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Comment by SideburnsOfDoom | Hacker News Reader

> Starship is going to be huge when it's finally operational.

Any day now. Yep, real soon, honest!

I don't understand this attitude. They're progressing steadily on something that's never been done before. They'll almost certainly be launching satellites next calendar year, and at a pretty good clip by Q4.

Don't repeat mistakes of people that were making fun of SpaceX landing rockets before they started to land.

Starship has so much innovation in there, the raptors itself etc.

It launches, it flies, it re-enters and it lands. The engines work. The heat protection work. Even when they push it to the limits by intentionally experimenting with different heat protection, omitting tiles etc. Even when they are in R&D stage.

I believe they can make it work with little refurbishment between flights. Even if all didn't work like they planned, they still have a very, very good vehicle.

I mean something must go off the rails very very badly for the Starship NOT to enter the service.

It has to make money. The Space Shuttle was a technical marvel as well and was massively subsidized by the US taxpayer.

Falcon9 has basically no market: the only thing that keeps it flying is Starlink.

The whole AI/orbital datacentres/launch thing is a giant grift.

Falcon 9 has easily enough market launching commercial satellites to keep it flying outside of Starlink. It's the most efficient launcher in the world from a cost perspective. Falcon 9 was making money before Starlink existed.

That's not what Glynne said. The whole justification for Starlink was to create demand for Falcon.

I can believe that as people questioned the need for _rapid_ reusability without the market. However saying that F9 has no market besides starlink is false. Take a look at Q1'24. report: https://payloadspace.com/payload-research-q1-space-industry-... 20 starlink / 11 commercial

2025 report https://spacedaily.com/t-spacex-launched-165-falcon-9-rocket...

123 Starlink / 42 commercial. Almost 1 commercial launch per week. I don't think any other launcher does 42 launches per year apart from china.

And the way F9 enabled Starlink is spectacular - a money printing machine on itself for SpaceX.

That's not the same thing as saying there was no market for F9. SpaceX wanted to have a larger market. They were already making money. A lot of money. They could slightly undercut the price legacy providers were offering with a much larger profit margin.

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