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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • You left out a part in that quote, “eventually”. SpaceX have delivered on every NASA contract milestone, most (well) on time even which is unheard of in the space industry. SpaceX have fulfilled their first contract for delivering cargo humans to the ISS and is now on their second contract while Boeing is yet to deliver a single ounce human to the ISS for their first contract that they got before SpaceX got their first. SpaceX delivers, and for a good price as well. SpaceX have never claimed they would make space ‘travel’ 1000x cheaper. Their goal is to make it 1000x times cheaper to lift mass to orbit. Eventually. This is the whole reason for the Starship project. They have made it 5-10x cheaper with Falcon and a working version of the current incarnation of Starship could be 50-100x cheaper. Still a ways to go, but can’t say they aren’t delivering. Nobody else comes close. Which is why SpaceX (the company) will be shooting 90% of all mass to orbit worldwide this year. China (the country) will do about 6%. All other companies and countries together will do the remainder. Why? Mostly because they are by far the cheapest and partly because they are the only ones who can launch so often. Turns out landing a rocket and using it again was a pretty decent idea.

    SpaceX have never claimed we would have tourism to Mars soon. Even Elon has not claimed that. At best they would claim it is not outside the realm of possibility within the next few decades.

    The accomplishments of SpaceX are undisputed. Which makes it a shame to have such a negative opinion based on so little information in my view. I get a lot of joy from ignoring Elon and focussing on the progress of the company. They do remarkable things. As do others in the space industry and I enjoy following their progress as well.



  • They cut off the engines a couple of seconds before reaching orbital speed for safety. Until they prove they can control the ship on orbit they can’t risk having a 16 floor tall 125 ton steel tower coming down in a random location. This is unrelated to any of Elon’s shenanigans.

    There is nobody who knows even the slightest bit about space flight that doubts Starship can reach orbit.

    SpaceX has many things to get done to make Starship the fully reusable rocket they want it to be, but picking orbital speed is just about the weakest argument against it.