SpaceX plans to become a mobile carrier • Hacker News Board

Re: SpaceX plans to become a mobile carrier

#11

Post by jfengel » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 2:17 PM UTC

Zigurd wrote: post #10

rvz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to explain what investment fraud SpaceX just committed?

Starship has as much chance of working to spec as the Theranos machine. Except the scam is three orders of magnitude or more larger. But if you take a step back and ignore the hype, the rocket is way too big for orbital delivery of payloads, and there is a very real likelihood that it will never get beyond low Earth orbit. It will work any day now was exactly Elizabeth Holmes's pitch.

That seems an odd comparison. Theranos was complete vaporware. You've seen Starship; it goes into space and comes down in a controlled fashion.

Maybe it won't work out; they've certainly had a lot of problems. But why compare it to something that didn't exist at all?

Re: SpaceX plans to become a mobile carrier

#12

Post by ben_w » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 2:53 PM UTC

rvz wrote: post #8

ben_w wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between the financials on one side, vs. graveyard, innovation by buying startups, dropping "don't be evil", and ads everywhere on the other, I don't know if you're suggesting this is good or bad.

Both Google and SpaceX have a near monopoly in the services that they operate that have high demand.

> services that they operate that have high demand.

"high" doing heavy lifting there, I think.

SpaceX has a lot of demand for rocketry… from itself, in the form of Starlink. Starlink has segments where it's a near monopoly but those segments are low-demand, and segments where it's high demand but those segments aren't a monopoly.

Outside Starlink, there's not a particularly vast mass of stuff people want to launch right now.

Re: SpaceX plans to become a mobile carrier

#13

Post by Zigurd » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 2:54 PM UTC

jfengel wrote: post #11

Zigurd wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starship has as much chance of working to spec as the Theranos machine. Except the scam is three orders of magnitude or more larger. But if you take a step back and ignore the hype, the rocket is way too big for orbital delivery of payloads, and there is a very real likelihood that it will never get beyond low Earth orbit. It will work any day now was exactly Elizabeth Holmes's pitch.

That seems an odd comparison. Theranos was complete vaporware. You've seen Starship; it goes into space and comes down in a controlled fashion. Maybe it won't work out; they've certainly had a lot of problems. But why compare it to something that didn't exist at all?

The Theranos machine actually did run blood tests. But only a very limited number of blood tests can be run on a finger prick sample due to limitations on the volume collected, contamination, etc.

In other words it was a wild ass idea from an entrepreneur who lacked knowledge of how blood tests actually work. That's not too dissimilar.

Re: SpaceX plans to become a mobile carrier

#14

Post by ben_w » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 3:06 PM UTC

Zigurd wrote: post #10

rvz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to explain what investment fraud SpaceX just committed?

Starship has as much chance of working to spec as the Theranos machine. Except the scam is three orders of magnitude or more larger. But if you take a step back and ignore the hype, the rocket is way too big for orbital delivery of payloads, and there is a very real likelihood that it will never get beyond low Earth orbit. It will work any day now was exactly Elizabeth Holmes's pitch.

> Starship has as much chance of working to spec as the Theranos machine.

Don't get me wrong, I'm skeptical about SpaceX's business model (I really must make more time to work on that blog post about orbital compute…), but no, that's just plain wrong.

And I agree with you there's a real risk about going past LEO: between the booster still not landing reliably, and the team being still so lacking in confidence that after all this time the orbits still have not been circularised, there's a decent risk LEO is all it is good for.

But even in expendable mode, where it's not going to be any good at all for the Moon or Mars, this is still a cheap LEO solution.

And so far, Starship has actually been to space and back. It's taken so many test flights and cost so much during development (so far) that I think it compares mediocrely to the Soviet N1, and the US Saturn V and Space Shuttle, but that's a huge improvement over Theranos.

Now, it may fail for unrelated reasons (spoiler from blog draft: data centres should not be in space), but the going-to-space part of SpaceX seems reasonably sound.

Re: SpaceX plans to become a mobile carrier

#15

Post by Zigurd » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 4:22 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #14

Zigurd wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starship has as much chance of working to spec as the Theranos machine. Except the scam is three orders of magnitude or more larger. But if you take a step back and ignore the hype, the rocket is way too big for orbital delivery of payloads, and there is a very real likelihood that it will never get beyond low Earth orbit. It will work any day now was exactly Elizabeth Holmes's pitch.

> Starship has as much chance of working to spec as the Theranos machine. Don't get me wrong, I'm skeptical about SpaceX's business model (I really must make more time to work on that blog post about orbital compute…), but no, that's just plain wrong. And I agree with you there's a real risk about going past LEO: between the booster still not landing reliably, and the team being still so lacking in confidence that af…

Using capillary blood that's been sitting on your fingertip, that has some amount of interstitial fluid in it will make your blood tests fail, even if you collect enough blood that way to use a conventional blood testing machine. If you look deeper Theranos is not that different from thinking "OK we can recover boosters, upper stages are an incremental development."

Having dealt with incompetent phlebotomists on a couple occasions, I can see where investors would get enthusiasm for a blood machine that makes everything is simple as a finger-stick test. But it's very analogous to extrapolating from falcon 9.

Re: SpaceX plans to become a mobile carrier

#16

Post by ben_w » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 6:35 PM UTC

ai_critic wrote: post #6

The incredibly obvious play here is teleoperation and low-latency robotics, and then selling that capacity to whoever handles the bot hardware. It remains to be seen if public investors are as ambitious as the engineers.

> It remains to be seen if public investors are as ambitious as the engineers.

And what politicians do when

  "Damn immigrants coming here taking our jobs"

turns into

  "Damn remote workers, staying right where we insisted they stay, still taking our jobs"