281–290 of 326 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shame they're risking that ability with the IPO. We've seen how irrational and ignorant stock traders are from other publicly traded space companies. Even scrubbed launches cause the price to dip.
Elon negotiated with Nasdaq to automatically accept it in Nasdaq 100 index after 15 days, so the stock traders don't really matter.
I wonder if the hot separation was supposed to be that hot. Going at mach 5 and doing a quick U turn while there was some weird orange color on the side of the Super Heavy, then (possibly?) losing most engines from it seemed extra chaotic
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you can afford it, I'm sure anyone developing a rocket would prefer to do it this iterative way. I don't really understand the complain.
The part that makes no sense to me is why they are going starship scale rather than falcon 9 scale. Had they done their prototyping on a rocket with 9 engines on the first stage and 1 on the second, they could have gotten to raptor 3 (and a falcon 9 replacement) while blowing up way fewer engines, launch complexes, etc. There's a reason Spacex started with the falcon 1 rather than the falcon 9. It's a lot cheaper to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But all of those 12 launches happened in just 3 years, and cost a tiny fraction of other major spaceflight development programs. For reference, SLS has been in development for 5 times as long, and cost 15-20 times as much, as Starship, and they still haven’t landed people on the Moon, which has been one of the stated goals since the Constellation program in 2005. I don’t see how the number of failures matters if the…
It seems premature at best to make any sort of triumphant comparison, when Starship has yet to complete an orbit of the Earth while SLS has carried humans to the moon It's especially ironic to talk about not landing on the moon yet, when it is the landing system--aka Starship!--which is the primary bottleneck for that goal I am in no way trying to make this some SpaceX vs NASA pissing contest, but there seems to be a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember this being the same argument used against the Falcon 9 when it first stuck its landings. "Oh, they'll need to do it 10x to be profitable!" Now they do, as a matter of course.
Just because you defeat popular consensus of what is possible in one place doesn't mean you can continue to do it again and again. This stuff is hard.
Being a cynical naysay isn’t hard.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"surviving reentry" and being reusable are two very different things, particularly if this is to become human rated.
Human rating is irrelevant to what they want to do, it is only a NASA rating - if NASA wants to ride they will have to come up with a rationale but private astronauts can fly on it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Loyal wingman aircraft would have to be stealthy though to do it. The whole point of the F-35 is that it is a stealthy platform with a very advanced set of targeting and weapons capabilities: but the issue is a similar capability drone would basically have a similar price tag since the expense of the pilot is minor in that case. Like plausibly the best autonomous F-35 platform would just be an F-35.
It's not the expense of the pilot but the fact that the human pilot is subject to human biological constraints. Ie they black out after 9 Gs or so. An autonomous platform you'd want to design to be able to routinely do outside that envelope in a way that a platform designed for a human occupant is not.
There's no drones currently in development AFAIK with this goal either - the focus is on getting them to do useful mission without a pilot, rather then out dogfight or outmanoeuver missiles.
Basically the point stands: a hypothetical "better then F-35" drone is likely more, not less expensive then an F-35.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If there were infinite gold bars just sitting on the surface of the moon, it wouldn't be economical to go collect them and bring them back to Earth. No matter how expensive you think any metals are here on Earth, the cost of launching vehicles, rendezvousing with said metals and bringing them back to Earth makes it uneconomical. An asteroid is much, much further than that but more important than distance is the delta…
If we ever mine for gold in space, I suspect it would be more economical to leave the gold there than to bring it down to earth. Most gold ownership never results in delivery, people just own receipts for gold stored elsewhere. I’ve always found it amusing that so much effort goes into extracting gold from the Earth when such a substantial amount of it goes right back underground into some vault.
Obviously pre-mined should trade lower than earth mined gold. Price should be something like Earth gold pricing- mining cost - cost to transport back to earth (or location based prcing, we are some time away from space based economics). Basically you will be trading rights for mining for a particular space mine.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-11-24/lea... (paywalled)
This incremental progress, far smaller improvements than planned, has put them so far behind schedule I'm not confident this design is any good. Still haven't done orbit. This launch was not a smooth launch. SLS by contrast seems to work. Why did nasa contract SpaceX for the lander. The whole plan is bad.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Go back and look at the original plans and projections. Constantly redesigning is not something to be proud of. I call it vibe spaceship design.
Two successful test missions over 15 years using a dead end rocket and ship design for $50+ billion is not something to be proud of either. Starship's design is so far beyond where the rest of the world is that even if it takes another 3 years of iteration to perfect it will still be by far the best rocket in the world for many years afterward, to the point where it would hardly make sense to choose to launch on any…