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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

In some ways, not a good sign. Space-X can't make and launch Falcon boosters fast enough now. They're not a big enough company to do many things in parallel. Their unfinished, and late, projects include the Falcon Heavy, the Brownsville TX launch facility, and the crewed Dragon, all of which were supposed to be working by now.

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>Space-X can't make and launch Falcon boosters fast enough now.

The bottleneck is not Falcon 9 production, at this point it's largely on the payload side. A faster turnaround would certainly help, but there's only so much optimization that can be done.

The Falcon Heavy is not a priority because (1) much less demand from customers and (2) it's a transitional system between Falcon 9 and built-for-reuse BFR/MCT, so it will have limited use.

Brownsville isn't a case of them being distracted but just underestimating the degree of soil surcharging needed. Crewed dragon is unfinished but hasn't missed any of NASA's deadlines so far.

I do wish that Falcon Heavy would finally launch though.

As a point on the FH, one reason it's delayed is that it has lower priority: now that the Falcon 9 has been upgraded to the full thrust version, it can take many customers who were originally envisioned to go on the Heavy

I think that they only have one customer lined up which actually needs the heavy? And hopefully being able to do the red dragon mission in 2018.

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