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Interesting definition of "struggling", as in "managed to catch the largest booster rocket ever built with by snatching it mid air, and land the largest space ship in the ocean using a belly flop maneuver that everyone said was crazy and would never work".

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Overall, the rocket launching part of SpaceX is making a loss. Starship R&D is, despite being cheaper than traditional old space development, still *very* expensive.

If Starship wasn't being developed (either because it worked and replaced Falcon or just if they stop), they wouldn't be making a loss on rockets.

The 'struggle' is that they seem to have regressed from that point, and that the scale of Starship is perhaps too big for a 'fail fast, iterate rapidly' approach.

Especially now that every failure results in a massive wave of negative publicity

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