If he doesn't write his own tweets then he hires someone with the same personality to write them. They are not notably restrained or anti-inflammatory.
Hmm is this why Elon wants to deregulate his pursuits? Should we just turn a blind eye to this sort of pollution in the same way the Spacex camera cut the shot of the explosion as it occurred?
Let's hope our government will more proactively monitor these launches starting in January 2027 when a new Texas and federal government comes to power.
Lol. I'm not sure if you're making an ironic joke, but they actually had to prove this when the previous administration was trying to bury them in bureaucracy. So they had to carry out a scientific study to demonstrate that (1) the ocean is quite large and (2) the odds of anything being at any specific point are quite low.
I'm sure you can dig it up somewhere if you too need a study to confirm such.
Is it weird that a private for-profit company wanting to explode something in public space needs to prove it does what it can to minimize the potential damages? Should everyone be allowed to throw bombs into the ocean? Or just Elon?
I still remember watching Falcon 9 (Block V, iirc) successfully landing back on land (as opposed to droneships) after deploying Orbcomm OG2 satellites in December 2015 -- almost 11 years ago.
We went outside in our Orlando office to see the flair up in the sky, and then were looking for the re-entry, by the time we could figure out where it was our coworker said it was already standing upright.
I was at Canaveral for the double booster return (Heavy?), and it's unbelievable the velocity those things come back down at, with the powered deceleration.
A few seconds after the sonic boom, you're seeing them cancel out the last of their velocity and land on the pad.
One of those 'it can't possibly be that big because nothing that big could be moving that fast' optical lack of reference moments.
Yeah I think people that have never seen one of the beasts just can't imagine the scale. Fully 'assembled, the height is upwards of 120m - 70 on the booster, 50 on the upper stage. So it's something bigger than a football/handegg field going into space and something still in the same ballpark coming down at near freefall, then slowing itself, and landing on a spot with a margin of error of a few meters.
I'll be that guy: they still have to fly it again. That's the real question. Incredible achievement. We got used to landing and caught boosters real quick!
This was a huge milestone, but you're right that there are a long list of future milestones: catch both on the same flight, reuse of both on a given flight, fly without significant refurbishment, fly N times in T time for many values of each, orbital refueling, crew, etc.
Space Shuttle was a compromised design from the beginning. They originally wanted the Space Shuttle booster to also have wings and return to launch site (with a crew!). But they couldn't afford to develop two new vehicles, so they compromised by making the external tank as cheap as possible and adding solid rockets (which led to the Challenger disaster).
But their biggest mistake was having the engines on the orbiter (so they could be recovered) but not the fuel tank. That meant the orbiter had to hang on the side of the external tank, which made it vulnerable to foam strikes (leading to the Columbia disaster).
Landing with wings is aesthetically pleasing (compared to tower catches) but consider the waste: You have to boost the weight of the wings, landing gear, etc. all the way to orbit and then bring it all the way back. It's much more efficient to just bring fuel and use that for landing. And if your guidance is accurate enough, a pinpoint landing means you can land on the launch tower and not worry about landing legs.
For the shuttle there was also a lot of interference from the Airforce, which forced them to have a massive payload bay, so AF could launch and service their big Keyhole satellites (and possibly snatch Soviet ones in one orbit without warning).
Then there was pressure to make use of solid propellants to amortize their use with military uses, not to mention pushing for Shuttle carrying all payloads for the US.
This together created the dangerous and expensive design tHat was STS.
People give the USAF shit about influencing the shuttle specs, given the capability was never used...
... but a lot of those were set in 1968 - 73, when relationships between the US and Soviet Union were very different than the late 80s.
Given the development and operational timelines, it wasn't a bad bet to cover needing that military capability, had things turned out differently between the two superpowers.
Challenger blew because the joint was designed to always be in compression--but it went into tension during the twang. After the headlines they paid attention and fixed it.
Congress insisted on the boosters to be made in other districts distant from the launch sites, so they were forced to make them in segments instead of a single continuous tube welded together permanently.
The risky thing about solids is that you cannot abort them. Once they light, there is no turning them off.
Shuttle always started the main engines for a few seconds (wasting fuel) to make sure the engines worked before lighting the solids. But there were many engine-out scenarios after the solids were lit that would result in loss-of-crew.
It wasn't actually the Airforce, it was a group of consultants at the white house who forced it. But even without that, many of the bad choices had already been made by then.
> Then there was pressure to make use of solid propellants
As far as I remember the decision was based on development costs (like most decisions).
I tend to think that for human rated flights it may be possible to give it a parachute just in case powered descent is not possible for any reason as a precaution for a belly flop water landing with parachute assist. The flaps are already there too so maybe just increase their size is possible for a glidable descent? We're entering a size class for the vehicle that makes some outside the box stuff possible without sacrificing too much in terms of payload capacity.
The space shuttle was aerodynamic for a very specific reason - they had to do a mission (that never happened) where they would launch, deploy a spy satellite into a specific polar orbit, and return back to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in a single orbit. The result was a requirement for a lot of cross range, which needed large wings that hurt its performance a spacecraft.
Starship doesn't have that - and so it can be much more optimized for it's purpose. It's basically tanks with a cargo bay and control surfaces, while the shuttle had to toss it's tanks away every flight.
There's many objections to this, but a major one is that the entire vision for Starship is Mars and other terrestrial bodies. If you create something optimized for Earth, you have to start over from scratch for another planet. And vice versa if you create something specialized for another planet.
An adaptable retropulsive landing system, by contrast, is fit for duty just about anywhere. In the long run you'd just need the atmospheric/planetary specs, a flat hard surface somewhere, and it'd be able to come down on it safely.
> Why is Space-X undervalued because they can catch a rocketship?
The market values SpaceX over multiple areas of the business and their future plans and it isn't just this event which they have proven to accomplish.
> You do understand that a company needs to have a business case equivilient to its valuation right?
Nope. That is not how this works nor how investors see it. It is about their total addressable market (TAM) which SpaceX can capture over everyone else. So here are some more further questions:
1) Who is paying SpaceX for the compute that they have?
2) How quick is SpaceX building their data centers to support their customers?
3) How many people use Starlink as their primary internet provider?
You understand that almost all of where SpaceX businesses can expand into those areas and grow into that valuation and higher?
> Our whole planet sends 1000-2000t of payload into space, most of it is now starlink.
Your point is?
So who else can catch and reuse a rocketship to frequently deploy satellites into space in a very short period of time? (Don't say Blue Origin.)
1) Anthropic because Elon Musk bought too much Compute and doesn't need it for his own AI proudct. In parallel Neoclouds are building up the same compute and its more like a negative sign that they got lucky
2) ? I don't understand what you mean. Are we now talking about Datacenters for others or the space thing?
3) probably below 8 million. 10 Million customer overall, plenty as an alternative or for camping etc.
Amazon Leo is an alternative. But for sure Space-X started a race to the bottom (china, blue origin and co) so they have to start moving and use their first mover advantage.
My point is, that Space-X is already responsible for the most amount of payload which gets send into space. We as a whole planet don't have that much payload and Space-X made it alot cheaper to send payload up.
So were is the 1 Trillion evaluation? Btw. its currently at 1.89T
> 1) Anthropic because Elon Musk bought too much Compute and doesn't need it for his own AI proudct.
The Grok models and products also use the compute in SpaceX's data centers. It only makes sense to provide that excess compute to others such as Anthropic that don't own any, and that is worth tens of billions a quarter.
> In parallel Neoclouds are building up the same compute and its more like a negative sign that they got lucky
It is not the same. You can ask any chatbot, how many GPUs do the neoclouds have over SpaceX in their data centers?
Then:
> 2) ? I don't understand what you mean. Are we now talking about Datacenters for others or the space thing?
Both. The point being that they (SpaceX) are already quickly building new ones on land codenamed "Gun Range" and "Spam" and are the only ones that can launch and connect all of them via Starlink (if they in space) and serve both themselves and new customers.
> Amazon Leo is an alternative. But for sure Space-X started a race to the bottom (china, blue origin and co) so they have to start moving and use their first mover advantage.
Amazon Leo is not even generally available. So that doesn't even count.
> My point is, that Space-X is already responsible for the most amount of payload which gets send into space. We as a whole planet don't have that much payload and Space-X made it alot cheaper to send payload up.
So what happens when the neoclouds are not able to build data centers on land anymore due to legislation that prohibits more of them getting built [0] and ultimately they get paused? Most of the neoclouds are already sold out and cannot build more of them and have deadlines on these loans with interest on them.
Maybe the compute has to be deployed somewhere else in the long term.
> So were is the 1 Trillion evaluation? Btw. its currently at 1.89T
Exactly. It if goes lower than 1T it is cheap. This is not even pricing in the building of their own semiconductor fabricator (Terafab).
If you start building Datacenters up in space, you need to send A LOT of Starships up there for MONTH to get ONE normal avg size GPU based DC in Space.
This DC can then poisen our atmopshwere btw. and burns up limited resources on our own planet.
They don't need the compute because their product Grok is not competitive. They don't use the compute to make Grok better because?!
Amazon Leo will be though. Space-X has a first mover advantage, what did Tesla do with it?
> If you start building Datacenters up in space, you need to send A LOT of Starships up there for MONTH to get ONE normal avg size GPU based DC in Space.
This isn't a massive problem for SpaceX as you want to believe it to be.
> This DC can then poisen our atmopshwere btw. and burns up limited resources on our own planet
So are you going to tell them to pause everything? (You won't) What solution do you have to them to solve this? (You don't have any solution.)
> They don't need the compute because their product Grok is not competitive.
That is false. Otherwise they would have given up on scaling Grok already.
> They don't use the compute to make Grok better because?!
So Cursor does not have any customers that use Grok on a regular basis beyond Twitter / X? Nor does Grok Bot need the compute either? (They most certainly do.)
Efficiency gains in their inference engines allow them to use less GPUs for themselves, and also sell that excess compute to others who are otherwise sold out. Both scenarios can be true and it doesn't mean they "don't need it" either.
> Amazon Leo will be though. Space-X has a first mover advantage
With what launch pad? SpaceX has plenty of their own and are building even more.
> What did Tesla do with it?
They built self-driving cars with "FSD" and autopilot with that advantage, and your point is?
Launch itself isn't super profitable and doesn't have a very big TAM, especially if you carefully treat the TAM as a present value and discount future cash flows. Also, at least by my personal guesswork, Starlink alone shouldn't get close to a $1 trillion valuation. It seems like the current valuation is based on people's guesses about the likelihood that space data centers pan out in a big way.
> It seems like the current valuation is based on people's guesses about the likelihood that space data centers pan out in a big way
The Starship program is one of - if not the - biggest risks here. Making starship work could bring the launch cost down far enough to derisk that whole program, and today just made it a lot less risky
Starlink is going to be using a lot of launches for satellite replacement. Target constellation size is 40K satellites, which with a 5 year satellite lifetime means they need to replace 8000/year (160 launches of 50 satellites each => 3 launches per week).
We've seen the booster landing/catch before, but seeing the ship do it with the belly flop definitely looked cooler to me. I still remember the awe of watching two boosters land at the same time after a heavy launch. Watching the transition from bellyflop to landing gave me the same awe and being impressed.
Kind of crazy to reduce the hardware on ship so much and move so much complexity to the ground. This can really only happen in a situation where anybody can throw out any dumb idea, because if you suggested this 20 years ago people would think you are an idiot.
That's...the point. You can hire commercial welders to work on the ground side and build everything out once, cheaply.
The issue with the shuttle era was that they needed huge teams of specialized technicians to refurbish the insanely complex orbiter after every mission.
If we ever get sufficiently improved materials science for heat shields and engines there's still always a possibility of returning to the SSTO space plane concept. That would allow a more austere launch and recovery environment, but given current limitations this is the local maxima.
The actual problem with the shuttle was the same as the same as the actual problem with all space technologies -- there just isn't that much value in launching stuff into space. It's nonzero, but it's a rounding error when compared to terrestrial applications.
>This can really only happen in a situation where anybody can throw out any dumb idea, because if you suggested this 20 years ago people would think you are an idiot.
Indeed.
Musk's biographer tweeted the pages from his book <https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942> discussing how in late 2020 Musk suggested, then insisted against considerable opposition from his engineers, that Superheavy be caught with chopsticks instead of landing on legs like Falcon 9.
Also according to the book, Musk is the person who suggested and, against considerable opposition from his engineers, insisted on Starship switching to stainless steel instead of carbon fiber <https://x.com/richardprice100/status/1728106606616015097>.
(Hint to others: Musk was right and his engineers were wrong. Both times.)
Reusable stages is very neat, but seems a little crazy to pay the tyranny of the rocket equation twice. I heard one person say that carrying fuel to land over the whole flight means it takes 23x more launches to get an equivalent payload to orbit.
Using modern technology, couldn't disposable first stages be produced much more cheaply than during the space race?
How much of modern manufacturing disposable booster's cost would be fuel vs metal?
It costs less, but it is not free. The stages need to be designed to come back and that adds weight. Additionally you need some fuel, it is not all air breaking.
And every bit of weight is really bad, because of the rocket equation.
Without internal figures no one can say what is ultimately financially better. Especially now that the development is a sunken cost.
Yes, they should just parachute people out of planes, why reuse them thousands of times, carrying that extra fuel to land, they could go another few hundred miles.
The point is the ship and rockets are expensive vs fuel. Fly a Starship 100 times the cost is amortised over the flights and fuel+bit of refurb maintenance is tiny.
That 23x number is trivially refuted simply by looking at the fact that this flight delivered 52 tons of cargo to orbit. Could a similarly sized expendable rocket like the Saturn V deliver 1196 tons?
If the fuel (+ oxidizer) ends up costing as much as 1% of the cost of launching a conventional single-use rocket then the people behind it will be very happy. That means that their rocket (+ cost of ground facilities + all the people prepping the rocket and monitoring the launch) is very cheap.
The fuel (+ oxidizer) is basically free compared to all the other costs.
He's actively holding the program back at this point. Top engineers in this industry are increasingly reluctant to join a company with a such a toxic culture and public reputation tainted by musk.
Pre-trump 1 SpaceX was a tough place with a slightly off vibe but otherwise strong industry reputation.
Post-trump 1 SpaceX became a place you put in a couple years so that you could get a more stable job wherever you wanted
Post DOGE SpaceX is a place you really have to hold your nose to work at and coming out of that company increasingly labels you as a possible culture problem. I've seen a lot of SpaceX people getting turned down during interviews because they're either toxic or present a risk of toxicity.
And yet, the ones there just achieved an engineering miracle. So that probably shows that ones turned down were probably turned down because they didn't add anything positive to the company.
The same top engineers not achieving the same or even similar things? It's okay to dislike the culture, in fact they should be mad as hell at it. But if you can't/won't join'em, beat'em.
What actually is the point of all this? I'm not trying to be a snarky contrarian, I've never had any interest whatsoever in space, star trek, "what's out there?", so I genuinely don't get it.
I'm not trashing people's interests, obviously I am the odd man out in not giving a damn, I just don't see what we're trying to achieve when there are so many issues we can't even figure out on earth.
> damn, I just don't see what we're trying to achieve when there are so many issues we can't even figure out on earth
Earth issues are mostly coordination problems. Space issues are technological problems. Elon Musk has been very successful at solving technological problems: electric vehicles, space flight, mind-machine interfaces.
It makes sense that people like him who can solve technological problems point their attention and substantial agency to the things that their unique skills place them in a position to solve.
The Elon Musk of coordination does not currently exist. One must imagine that the kind of person or school of people who instituted NATO and the US-Japan MDA and turned our one-time enemies into our staunchest allies were people of such caliber but there’s no one I know today who qualifies for that.
Musk definitely has mastered firm-level coordination but clearly national coordination (let alone international coordination) is a problem beyond even him. His teams nearly religiously point the same way, and they have achieved wonders. It is truly remarkable what these people have done. Good for them, and I’m glad to see them at it!
Elon Musk is not the person building any of it. Not EVs, Space Flight or mind-machine interfaces.
He is reckless and ignorant and yes it works for some of his stuff and it doesn't work for others.
His ignorance alone in DOGE probably killed children and humans. Don't get me wrong, US of America doesn't has to pay for aid around the planet even if they contribute massivly to climate change and consumes a lot of resources importet around the planet, but his abrupt cancelation and involvment in USAID killed chilrden and humans.
Do we also ignore everything else if you list up things which are only positive? Like Boring company? Solar city? Buying Twitter and manipulating democracy around the planet? Doing an Ad tour in front of the White House and disrespecting anyone else who can't buy themselves next to Trump?
Thank you for the well thought out reply. I will try to do better to understand the larger technological breakthroughs of space flight as a key development in how things modernize on earth itself
I mean, you need to get money from somewhere to fund your dreams.
If it's datacenters in space then let be it. They are pretty cool as well. It seems a lot of people don't like them on Earth.
I am not a cynic, but a realist. It is easy to do things when you put a ton of money towards the effort so I find this nothing special. Maybe when I was a child these things would fascinate me, but they are just engineering.
So, what would amaze me? Ending homelessness in the United States. Because that takes more than money. I would like to swap the "passion" or engineering for the "compassion" of ending suffering. Very easy to shape and change material things, very hard to change the heart.
The people you want to share your excitement might be suffering under the same separation of wealth that made this landing possible. (Yet there is little talk that they failed to catch the booster and it exploded).
The two big causes of homelessness are substance addiction and craziness. Semaglutide is the first medical intervention that can help to some extent with the desire part of addiction.
Electric brain stimulation is likely able to help with mood disorders. Maybe even OCD and schizophrenia. If nothing else, proper measurements (lots of good data) of both healthy brains and mentally ill brains should help. We've had almost none of that, with EEGs being rather pathetic.
Nobody is going to "solve" homelessness tomorrow or next year. Not the people who think they can just spend more money -- someone's money, not their own, not the people who think charity is the way forward, and not the people who think what is needed is cures.
We can do some almost immediately if we are willing to institutionalize more people but it's not a good or complete solution and we aren't willing to, anyway.
The real improvements are likely to eventually come from things like semaglutide (and more likely more research into the instincts that drive addiction, now that we finally have a molecule that can affect them) and things that both provide data (that we sorely need) and can provide interventions directly in the brain.
Still waiting on the promised $25,000 EV though. If Neuralink is anything like American EVs, psychiatric patients might as well move to China for treatment.
You don't need private people/companies or more taxes for that. US has enough resources to do it already. Maybe you should go ask your politicians, better yet, ask your friends/neighbors/yourself if you are ready to take the drastic steps necessary to solve that.
Of course, you should not need to ask, in a better world.
If govt really cared about it, more than that, if (most) PEOPLE really cared about it, it should be top 3 priority of any govt in any country.
- Govt should build massive cheap hotel-type housing spaces (full free) equipped with bare minimum necessities like roof, heating, food, basic healthcare (not million $ free cancer treatment).
- Mandatory drug rehabilitation (if applicable)
- Mandatory job search/placement/training
- Jail with forced-labor for people who put no effort and/or causes disturbance
If your govt has $6M to fund tourism in Egypt, money to fund opera/ in columbia, comic book in peru, then they have money to help homeless people IN the country. No money should go to non-citizens (let alone non-citizens in another country) while citizens of a country go homeless.
I am typing this from the security of my home, without worrying about 0c temp, or food. So it is easy for me to say this but still, I am sorry that you are going through this, and I sincerely wish you the best; that your life turns around, even if just a little, enough to have a roof over your head.
Thank you for for making this comment. It helped me realize in myself what's changed over the last few years.
I grew up reading Zubrin's The Case for Mars, The Martian, and October Sky. I went to space camp at NASA, and as a 14 year old I sent an angry email to NASA when I learned of the early ISS decommission date(they later extended the lifespan several times, and I like to think I was the reason ;) ).
I followed Bigelow Aerospace in the 2000s doing the only interesting commercial work in space, and afterwards became amongst the first online SpaceX fanboys, long before they ever landed a merlin engine.
I studied hard in school with a passion of going to Embry-Riddle to learn to build rockets - though I ultimately chose a software path in life instead, I stayed an enormous space fanboy over the 2010s, frequenting the SpaceX subreddit and catching every launch and landing stream I could live.
I've cried watching so many rocket landings. The spirit of human endeavor is god damn BEAUTIFUL to me.
I want to point my finger and say that everything else changed. The Internet became what it is. Elon Musk showed his true colors. Software Engineering became middle management.
But the truth is that I've changed.
I care about the people wealth disparity hurts more than I do about us getting our perfect vision of the future now now NOW.
The faster we pump this machine, the louder the Earth is SCREAMING.
The world is on fire, and we're covering it in data centers with the goal of building artificial machines for strip-mining humanity of the very competency in engineering that has given us so much joy.
We're caught up in a race to the bottom and without diverting our path I have to wonder if this starship landing will be one of the last great human-driven engineering achievements before we lose the ability to do so ourselves.
I don't think the answer is to swap the passion for engineering with compassion, as I think they can both live happily together, but I hear where that desire is coming from.
It's coming from a place of love.
And when the last tree has fallen, we may find that we cannot eat money.
Homelessness is largely driven by personal choice and by our desire to not compel the "unhoused" into mental institutions where they'd probably be better served.
There are ample government and private support mechanisms, including housing and food, but most choose not to take advantage.
> Homelessness is largely driven by personal choice
Ha! Really? I am homeless. Disabled with a serious mental illness. I just cannot afford housing anymore. Living out of my minivan.
Not my choice. I do not even have a psychiatrist or therapist anymore.
> There are ample government and private support mechanisms, including housing and food, but most choose not to take advantage.
This is the biggest myth neoliberals tell themselves to feel better. I agev up. Seven years on a section 8 housing list then they just dumped me with no explanation.
Me and four other engineering graduates just sat and watched this around a big TV in my mates apartment in Sydney, and what we saw was an amazing team, delivering amazing engineering results. Just take a win for humanity for once.
I would think that private space exploration frees up all sorts of NASA funding which can be spent on your social improvements of choice, no? Hard for me to see the either-or you're positing. We can have both.
I share your unhappiness with the grifts, including SpaceX's. Then I think of the thousands of lesser, more damaging-in-aggregate ones that I likely have no view into, and it bums me out.
So yeah, what I have left is my child-like "heck yeah rockets!" :) And this one was great.
All I want are bigger and more cleverly located space telescopes, a couple of more probes and orbiters around other planets and asteroids, and I want those Mars samples that Percy has been pooping over the Mars surface returned to Earth and studied in a lab. And maybe a probe to Alpha Centauri or exo-planet viewers that use the Sun’s gravitational lensing in the next 5 or 6 decades.
I think the concept for the Alpha Centauri probes uses solar sails and externally fired lasers[1]. The exo-planet viewer concept also proposes solar sails.
In orbit refueling is likely next year. The goal is to have two shots at a moon landing in 2028.
And a nuclear ion rocket scheduled for 2028 as well.
The current NASA administrator is doing a good job getting rid of all the things keeping NASA from doing things. (And at least after Artemis II, both parties in congress seemed to be on his side.)
I believe it was Trump and Elon Musk falling out over the "Big Beautiful Bill". A lot of people then campaigned for to get the job anyway, and he did.
After Artemis II, there was a moderately hilarious congressional hearing in which the Republicans insisted on giving NASA more money, the Democrats insisted on giving even more money than that, and Isaacman trying to say "we're good".
- longer in orbit missions for Starship of weeks or months. There are some non trivial issues with that probably; and you'd need that to not make refueling pointless.
- having two active launch sites. Nor strictly required but probably handy if you are going to have two Starships in orbit at the same time.
They might not get to all that in that order. But the important step today is that they get to inspect a "flight proven" Starship without water damage. I bet they are going to learn a lot of details of where exactly they need to iterate and improve. This took them some time with Falcon 9 as well. We've gotten used to this thing basically launching and landing without many issues. But that wasn't always the case. 2027 is probably going to see an increase launch rate.
Moon landings are going to be an interesting one because it depends on NASA as well and the decision making around that is very political. On the other hand, there's going to be increasing peer pressure from the Chinese. They have their own plans and it doesn't involve waiting for NASA to get there first. They are targeting 2030 for a manned mission. I expect the politics might get a bit more opinionated on that topic as that gets closer. The long term game here is not just landing and planting another flag but actually establishing a permanent presence on the moon. That involves flying useful payloads back and forth. Starship seems designed for that.
What happens after that is going to be an interesting one. IMHO, Starship is optimal for earth landings but not necessarily for the moon and Mars. What's currently flying is probably over engineered for a place with no atmosphere and one 6th of the gravity (the moon) or a very thin atmosphere and one third of the gravity (Mars). Would those flaps even work in the Mars atmosphere? However, it's a great launch vehicle to get components in space to build something more optimal. Also the booster might be used to launch other things than Starship. Like something that will never come down and can instead be fueled for deep space missions and Mars/Moon landings.
Only recently I read how the dust on Mars surface is toxic, contains those unhealthy ultrafine particles (PM2.5 and PM0.10) and sticks to almost all surfaces. It will be difficult to keep from getting inside a habitat.
And how the Apollo astronauts got "lunar hay fever", allergy-like symptoms from
the lunar dust that stuck outside their space suits and so got carried inside their lunar module.
It's difficult to underline how huge this is. This marks the first time in the history of rocketry that the upper stage of a rocket has returned home from orbit to a safe, upright landing.
(And to preempt the obvious objection: yes, maybe you can call the Space Shuttle an "upper stage of a rocket" if you squint hard enough, but it didn't do upright landings, none of its boosters were reusable and even the Shuttle itself was effectively rebuilt from scratch at exorbitant cost each time.)
It's sad to see a lot of media missing the point, eg as I type this BBC is reporting this as "SpaceX successfully catches part of Starship rocket on its return to Earth".
Whatever you call it, the Shuttle Orbiter wasn’t a complete stage in any case. It needed the external tank, which was never recovered.
SpaceX has now demonstrated all the pieces of a fully reusable launcher. Next comes putting them all together in the same flight, and hopefully demonstrating that the flights can become frequent and cheap. There’s no guarantee of that, but it’s looking good.
> yes, maybe you can call the Space Shuttle an "upper stage of a rocket" if you squint hard enough
Why wouldn't it count? It is not the first time in the history of rocketry that the part that is not the boosters returns home intact.
Sure, you can say "it's the first time in the history of rocketry that it lands upright", but you could also say "it's the first time in the history of rocketry that it is not white".
If you want to say how huge this is, tell me how different it is from landing the boosters. Because from the outside it sure as hell looks very similar.
The Space Shuttle has four parts, namely the Orbiter, the External Tank, and the two SRBs. Only the Orbiter is reusable and actually lands, the rest are jettisoned in flight. (SRBs are recovered, the ET is not.) However, the Orbiter is completely incapable of flight without the other three, so it's not a rocket stage on its own, just part of one.
As for why it's harder to catch Starship than Super Heavy, where do I begin:
* Super Heavy is suborbital, its maximum velocity is far, far less than Starship.
* Super Heavy returns upright. The Starship does the famous but aerodynamically very complex "belly flop" to reduce speed.
* Super Heavy only has two static fins to guide it. Starship has four actively controlled fins that need to survive the extreme forces of launch and re-entry.
Thanks, the insights about Super Heavy vs Starship are interesting.
About how "huge" it is, I understand that it is economically huge: Musk will get even richer.
I would be interested in knowing how "huge" it is in terms of engineering. Like, my understanding is that they needed to invent new maths to go to the moon in the 60s. Does SpaceX compare with that, or is it "just" what you can do with a lot of money and powerful computers?
Genuinely interested, even though rocket fans will hate me for not knowing the answer and daring asking. Bring the downvotes!
Notably, they were reusable! Sure, they had to refurbish them, same with the shuttle’s main engines. The only thing they threw away was the external tank which didn’t have any engines.
Yeah this guy is smoking something. I actually think the shuttle landings were more impressive than this one. Not taking anything away from what they're doing here, but they're still only up to the mid-1970s technology-wise.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 50.6 ms ] threadHuge congratulations to the team.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GJ-wZLLuh9M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zt1V9UWhuKk
booster was low on fuel, plus no mood of risking tower with boom, boosters are cheaper than towers.
Let's hope our government will more proactively monitor these launches starting in January 2027 when a new Texas and federal government comes to power.
Trivial compared to what we already did with Deepwater Horizion.
I'm sure you can dig it up somewhere if you too need a study to confirm such.
Fabulous advancement for the human species.
A few seconds after the sonic boom, you're seeing them cancel out the last of their velocity and land on the pad.
One of those 'it can't possibly be that big because nothing that big could be moving that fast' optical lack of reference moments.
Seems like the same design principles that goes into Starship could create a version with more aerodynamic surface.
Is the idea that Starhship will be considered safe enough for human crews?
Space Shuttle was a compromised design from the beginning. They originally wanted the Space Shuttle booster to also have wings and return to launch site (with a crew!). But they couldn't afford to develop two new vehicles, so they compromised by making the external tank as cheap as possible and adding solid rockets (which led to the Challenger disaster).
But their biggest mistake was having the engines on the orbiter (so they could be recovered) but not the fuel tank. That meant the orbiter had to hang on the side of the external tank, which made it vulnerable to foam strikes (leading to the Columbia disaster).
Landing with wings is aesthetically pleasing (compared to tower catches) but consider the waste: You have to boost the weight of the wings, landing gear, etc. all the way to orbit and then bring it all the way back. It's much more efficient to just bring fuel and use that for landing. And if your guidance is accurate enough, a pinpoint landing means you can land on the launch tower and not worry about landing legs.
Then there was pressure to make use of solid propellants to amortize their use with military uses, not to mention pushing for Shuttle carrying all payloads for the US.
This together created the dangerous and expensive design tHat was STS.
... but a lot of those were set in 1968 - 73, when relationships between the US and Soviet Union were very different than the late 80s.
Given the development and operational timelines, it wasn't a bad bet to cover needing that military capability, had things turned out differently between the two superpowers.
I don't think the period is entirely declassified? If it ever will be
Challenger blew because the joint was designed to always be in compression--but it went into tension during the twang. After the headlines they paid attention and fixed it.
Shuttle always started the main engines for a few seconds (wasting fuel) to make sure the engines worked before lighting the solids. But there were many engine-out scenarios after the solids were lit that would result in loss-of-crew.
> Then there was pressure to make use of solid propellants
As far as I remember the decision was based on development costs (like most decisions).
Starship doesn't have that - and so it can be much more optimized for it's purpose. It's basically tanks with a cargo bay and control surfaces, while the shuttle had to toss it's tanks away every flight.
An adaptable retropulsive landing system, by contrast, is fit for duty just about anywhere. In the long run you'd just need the atmospheric/planetary specs, a flat hard surface somewhere, and it'd be able to come down on it safely.
Only catching both the booster and the rocket would top this one. But the rocket only being caught is still impressive regardless.
SpaceX below $1T is criminally undervalued.
You do understand that a company needs to have a business case equivilient to its valuation right?
Going to Moon only costs money, going to Mars only costs money.
Our whole planet sends 1000-2000t of payload into space, most of it is now starlink.
The market values SpaceX over multiple areas of the business and their future plans and it isn't just this event which they have proven to accomplish.
> You do understand that a company needs to have a business case equivilient to its valuation right?
Nope. That is not how this works nor how investors see it. It is about their total addressable market (TAM) which SpaceX can capture over everyone else. So here are some more further questions:
1) Who is paying SpaceX for the compute that they have?
2) How quick is SpaceX building their data centers to support their customers?
3) How many people use Starlink as their primary internet provider?
You understand that almost all of where SpaceX businesses can expand into those areas and grow into that valuation and higher?
> Our whole planet sends 1000-2000t of payload into space, most of it is now starlink.
Your point is?
So who else can catch and reuse a rocketship to frequently deploy satellites into space in a very short period of time? (Don't say Blue Origin.)
2) ? I don't understand what you mean. Are we now talking about Datacenters for others or the space thing?
3) probably below 8 million. 10 Million customer overall, plenty as an alternative or for camping etc.
Amazon Leo is an alternative. But for sure Space-X started a race to the bottom (china, blue origin and co) so they have to start moving and use their first mover advantage.
My point is, that Space-X is already responsible for the most amount of payload which gets send into space. We as a whole planet don't have that much payload and Space-X made it alot cheaper to send payload up.
So were is the 1 Trillion evaluation? Btw. its currently at 1.89T
The Grok models and products also use the compute in SpaceX's data centers. It only makes sense to provide that excess compute to others such as Anthropic that don't own any, and that is worth tens of billions a quarter.
> In parallel Neoclouds are building up the same compute and its more like a negative sign that they got lucky
It is not the same. You can ask any chatbot, how many GPUs do the neoclouds have over SpaceX in their data centers?
Then:
> 2) ? I don't understand what you mean. Are we now talking about Datacenters for others or the space thing?
Both. The point being that they (SpaceX) are already quickly building new ones on land codenamed "Gun Range" and "Spam" and are the only ones that can launch and connect all of them via Starlink (if they in space) and serve both themselves and new customers.
> Amazon Leo is an alternative. But for sure Space-X started a race to the bottom (china, blue origin and co) so they have to start moving and use their first mover advantage.
Amazon Leo is not even generally available. So that doesn't even count.
> My point is, that Space-X is already responsible for the most amount of payload which gets send into space. We as a whole planet don't have that much payload and Space-X made it alot cheaper to send payload up.
So what happens when the neoclouds are not able to build data centers on land anymore due to legislation that prohibits more of them getting built [0] and ultimately they get paused? Most of the neoclouds are already sold out and cannot build more of them and have deadlines on these loans with interest on them.
Maybe the compute has to be deployed somewhere else in the long term.
> So were is the 1 Trillion evaluation? Btw. its currently at 1.89T
Exactly. It if goes lower than 1T it is cheap. This is not even pricing in the building of their own semiconductor fabricator (Terafab).
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/nov/04/datacenters-...
This DC can then poisen our atmopshwere btw. and burns up limited resources on our own planet.
They don't need the compute because their product Grok is not competitive. They don't use the compute to make Grok better because?!
Amazon Leo will be though. Space-X has a first mover advantage, what did Tesla do with it?
This isn't a massive problem for SpaceX as you want to believe it to be.
> This DC can then poisen our atmopshwere btw. and burns up limited resources on our own planet
So are you going to tell them to pause everything? (You won't) What solution do you have to them to solve this? (You don't have any solution.)
> They don't need the compute because their product Grok is not competitive.
That is false. Otherwise they would have given up on scaling Grok already.
> They don't use the compute to make Grok better because?!
So Cursor does not have any customers that use Grok on a regular basis beyond Twitter / X? Nor does Grok Bot need the compute either? (They most certainly do.)
Efficiency gains in their inference engines allow them to use less GPUs for themselves, and also sell that excess compute to others who are otherwise sold out. Both scenarios can be true and it doesn't mean they "don't need it" either.
> Amazon Leo will be though. Space-X has a first mover advantage
With what launch pad? SpaceX has plenty of their own and are building even more.
> What did Tesla do with it?
They built self-driving cars with "FSD" and autopilot with that advantage, and your point is?
Launch itself isn't super profitable and doesn't have a very big TAM, especially if you carefully treat the TAM as a present value and discount future cash flows. Also, at least by my personal guesswork, Starlink alone shouldn't get close to a $1 trillion valuation. It seems like the current valuation is based on people's guesses about the likelihood that space data centers pan out in a big way.
The Starship program is one of - if not the - biggest risks here. Making starship work could bring the launch cost down far enough to derisk that whole program, and today just made it a lot less risky
Or do i miss something?
The issue with the shuttle era was that they needed huge teams of specialized technicians to refurbish the insanely complex orbiter after every mission.
If we ever get sufficiently improved materials science for heat shields and engines there's still always a possibility of returning to the SSTO space plane concept. That would allow a more austere launch and recovery environment, but given current limitations this is the local maxima.
Indeed.
Musk's biographer tweeted the pages from his book <https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942> discussing how in late 2020 Musk suggested, then insisted against considerable opposition from his engineers, that Superheavy be caught with chopsticks instead of landing on legs like Falcon 9.
Also according to the book, Musk is the person who suggested and, against considerable opposition from his engineers, insisted on Starship switching to stainless steel instead of carbon fiber <https://x.com/richardprice100/status/1728106606616015097>.
(Hint to others: Musk was right and his engineers were wrong. Both times.)
Using modern technology, couldn't disposable first stages be produced much more cheaply than during the space race?
How much of modern manufacturing disposable booster's cost would be fuel vs metal?
Without internal figures no one can say what is ultimately financially better. Especially now that the development is a sunken cost.
The point is the ship and rockets are expensive vs fuel. Fly a Starship 100 times the cost is amortised over the flights and fuel+bit of refurb maintenance is tiny.
That's still 1000x cheaper than... building a new airplane every flight.
And anyway those numbers area about moon missions, not low earth orbit.
The fuel (+ oxidizer) is basically free compared to all the other costs.
Source: Everyone else in SpaceXs rearview mirror - If the top engineers were elsewhere they would be ahead
Pre-trump 1 SpaceX was a tough place with a slightly off vibe but otherwise strong industry reputation.
Post-trump 1 SpaceX became a place you put in a couple years so that you could get a more stable job wherever you wanted
Post DOGE SpaceX is a place you really have to hold your nose to work at and coming out of that company increasingly labels you as a possible culture problem. I've seen a lot of SpaceX people getting turned down during interviews because they're either toxic or present a risk of toxicity.
The same top engineers not achieving the same or even similar things? It's okay to dislike the culture, in fact they should be mad as hell at it. But if you can't/won't join'em, beat'em.
- in orbit refueling
- moon landing
- Mars rendez-vous
- Mars landing
- humans on Mars
Nah, the game is to put data centers in space. Plus the Space Force dreams.
I'm not trashing people's interests, obviously I am the odd man out in not giving a damn, I just don't see what we're trying to achieve when there are so many issues we can't even figure out on earth.
Earth issues are mostly coordination problems. Space issues are technological problems. Elon Musk has been very successful at solving technological problems: electric vehicles, space flight, mind-machine interfaces.
It makes sense that people like him who can solve technological problems point their attention and substantial agency to the things that their unique skills place them in a position to solve.
The Elon Musk of coordination does not currently exist. One must imagine that the kind of person or school of people who instituted NATO and the US-Japan MDA and turned our one-time enemies into our staunchest allies were people of such caliber but there’s no one I know today who qualifies for that.
Musk definitely has mastered firm-level coordination but clearly national coordination (let alone international coordination) is a problem beyond even him. His teams nearly religiously point the same way, and they have achieved wonders. It is truly remarkable what these people have done. Good for them, and I’m glad to see them at it!
He is reckless and ignorant and yes it works for some of his stuff and it doesn't work for others.
His ignorance alone in DOGE probably killed children and humans. Don't get me wrong, US of America doesn't has to pay for aid around the planet even if they contribute massivly to climate change and consumes a lot of resources importet around the planet, but his abrupt cancelation and involvment in USAID killed chilrden and humans.
Do we also ignore everything else if you list up things which are only positive? Like Boring company? Solar city? Buying Twitter and manipulating democracy around the planet? Doing an Ad tour in front of the White House and disrespecting anyone else who can't buy themselves next to Trump?
So, what would amaze me? Ending homelessness in the United States. Because that takes more than money. I would like to swap the "passion" or engineering for the "compassion" of ending suffering. Very easy to shape and change material things, very hard to change the heart.
The people you want to share your excitement might be suffering under the same separation of wealth that made this landing possible. (Yet there is little talk that they failed to catch the booster and it exploded).
Musk's Neuralink is ironically likely to help on the psychiatric disorder side.
Just Send More Money™ is not likely to help (as you recognize). Neither is "compassion".
Electric brain stimulation is likely able to help with mood disorders. Maybe even OCD and schizophrenia. If nothing else, proper measurements (lots of good data) of both healthy brains and mentally ill brains should help. We've had almost none of that, with EEGs being rather pathetic.
Nobody is going to "solve" homelessness tomorrow or next year. Not the people who think they can just spend more money -- someone's money, not their own, not the people who think charity is the way forward, and not the people who think what is needed is cures.
We can do some almost immediately if we are willing to institutionalize more people but it's not a good or complete solution and we aren't willing to, anyway.
The real improvements are likely to eventually come from things like semaglutide (and more likely more research into the instincts that drive addiction, now that we finally have a molecule that can affect them) and things that both provide data (that we sorely need) and can provide interventions directly in the brain.
You don't need private people/companies or more taxes for that. US has enough resources to do it already. Maybe you should go ask your politicians, better yet, ask your friends/neighbors/yourself if you are ready to take the drastic steps necessary to solve that.
But imagine engineering hearts so that we did not have to ask?
If govt really cared about it, more than that, if (most) PEOPLE really cared about it, it should be top 3 priority of any govt in any country.
- Govt should build massive cheap hotel-type housing spaces (full free) equipped with bare minimum necessities like roof, heating, food, basic healthcare (not million $ free cancer treatment).
- Mandatory drug rehabilitation (if applicable)
- Mandatory job search/placement/training
- Jail with forced-labor for people who put no effort and/or causes disturbance
If your govt has $6M to fund tourism in Egypt, money to fund opera/ in columbia, comic book in peru, then they have money to help homeless people IN the country. No money should go to non-citizens (let alone non-citizens in another country) while citizens of a country go homeless.
I am typing this from the security of my home, without worrying about 0c temp, or food. So it is easy for me to say this but still, I am sorry that you are going through this, and I sincerely wish you the best; that your life turns around, even if just a little, enough to have a roof over your head.
I grew up reading Zubrin's The Case for Mars, The Martian, and October Sky. I went to space camp at NASA, and as a 14 year old I sent an angry email to NASA when I learned of the early ISS decommission date(they later extended the lifespan several times, and I like to think I was the reason ;) ).
I followed Bigelow Aerospace in the 2000s doing the only interesting commercial work in space, and afterwards became amongst the first online SpaceX fanboys, long before they ever landed a merlin engine.
I studied hard in school with a passion of going to Embry-Riddle to learn to build rockets - though I ultimately chose a software path in life instead, I stayed an enormous space fanboy over the 2010s, frequenting the SpaceX subreddit and catching every launch and landing stream I could live.
I've cried watching so many rocket landings. The spirit of human endeavor is god damn BEAUTIFUL to me.
I want to point my finger and say that everything else changed. The Internet became what it is. Elon Musk showed his true colors. Software Engineering became middle management.
But the truth is that I've changed.
I care about the people wealth disparity hurts more than I do about us getting our perfect vision of the future now now NOW.
The faster we pump this machine, the louder the Earth is SCREAMING.
The world is on fire, and we're covering it in data centers with the goal of building artificial machines for strip-mining humanity of the very competency in engineering that has given us so much joy.
We're caught up in a race to the bottom and without diverting our path I have to wonder if this starship landing will be one of the last great human-driven engineering achievements before we lose the ability to do so ourselves.
I don't think the answer is to swap the passion for engineering with compassion, as I think they can both live happily together, but I hear where that desire is coming from.
It's coming from a place of love.
And when the last tree has fallen, we may find that we cannot eat money.
May love fill this place.
There are ample government and private support mechanisms, including housing and food, but most choose not to take advantage.
Ha! Really? I am homeless. Disabled with a serious mental illness. I just cannot afford housing anymore. Living out of my minivan.
Not my choice. I do not even have a psychiatrist or therapist anymore.
> There are ample government and private support mechanisms, including housing and food, but most choose not to take advantage.
This is the biggest myth neoliberals tell themselves to feel better. I agev up. Seven years on a section 8 housing list then they just dumped me with no explanation.
I share your unhappiness with the grifts, including SpaceX's. Then I think of the thousands of lesser, more damaging-in-aggregate ones that I likely have no view into, and it bums me out.
So yeah, what I have left is my child-like "heck yeah rockets!" :) And this one was great.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2069_Alpha_Centauri_mission
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens
“Okay, they can, but the engines are too complex and expensive!”
“Okay, they can be made much simpler and cheaper, but they’re not powerful enough!”
“Okay, they’re powerful enough but the heat shield won’t work!”
“Okay, it works, but catching a rocket is impractical!”
“Okay, catching a rocket is practical, but…” <—- we are here.
"They'll never be able to re-use the ship"
"They can re-use it, but it's not economical".
"They can re-use it economically and fast back to back...but look at the amount of environmental damage!"
"They can't generate enough power to fix the damage"
"They generated enough power to undo environmental damages but ruined the sky"
...
Google is only able to fund Waymo, Quantum Computing, etc because of their questionably moral ads cash cow.
And a nuclear ion rocket scheduled for 2028 as well.
The current NASA administrator is doing a good job getting rid of all the things keeping NASA from doing things. (And at least after Artemis II, both parties in congress seemed to be on his side.)
After Artemis II, there was a moderately hilarious congressional hearing in which the Republicans insisted on giving NASA more money, the Democrats insisted on giving even more money than that, and Isaacman trying to say "we're good".
(I believe NASA got the more money.)
- flying reused booster + Starship
- longer in orbit missions for Starship of weeks or months. There are some non trivial issues with that probably; and you'd need that to not make refueling pointless.
- having two active launch sites. Nor strictly required but probably handy if you are going to have two Starships in orbit at the same time.
They might not get to all that in that order. But the important step today is that they get to inspect a "flight proven" Starship without water damage. I bet they are going to learn a lot of details of where exactly they need to iterate and improve. This took them some time with Falcon 9 as well. We've gotten used to this thing basically launching and landing without many issues. But that wasn't always the case. 2027 is probably going to see an increase launch rate.
Moon landings are going to be an interesting one because it depends on NASA as well and the decision making around that is very political. On the other hand, there's going to be increasing peer pressure from the Chinese. They have their own plans and it doesn't involve waiting for NASA to get there first. They are targeting 2030 for a manned mission. I expect the politics might get a bit more opinionated on that topic as that gets closer. The long term game here is not just landing and planting another flag but actually establishing a permanent presence on the moon. That involves flying useful payloads back and forth. Starship seems designed for that.
What happens after that is going to be an interesting one. IMHO, Starship is optimal for earth landings but not necessarily for the moon and Mars. What's currently flying is probably over engineered for a place with no atmosphere and one 6th of the gravity (the moon) or a very thin atmosphere and one third of the gravity (Mars). Would those flaps even work in the Mars atmosphere? However, it's a great launch vehicle to get components in space to build something more optimal. Also the booster might be used to launch other things than Starship. Like something that will never come down and can instead be fueled for deep space missions and Mars/Moon landings.
Only recently I read how the dust on Mars surface is toxic, contains those unhealthy ultrafine particles (PM2.5 and PM0.10) and sticks to almost all surfaces. It will be difficult to keep from getting inside a habitat.
https://www.space.com/astronomy/mars/mars-dust-is-toxic-how-...
And how the Apollo astronauts got "lunar hay fever", allergy-like symptoms from the lunar dust that stuck outside their space suits and so got carried inside their lunar module.
https://www.esa.int/articles/about-us/directorates/human-and...
(And to preempt the obvious objection: yes, maybe you can call the Space Shuttle an "upper stage of a rocket" if you squint hard enough, but it didn't do upright landings, none of its boosters were reusable and even the Shuttle itself was effectively rebuilt from scratch at exorbitant cost each time.)
It's sad to see a lot of media missing the point, eg as I type this BBC is reporting this as "SpaceX successfully catches part of Starship rocket on its return to Earth".
SpaceX has now demonstrated all the pieces of a fully reusable launcher. Next comes putting them all together in the same flight, and hopefully demonstrating that the flights can become frequent and cheap. There’s no guarantee of that, but it’s looking good.
Why wouldn't it count? It is not the first time in the history of rocketry that the part that is not the boosters returns home intact.
Sure, you can say "it's the first time in the history of rocketry that it lands upright", but you could also say "it's the first time in the history of rocketry that it is not white".
If you want to say how huge this is, tell me how different it is from landing the boosters. Because from the outside it sure as hell looks very similar.
As for why it's harder to catch Starship than Super Heavy, where do I begin:
* Super Heavy is suborbital, its maximum velocity is far, far less than Starship.
* Super Heavy returns upright. The Starship does the famous but aerodynamically very complex "belly flop" to reduce speed.
* Super Heavy only has two static fins to guide it. Starship has four actively controlled fins that need to survive the extreme forces of launch and re-entry.
About how "huge" it is, I understand that it is economically huge: Musk will get even richer.
I would be interested in knowing how "huge" it is in terms of engineering. Like, my understanding is that they needed to invent new maths to go to the moon in the 60s. Does SpaceX compare with that, or is it "just" what you can do with a lot of money and powerful computers?
Genuinely interested, even though rocket fans will hate me for not knowing the answer and daring asking. Bring the downvotes!
I think the space shuttle counts as a landed rocket orbiter, though.
Notably, they were reusable! Sure, they had to refurbish them, same with the shuttle’s main engines. The only thing they threw away was the external tank which didn’t have any engines.
The SRBs of the shuttle landed by parachute and were recovered from the water and reused
Look its cool to see a catch like this, it doesn't necessarly feels that difficult tbh?
And I just don't get it? Is it cool to watch? yes, but whats the endgoal besides reducing costs for starlink and military stuff?
I get it’s exciting but it means almost nothing for 99% of people.