31–40 of 83 posts
I'm saddend by how little I care. I used to follow this quite intensely, and wished space-X the best. But with the owners antics, I just can't get myself to care that much. At the very least, that is sad for all the hardworking people at space-X.
What did their boss do that makes you feel so so sad?
I'm saddend by how little I care. I used to follow this quite intensely, and wished space-X the best. But with the owners antics, I just can't get myself to care that much. At the very least, that is sad for all the hardworking people at space-X.
The development timeline has been so strange. Falcon 9 was made so quickly compared to Starship. I would have expected a working rocket would have been quick - especially given they have a wealth of experience making the first one. And then I would have expected a protracted period of nailing down the landing and reuse And yet.. just getting this thing to orbit has been seemingly as hard as catching it coming down Do…
It's pretty obvious that the programme has had issues that I don't think SpaceX were prepared for, in the parts that aren't the a priori obvious hard problems. In that sense, it just hasn't been as well executed as they'd like. Especially their difficulties with weight and payload that are probably why they frontloaded so many design changes before letting it settle.
Then there's some significant fraction where SpaceX really has intentionally done the 'rapid iteration' thing, and keeps flying unfinalized designs in boundary-testing ways on an in-progress factory system. For all Starship has flown badly, it's not like even the easier competition is flying much well in the meantime. Starship flies absurdly frequently.
And this is in part that SpaceX aren't just building a rocket with 2-3x the liftoff thrust of a Saturn V, aren't just building a rocket with first stage reuse, aren't just building a rocket with unprecedented complete second stage reuse, they're also building it to be cheap and mass produced in a factory. Big is hard. Reuse is hard. Cheap is hard. Factories are hard. Makes sense the rocket is hard!
Then there's also the point that while Starship has been a mixed bag, it has also achieved a lot. Its last flight was extremely solid, and really did show the whole mission profile down to soft and positionally-accurate drill landings of both stages. Nobody else has done what Starship has done.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this something you think they can or should fix?
Been a while since I've looked at available APIs, but can't the browser handle conversions into its own local system TZ? If it's going by IP geolocation, I would call that a bug.
In this case, SpaceX seems to be using UNIX timestamps(1) which is probably fed to a combination of Date and Intl to obtain a localized date string. Extrapolating the country where the user is located is not really rocket science either. But, if my context is somehow tampered with (VPN, internal clock, browser settings…), then I will get a potentially "wrong" date, for whatever definition of "wrong".
The problem is fundamentally the same on the server side because you can only rely on the information you get… which might be wrong.
So either you take the safest route, which is to display the local time of the organization or its UTC representation and let visitors figure out their local date on their own, or you take a somewhat riskier one, which is to try to display a localized date to your users and accept the potential flaws of the method.
[1] https://sxcontent9668.azureedge.us/cms-assets/future_mission...
Whats the tine frame for starship to be working?
Flight 11 is the last of the 'Block 2' Starships, so not 11, but potentially Flight 12 could be a successful derisking mission of Block 3, and then Flight 13 would be first full operational mission. Actual full reuse could follow soon after that.
The optimistic case is that they've demonstrated everything they need to except for having a fully reliable heat shield, but they also seem to have a workable plan for the heat shield for literally the first time in the program's history.
The pessimistic case is that Block 2 was rough, and making mistakes doesn't prevent an organization from making more mistakes. If things continue to go wrong, it could be arbitrarily far out.
Wikipedia has a compilation of what's on the agenda:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starship_launches#Futu...
The development timeline has been so strange. Falcon 9 was made so quickly compared to Starship. I would have expected a working rocket would have been quick - especially given they have a wealth of experience making the first one. And then I would have expected a protracted period of nailing down the landing and reuse And yet.. just getting this thing to orbit has been seemingly as hard as catching it coming down Do…
Was the falcon 9 that much faster? They also had issues with the initial launches of falcon 1 and 9. Plus they did not start with reusable rockets like they are here - it took years and many landing failures to get there. And of course the scale is a totally separate ballpark - falcon was in a scale that was well known, starship is in a scale rarely worked with. Probably the closest comparable rocket to starship woul…
Falcon 9 was announced in 2005
First launch in 2010
By the third flight they were delivering to the ISS
Starship .. it's a bit unclear when they started designing it b/c they kept changing the design. But It's been in design for ~10 years.
> As of August 26, 2025, Starship has launched 10 times, with 5 successful flights and 5 failures.
10 launches.. and not even in orbit. Not to speak of ISS. I'm sure they'll make it work eventually, but I would expect with experience the design time would decrease, not increase. Starting from zero, making the first rocket engine has got to be much much harder than making an improved iteration (even if more complex)
The development timeline has been so strange. Falcon 9 was made so quickly compared to Starship. I would have expected a working rocket would have been quick - especially given they have a wealth of experience making the first one. And then I would have expected a protracted period of nailing down the landing and reuse And yet.. just getting this thing to orbit has been seemingly as hard as catching it coming down Do…
There was a chance at getting that done with Jared Isaacman, but it looks like Team Pork Barrel has put its foot down, and that just isn't going to happen now.
If the goal of Starship development program was just "make it to the orbit", they could have done it quite a few flights ago - as early as Flight 4. Instead, they keep testing first stage RTLS, reentry profiles and heat shields - neither of which is a requirement for "make it to the orbit".
Starship is much larger, much more ambitious, and SpaceX can now afford to burn through more hardware than they ever could. They are setting harder goals and taking more risks with the test program.
I'm saddend by how little I care. I used to follow this quite intensely, and wished space-X the best. But with the owners antics, I just can't get myself to care that much. At the very least, that is sad for all the hardworking people at space-X.
Don't discount all of the great engineers at SpaceX just because of their boss, they are still pushing the limits of rocket science every day! And who knows, maybe they're just like us, and they think their boss is a jerk just like any other company employee.