SpaceX is, for many of us, what made many of us (myself included) not realize what a raging moron Elon Musk was and is for the longest time. I've come to believe that SpaceX succeeded in spite of Elon, not because of him. Whoever is really in charge has probably built an organization that is designed to insulate itself from Elon's influence.

And Falcon 9 is an unmitited success, to be sure. SpaceX basically owns the launch market because of it.

But eventually the chickens come home to roost and I really wonder if Starship will be the downfall of SpaceX. Let me explain.

Commercial space launches to LEO are SpaceX's bread and butter. There are over 100 a year now and whatever the cost of refurbishing used Falcon 9 first stage boosters is, I think the volume of launches (even if you exclude the induced demand from Starlink launches) has locked in an economic advantage for commercial launches for the next 10-20 years, in a similar way the 747 did for Boeing in the commercial aviation market. It's just that dominant.

But you have to ask what problem Starship solves. SpaceX already has a heavier launch capability (ie Falcon Heavy) but there's little demand for it. There have been 11 Falcon Heavy launches total AFAICT. So what is Starship going to launch? You might say that there will be new payloads once the launch capability exists.but we've simply seen no evidence of this thus far.

Starship is more complex, specifically the Raptor engines. You have two cooled propellants instead of one (because of coking with Merlin engines). In-orbit refueling is going to take so long to prove and perfect for some of the stated goals.

And Starship just isn't designed to land on things with a human crew. If a Starship booster lands on Moon (or Mars, which will never happen), your astronauts are 40 meters in the air. This is... far from ideal.

The US government simply won't allow SpaceX to fail. It's a national security issue. So I guess this doesn't matter. And it may be that the Falcon 9 cash cow props the company up from any number of boondoggles.

If Starship reaches its reliability and cost targets, it will lower the LEO payload cost per kg significantly but that's a lot of ifs and a ton of investment. But if you're not sending up a huge payload, you just don't need that. Starlink is fairly unique in being such a large constellation on similar orbits that you can launch them on a single orbit. Launching multiple satellites in vastly different orbits is not something a single rocket can do.