is interesting and well-thought-out (usually).
In general, the opinion on SpaceX among space enthusiasts seems to be overall very positive, and it is usually only people who are not very interested in space that comment negatively on SpaceX -- but only since Musk got involved with the Republicans. Or at least that's the case on Ars Technica, which tends to be pretty partisan.
It's a clear positive for SpaceX. How much humanity stands to gain has yet to be seen.
As with anything else, it depends on your point of view. Does Hubble benefit humanity or should we have spent the money helping the homeless instead?
There is no correct answer; only preferences. I happen to like SpaceX’s goals.
Ah, yes, of course. I wasn't trying to make quite the esoteric point. More specifically that currently, if starship succeeds, it will be good business for SpaceX and enable them to launch many more satellites around earth at a cheaper cost but greater scale. I don't think this will be much of a positive for humans in general (beyond the current state).
Now if the lofty goals of enabling Mars and Moon habitation come to fruition, I would take a different view. For now I consider achieving that goal to be science fiction, but hopefully that changes in my lifetime.
Agreed! That makes sense.
Agreed! And thank you for putting it in perspective.
Everyday Astronaut feed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6tP0il4z64
I enjoyed this video of [what turns out to be an unrelated] explosion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep8XJanoFgw
At about 0:39 a pressurized tank of something does a whimsical loop-de-loop into the plume of fire and it's hard not to feel like the little guy is just having so much fun.
That's the flight of SN9 from 4 years ago, not the IFT9 flight.
That's Starship SN9 (hop tests within the atmosphere) from a few years ago, unrelated to today's launch.
this headline is wrong. It didn't explode on impact, it exploded when they tried to do the landing burn. We think.
We don't really know, just yet, because there's no video of this, despite the headline implying that there's video of the explosion.
The official SpaceX stream is much higher quality with better camera angles and commentary in my opinion.
https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-...
"The media could not be played."
Unlike YouTube, the X player is increasingly broken.
Works fine for me. Are you blocking X?
No, but X blocks me because I prefer not to create an account.
It only requires an account if you access it from a phone. Using desktop and there's no issue (which is better anyway as most phones can't display 4K content).
It might not like Firefox, Ad Block, or something. I don’t care enough to troubleshoot because the best outcome is that I can access X.
Maybe I missed it but when the booster was supposed to land or begin the landing burn it was lost by the cameras so it probably impacted somewhere other than where it was supposed to land.
It exploded at the start of the landing burn, not on impact. This was the first attempt to re-use a booster.
Booster was not intended to be recovered. They said before launch they were intentionally testing how far they could push it until it exploded so they knew what the true limits are.
The commentary gives me the impression that the booster didn't fail due to the reasons they were expecting it to. I think that they were expecting a successful engine relight and an eventual destruction due to loss of vehicle control.
“We had a couple of issues, but importantly we did launch on time”
they were 5 mins late, so almost on time.
Any time during the launch window is "on time".
Also, Starship is out of control now.
What do you mean? We don't know where it will land?
It lost attitude control not all that long after the engines cut off, so it didn't reenter under control, heat shield first -- but it was under control while the engines were running.
orbital mechanics puts bounds on where the parts that survive reentry will land (inside the declared danger zone).
Here is the obligatory summary/analysis by Scott Manley: https://youtube.com/watch?v=aqQM1AfpSZI
SpaceX is, for many of us, what made many of us (myself included) not realize what a raging moron Elon Musk was and is for the longest time. I've come to believe that SpaceX succeeded in spite of Elon, not because of him. Whoever is really in charge has probably built an organization that is designed to insulate itself from Elon's influence.
And Falcon 9 is an unmitited success, to be sure. SpaceX basically owns the launch market because of it.
But eventually the chickens come home to roost and I really wonder if Starship will be the downfall of SpaceX. Let me explain.
Commercial space launches to LEO are SpaceX's bread and butter. There are over 100 a year now and whatever the cost of refurbishing used Falcon 9 first stage boosters is, I think the volume of launches (even if you exclude the induced demand from Starlink launches) has locked in an economic advantage for commercial launches for the next 10-20 years, in a similar way the 747 did for Boeing in the commercial aviation market. It's just that dominant.
But you have to ask what problem Starship solves. SpaceX already has a heavier launch capability (ie Falcon Heavy) but there's little demand for it. There have been 11 Falcon Heavy launches total AFAICT. So what is Starship going to launch? You might say that there will be new payloads once the launch capability exists.but we've simply seen no evidence of this thus far.
Starship is more complex, specifically the Raptor engines. You have two cooled propellants instead of one (because of coking with Merlin engines). In-orbit refueling is going to take so long to prove and perfect for some of the stated goals.
And Starship just isn't designed to land on things with a human crew. If a Starship booster lands on Moon (or Mars, which will never happen), your astronauts are 40 meters in the air. This is... far from ideal.
The US government simply won't allow SpaceX to fail. It's a national security issue. So I guess this doesn't matter. And it may be that the Falcon 9 cash cow props the company up from any number of boondoggles.
If Starship reaches its reliability and cost targets, it will lower the LEO payload cost per kg significantly but that's a lot of ifs and a ton of investment. But if you're not sending up a huge payload, you just don't need that. Starlink is fairly unique in being such a large constellation on similar orbits that you can launch them on a single orbit. Launching multiple satellites in vastly different orbits is not something a single rocket can do.
Starship is going to launch the next gen Starlink satellites which SpaceX desperately needs to get in the air as with 5 million subscribers their service is being over saturated around the world. Especially in the developing world and many other places where Starlink hands down beats terrestrials offerings.
In terms of Elon's contribution, you couldn't be more wrong. It was Elon's decision to pursue Starlink - a business model that had bankrupted all previous companies that attempted it. Elon's decision to pursue reusability which made Starlink feasible. Elon's decision to fire all the upper management of Starlink when the program wasn't going well - and in under a year of that decision had completely redesigned satellites in orbit. And now it's Elon's decision to pursue Starship that is a money furnace, but if it pays off Starlink 3.0 could bring in an order of magnitude more money than it does now.
The same high risk, high reward methodology with a good dose of micro-management is how he's brought six distinct companies to multi billion dollar valuations. And how he's succeeded despite the incessant reporting of his or his companies imminent failure.
High risk high reward doesn't always pay off. Sometimes you gotta swallow a Cybertruck, or a $44 bln Twitter acquisition, or a high-margin Nvidia-fuelled AI datacenter, or a political lobbying shitstorm. All of which fall squarely in the lap of Mr. Musk as the adamant leader pulling the strings.
If you're correct and Elon is to be credited with these administrative successes, then turnabout is fair play in assessing his entirely unnecessary business strategies. Let's not fool ourselves into thinking Tesla would be undervalued if Elon hadn't bought Twitter. I heard the "underrated genius" shtick when Jobs died, and then every subsequent biography echoed his personal struggles and failures he hid to prop up his cult of personality.
Twitter is once again worth $44 billion which arguably was an inflated price at the time of purchase. Tesla is a trillion dollar company. xAI is reportedly at $120 billion.
Idk man, big picture, I see nothing, but success with the media focusing on just the speed bumps along the way
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/19/value-elo...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/technology/xai-elon-musk-...
Let's look at Elon's accomplishments:
- Ousted from Paypal for pure incompetence. Made money anyway from vested stock riding the dot-com bubble;
- Bought his way into Tesla then engaged in historical revisionism to paint himself a "founder". Tesla is a weird company because it defies any fundamentals. It seems to be valued between $500k and $1M per car sold in a year, which is just ludicrous. Tesla, as a company, has only survived by government largesse, be they carbon tax credits or the DOE loan in the late 2000s that saved Tesla from bankruptcy.
The only thing propping up Tesla now is import bans on Chinese EVs. Tesla isn't a car copmpany or an energy company. It's a proxy for investing in Elon directly. When Elon's relationship with the administration inevitably sours, Tesla's fortunes will sink as well. European Tesla sales have already dropped ~50% due to brand damage. The admin has cancelled an EV credit program that Tesla relied upon.
- SpaceX. This is a success. I still contend SpaceX succeeded in spite of Elon, not because of him;
- SolarCity. Failure. This became a recurring trend as SolarCity ended up owing a lot of money to SpaceX so the Tesla buyout was basically Elon using one of his companies to rescue another of his companies that owed a ton of money to yet another of his companies;
- Twitter. This one is hilarious because he completely overpaid for it. It seems like he was goaded into buying it by Peter Thiel and tried to get out of the deal until the Delaware Chancery Court forced him to complete the sale. By all accounts its lost 70-85% of its $44B purchase price. Elon ended up raising a bunch of money for xAI and basically used that to buy out his bad investment in TWitter, which for anyone else would be corporate fraud on a massive scale.
And what does Elon do all day anyway? Because it seems all he does is pretend to be a gamer and tweets nonstops. When does he actually manage any of these companies? In fact, his tweeting actually hurts his companies, Tesla in particular.
I'm honestly surprised there's still anyone who clings to the myth of Elon given all the evidence we have to the contrary.
Electric cars are mainstream now. Reusable rockets are real. Twitter won an election and spawned XAI. Elon is the richest man in the world. Yeah bro, he's a moron. Sure.
Tesla was almost bankrupt when Musk went to the Department of Energy Loan Office and said he had an investment from Mercedes to get $465 million dollar loan to save the company. That singular act was why you even hear about Elon today. Without the loan, he would not have gotten the Fremont factory and project WhiteStar would have been dead.
Without that loan, Musk couldn't use his wealth to reinvest into SpaceX and also would have had a damaged reputation and credibility. SpaceX would have survived, but it's development would have been much much slower. You wouldn't have Falcon Heavy and Starlink, and Starship today.
So thank your government folks for creating both the electric vehicle market and private space market! Without the government creating these markets, there would be no richest man Musk today. So thank the ATVM program authored by Senator Stabenow and NASA's COTS program. The point here is to illustrate the huge amount of power the government has to pick winners and losers. That it is the government that creates markets to play in and money to play with.
It's not fair. His dad had a partial stake in an emerald mine!
And later went bankrupt, and not the company bankruptcy kind, the personal bankruptcy kind.
> I'm honestly surprised there's still anyone who clings to the myth of Elon given all the evidence we have to the contrary.
If only there was some clear metric or way to quantify someone's business success... Hmmmm...
Reading this comment gave me flashbacks of every time a non-engineer bean counter rug-pulled the funding from an almost complete project because they didn't understand or trust the engineering process.
The starship program seems more likely to suffer from overpopularity due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Falcon Heavy is intended for flying payloads that are very large or required very high energy orbits. For smaller payloads, Falcon 9 is more cost-effective, which is why SpaceX uses it for Starlink currently.
However, if Starship works, it will drastically reduce cost to orbit and become the workhorse for basically all launches.
> But you have to ask what problem Starship solves.
We already know that — they've been very clear about it from the start. Starship is designed to get to humans to Mars.
>SpaceX is, for many of us, what made many of us (myself included) not realize what a raging moron Elon Musk was and is for the longest time. I've come to believe that SpaceX succeeded in spite of Elon, not because of him. Whoever is really in charge has probably built an organization that is designed to insulate itself from Elon's influence.
Sorry to shatter your illusions, but Musk is SpaceX's founder, CEO, and chief engineer. He has a physics degree from Penn and was admitted to an engineering graduate program at Stanford but worked in Silicon Valley instead, where he made the fortune that he used to finance SpaceX.
Musk's biographer tweeted the pages from his book <https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942> discussing how in late 2020 Musk suggested, then insisted against considerable opposition from his engineers, that Superheavy be caught with chopsticks instead of landing on legs like Falcon 9.
Also according to the book, Musk is the person who suggested and, against considerable opposition from his engineers, insisted on Starship switching to stainless steel instead of carbon fiber <https://x.com/richardprice100/status/1728106606616015097>.
(Hint: Musk was right and his engineers were wrong. Both times.)
PS - if you bring up Gwynne Shotwell, look up what a chief operating officer is responsible for (and not responsible for, relative to the CEO).
Nothing you've said contradicts my comment.
First, I couldn't care less what his biographer said. These aren't statements made under oath. The biographer isn't even a journalist. They're a propagandist. It's meaningless.
For many people, they think Elon is smart until he starts speaking about a topic you know and then you realize what a narcissistic moron he is. Like I already knew he was a moron but when he started talking about my area of expertise (software engineering), oh boy, it was way worse than I had imagined, specifically in the wake of his Twitter takeover.
It's endlessly fascinating to me how many people desperately cling to the myth of meritocracy, either because they align with the politics of the myth's purveyors or that they simply want to believe that their hard work will be rewarded.
A cursory examination of Elon's history exposes just what an incompetent moron he is. For example, his disastrous run at Paypal [1].
As for going to Penn and Stanford, so? George W. Bush went to Havard and Yale. So did Ten Cruz. Donald Trump bought his way into UPenn (Wharton, specifically). Roughly a third of these colleges are "legacies" or otherwise people buy their way in.
[1]: http://www.bhpanel.org/failing-upwards-the-story-of-elon-mus...
Starlink pays for Starship, and Starship accelerates Starlink. This seems useful enough.
Summary: launched to the point that starship separated successfully. The booster appears to have exploded on its landing burn. They never intended to catch this booster but they didn't expect it to explode during the landing burn. Starship meanwhile got all the way to SECO, which is farther than the previous two missions. They were not able to open the pez-dispenser door to launch the starlink dummies. Some time after that it became clear that starship was tumbling out of control. They did not attempt to relight the engines. Reentry was uncontrolled.
One important additional detail is that the Starship started shedding debris (both inside and outside) and tumbling slowly, right after SECO. A leak also seems to have developed at the same time - which would explain the gradually worsening tumble rates. Leaks are unfortunately difficult to distinguish from intentional venting, if you're unfamiliar with the venting scheme. However, it's more or less surely a leak(s), especially given that the same were not observed in previous flights.
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That I've heard of, Elon's Jeckyll/Hyde issues have been well-known at SpaceX for twoish decades. Employees (not just engineers) who couldn't look past those would self-select out over that same time frame.
Flipside, people who prioritize working for an actual, high-functioning rocket company have been self-selecting in to SpaceX over the past decade or so.
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Reason 1: General Fandom
Reason 2: Consider SpaceX's Falcon 9 record in terms of flight pace, total mass delivered, etc. This gives ample reason for optimism that Starship will ultimately work... though the flight test record of Starship so far has been notably spotty.
SpaceX does not seem inclined to give up anytime remotely soon, is bringing in tremendous cash flow via Starlink and has nearly unlimited ability to raise capital. Musk presumably has enough influence in Washington to keep the FAA on board... and that is the only permission they need to keep trying as long as it takes.
Not trying to diminish SpaceX overall success and innovation - I still remember watching live the first landing of the Falcon 9 - had tears in my eyes.
But this feels very different.
Then maybe you should watch all the times they failed before they didn't https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ
Oh man, couldn’t disagree with this more strongly. SpaceX make an effort to be pretty transparent about what they’re trying to achieve and what constitutes failure. FSD is vapourware; SpaceX has been successfully launching and landing - now catching - rocket first stages for years. This is quality stuff.
FSD ain't vaporware, the beta program is very public, and it's getting progressively better at a rapid pace.
The release estimates and Elon's statements about it were BS for sure, but it's a very real thing.
I will bite - Tesla has been selling, for the past 10 years, cars that were supposedly becoming Fully Self Driving 'before the end of the year' for the past 10 years straight.
Let's say somebody bought it 5 years ago, then sold his car last year. From his perspective - was it vaporwave or not ?
Some day, it will work of course. There are other companies operating robotaxi on scale for quite a long time already. It's just not that day yet, not for Tesla at least.
Sure, but I'm talking about the tech, not the buyers who got screwed. Saying that FSD is vaporware because it is not available for a lot of Tesla owners is like saying that Waymo is vaporware because it is only launched in certain cities.
Perspective right, the definition:
> software or hardware that has been advertised but is not yet available to buy,
for me, if I would've bought a Tesla, it would be vapourware for sure: Elon advertised it every chance he got and gets (this summer we will have it!), people bought it because of that and it's not there: that's vapourware.
The feature currently called "full self driving" is just a preview and prototype.
The real thing, the broken promise, is level 4 or 5 and it's not available to anyone. They're not even at level 3.
I see what you mean, but I guess it depends on your definition of vapourware. I don’t think whether it’s publicly available is determinative. That fact that it’s called “full self-driving”, combined with the claims made about (let alone the money taken for it), and the length of time taken, render it vapourware for me. Duke Nukem Forever was the platonic vapourware, until it released as a complete product, at which point it ceased being vapourware. I don’t think anyone believes that FSD is the finished article, and those last few percent are critical where human lives are at risk. But I can see that reasonable minds may differ. It’s not a precise term.
Failure is part of the process and they're quite open about it and have a wonderful sense of humor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ
Every launch is a learning experience and leads toward success.
Should they not be lighthearted and optimistic? Or did you leave a comment just to vent some of your personal grievances with a dash of JAQing off?
is there a better choice for that funding? as far as i know spacex has been and is still doing things better than any alternative.
> Feels like FSD for the past 10 years all over again (this time funded directly by US taxpayers).
Neither SpaceX nor Starship is subsidized in any way. SpaceX does have a contract for providing a Starship-based lander for Artemis's HLS, but that is (as with all other SpaceX government contracts) paid based on benchmarks and/or final delivery.
success theatrics
paid the karma tax there haha, predictable though.
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Getting some good video from inside starship. Any info on how tall the interior is?