Musk's SpaceX to build $100B launch facility in Louisiana | Hacker News Reader

Musk's SpaceX to build $100B launch facility in Louisiana

bbc.com

9 pointsnativeit9 comments

I wonder what (if anything) this means in relation to this other recent headline: "The world's busiest spaceport is about to get a lot quieter, at least for now" https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/08/the-worlds-busiest-spa...

SpaceX is going all in on Starship.

... untill Musk no longer matters. After that, that project is going in the trash faster than you can blink. Its a collosal waste of time, money, and resources, and its never going to work.

Ego driven and foolish. Starship stacks up a multitude of project risks each of which has to be perfectly solved or the whole project fails. As Elon fans will point out, all of these problems can be solved in KSP. But only a fraction of them will work out in real life.

Elon has been quoted in the media recently proposing preposterous launch cadences. He has to, even though they are preposterous as they appear to be. If he had to admit that launch cadence is never going to be much faster than Falcon, he would also be admitting that getting starship to the moon will never happen.

If he had to admit that Starship isn't up to its payload spec, he would have to admit that no matter the launch cadence, starship will never be refueled in orbit, and therefore never get beyond low Earth orbit.

Apollo is the subject of several books on project management for good reason. Starship will become a case study in how not to do it.

In the long-run, people will probably move away from these Gulf of Mexico states. Climate change will force them or choose a harder life they can have elsewhere. The desert or marshes can be fun for a short get-away, but not so much for a way of life.

I've been anxious about this prospect. Having seen the rightward ideological lurch all over the world caused by immigration in the last 15-years, the relatively extreme mass migration that's likely as the planet gets warmer promises to be an existential threat to any number of societies. In my opinion, we should be looking ahead and tempering our attitudes for what seems increasingly inevitable. It's quite literally the least we can do, since the cessation of oil consumption has yet to make an appearance at the proverbial table.

I think you want to keep options open and then be able to adapt rapidly to an unpredictable future.

It is better to cultivate a flexibility and resilience, rather than (prematurely) optimize for a single outcome.

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49436822

https://archive.is/oTBkW

Reply on news.ycombinator.com