Comment by JumpCrisscross
4 days ago
> 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.
To paraphrase, spacex is "making the impossible merely late"
> 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?
3 replies →
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?
> 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.
1 reply →
He's a much bigger asshole than he is a fraud, but he is a fraud too. There's no hype like Musk hype.
I fully agree with you, but the answer is obviously "because he's a very unpleasant man."
4 replies →
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.
7 replies →
> 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...
2 replies →
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.
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.