Comment by adastra22
19 hours ago
China (and others, e.g. Blue Origin and Rocket Lab) are rushing to catch up to where SoaceX was 10 years ago. They are moving faster than anyone in aerospace has ever moved before, but SpaceX is still accelerating faster than that. By the time they catch up, the game will have again changed.
SpaceX and NVIDIA share this trait. They out-innovate, and know only one speed: the speed of light. The tortoise can only beat the hare if the hare takes a nap, and nobody is napping at SpaceX.
I’m not a fanboy. I have criticisms of SpaceX. But you are pattern matching to the common story of startups getting complacent and being surpassed by up-comers in China and elsewhere. But the innovators dilemma only applies if the innovator stops innovating. Two decades on, SoaceX is still innovating as much as they always have.
> They are moving faster than anyone in aerospace has ever moved before, but SpaceX is still accelerating faster than that. By the time they catch up, the game will have again changed.
That was a believable pitch up to around 2020 or so.
In 2018 they announced they were going to send a private crewed mission around the moon in 2023. Now we have the benefit of hindsight, it's 2026 and the vessel they were going to use has not yet had one circularised orbit.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but at this point Starship development is currently going slower than both the historical analogs, the Saturn V and the Space Shuttle.
That has been how Elon always operates. It’s “green lights to Malibu” timeline estimation. He does it for a reason.
That much has always been obvious, however (1) note final paragraph, and (2) the stock price estimates (both SpaceX and Tesla) are also based on "green lights to Malibu" degrees of optimism.
I mean, given the pyrotechnics, the most obvious historical analog is the N1.
Perhaps, and good suggestion regardless, but the Soviet leadership was so adverse to negative publicity that it's hard to be sure how happy they were with hardware-rich testing.
Throwing cheap rockets into the air until they don't explode worked fine for Falcon; but given how long it's taking, I'm not sure it's working okay for Starship, and I'm now completely convinced that this is a *terrible* way to make something that's supposed to land on Mars, refuel, and return.