I’m a bit saddened this thread has so little activity, 55 comments as of posting, here even though there are half a million people watching the spacex stream. Just watching the launch, the amount of technology and people involved is incredible.
For all very real SpaceX achievements there's certain Musk fatigue if you haven't noticed. He's done enormous job to sour people on the idea of becoming multiplanetary species.
I was all for going multi-planet until I realized the second part of the plan was “and fuck the planet we’re on now.” I’m afraid the second part is coming along much faster than the first.
Speaking as a crab in a bucket, for all the very real WorldX achievements there's a certain Muskcrab fatigue if you haven't noticed. He's done enormous job to sour fellow crabs on the idea of leaving this bucket.
What if I told you every bucket within about 4 light years of us is known to have no water, no air, and hot/cold as hell? And even the worst part of the current bucket is better than any other bucket we know of?
Speaking as a bucket who, within, holds many crabs, I think the crabs inside me could make me (the bucket) MUCH nicer than any of these other, more desolate, buckets nearby. Instead of investing untold wealth into navigating towards these far off buckets that currently are full of holes, and cannot house crabs, it would be much cheaper to make me (the bucket the crabs are in) very nice for all of the crabs.
It's silly to me that some crabs are working on trying to leave the nice bucket (me, where all the crabs are) for some shoddy bucket far far away. All because they don't want to fix the bucket they have at hand.
This is ballistics weapons technology, being progressed by a country that can't stop missile striking people, who has recently declared its intent to heavily weaponize space, whose leader has recently "claimed the moon", who is actively declaring its desire to annex its own allies, done by a corporation whose profits will be almost exclusively concentrated in a very small group of the already-wealthy in a country with horrific wealth disparity.
The V-2 was also a technological achievement. Doesn't mean the UK was cheering it on.
I think there are so many more mission objectives for success, e.g., still in payload deploy. I think we've already reached a lot of milestones with this launch, but there's still a lot of satellites to go at the time of writing. I'm so used to these failing that I'm holding my breath until everything is done.
Only a certain type of person likes hard challenges, and many people are content chasing what is easy.
It's why everyone wants to work on software instead of hardware. Doing hard things is hard, and most people are incapable or unwilling to do the hard things. Prompt engineering is great for lazy morons.
I used to watch every spacex launch. I was enamored with the company and what they're accomplishing. After the election and The Salute, well. I just haven't watched one launch since. I've just completely lost interest, which is a total shame. I still watch NASA launches but they don't scratch the same itch those spacex ones did.
I just don't care to watch what an AI company run by a nazi does. One of the biggest heel turns in human history.
I think the use of “nazi” is simply sloppy thinking, but if you are genuinely interested in problematic quotes from Musk, he posts to Twitter very often.
Ship will also have to be outfitted with a life-support system ahead of crewed missions, which could be coming relatively soon. For example, NASA picked Ship to the be the first crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program, which aims to land people on the moon for the first time in 2028 on the Artemis IV mission.
Don't worry, there is absolutely no chance this will happen in 2028. There are many detailed takedowns of why the "Human Landing System" schedule is preposterous, but here's HN's idlewords:
There is (2 minutes before Flight 14, maybe it changes in 10 minutes) low chance, but not no chance.
> This would be an ambitious but achievable cadence for Starship, particularly if the tanker Starships didn’t have to be reusable, and could be made without a heat shield or control surfaces. Just how much time SpaceX has to reach this cadence is an interesting question, since right now NASA and SpaceX are locked in a game of chicken around who can commit to the least realistic timeline. But it probably has to get in gear by early 2027.
This is good evaluation. A launch every week in 2027 is ambitious, but not impossible.
The live channel has some video of recovery of the last starship which is pretty cool - it remained floating so they crawled up and removed some of the tiles to see how they performed, and actually reinstalled a few of them for the upcoming flight. So this mission will actually see some of the tiles flying for a second time.
> During operational flights, SpaceX plans to bring both Super Heavy and Ship back to the launch pad, where they'll be caught by the tower's "chopstick" arms. The company has already done this three times with Super Heavy but has not yet attempted it with Ship.
They seem to have reached near-orbit with one vacuum engine failing. Lets see if they decide to go all the way to orbit or if the failure causes an abort.
What was interesting is how short the single engine burn was to bring it from suborbital to orbital. It was just a few seconds. I'm not even sure I saw the altitude change.
Orbital insertion burns do not have to change the current altitude, their only required role is purely about adding speed to the orbit bringing up the altitude of the orbit's periapsis (lowest point of the current orbit) from inside the atmosphere to roughly the current altitude (or above).
You should try out Kerbal Space Program you'll learn all about it. The rocket is perpendicular to the ground so the burn adds speed, and altitude on the other side of the orbit.
I haven't watched the footage yet, but if they were already at apopasis (highest point in orbit), orbital insertion would primarily raise the periapsis (lowest point) on the other side of the planet, so very little altitude change would be seen. It would be mostly an increase in velocity.
Having an impossible critical path will be the demise of the starship project. Too many things have to work that cannot be tested out of order. Too many of those things that needed to work years ago still don't. And those are the easy ones.
The items I'm listing here are just a subset of the critical path, and each milestone along the way will take months, optimistically, and years more realistically. To the point that starship won't be relevant to moon missions or any commercial use by the time it does what it needs to do to even partially fulfill the plans for it:
It needs to meet payload specifications. Currently it is off by a factor of two, which sounds doable until you realize the spec is 100 tons, and they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system.
It needs a launch cadence fast enough so that refueling doesn't take 15 separate starship tankers. Currently it would take years to refuel one single starship to make a one-way trip to the moon.
There's just a minor milestone on the way to that launch cadence: catching both stages.
Once both stages are reliably caught after a mission, refurbishment needs to be minimal. Proving that out will take several missions.
This is a simplified list of items on the critical path, but reaching each of these items has risks, and if those risks prove to be problems to solve, then each of those problems has a list of tasks and tests associated with it.
Some people think very highly of Elon for proposing technologically elegant solutions. But he's got a really big blind spot for the project management implications.
I'm saddened by this comment being upvoted a lot on this site. I'm a space nerd from EU and have been watching SpX since they were launching from an atol. This comment is the epitome of clueless negativity, wrapped in an umbrella of big words and a list of things that are neither important nor factually correct.
Nothing listed in this comment is going to lead to "the demise of the starship project". And nothing listed there is original. We've heard it time and time again, when F9 was ready to launch, when F9 was ready to land, when F9 did land (bbbut they have to do it constantly), when F9 managed the first re-use (they need to do it at least 10 times so it's worth it) and so on and so forth.
They've now launched AND landed >600 times already. Let's just say they know what they're doing.
Anyway, for a bit of context: the current first orbital flight, with 26 satellites deploying right now, is adding the same amount of Starlink bandwidth as 22 F9 launches. Let that sink in and re-do whatever cost/opportunity and "management" spiels you need to do. One flight > 22x F9 flights.
That alone justifies the Starship. The rest is the cherry on top.
They've reached orbit, and at the time of this comment are preparing to deploy Starlink sats. Which means they've successfully closed the economic development loop for the Starship program. Falcon 9 can't launch Starlink v3, only Starship can. They've already demonstrated successful booster catch. Even if they discard Ship in the ocean after every launch they're no worse off than with Falcon 9 (which also discards it's upper stage).
They'll ramp falcon flights down quickly. Ramp up Starship launches just as quickly. And in a couple years time we'll have a blooper reel like this one but larger by 10x: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ
I'm glad they gathered the courage to go for orbit and launched these v3 satellites so they can test real deployment of starlink v3. A bit of a cliffhanger for a few moments there. The starlink v3 direct-to-cell coverage will be a big upgrade when it comes online, allowing users without a terminal to use the constellation. And the laser based inter satellite communication is a big upgrade to how v3 can communicate. The catch, landing and recovery of both stages will be big next steps.
SpaceX knows that pulling the risk out of system is the ask here and they continue to progress and push their limits and capabilities, which is a healthy sign for the US space industry and more broadly for technical progress worldwide.
Now the goalposts for Starship is just whether it can put Starlink into orbit?
You seem to be suggesting that Starship just needs to self-fund its own development, and then the question of whether that development leads somewhere desirable/valuable is de facto answered or irrelevant. Why would that be the case?
Now the point of economic sustainability was always putting Starlink into orbit. That's something people in the space community have said from the beginning.
And both the booster and the Starship itself have proven that they can get back to ground mostly intact. So its not like they are only working on 'getting to orbit'. And clearly it is leading something desirable if the have proven that they can basically land the second and first stage, something nobody else has ever achieved.
Question how fast they can make the turn around are still there along with other question. But once you can repeatably launch you can improve much faster as they did with Falcon 9. And you can do more and more tests in shorter time, accelerating development.
> they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system
In it's current test iteration they are overengineering many parts and opting for heavier, cheaper versions since currently the ship gets thrown away each time. One example are the grid fins. On Falcon 9 they are made of titanium, but on Starship they are steel probably because it's just easier to work with and why put in extra effort for something that will end up in the gulf? If they just swap in titanium grid fins they'll save 3 tons in the weight of the booster and even more fuel since that extra weight won't be getting carried up.
This post feels like written by a QA. This is their first semi operational flight . In its current state starship is a reason to be proud by any nation . It pushed science forward with cost and payload size never possible before . That’s only current state .
Raptor 3 has its only 3rd flight . That’s why the payload is “only” ~50t. Just for the reference, it’s already one of the most capable rocket in the world as of today , and even with partial reusability it has future.
They clearly doing rolling improvement , rollout and testing of many components of different readiness. Otherwise they will never ship anything.
Reusable falcon 9 boosters are an informative history: how many years did it take to successfully land a falcon 9 booster? Scale your expectations appropriately.
That's a bad comparison. Falcon 9 wasn't developed to be reusable. And it it didn't actually take that long. Also Starship has already proven that Starship booster can land. And Starship itself has cleanly landed on the ocean.
There is still a question about turnaround time, but just comparing the state now to early Falcon 9 is not accurate.
i personally wanted those to work (except Twitter, i believe social media is net net bad for society)... and yet i don't feel the need to jerk him off with my hands
Fsd is amazing. I use it daily, it completely changed my daily drive in that I don’t. All of my driving is now on fsd, I sit back and chill while the car takes me to my destination.
As far as space goes, there isn't any. The closest is Falcon Heavy, which turned out much more complicated and expensive than originally expected. But it flies.
Saturn V was the culmination of a loooooong development history which included many rockets in the same family (hence the V), and some spectacular RUDs.
Gentle reminder that the Apollo project was eating about 0.5 percent of the entire US GDP yearly. That buys a lot of engineers and other capacity.
An equivalent of this would be about 160 billion USD a year today, and Starship is definitely at least an order of magnitude, perhaps two, cheaper than that.
Starship's commercial viability rests almost entirely on whether it can orbit Starlink satellites more cheaply than Falcon. Falcon is around $3000/kg, Starship was promised at $100/kg, I doubt even Elon believes that number but it does mean they have plenty of buffer and cutting capacity from 50T to 100T is not the end of the world.
I agree that the Human Landing System plan for the moon is a shitshow, but it's almost a distraction for SpaceX at this point, and it would not surprise me if the whole program gets axed by whoever comes after Trump.
Starlink is just the civil version of Starshield. As long as the US Army needs unrestricted internet access across the globe Starlink will continue to exist.
"Currently it is off by a factor of two, which sounds doable until you realize the spec is 100 tons, and they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system."
You can probably prolong the stack, exactly as they did with Falcon. Also, Raptor 3 is more powerful than previous models, and I would expect future Raptor 4 to add some oomph as well.
"But he's got a really big blind spot for the project management implications."
Uh, isn't Starbase evidence to the contrary? They can produce rockets and rocket engines faster than anyone else in the world. And Raptor unit cost is ridiculously low for a liquid rocket engine.
It certainly is, but my mind is more boggled by the Saturn V that did it 60 years ago. Space launch technology feels like it had a 30 year gap, as in, nothing significant happened between the Space Shuttle and the Falcon 9. And now, we are just catching up. Not just SpaceX, there is also Blue Origin, Rocketlab,... and everything that's happening in China.
An by the way, the whole point of Starship is not just doing it, it is doing it cheaply (by space standards). The whole reusability thing is part of it, and so is the "assembly line" approach that lets SpaceX treat their experimental rockets like fireworks. If the goal was just to lift a lot of mass off the ground, it is not even a great design, reusability in particular is costly in terms of payload capacity.
It's incredible to witness what humanity is capable of when pushed to our limits and appropriately motivated. The space race was in many ways a civilizational and existential fight for the U.S. The innovations this spurred in a relatively short span of time (and the risks the astronauts took) are numerous and impressive. I sometimes wonder that if in the absence of adversity, humans tend towards comfort and security and stability. Maybe that's obvious. Maybe most people with full bellies, warm homes, and physical security just aren't motivated to work 16 hour days for years on end and risk lives.
I suppose we should be grateful that SpaceX has found and collected enough of these crazy people in one place on this mission.
An interesting theory. Intelligence tends towards entropy in the absence of exciting stimuli. Maybe life on Earth has just been so besieged over the eons that it has forced us to progress to where we are. Once we reach [Wall-E levels of comfort and abundance,](https://corporalculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/walle...) we're doomed. Maybe we're already seeing this with the fertility crisis.
Yes. The Starship program is pushing the limits of engineering, if it fails today it doesn't make it unimpressive
I'd also consider the attempts at fusion energy to be very impressive engineering projects even though none have them have yielded a stable source of fusion energy
I think for a sense of scale if this works as the SpaceX team wants, they will be able to launch more mass to orbit in a single day than all payloads ever before 2022 (rough math). And at a cost roughly 1/100th the prior average.
Does someone know where to watch the official livestream? The internet is so swarmed with all the recasters I cannot find the official stream anymore...
My experience however is that NASASpaceflight provides an overall better coverage than the official stream, only recasting when they don't have camera angles themselves (Such as when the ship is in space or during reentry)
I got them but with a 10 second delay compared to the spacex feed, which was irritating but meant I could flip between the "official" commentary and NASASpaceflight.
There was a bit of snark from the SpaceX guy Dave about whether or not the go/no-go decision had been made and not to listen to "other broadcasters" and he was right.
But the NASASpaceFlight guys are the right kind of nerds to be commentating, because they don't have to keep up the "steel jawed rocketman" image and can just geek out on the launch.
Yeah but it's just a white-labelled version of the X stream with all its warts.
ETA: Sorry this was ambiguous, I'm complaining that the stream on spacex.com uses x.com, whereas there used to be a much better stream through youtube.com
That's the opposite of the criticism that was levelled at him, during earlier launches, when he was preferring his own cameras even though they only caught fog.
I use to watch the nasaspaceflight and everyday astronaut streams but the official one is best for the actual launch. The other two are good for the commentary because if you ask a question in the chat they’ll sometimes answer it.
I tuned in at T+11 just in time to hear the announcer talking about splashdown in the Indian ocean and that they weren't going to orbit today, followed immediately by saying the team is still considering options and trying to find a way to get to orbit. We'll see what happens.
Same with data centres in space, "Noooooo it cant work, heating in space, blah blah" same people, will never achieve anything in life as they only see limits.
To be fair, radiators in space doesn't require any new technology. It's a very well understood problem. The best method is infrared radiators. Cooling is just a function of how large the surface area of the radiators, their heat, and the cooling required.
Where I think you're correct is that typical AI data centers require a LOT of cooling, and to achieve this at scale would require enormous radiators. So large that it's hard to square the business case given current launch costs. I've read a lot of research in this space and it looks like the much more realistic use cases (at least at first) will be sub-processing. Meaning processing data already in space. These could be telemetry, Starlink, tracking, telescopes, logistics, military, GPS, weather, deep space missions, first-response, alerts, etc. In particular, applications which require lower latency.
There are also other applications which are less cost sensitive. For example, applications which might be banned on Earth, or at risk of espionage, attack, or intrusion.
If we want to make typical AI data centers in space to be economical, we need launch costs to drop to under $200/kg. Interestingly, [Starship could reduce costs down to $67/kg.] Even lower with >9 launch cycles. (https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/rocket-developers-used...) This would make the business case *extremely* attractive.
Great comment and I agree with all of it except you're describing an expanded starlink rather than "datacenters in space". There are definitely workloads that benefit from being in space but that's different from being an economical place to put a rack of H200s doing training or inference.
Dissipating that much heat in the first place would be a first, you also need a butt ton of power so maybe you can shade your giant radiators with giant solar panels, but all of this needs to unfold from something launch-packaged.... AND be cheaper than just plugging them in on earth.
I agree on all points. That said, we're seeing a lot of preparatory activity from many places. SpaceX, Google, Starcloud, Blue Origin, Cowboy Space, Orbital Compute, Odyssey, and China’s ADA Space/Zhejiang Lab. SpaceX and Blue Origin have filed plans for huge orbital compute constellations. Google is developing TPU-equipped satellites under Project Suncatcher. Starcloud has already flown an Nvidia H100 in orbit. China’s ADA Space has also launched a small network of AI-compute satellites. A lot of very smart and very rich people are making big bets in this space.
We're still a few years away, but I suspect this is going to happen fast, starting with the edge/low latency compute.
"It's unreasonable to say starship can't work in a world where the Saturn V did work."
Most of the doubts were economical as well. Saturn V was extremely expensive, its per-unit cost could be expressed in still-human-readable fractions of the entire US GDP. Starship should be several orders of magnitude cheaper while providing more capabilities.
You’re right, I’m just back from the city, took no time and was so cheap thanks to the hyperloop. Next week I go to Asia, I think I will use the rocket transport system Musk announced a few years ago. It’s so nice how my Tesla is making me so much money while I’m traveling, offering taxi service to everybody around. Next will I will get the add-on to have it join the Tesla compute fleet - it’s free compute if you think about it, given the solar roof is generating the energy! Might even get one of those humanoid robot to replace me at work. Just hope it’s not raining too much, my cybertruck steel plates are rusting a bit. Also, my kids are really enjoying their summer camp at the Mars colony!
Limits are security. Dont have to do this, don't have to risk that, no need for uncertainty, anxiety won't kill the weak confused mind...you can't fail if you never try (big brain!). That's the type. It is called cowards ;)
planned 6 orbits, 10hr's in space
the load of satelites will deploy 10x the banwidth of a single falcon launch making the economics of this venture rather startling for any 'competition'.
if they nail the deploy, relights, and soft landings, it will time for everybody to rethink everything *
* keep in mind they are already tinkering with on orbit fuel tranfer technology, which will lead to routine bunkering *
other things, like doing visual condition inspections of every ship in orbit means there experience base grows at a rate that other companys litteraly cant imagine.
Not a fan of Elon Musk at all, but SpaceX is damn impressive. Watching these key launches always makes me emotional for our species and what we can accomplish together.
Prompting claude 5.5 has more appeal it seems.
It's silly to me that some crabs are working on trying to leave the nice bucket (me, where all the crabs are) for some shoddy bucket far far away. All because they don't want to fix the bucket they have at hand.
The V-2 was also a technological achievement. Doesn't mean the UK was cheering it on.
So it's hard to leave that out. It's genuine achievement and it's politics, both.
We've been watching in the office though. There's been a lot of interest in it.
Only a certain type of person likes hard challenges, and many people are content chasing what is easy.
It's why everyone wants to work on software instead of hardware. Doing hard things is hard, and most people are incapable or unwilling to do the hard things. Prompt engineering is great for lazy morons.
I just don't care to watch what an AI company run by a nazi does. One of the biggest heel turns in human history.
please elaborate with quotes
Don't worry, there is absolutely no chance this will happen in 2028. There are many detailed takedowns of why the "Human Landing System" schedule is preposterous, but here's HN's idlewords:
https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/how-should-we-think-about-...
> This would be an ambitious but achievable cadence for Starship, particularly if the tanker Starships didn’t have to be reusable, and could be made without a heat shield or control surfaces. Just how much time SpaceX has to reach this cadence is an interesting question, since right now NASA and SpaceX are locked in a game of chicken around who can commit to the least realistic timeline. But it probably has to get in gear by early 2027.
This is good evaluation. A launch every week in 2027 is ambitious, but not impossible.
I don't think a week is enough to gather data and fix subsequent launch
His lordship announced this to the world at the UN.
Launch window is 8:15 AM to 9:30 AM eastern time.
Superheavy will land 7min after launch. Starship lands 9hrs post launch.
Edit: Both will be splashdowns (originally said they'll be caught)
https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1qxvvenMPMQxB
https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14
SpaceX's flight profile says both are splashdowns?
F9 fits how many?
Hell yeah, that was the longest 10 minutes.
Update: Or maybe not? They're reviewing the status now.
Update 2: Go for orbit!
Update 3: Orbital insertion complete!!
Update 4: First Starlink satellites successfully deployed!
The items I'm listing here are just a subset of the critical path, and each milestone along the way will take months, optimistically, and years more realistically. To the point that starship won't be relevant to moon missions or any commercial use by the time it does what it needs to do to even partially fulfill the plans for it:
It needs to meet payload specifications. Currently it is off by a factor of two, which sounds doable until you realize the spec is 100 tons, and they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system.
It needs a launch cadence fast enough so that refueling doesn't take 15 separate starship tankers. Currently it would take years to refuel one single starship to make a one-way trip to the moon.
There's just a minor milestone on the way to that launch cadence: catching both stages.
Once both stages are reliably caught after a mission, refurbishment needs to be minimal. Proving that out will take several missions.
This is a simplified list of items on the critical path, but reaching each of these items has risks, and if those risks prove to be problems to solve, then each of those problems has a list of tasks and tests associated with it.
Some people think very highly of Elon for proposing technologically elegant solutions. But he's got a really big blind spot for the project management implications.
Nothing listed in this comment is going to lead to "the demise of the starship project". And nothing listed there is original. We've heard it time and time again, when F9 was ready to launch, when F9 was ready to land, when F9 did land (bbbut they have to do it constantly), when F9 managed the first re-use (they need to do it at least 10 times so it's worth it) and so on and so forth.
They've now launched AND landed >600 times already. Let's just say they know what they're doing.
Anyway, for a bit of context: the current first orbital flight, with 26 satellites deploying right now, is adding the same amount of Starlink bandwidth as 22 F9 launches. Let that sink in and re-do whatever cost/opportunity and "management" spiels you need to do. One flight > 22x F9 flights.
That alone justifies the Starship. The rest is the cherry on top.
They'll ramp falcon flights down quickly. Ramp up Starship launches just as quickly. And in a couple years time we'll have a blooper reel like this one but larger by 10x: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ
Edit: Starlink deployed.
SpaceX knows that pulling the risk out of system is the ask here and they continue to progress and push their limits and capabilities, which is a healthy sign for the US space industry and more broadly for technical progress worldwide.
You seem to be suggesting that Starship just needs to self-fund its own development, and then the question of whether that development leads somewhere desirable/valuable is de facto answered or irrelevant. Why would that be the case?
Milestones. Engineers deal in milestones. Goalposts are for sportsball.
And both the booster and the Starship itself have proven that they can get back to ground mostly intact. So its not like they are only working on 'getting to orbit'. And clearly it is leading something desirable if the have proven that they can basically land the second and first stage, something nobody else has ever achieved.
Question how fast they can make the turn around are still there along with other question. But once you can repeatably launch you can improve much faster as they did with Falcon 9. And you can do more and more tests in shorter time, accelerating development.
In it's current test iteration they are overengineering many parts and opting for heavier, cheaper versions since currently the ship gets thrown away each time. One example are the grid fins. On Falcon 9 they are made of titanium, but on Starship they are steel probably because it's just easier to work with and why put in extra effort for something that will end up in the gulf? If they just swap in titanium grid fins they'll save 3 tons in the weight of the booster and even more fuel since that extra weight won't be getting carried up.
Raptor 3 has its only 3rd flight . That’s why the payload is “only” ~50t. Just for the reference, it’s already one of the most capable rocket in the world as of today , and even with partial reusability it has future.
They clearly doing rolling improvement , rollout and testing of many components of different readiness. Otherwise they will never ship anything.
And the biggest customer is SpaceX: https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-bought-tesla-cybertru...
There is still a question about turnaround time, but just comparing the state now to early Falcon 9 is not accurate.
Let's stop pretending he's God.
Boring Company is also on the path to being successful, it's just not advertised much.
Solar roof - yes, this one I would mark as a failure.
Cybertruck - they're still selling, so not a failure. But not as great as originally promised.
Hyperloop - this could still come after boring company succeeds.
Nobody is saying he's god. But maybe, he understands engineering better than some commenters on HN, that's all.
But it's HN and I know you guys are mostly brain rotted muskophiles so let the downvotes rain
Gentle reminder that Saturn 5 worked pretty much eprfectly on its maiden flight.
Yeah, except it costed 12x per-flight, ran at 30x/kg, and wasn't reusable. So not exactly the same thing.
60 years ago.
An equivalent of this would be about 160 billion USD a year today, and Starship is definitely at least an order of magnitude, perhaps two, cheaper than that.
I agree that the Human Landing System plan for the moon is a shitshow, but it's almost a distraction for SpaceX at this point, and it would not surprise me if the whole program gets axed by whoever comes after Trump.
Selling sub-fiber Internet access into a globe increasingly covered in fiber is a silly long-term value proposition.
You can probably prolong the stack, exactly as they did with Falcon. Also, Raptor 3 is more powerful than previous models, and I would expect future Raptor 4 to add some oomph as well.
"But he's got a really big blind spot for the project management implications."
Uh, isn't Starbase evidence to the contrary? They can produce rockets and rocket engines faster than anyone else in the world. And Raptor unit cost is ridiculously low for a liquid rocket engine.
Putting weapons in orbit seems a very likely goal, given the attitude of the current US leadership.
They felt confident enough to recently acknowledge publicly their existence:
https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cmn07yjqg5rwo
An by the way, the whole point of Starship is not just doing it, it is doing it cheaply (by space standards). The whole reusability thing is part of it, and so is the "assembly line" approach that lets SpaceX treat their experimental rockets like fireworks. If the goal was just to lift a lot of mass off the ground, it is not even a great design, reusability in particular is costly in terms of payload capacity.
I suppose we should be grateful that SpaceX has found and collected enough of these crazy people in one place on this mission.
well US government found new toys (proxy war) instead of space
Would HN describe a huge program that didn't do the thing it was designed to do a "feat of engineering"?
I'd also consider the attempts at fusion energy to be very impressive engineering projects even though none have them have yielded a stable source of fusion energy
It’s a lot of records that just got broken.
Inspiring to watch, really.
Edit: https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14
My experience however is that NASASpaceflight provides an overall better coverage than the official stream, only recasting when they don't have camera angles themselves (Such as when the ship is in space or during reentry)
There was a bit of snark from the SpaceX guy Dave about whether or not the go/no-go decision had been made and not to listen to "other broadcasters" and he was right.
But the NASASpaceFlight guys are the right kind of nerds to be commentating, because they don't have to keep up the "steel jawed rocketman" image and can just geek out on the launch.
Also can recommend the restream of everyday astronaut Tim Dodd
ETA: Sorry this was ambiguous, I'm complaining that the stream on spacex.com uses x.com, whereas there used to be a much better stream through youtube.com
They are already live and have a lot of background discussion, unlike the official SpaceX stream.
And it's SpaceX, not ESA, sadly.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=fmkHjDeECps
Also hosted directly on SpaceX website:
https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14
T+22: Go for orbit!
I am so looking forward to a successfully launch today.
For datacenters in space to work, they have to solve a bunch of unsolved problems and be more economical than datacenters in earth.
Where I think you're correct is that typical AI data centers require a LOT of cooling, and to achieve this at scale would require enormous radiators. So large that it's hard to square the business case given current launch costs. I've read a lot of research in this space and it looks like the much more realistic use cases (at least at first) will be sub-processing. Meaning processing data already in space. These could be telemetry, Starlink, tracking, telescopes, logistics, military, GPS, weather, deep space missions, first-response, alerts, etc. In particular, applications which require lower latency.
There are also other applications which are less cost sensitive. For example, applications which might be banned on Earth, or at risk of espionage, attack, or intrusion.
If we want to make typical AI data centers in space to be economical, we need launch costs to drop to under $200/kg. Interestingly, [Starship could reduce costs down to $67/kg.] Even lower with >9 launch cycles. (https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/rocket-developers-used...) This would make the business case *extremely* attractive.
Dissipating that much heat in the first place would be a first, you also need a butt ton of power so maybe you can shade your giant radiators with giant solar panels, but all of this needs to unfold from something launch-packaged.... AND be cheaper than just plugging them in on earth.
We're still a few years away, but I suspect this is going to happen fast, starting with the edge/low latency compute.
Most of the doubts were economical as well. Saturn V was extremely expensive, its per-unit cost could be expressed in still-human-readable fractions of the entire US GDP. Starship should be several orders of magnitude cheaper while providing more capabilities.
I don't doubt Starship, BTW. Great project.
works beautifully