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I'm very much in the Musk hater category, but it really takes some doing to dismiss SpaceX as vaporware.

This is the problem with the dialogue around Musk. He's not 99% vaporware, he's 80-90% vaporware. That's problem enough.

In some cases, like Tesla, the vaporware is propping up the company (pivoting to robots!) even though sales are crashing because of the self-inflicted immolation of his personal brand. This is not going to end well.

Going to the moon is very much vaporware. Maybe the penultimate example of it.

Going to the moon was, at the very least, demonstrated as technologically possible in the 1960s, and you can literally go watch a Starship launch if you want. I have a very hard time putting it in the same "entirely prospective" category as androids, self-driving taxis, and Mars bases.

The moon is orders of magnitude more difficult to land on than launching a LEO satellite.

And that'd be a great point if we didn't already do it six times with slide rules in the 1960s.

penultimate = second last

I'm sure Musk will have another scam soon enough!

Touche!

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