Comment by inglor_cz

"what they're finding out about the complexities of building Starship that they can barely get it back down to this planet, never mind back from a second one."

I would argue that complexities of building Starship are already a solved problem. Boca Chica built a lot more test units than there were (test or production) Apollos and the "factory for rockets, churning them out in regular intervals" part seems to be mastered. They even made three iterations of Raptor, and the third one looks really promising so far.

What is far from perfected is the heat shield and I agree that it is a critical problem.

"it, they can push out the timeline for that further than the original 2026 on Mars goal that they are about to wildly overshoot"

True, but this seems to be ubiquitous in space industry. I am old enough to remember talking about the US going back to the Moon in the 1990s. But the goal, declared by presidents (who have a lot more power at their hands to fulfill it) kept being pushed back and back, always into the next decade, then the next...

If you tolerated it from the government, you should probably tolerate the same from Musk, for the sake of consistency.