Starship's eleventh flight test
spacex.com
spacex.com
I used to follow this quite intensely, and wished space-X the best. But with the owners antics, I just can't get myself to care that much. At the very least, that is sad for all the hardworking people at space-X.
What used to be a very exciting pioneering space company is now a cash cow that directly funds and enables whimsies of an unhinged billionaire that keeps doing shit aimed at destabilizing lives of many, including mine. And I am not even in the US!
I mean, I live in Germany now, and the German name for Germany isn't Germany (except when it is because Denglish is surprisingly also used in political posters), and likewise has a different name in French (Allemagne), Dutch (Duitsland), Danish (Tyskland), Polish (Niemcy), and Czech (Německo).
Or how the body of water separating Great Britain from mainland Europe is "The English Channel" or "La Manche" (literally "the sleeve", but also name of a department of Normandy).
I saw fellow liberals protesting the Tesla cafe in Los Angeles. They’re actively discouraging people from buying electric. Global warming is the more important threat to our species and these fellow liberals are ACTIVELY DISCOURAGING people from buying and owning electric cars. Truly the mind boggles.
Spacex contracts are by far the lowest cost to get cargo into orbit though. They save the gov money.
Your spacex contracts thing is bullshit too, but first the more important stuff. I think you'll agree many of these affect poor americans greatly, as well as poor people worldwide. A partial list of what Musk did with DOGE:
* Mass layoffs across the government. Especially education is badly affected.
* USAID shutdowns
* DOE downsizing (ie. killing education)
* Sabotaging student loans (purposefully cutting the infrastructure and personnel for getting a student loan)
* Killing off local Social Security access by closing offices
The list goes on. Next time Elon Musk says he needs engineers, I hope someone has the courage to ask him why he seriously and purposefully damaged education for Americans.
As for the spacex contracts: a cheaper price only helps if it actually leads to less spending. Since the US cannot risk spacex being the only access to space, it cannot cut funding to ULA contracts. Therefore spacex is more expensive, despite the cheaper sticker price.
Think of it this way. Let's say there's 2 cars. One is 40,000 USD (thanks to Musk and Trump's tariffs). One is 20,000 USD. But due to law you can only buy the 20,000 USD car if you ALSO buy the 40,000 USD car, there's no other way. So the real price is:
* the "cheaper" car: 60,000 USD total price
* the "expensive" car: 40,000 USD total price
See the problem here? Spacex is not actually cheaper. Only by not counting a bunch of costs because they come out of a different budget is spacex cheaper. A fact ("deception" I would say) that keeps repeating in mr. Musk's businesses. The sticker price on Tesler cars, for example, has similar problems: EXPENSIVE mandatory maintenance means the price of Musk's electric cars is far more than the competition, despite the sticker price sometimes being cheaper. Of course, now even the sticker price is far from the best.
The rest of the world is not entitled to unlimited American funds for all time.
>* DOE downsizing (ie. killing education)
Canada doesn't even have a federal-level education department. Is Canada filled with uneducated morons?
>As for the spacex contracts: a cheaper price only helps if it actually leads to less spending. Since the US cannot risk spacex being the only access to space, it cannot cut funding to ULA contracts. Therefore spacex is more expensive, despite the cheaper sticker price.
The mind boggles at this "logic".
The desire for having multiple launchers is not because "the US cannot risk spacex being the only access to space", but because the US got badly burned by putting all its rocket eggs into one space shuttle basket.
If SpaceX didn't exist, and the US government used ULA and Blue Origin for all its launches, the US would be paying far more than it is now. Don't believe me? Biden's NASA administrator Bill Nelson quoted a member of the Joint Chiefs as telling him that SpaceX had saved the US government $40 billion for just launching military payloads <https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/06/05/did-spacex-really-...>.
On the civilian side, SpaceX saved NASA $2 billion for just one payload, Europa Clipper <https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/a-year-from-launch-the...>, so who knows how many billions more from other launches.
The above is purely a cost analysis, and doesn't even cover SpaceX allowing the US to no longer being dependent on Russia for sending people into space, as was the case from 2011 to 2020.
Btw: if you're going to be racist, don't you have a problem with the fact that mr. Musk ... is not an American? I mean that is the one thing I'll credit Musk with: making Trump suck his ** in front of conservative "we hate immigrants" voters, on the white house lawn exposes the hypocrisy of MAGA and GOP voters better than even throwing a nuclear bomb on Breitbart could.
I lean pretty far left myself. But this kind of comment is why I think the left keeps losing.
The person you're engaging with is presenting rational arguments and logic in good faith, and instead of engaging and disagreeing and presenting your own counterarguments, you're just labeling them a racist.
This is not persuasive to anyone. In fact, it massively hurts your case, as readers assume you simply don't have any good reasons to support you. And I'd say it goes even further, and hurts "the left" as a whole, as people are conditioned to view that movement as in support of silencing conversation. Fewer than 20% of the population wants to live in a world where legitimate discussion might have you branded as a racist, homophobe, sexist, fascist, etc.
And not only that, it completely weakens the word. If you use the word "racist" to describe pretty much anyone who disagrees with you, then suddenly it applies to the vast majority of people, at which point it (by definition) no longer describes behavior that society finds unacceptable. Then it loses all power to cause anyone to actually reflect on themselves, or to take it seriously when the charge is levied against others.
I highly recommend reserving these words for the specific and rare times where they actually apply.
He also made a great many people rich not to mention how many jobs. That does not count?
Also I have no idea what expensive mandatory maintenance you mean. As if any other car does not require maintenance.
To the posters who say: Ah why should anyone care that you don't care... and actually going to call the post "narcissist"... what the heck, aren't you pointing the gun in the wrong direction? :P
I agree with the sentiment that this is sad. I was very excited for space, space space! And new cool technology and the options it'll bring. It's like we could follow the Apollo project again, but for a new generation, after decades of not-a-lot happening.
So I am sure there are hundreds of millions which are now caught between starry-eyed fascination with the technology and the progress of technology and extending humanity's reach with these biggest and most powerful, while also incredible sensitive and complex machines ever built...
But seeing the main guy unravel into a spit sputtering raving lunatic on social media, going deep into the nastiest rabbit holes available, and showing no concern for the wellbeing and welfare of those requiring protection...
Turns the whole endeavour on its head. Now it looks like the selfish race to capture space for the 1%, to monopolize access and use it as a political tool to further only the very selfish agenda of some detached madmen who don't care about the political "temperature" on earth and the damage they are doing.
So, millions of people turn their heads in sadness, and I completely understand and share that sentiment. It's a shame. It's breaking hearts.
@Elon open your eyes! Enough is enough! :)
Empathy is not weakness.
We'll have you back on the woke team the moment you're ready! :)
You are entitled to your opinions, I happen to be more or less on the same side as yours. If antics is what make you enrage, though, it isn't hard to find people that you agree with ideologically having the same behavior, and I doubt you find them as distasteful.
Politics changes but technological advances are permanent that have long term impacts.
That's not necessarily true, look at the clockwork cylinder fished up from the ancient Greeks that was apparently an Olympic oriented calendar.
And.... the pyramids. Built by humans, yet the method is not well understood now, so little so in fact that aliens seems more plausible.
I would say that technological advancement is often lost to time, those are just two examples and I imagine there are countless more we don't know.
It tells me
> October 14, 2025 00:15 - 01:30 United Kingdom Time
If it's going by IP geolocation, I would call that a bug.
In this case, SpaceX seems to be using UNIX timestamps(1) which is probably fed to a combination of Date and Intl to obtain a localized date string. Extrapolating the country where the user is located is not really rocket science either. But, if my context is somehow tampered with (VPN, internal clock, browser settings…), then I will get a potentially "wrong" date, for whatever definition of "wrong".
The problem is fundamentally the same on the server side because you can only rely on the information you get… which might be wrong.
So either you take the safest route, which is to display the local time of the organization or its UTC representation and let visitors figure out their local date on their own, or you take a somewhat riskier one, which is to try to display a localized date to your users and accept the potential flaws of the method.
[1] https://sxcontent9668.azureedge.us/cms-assets/future_mission...
F1 finally has a really nice system for showing time[0]. They show both the local time at the circuit and the local time wherever the user is. For years they showed only the track time, without even a hint about the timezone the track was in.
Keep in mind: they're yet to reuse a ship, and landing Starship onto the launch tower is even more precarious than their first stage landing trick. There's still a lot of room for actual fuckups to happen there. They're going to lose ships, and they'll be lucky to avoid losing a tower.
The first crew should spend some time on Mars on their own, inside the Starship, and maybe in buildings it erects, or tunnels it digs.
I would have expected a working rocket would have been quick - especially given they have a wealth of experience making the first one. And then I would have expected a protracted period of nailing down the landing and reuse
And yet.. just getting this thing to orbit has been seemingly as hard as catching it coming down
Does anyone in the know have a good assessment of what's up? Did they just take bigger risks making the Falcon 9? Is the workforce burnt out?
From the descriptions and how they speak, they don't seem interested in getting to orbit unless it's reusable. But it seems like a giant non-reusable rocket would already be a huge win. It's at least shut down the ridiculous SLS program and freeup a bunch of funding
Probably the closest comparable rocket to starship would be the N1, and that never successfully flew
Falcon 9 was announced in 2005
First launch in 2010
By the third flight they were delivering to the ISS
Starship .. it's a bit unclear when they started designing it b/c they kept changing the design. But It's been in design for ~10 years.
> As of August 26, 2025, Starship has launched 10 times, with 5 successful flights and 5 failures.
10 launches.. and not even in orbit. Not to speak of ISS. I'm sure they'll make it work eventually, but I would expect with experience the design time would decrease, not increase. Starting from zero, making the first rocket engine has got to be much much harder than making an improved iteration (even if more complex)
Falcon 9 was SpaceX's second rocket, but it also underwent several major changes before it becomes the workhorse that launches more than the rest of the world combined.
Again, I have no idea what the difficulties actually entails.
It's pretty obvious that the programme has had issues that I don't think SpaceX were prepared for, in the parts that aren't the a priori obvious hard problems. In that sense, it just hasn't been as well executed as they'd like. Especially their difficulties with weight and payload that are probably why they frontloaded so many design changes before letting it settle.
Then there's some significant fraction where SpaceX really has intentionally done the 'rapid iteration' thing, and keeps flying unfinalized designs in boundary-testing ways on an in-progress factory system. For all Starship has flown badly, it's not like even the easier competition is flying much well in the meantime. Starship flies absurdly frequently.
And this is in part that SpaceX aren't just building a rocket with 2-3x the liftoff thrust of a Saturn V, aren't just building a rocket with first stage reuse, aren't just building a rocket with unprecedented complete second stage reuse, they're also building it to be cheap and mass produced in a factory. Big is hard. Reuse is hard. Cheap is hard. Factories are hard. Makes sense the rocket is hard!
Then there's also the point that while Starship has been a mixed bag, it has also achieved a lot. Its last flight was extremely solid, and really did show the whole mission profile down to soft and positionally-accurate drill landings of both stages. Nobody else has done what Starship has done.
There was a chance at getting that done with Jared Isaacman, but it looks like Team Pork Barrel has put its foot down, and that just isn't going to happen now.
If the goal of Starship development program was just "make it to the orbit", they could have done it quite a few flights ago - as early as Flight 4. Instead, they keep testing first stage RTLS, reentry profiles and heat shields - neither of which is a requirement for "make it to the orbit".
Starship is much larger, much more ambitious, and SpaceX can now afford to burn through more hardware than they ever could. They are setting harder goals and taking more risks with the test program.
Starship development time is much harder to pin down and it has changed a lot more. A post-Falcon 9 rocket was announced in 2012, but it was very different (e.g., initially meant to be carbon composite, changed to steel in 2018, went through 3-4 name changes). Starship seems much more exploratory, pushing the boundaries of what has been done in rocketry. Structural material is unusual, fuel is unusual, engines are unusual, using tower to catch rockets is unusual, reentering and reusing booster is unusual, size and weight of rocket and thrust is unsuaul, etc.
Starship's first booster landing (tower catch) was in 2024, so even if we took the start of development as 2012, that is only 2 years later than Falcon 9 for ~same milestone. Falcon 9 of course was flying commercial payloads for some time before booster reuse, which puts it well ahead of Starship on that metric, but I would say SpaceX has been less concerned with getting something to space, they have a reliable solution for that already which is still well ahead of competitors for cost effectiveness, and the company is financially in a much better place than it was when trying to get Falcon 9 working.
Starship development is still working on returning the second stage and orbital refueling, which are beyond Falcon 9's capabilities. It's possible it could have been launching commercial payloads by now if that's what they had concentrated on (without reusing the second stage). They have demonstrated second stage engine re-light and payload deployment, which is basically is needed to put Starlink satellites into orbit.
They're making pretty steady progress. It's off what they had hoped, but so is every rocket company and government rocket project.The rocket is the largest machine ever to fly. It's approaching 3x the size and power of the Saturn V at launch. The engines are like nothing ever made before in terms of power and efficiency. It seems likely to significantly reduce cost per kg to orbit beyond the revolutionary Falcon 9 even if it doesn't hit their goals (which might be unrealistic) of 2 orders of magnitude cheaper, 1 order of magnitude might be possible ($2000/kg -> $200/kg) even without second stage reuse. With orbital refueling it promises to reduce costs of payload to Moon and other planets and outer space. This could spur development of scientific instruments and experiments that are cheaper or more capable (or both), and exploration of space.
I think it's very exciting, not just for the promise of continuing better and cheaper communications for us on earth, but for all the science and exploration it could help to unlock.
It does seem like they're having trouble with re-entry and reusing the second stage. I hope they can work that out. I'm sure they can get it to reenter and land (they essentially already have twice), I'm just quite skeptical of the promise of a few hours reflight turnaround time. I suspect that if that continues to cause them trouble, we're likely to see them start to fly payloads next year without second stage reuse working yet.
Starship on the other hand is pioneering new stuff - hopefully the world's first fully reusable rocket which no one has managed before.
Flight 11 is the last of the 'Block 2' Starships, so not 11, but potentially Flight 12 could be a successful derisking mission of Block 3, and then Flight 13 would be first full operational mission. Actual full reuse could follow soon after that.
The optimistic case is that they've demonstrated everything they need to except for having a fully reliable heat shield, but they also seem to have a workable plan for the heat shield for literally the first time in the program's history.
The pessimistic case is that Block 2 was rough, and making mistakes doesn't prevent an organization from making more mistakes. If things continue to go wrong, it could be arbitrarily far out.
Wikipedia has a compilation of what's on the agenda:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starship_launches#Futu...
Given their sizes and capabilities, the entire Lunar Gateway space station could be deleted and leave only the lunar-variant Starship upper stage it's supposed to dock with in the same orbit for the crew launch vehicle from Earth to dock to directly instead.