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jojobas

HLS isn't going anywhere.

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> HLS isn't going anywhere

I've been hearing this about every SpaceX project for the last twenty years.

Judging by the fact it's 2026 you must be writing this from the Mars base.

> Judging by the fact it's 2026 you must be writing this from the Mars base

SpaceX was started in 2001. It announced Falcon 9 and messaged its reusability ambitions in 2005.

Falcon 1 wasn’t going anywhere because making rockets is too hard. Falcons 5 and 9 weren’t going anywhere because medium lift is a different ball game. Falcon Heavy wasn’t going anywhere because timing that many engines impossible. Reuse is impossible. (The kerosene will clog everything.) Then, after refly: the total launch market will never be more than $5bn, so reuse is useless.

More recently stainless steel can’t work. Now it’s shifted to reuse and refurbishment being too difficult, or refueling being impossible because of boil-off. Because keeping shit from boiling, apparently, is just unsolved engineering. ಠ_ಠ

Not everything SpaceX does is genius the first time. But they’re ridiculously good at not persisting with stupid. The idea that a dozen rapid depot launches is somehow a gating concern, again, as a tech demo, we’re building the depot eventually, is just such a weirdly small and big concern.

> But they’re ridiculously good at not persisting with stupid.

They are persisting with HLS though.

> They are persisting with HLS though

Through what? What experimental data do you think renders this path foolish?

Because I’m seeing a rapid-reuse heavy lift system with a fuel depot being built.

I dunno, the fact that nobody can say how many fuel launches a moonshot is going to take, but at least 12? And that the lunar orbit chosen due to available energy makes rapid extraction impossible?

> the fact that nobody can say how many fuel launches a moonshot is going to take, but at least 12?

Nobody has ever done in-orbit propellant transfer or storage. We’re building it to see what those numbers shake out to, and how the propellant gets lost. (Boil off? Leaks? Incomplete transfer? Weird, unexpected degradation because space? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.)

If it works, it dramatically reduces the cost of lunar and deep-space access. You’re saying that isn’t worth it because it isn’t certain? This is spaceflight. Nothing is certain. We have to weigh risks and payoffs. And then mitigate them. The time for mitigating this risk is this (and probably next) year. If the refuelling is dumb, the plan changes—Blue Origin is testing its own approach on the same timeline.

Like, in Apollo 11 we fucked up the lander’s fuel budget. The astronauts were literally running out of fuel because a foreseeable problem, the surface being bumpier than expected, wasn’t contingency planned for over ten preceding missions. And we’re trying to do better than just retreading Apollo, because Apollo—strategically—failed as a platform for further manned spaceflight.

> the lunar orbit chosen due to available energy makes rapid extraction impossible

Isn’t NRHO an Orion limitation? Can Orion circularise on its own?

Also, rapid extraction hasn’t been a requirement for the Moon since ever? If you want rapid extraction, plant a ship that can motor off the Moon home in one shot as an emergency-egress option down the road. In the meantime, you’re days away from help under ideal circumstances; realistically, we don’t have rescue options.

Starship might be crap. But the bets look good, and the project is on the whole no more ambitious than the original Apollo missions. The criticisms you’re raising are either fundamental to the mission architecture because it’s developing a new spacefaring capability (refueling and rapid relaunch) or cost-cutting choices irrelevant to HLS (Orion’s second stages being efficient but underpowered).

"How many fuel launches" is the error margin.

If they get less performance or more mission payload, they can add tanker launches. If they get more performance or less mission payload, they can remove tanker launches.

People ran into "the design is 10% heavier than planned for unexpected engineering reasons and now we have to make hard choices" on space missions far less complex than a literal Moon landing. SpaceX has externalized the "hard choices" into the tanker count, pre-emptively.

The lunar orbit of Artemis is defined mainly by SLS/Orion's performance, or lack of thereof. The specific NRHO was a Gateway choice, and might now be dead alongside it, but by itself, Orion can't get to low Lunar orbit. Which drives some peculiar design choices.

So many (perceived) problems with spaceflight and building moon bases and the like are solved by simply making the process and cost of launching faster, easier and cheaper; the problem that NASA has always had is that each launch, even with the reusable space shuttles, cost billions and took years of engineering, planning, etc. To the point where yesterday's launch was done with (what I perceive to be) salvaged parts where the engineering was done decades ago, because engineering something new would be too expensive and take too long.

Sure, don't fix what isn't broken and all - *nix tools are decades old too after all - but still.

Ughhh, Elon Moosk amirite? Such a fraud, because [???]

I don't really understand why these kinds of comments persist except as some pathological cope when confronted with a world that doesn't work the way you want it to.

It's not convincing, it immediately outs you as a zealot, it's counterproductive in every single way. Why keep doing it?

just saying: he is good at vaporware on a large scale and kind of a fucked up person. It's not weird people are skeptical. But he also has basically an endless money supply so he can throw money at problems and make them go away eventually. But his timelines are basically all lies used to get venture and retail money into the game.

That describes basically all founders though, minus the endless money supply. That's how business/sales works: make promises, build product later.

Also SpaceX, Tesla, PayPal, OpenAI, Grok and Neuralink aren't vaporware...

The claim fundamentally doesn't make any sense.

Cybertruck, Semi, Hyperloop, robotaxi, point-to-point rocket travel, tunnels, the list goes on.

Making promises and "it's essentially ready, it's just about regulators" are quite different, if not for Trump he'd be done for securities fraud.

All of those exist or are being worked on, so I don't get it. Except maybe hyperloop, which was abandoned afaik.

What are you even trying to say? That these projects are totally fake? AI generated or something? Like the Moon landing was fake?

Of course they are real, just like Theranos, except that one was less fraudulent.

The one with sales in seven countries and over 50,000 vehicles driving on roads?

Hyperloop was never a Musk project — it was a back of the napkin suggestion he gave away.

I fully agree with you, but the answer is obviously "because he's a very unpleasant man."

Lots of powerful people are unpleasant, but Musk additionally got involved in politics in a very visible way at a very partisan, polarising time in American history. He didn't attract as much hate before 2024.

Maybe more people should listen to Musk's political message. The Biden Administration was playing nasty games, blocking progress on both SpaceX and AI generally.

That's beside the point... Fact is, there's a schism and no one crosses it. Elon picked a side I guess, so the other side hates him.

The Biden admin was TRYING to slow down AI. It did not work for them.

As for SpaceX I'm not sure what you mean seeing as how the government is easily its largest customer...

> don't really understand why these kinds of comments persist

One, you can make money criticizing Elon on the internet.

Two, controversy is catnip to the man. DOGE was a disaster. X and xAI look like aborted disasters. And he’s clearly gotten bored with Tesla. It isn’t hard to project that on SpaceX if you don’t know the heritage.

My guess is Tesla's pivoting to batteries and storage. Huge demand, great margins, competitive advantage.

I'm very disappointed Tesla has (seemingly) abandoned its goal of producing 20m Model 2 per year. Forfeiting the mass market is a bummer. More so every passing day.

(I'm bearish on Robotaxi and (Tesla's) self-driving.)

He's a much bigger asshole than he is a fraud, but he is a fraud too. There's no hype like Musk hype.

> confronted with a world that doesn't work the way you want it to

Sure.

Some of us are just trying to figure out the new rules. What is all this hypercapitalism stuff (aka Muskism) and who are the people (lunatics) pushing us there?

So it's natural to kibitz about one of the most powerful people on the planet. Especially when he's also a world-striding shit poster, antagonizing everyone, demanding a response.

FWIW: the writings of Jill Lepore, Quinn Slobobian, and Ben Tarnoff have been most illuminating. Ditto their misc guest appearances on various podcasts.

X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story

https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/elon-musk-the-evening-rocket

Elon Musk Is Building a Sci-Fi World, and the Rest of Us Are Trapped in It Nov. 4, 2021

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/opinion/elon-musk-capital...

Muskism: Guide for the Perplexed

https://www.amazon.com/Muskism-Guide-Perplexed-Quinn-Slobodi...

https://bookshop.org/p/books/muskism-a-guide-for-the-perplex...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/mar/26/muskism-by-qui...

https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/books/muskism-review-elon...

So you just hate him. Great. Now stop derailing every thread related to NASA/Spacex launches.

Citations, please.

They are very good in finding money from somewhere to afford all of this.

If this doesn't play out to be reducing costs for the avg american, Musk was able to get funded by the american tax payer nicely.

Musk has saved the tax payer (through the government) billions of dollars on every project SpaceX has been involved with. They have earned money by providing vital Internet services to the disconnected and left behind in rural areas all over the world.

9 Million customers. I know a handful of people who use it as a secondary option who were everythign but 'left behind'

Thats not a lot of people.

And with the satelites risk and disruption to astronomy and the co2 usage, it might have affected more people negativly than positivly.

What's your (hot) take on Starship's second stage reusability?

My (noob) understanding is the challenge is achieving reuse (safety, reliability) while keeping the (economically necessary) 100 ton payload capacity.

To paraphrase, spacex is "making the impossible merely late"

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