Starship's Tenth Flight Test
spacex.com
spacex.com
Everyday Astronaut's live stream has started already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv97hecvwfI
NASASpaceflight also, with guest Scott Manley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7WmlTp7ue0
The only official SpaceX stream will be here closer to launch: https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1yoKMPRjeYYxQ but the YouTube channels will be rebroadcasting it after their own cameras lose sight of the rocket.
There may or may not be an official SpaceX technical update presentation before or after the launch. There was supposed to be one last time too but it was silently canceled, so TBD.
The main thing I took away from visiting KSC the first time (alas missed out on any launches) was how incredibly huge all things orbital-launch-related are, even for smaller rockets. Also didn't realize how large the Blue Origin facilities are there. It's one thing to see glimpses in a spaceflight YouTube channel video, it's another to drive alongside them.
Avoids all the tourists, insane parking, and/or Playalinda capacity uncertainty. Also skips the viewing platforms in the park that semi-professional photographers are huge dicks about.
We should focus on building digital bodies to house our children.
Our species in its current form dies with this gravity well. We're evolved to and fit it like a glove.
It's our minds that will see the universe.
Being realistic is one thing but completely giving up on pushing out the frontier of our capabilities is shameful IMO. Literally mailing it in isn't a substitute for space travel.
We carried the seeds of our civilization to new continents which carry our gas mixture, food resources, temperature, gravity, and a million other parameters that the human body plan needs. The destinations were completely hospitable.
Good luck in space. It is beyond hostile and offers nothing for our survival. Also, there's really no economic reason to go there.
Space belongs to the robots.
1) Access the vast resources available elsewhere in the Solar System.
2) Move most polluting and destructive heavy industry off of Earth (this will take big advances in propulsion technology).
3) Provide good habitats for humans and ideally much of Earth's ecosphere elsewhere in the Solar System. Certainly the human population alone could rise to the hundreds of billions if desired/needed.
Surely it'll take a lot of progress to achieve those goals, but they're within reach of our current scientific knowledge. Interstellar travel, on the other hand, is much more of a stretch goal! ;-)
If you didn’t have human Spaceflight you’d get the budget for gps, military, and maybe weather satellites and not a whole lot else.
This is NASA's language: https://www.nasa.gov/reference/jsc-crewed-spacecraft/
I'm more of a massive spinning space station made from asteroid/lunar mined materials kind of guy myself.
But if harebrained ideas to colonize a body with substantially lower gravity that may no idea if the human body is even compatible with that lower gravity get us the infrastructure needed to get lots of stuff into space then so be it.
What do you think is the biggest part of the transport costs and why in your opinion can it not be reduced?
People can take initiatives on a completely unknown environment way better than our best computers can, including fixing things. That's a reason manned space stations are so useful, you can launch an experiment up there and know than there are smart people who will make things work even if you forgot some minor details. It is even more important the further you go, as latency increases.
In addition, manned space exploration tells us valuable information about ourselves. About our bodies, our mind. It may lead to valuable medical discoveries. And of course, at some point we will want to go there in person, from long term goals like space colonization to simple curiosity, and these are the things we need to know.
And I don't think manned space exploration held back anything. Manned exploration is inspiring, and Apollo was an important political move, it means lots of funding. Pictures of outer space clearly don't have the same impact. It is easy to see, for the decades where no one considered manned space exploration, not much happened compared to what happened in the 70s, including on the unmanned side, simply because of shrinking budgets due to the lack of interest. Yes, we did stuff, but Voyager, Venera, Hubble, Pioneer, etc... all in the 60s and 70s.
These test launches are expensive and it's going to take a long time to recoup that R&D, in large part because of... the Falcon 9. You have to look at what problem Starship is solving. Typoical answers are:
1. Greater payload capacity. This is true but is there demand for that? This is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem but we can point to the Falcon Heavy as a useful data point. There have only been ~13 launches thus far. Some might say "you can launch multiple payloads in one launch" but you really can't unless they're on pretty much the exact same orbit. Starlink works fine for this because they are on basically the same orbit.
2. Maybe it's "reusable second stage". This is only a fraction of the total cost, like an order of magnitude less than the impact of the reusable first stage and Falcon 9 already has taht. And it's proven; or
3. Which brings us to "landing humans on the Moon or Mars" but it's not really a suitable vehicle for that. Think about it. How are you going to land? They're reduced launch weight with the chopstick catching mechanism for the first stage such that it can't land on its own (unlike Falcon 9) so we'd need the second stage to be able to land on its own and take off again. We're nowwhere near even testing that. And it's going to take a lot of testing for human-rating flight.
But OK, let's look past all that and say it lands on the Moon. Well, how do the astronauts get out and back in? They're 30-40 meters off the ground.
I just don't know how this program succeeds.
2. I wouldn't dismiss the cost savings from a reusable second stage.
3. They already have experience with legs from Falcon 9, and they're already landing this rocket very precisely with their tower. I would expect the development timeline for legs to be short. Much shorter than the development timeline for human rating the rest of this, for instance...
3.5. Winches and ropes are light and cheap, lowering things to and raising things from the surface doesn't strike me as a particularly difficult problem... apart from maybe the human-rating aspects of the system.
I think Starship has a good theoretical basis for being an economic success. On the other hand I don't have much faith they will successfully execute at this point.
They're massively behind schedule and presumably above anticipated cost. They aren't showing signs of having successfully designed a safe, reliable, and cheaply built vehicle. They've been making what externally seem like stupid mistakes like having their rocket fail in basically the same way twice in a row. They are making political enemies left right and center whether it's by having a fascist CEO committing election related crimes, or littering the same down-range islands with rocket parts from failed launches. They are almost certainly driving away talent by virtue of the same CEOs political roles and crimes, and by virtue of doing things like taking SpaceX engineers and having them work on twitter.
As an ignorant outsider who only watches these Starship launches and doesn't do Kerbal, seems to me like another Cybertruck, where he after super successful model goes all in for big and cool (to him) even if it doesn't work
(Driving a Tesla is subject to public scrutiny from others both while driving and when parking)
The reason why you have to go big for Starship is just inherently true based on physics.
And the problem with Cybertruck isn't that it's 'big' or 'cool'.
2. Still a huge reduction in price. A full StarShip launch is expected to be much cheaper than a full Falcon 9 launch (per launch) because the cost is just fuel (about $300k) and some maintenance.
3. Putting legs back on for the Mars landing vehicle (a small fraction of the # starships launched btw) is totally practical.
Testing-
Yes, there is a lot more testing to go. I personally prefer testing and data-driven approvals than the traditional Paperwork based approval methods.
Falcon Heavy is only useful for specific missions as it doesn't improves cost economics to LEO over Falcon 9.
> "you can launch multiple payloads in one launch" but you really can't unless they're on pretty much the exact same orbit
This is not true. First of all, many things often go into the same orbit and many orbits are pretty standard.
Second, as you avg kg to orbit goes down, there is an ever greater intensive to use low mass high efficiency engines to do an orbital transfer after launch.
SpaceX just doesn't do that because they do actually need many sats in the same orbit. But its very possible.
> This is only a fraction of the total cost
Its not that small a fraction as you suggest. Internal cost at SpaceX for a Falcon 9 flight is somewhere between 15-30 million $. And of that at least 5-10 million $ are the upper stage. So its actually a huge fraction of the cost.
And the engine on the Upper Stage is also the longest lead most complex to manufacture part.
So you are right, the first stage was a bigger deal in absolute terms but the second stage re-usability is still a gigantic opportunity.
> but it's not really a suitable vehicle for that.
Seems like NASA disagree with that assessment.
> We're nowwhere near even testing that.
They did test launch and landing of the second stage on earth many times. Why do you suggest we are nowhere near testing that.
> And it's going to take a lot of testing for human-rating flight.
Seems like a good place to be for a company that does a lot of testing as part of its development.
They broke the previous booster by overdoing it, so it remains to be seen whether they'll find the balance between "fuel efficient" and "doesn't cause catastrophic internal booster damage" this time around.
Given they've demonstrated all core steps (near successful re-entry, near-orbit insertion, booster catch) I'd say they are like 95% there.
> The primary test objectives for the booster will be focused on its landing burn and will use unique engine configurations. One of the three center engines used for the final phase of landing will be intentionally disabled to gather data on the ability for a backup engine from the middle ring to complete a landing burn. The booster will then transition to only two center engines for the end of the landing burn, entering a full hover while still above the ocean surface, followed by shutdown and drop into the Gulf of America.
...
> The flight test includes several experiments focused on enabling Starship’s upper stage to return to the launch site. A significant number of tiles have been removed from Starship to stress-test vulnerable areas across the vehicle during reentry. Multiple metallic tile options, including one with active cooling, will test alternative materials for protecting Starship during reentry. On the sides of the vehicle, functional catch fittings are installed and will test the fittings’ thermal and structural performance, along with a section of the tile line receiving a smoothed and tapered edge to address hot spots observed during reentry on Starship’s sixth flight test. Starship’s reentry profile is designed to intentionally stress the structural limits of the upper stage’s rear flaps while at the point of maximum entry dynamic pressure.
It’s funny that the social engineering of the administration that allows them to launch is just as important as the mechanical engineering of the vehicle in terms of achieving their macro goal.
I think this sort of “solve all of the problems, in every domain, that stand in our way” explains a lot about their activities and strategic planning.
Not only this test IIRC, Starship 9 had reentry trajectories that would stress-test the hardware to its limits too. In general I think their current strategy is testing the hardware limits in real conditions and improving rapidly on it to reduce the chance of any small failure to become catastrophic.
I was mostly impressed by the materials science of the space shuttle tiles, even though they’re expensive.
A single RS-9 engine -- one of five used in the SLS -- costs more than an entire Falcon 9 launch with payload, taxes, and profit!
Starship is similarly frugal. Its construction is simpler, it is made of cheaper materials, it uses a cheaper fuel, etc, etc...
“Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.”
Because we haven’t seen a single re-use of a starship yet nor any significant payload brought to orbit, or the orbital refueling turn around and launch cadence necessary to even achieve 1/10th of what Musk suggests is “possible on paper”.
Super-heavy is being wasted on a potential dead end 2nd stage in my opinion.
You can do that when you have $1b/flight to spend on refurbishing.
Reflying the booster cases doesn't change the fact that an essentially new solid booster has to be manufactured.
In fact it didn't even financially make sense to reuse the boosters, so it was actually worse then not being reusable at all.
As with everything with Shuttle, it all sounds cool when you imagine it, but then if you look at the actual program its basically a 40 shit-show that started very badly and basically never got better. In actual fact, it failed completely as an industrial program for the US.
https://cdn.northropgrumman.com/-/media/wp-content/uploads/a...
The tiles themselves were apparently a big source of the problems on the shuttle too. If they can figure out reusable tiles with starship, with quick turnaround and low-cost for maintenance, that'd be a huge engineering accomplishment.
They've gotta consistently re-enter it first though.
Reusable but had to spend 2 months after use being repaired/having parts replaced, meanwhile Falcon 9 has turn around times in days and Starship is aiming for hours.
Whilst the the achievements and technological marvels by NASA should never be understated, Starship is aiming for a target significantly more difficult than the space shuttle.
Shuttle then took all that money, in turn losing the US the capability to do all this amazing stuff. With the promise that it could then do all those things again but actually do it cheaper.
In that aspect, Shuttle completely failed. Not only did the US lose most of its capability for the next 40 years, some we still have not gotten back. And it did that while costing absurd amounts to develop and then a huge amount to operate, so much that NASA barely had a budget to actually do anything useful with Shuttle. And of course it also took so much time to develop that a whole space station had to be scarified for it.
So really the whole Shuttle program is an anti-achievement, it literally directly reduced the technical capability of a nation and turned it from the best space nation in the world into the second best to arguable being second best.
Technical complexity by itself is not a mark of great engineering, and that's all Shuttle was. In terms of actual objective measure, Shuttle is a failure pretty much every way you look at it. Failure on cost, failure on safety, failure on ecosystem, failure of evolution, failure operational reliability and so on.
Soviets could launch payload and human cheaper to LEO for the next 40 years and only SpaceX brought this back to the US.
Did we all forget that the Space Shuttle is a failed program because it was unacceptably deadly due to a high failure rate?
All other rocket programs, including Starship are significantly worst in terms of failure rates than Shuttle.
Falcon 9 has had 531 launches over 15 years (394 of them have happened since January of 2022), with 3 failures (one on the pad before launch, two during launch), for a success rate of 99.4%. Had these failures occurred during manned missions, the Dragon capsule's launch escape system would have likely saved the crew.
The mature version of Falcon 9 (block 5) has had 466 successful landings out of 472 attempts, giving it a success rate of 98.7%. This likely means that riding on a Falcon 9 first stage with no additional safety devices (such as a parachute or a launch escape system) is safer than riding in the Shuttle.
Starship's budget is 2-3% of the Apollo program, and its goal is to become profitable long term. I would assume that given a sliver of the same budget, and a much harder problem (fully reusable super heavy lift vehicle), and more regulations than the 1960s, it would take significantly longer.
It's also not useful to compare failure rates yet, because Starship is currently a test program. SpaceX believes that it's cheaper to build, test, and revise rather than to try getting it right the first time. They know Starship is not reliable, which is why they don't have real payloads in their test flights. Contrast this to the Space Shuttle, which NASA thought was so safe that they put a schoolteacher on it and broadcast the launch to children across the country.
Musk himself has a deadline of December 2026 for Mars, ignoring Artemis. How many more launches do they need to work out orbital refueling to make that deadline if they don’t test actually sending a real payload into space?
Don't take my word for it. Richard Feynman served on the Challenger commission and very nicely summarizes the difference between Apollo and Space Shuttle.
SpaceX is doing stuff that's just beyond the scope of what's deemed conventionally realistic. That's achievable and pushes us forward.
Cost to launch on falcon per kg: $2-3k. Wait, that's price. SpaceX is profitable. It's roughly 100x cheaper.
A fully loaded falcon costs less than $500k to launch?
Maths checks out, whether the cost per launch is really that low is another thing.
And that wouldn’t be a profit margin of 99%, it would be a profit margin around 10000%
$350,000 at the lower end where he said $20.
I don't think the expendable upper stage on its own is $350,000-$500,000. I think the fairing is probably more than that.
Still one of my favorite works of music and cinematography both; I just don’t agree at all with the implicit message. We are destined for the stars.
That end scene with the Atlas missile that you linked is def the best though (and Prophecies is the best song/track too).
I'm just a bit of a contrarian, and couldn't resist the appeal of that reply :@)
The stars suck, though. Even Mars is entirely awful.
Like, that's not very different from "we're destined for Hell". Not an inspiring sentiment, right? It's really bad.
How awful it is aside, it's also roughly as realistic as "we're destined for Tolkien's Middle Earth". Only marginally less fantastical.
That's what I mean about space being just the worst. Like, it's so bad. Even Mars, which is relatively decent by space standards, is complete shit. Complete shit that's also insanely expensive to reach.
Dominating the environment is what we do. for better or worse... its the one true value we can measure ourselves against.
Just fantastical thinking that we’ll make any headway on that trip in the next 50 years.
It’s only “entirely awful” if you want to do things like walk around outside and sit under trees. It has a lot of co2 and h2o around, and while the sunlight situation isn’t great, it isn’t dire either.
We could have been destined for the stars fifty years ago, but it turns out we're a stupid species with no planetary intelligence.
So we spend far too much energy finding clever ways to blow things up - cities, rockets, economies - and far too little on boring shit like keeping the climate stable and the lights on.
And even less on the breakthrough physics, psychology, politics, and ecology needed to make interstellar travel even remotely likely.
I think the global CO2 levels would disagree. Our oceans, and therefore most of the biosphere are quite literally out of (pH) balance due to rapid CO2 release.
> We are destined for the stars.
I doubt it. Don’t get me wrong I love the idea of it, but the reality is our physical form is so fragile and fleeting relative to the harsh vastness of the Universe.
We should protect this cradle of our genesis with everything we have. That we have not met other life should be taken as a warning of how difficult the road ahead.
Did you not see the booster catch work on the first try? The partially successful re-entry even with half the control surface melting away?
The hundreds at SpaceX are doing Apollo-level breakthrough work, and it should not in any way be minimized due to tangential Elon-hate.
You're right. It shouldn't be. And yet here we are wasting our digital breaths talking about the man. And there's really only one person responsible for that.
If you're wasting your breath talking about someone, it's not on them, it's on you. We live in a world where everyone should have realized by now that attention is the most valuable currency you have ... and yet people continue to use that currency on things they claim to dislike ... I have a hard time feeling bad for them.
"Grass-fed body mass is the most valuable currency", said the rancher to the fenced-in herd of beef-cows.
Nah, that's what someone with power says in order to distract you from realizing you don't actually have nearly as much. Attention has never been a good substitute for power, or thousands of years of human civilization would be very very different.
There's a fine line between stoicism and self-defeating tactics.
Don’t succumb to survivorship bias.
It’s exceptional that people centrally organized a huge amount of effort and resources towards something imagined by countless humans since prehistory, was far from being a sure thing, had no possibility of revenue and only indirect value, planned and executed a full decade toward a single objective, and succeeded in a single moment shared by almost everyone with a television.
Arpanet, the transcontinental railroad, the pyramids…amazing still but lacked the 0 to 1 all at once factor. Starship is inspiring and also not a moonshot.
How is that a greater achievement than Falcon 9 and reusable boosters, especially Falcon Heavy? Like sure if Starship lives up to its goals it will be a greater achievement. But how would an ambitious project that fails its most fundamental task (reaching orbit reliably) be a greater achievement than one that actually does meet its goals and was (and is) still incredibly revoluationary?
Starship is a HARD project, and even the components that they have completed are insane levels of engineering, far beyond even the whole F9 program.
It’s not just a “does the rocket work” thing. Every working part of Starship so far has been a monumental breakthrough of unprecedented scale. The fact that they built the largest ever orbital launch system (it’s currently not yet reusable but it can indeed put a ~hundred tons into orbit in a single 15 minutes) is enough to classify it as an unqualified success. Their stated goal just happens to be significantly greater than even that.
It has already surpassed the (non-reusable) Saturn V in price/perf as well as payload capacity (and development program total cost).
It's ok to not like the guy at the top, but still marvel at the achievements of the people he pays.
I appreciate their work however and it's a shame that Musk has tainted their efforts. He could be a decent man if he tried but he's clearly chosen a different path.
I agree that plenty of good has happened because of the profit motive but SpaceX is not patronizing the sciences, NASA is.
You see the same sort of thing in F1 drivers. Even in the most casual of driving competitions they are competetive to the point of pettiness. My theory is that's part of what makes them an F1 driver - the inability to lose. it can easily be turned to destructive purposes, see all the avoidable crashes but it gets harnessed and turned to useful purposes.
On a more loaded tangent, see Trump. His lifelong ambition was to be famous and become president and i thinkthat, more then his billions gave him the drive to run for office and get reelected (you can argue that it was to satisfy his overwhelming ego but that doesn't change my point). Even if you despise them and everything they stand for i think everyone can learn something from them in how to succeed in their goals. it's not being narcisstic and elbowing everyone out of the way, but it is about having goals, wanting them enough and a healthy dose of self belief.
And if you actually study SpaceX and Tesla, then you figure out that they are actually very smart with their capital investments, and therefore didn't need nearly as much funding as his competitors.
And not being able to do one thing, running twitter, doesn't mean magically that its the same at other companies. Morris Chang failed at running a consumer facing job at TI but do we therefore conclude that he is bad?
SpaceX is just the commercialization of stuff that was invented by our parents and grandparents in the 60s, 70s and 80s.
xoxo <3
Humanity
As much as I would like to make snarky comments about not launching, space is hard and I'm happy to give them a break. Wait until Starship is ready to launch and has a decent chance of not breaking up over the Caribbean is my take.
Also combustion itself is not properly understood all the way down, so there is literally a big physics gap involved here.
We are - at least in terms of model fidelity. There's limitations to how much CFD/simulations you can do. That kind of data (+other sensors) is used to refine models - thermal, aerodynamics, structures. Especially with starship, they are able to stream out live-video and data so that they get it even if the vehicle breaks up. Controlled hypersonic flight of such structures has been done very few times. There's stuff that can be learned from previous vehicles like the Space Shuttle but there are a lot of things that are very different - different control surfaces, flight profiles, thermal management etc.
There is more to engineering than understanding the fundamental physics.
Just as one example, a spacecraft moving through a fluid atmosphere and with fluid fuel/oxidizer burning in its combustion chamber is going to involve incredibly complex turbulent fluid flows. And turbulence is something that we famously don't have good high-level theories (approximations) for.
Take the last flight as an example. The booster experienced what was (probably) a structural failure in the propellant fuel lines. Simulating stress in the structure under static conditions is quite straightforward. Simulating the stress as the rocket ascends vertically and the tanks empty is hard, but doable.
Simulating the dynamic loading as the rocket flips? The fuel sloshes around, the sloshing fuel changes the kenimatics of the rocket, the kenimatics of the rocket change how the fuel sloshes, the engines try to correct adding a new force, the thrust from the engines creates increased force on the fuel increasing the pressure to the pumps, the performance of the engines changes because of the new fuel flow, that alters the acceleration further causing fuel to slosh, gass bubbles are intrained in the fuel from all the sloshing thus altering its flow/sloshing behavior, valves open and close creating pressure waves in the fuel that travel up and down the fuel lines (the water-hammer effect alone being enough to burst the pipes if valve closing is not well-timed), and the rocket itself flexes as all this happens, testing every exact detail of the manufacturing which you have to go out to the factory and physically measure. No simulation software ever imagined can handle all that coupling of systems.
The usual solution is to make some conservative estimates (the center-of-mass of the fuel will move by at most some amount, bubbles will last at most some time, the engines will have so much control authority, etc). But that requires experience. And this is aerospace, so safety margins are tiny.
The failures Starship had were often to do with simpler engineering bugs that they’ve been ironing out, such as: leaks in piping caused by violent shaking, explosive gases accumulating in closed spaces, filters getting clogged by ice forming in the cryogenic tanks, and burn-through of an experimental heat shield design at moving joints.
WRT Starship, I'm sure that certain aspects (like heat shield performance) can be simulated to acceptably high fidelity, but the entire system is beyond simulation. An accurate simulation would have to simulate the materials and mechanical behavior of every component, in an interconnected way, under a wide variety of stress states -- which is basically impossible with modern technology. Maybe in a few decades...
Ok chatgpt 21.2
Build me a rocket simulation
Ultimately this is an important step towards a future with healthcare providing thousands of years of life, and unlimited housing space.
Your second sentence showcases some wildly negative biases. I suspect we could probably save money by improving the efficiency of our social programs and end up with even more to spend on scientific advancement.
I agree that there are many better ways to organize social programs, e.g. replace all of them with negative tax, when some percentage of all tax collected past year is divided equally between all citizens of any age.
Sure well organized society is very impressive, e.g. invention of capitalism and private ownership is the greatest invention ever made, but the point i was trying to make is that it is only a foundation for really exciting stuff like science spaceships, immortality.
NASA is cool and undergoing massive defunding. Education is already under-funded and now under attack. Science is being actively squashed and replaced with religion yet somehow, you think space travel will become more likely?
No one rational can possibly believe this is supposed to be a serious strategy, surely?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45008078 and marked it off topic.
Edit so being distracted was a net benefit for Tesla and Spacex? Down voters have not addressed this assertion, must be true.
Before that, I'd assume it was mixed - I think people were buying because EVs were seen as futuristic, and there was non-partisan support for Musk when his main association was visionary rather than political/nutjob.
Tesla was a virtue signal brand from day one[1]. Their core insight came from Palo Alto et. al. You’d drive through the suburbs and many driveways had two vehicles: a [insert gas guzzling luxury vehicle] and a Prius. One vehicle to signal wealth/status - the other to signal environmental consciousness. But the eco vehicle was a compromise; compared to the jaguar it sat next to, it was a clunker.
Tesla’s GTM strategy was that you could buy a vehicle, without compromise, from them to signal to your social circles how much you cared about the environment. And it worked.
They broke the oil cartels with a direct to consumer sales strategy and kicked off the EV market.
But now that market’s needs are well met. The eco virtue signal crowd has multiple vendors selling decent products to meet their buying preferences.
There is a fairly large untapped market though that won’t convert off of oil. That demographic overlaps well with the 2025 MAGA coalition. And, with Elon’s involvement in that coalition, Tesla EVs are now a new virtue signal for a new demographic.
You have people buying EVs that were rolling coal as recently as 2 years ago.
[1] The brand being built around eco virtue signaling is well documented in early interviews with original founders - a quick search will turn up many direct quotes talking about them driving through California suburbs doing market research and discovering exactly that.
He’s also been very much in the driving seat on engineering for Starship, and we’ve yet to see how well that works out, but the success of F9 is there to see.
Quite a few major engineering decisions at SpaceX go all the way to Elon Musk himself. One of the best known is probably the decision to make Starship land onto the "chopsticks" of the launch tower, removing the need for dedicated landing legs.
Elon Musk made this suggestion back in 2020. Most of the engineers tried to talk him out of this crazy idea. So he took the few engineers who thought it was plausible and assigned it to them.
We even know for certain that this wasn't a success that got attributed to Musk after the fact - because this story was first printed in a biography in year 2023, when it wasn't clear whether this ambitious landing method would work in practice. The first "return to launch tower" attempt was only made in year 2024, and succeeded on the first try.
The Starship rocket is the most powerful launch vehicle ever constructed. If controlled by a maniacal megalomaniac it could be turned into a powerful weapon. Hopefully that won't ever happen. But it raises the question: should a private citizen ever be in control of such powerful technology whose development was funded by taxpayers?
I could make it clearer: Neoliberalism, specifically it's distinguishing trait of having governments foster markets via public money without getting public ownership, leads to concerning situations like the op was discussing.
Edit: Interestingly Trump's thing about getting the government getting a 10% stake in Intel is not neoliberalism! I don't like Trump, but that's still not neoliberalism
The ability to manufacture rockets like this would of course be very valuable to anyone developing ballistic missiles for military purposes. But there are also big differences as those use mostly solid fuel. Selling this information to other countries could be a potential national security risk.
Musk's rockets are inside the US, he would probably be able to launch one rocket on a target before the US military would stop any further launches. So I don't think any direct threat here by Musk would be that worrisome.
I would assume that the risk here is similar to that of many other companies or persons that use large amounts of explosives or other tools that could be weaponized. Musk has a delivery system that is superior to just driving a truck with explosives somewhere, but in many cases that doesn't matter much.
There are some scenarios I could imagine, but they're really more like movie scripts than reality. Musk doesn't have the power to prevent retaliation, and he also couldn't threaten or demand ransom as he couldn't defend his rockets against the US military.
Starlink is his property, he doesn't need to be head of state to suspend a free service and that's how it should be.