The SpaceX Thread

Xavin · Mar 11, 2025

I think Musk or Shotwell gave a date near the end of the decade where they expected Starship to completely take over from Falcon 9. They also plan to do Starlink launches with Starship as soon as possible, that will massively cut down on the Falcon 9 lunches even if no other customers want to use them. Much like flying on reused Falcon 9 boosters though, I assume they will lower the price and people will jump on the chance, even if it's new and somewhat unproven. It's not like choosing ULA for launches means your payload definitely won't explode.

People also tend to forget just how many Falcon 9s they blew up in a row before they finally got everything working. What seems excessive to us probably seems like a minor problem to them since they literally have a factory pumping out prototypes and plenty of money, unlike back then. Realistically they could keep blowing up a Starship every month for a year or two and they would still be ahead of schedule compared to ULA, Boeing, SLS, etc with any of their recent space projects.

Also, the kind of problems matter. The plumbing issues they are having are annoying but very fixable, while they just keep nailing the hard part of catching the rocket with the tower.

MilleniX · Mar 11, 2025

I doubt they've got 400 more Falcon launches ahead of them. I expect that once Starship is minimally viable, they'll swing basically all of the Starlink launches over to that. Keep in mind, they have plans for larger, heavier satellites that can only fly on Starship.

Once Starlink is flying on Starship, that'll build up launch heritage pretty quickly, such that commercial customers will pretty gladly take a discount to shift over.

That leaves national security payloads, human flights, and deep-space payloads. For national security stuff, I think their next phase of NSSL bids left the launch vehicle open, so they'll be able to switch those over as soon as they can get Starship certified. Crewed flights are obviously going to take a bunch more development work, as well as safety assurance, possibly for not much immediate purpose given ISS's decommission date, so those might just stay on Falcon 9 with Dragon. Deep space payloads are maybe the most interesting, since they tend to be developed on very long lead times, and would have to be engineered quite differently to carry their own third stage if integrating a Star-48 isn't good enough. I think they might sooner migrate to Vulcan or New Glenn, both of which are more favorable for delivery to high-energy orbits. The price difference might be less than the increased cost and risk of system design and integration.

Tom the Melaniephile · Mar 11, 2025

Jonathon said:
This might be premature, given that they can't seem to actually get Starship into orbit and they're only 50/50 on it not exploding. A complete, human-rated Starship is almost certainly still several years out, so, even if they got Starship working and transporting cargo tomorrow, they'll need Falcon 9 and Dragon launching reliably for a long while for anything that carries people. (Might explain Musk's desire to kill off the ISS, as that would get them out of probably all of their obligations for crewed flights for the foreseeable future.)

ISS flights are easy money for SpaceX.

Megalodon · Mar 12, 2025

Xavin said:
People also tend to forget just how many Falcon 9s they blew up in a row before they finally got everything working.

I remember how many they blew up before they got one to orbit. None. They didn't actually lose one until flight 19.

Xavin said:
What seems excessive to us probably seems like a minor problem to them since they literally have a factory pumping out prototypes and plenty of money, unlike back then. Realistically they could keep blowing up a Starship every month for a year or two and they would still be ahead of schedule compared to ULA, Boeing, SLS, etc with any of their recent space projects.

What's not clear to me is how long the endless money spigot allows that kind of program.

BrangdonJ · Mar 12, 2025

Megalodon said:
I remember how many they blew up before they got one to orbit. None. They didn't actually lose one until flight 19.

Starship hasn't reached orbit because reaching orbit has not been their priority. Their priority has been 100% reuse, which means finding a second stage design that can survive re-entry at orbital speeds. They have achieved orbital speeds. Obviously they have a problem with V2, but if they really wanted to make a point they could revert to V1 and make orbit with that.

Megalodon said:
What's not clear to me is how long the endless money spigot allows that kind of program.

Indefinitely?

demultiplexer · Mar 12, 2025

BrangdonJ said:
Starship hasn't reached orbit because reaching orbit has not been their priority. Their priority has been 100% reuse, which means finding a second stage design that can survive re-entry at orbital speeds. They have achieved orbital speeds. Obviously they have a problem with V2, but if they really wanted to make a point they could revert to V1 and make orbit with that.

I get that the propaganda is really strong with spacex, but please don't like... open your mind so much that your brain falls out.

Starship's stated goals before they started anything wasn't to blow up half the time. IFT-8 was not supposed to explode the same way as IFT-7, etc. etc.. It's clearly failing way more than expected and designed. It's not remotely successful, not even by Russian cold war standards.

That doesn't mean it won't eventually become something much better, but that potential future is still completely uncertain. It might also, like so many rocket programs, fail indefinitely and go away in favor of some new program. This is not a big deal, the only reason any of this is becoming such a big thing is because Elon is involved.

Speaking of which:

Megalodon said:
What's not clear to me is how long the endless money spigot allows that kind of program.

I've said this before: Musk has to be pumping money into SpaceX pretty much continuously for them to be burning so much material and R&D. So the spigot runs out when Musk goes away or his liquidity becomes tight.

MilleniX · Mar 12, 2025

demultiplexer said:
I've said this before: Musk has to be pumping money into SpaceX pretty much continuously for them to be burning so much material and R&D. So the spigot runs out when Musk goes away or his liquidity becomes tight.

SpaceX raised loads of external investor capital to fund Starlink. That's now cashflow positive. Their Falcon launches for not-Starlink are also prodfitable. It doesn't seem like any of their liquidity is coming from Musk.

demultiplexer · Mar 12, 2025

MilleniX said:
SpaceX raised loads of external investor capital to fund Starlink. That's now cashflow positive. Their Falcon launches for not-Starlink are also prodfitable. It doesn't seem like any of their liquidity is coming from Musk.

Of course, that's true, kind of forgot the other external capital. That's going to be a lot safer than relying on Musk, but they'll still need that external capital to do all the R&D and launches to get Starship mature. It's a multi-year process that burns many billions.

Xavin · Mar 12, 2025

demultiplexer said:
Starship's stated goals before they started anything wasn't to blow up half the time. IFT-8 was not supposed to explode the same way as IFT-7, etc. etc.. It's clearly failing way more than expected and designed. It's not remotely successful, not even by Russian cold war standards.

They didn't have a goal for them to blow up but they also didn't expect them to get back to earth. Before each launch Musk and sometimes Shotwell have given very moderate success chances, people just ignore that and expect everything to be perfect. It is a disaster if anyone else's second stage blows up. SpaceX has 10 more waiting with more on the way. If they have the same thing happen the same way in the next flight then I would start to worry as little, but I doubt that's going to be the case.

demultiplexer said:
I've said this before: Musk has to be pumping money into SpaceX pretty much continuously for them to be burning so much material and R&D. So the spigot runs out when Musk goes away or his liquidity becomes tight.

Starlink and Falcon 9 are profitable enough they could probably run off that indefinitely. Even so, I doubt they have any problem getting as much much as they ask for. SpaceX is as close to a sure thing way to make a fortune in the medium to long term as there is in this world. If anyone comes close to what they are doing, investors will jump on them too. If no serious competitors step up SpaceX is on track to be the biggest most profitable corporation in the world in the next 20 years and will potentially have a monopoly over all space industry and travel. I know people have doubts about space industry at all, but the massive success of Starlink should show that even just a few key applications will be massively profitable.

Justin Credible · Mar 12, 2025

Scrubbed for today.

dave99 · Mar 12, 2025

bummer, nice clear day here in south florida, and probably would have been right around the perfect time for those just-after-sunset launches that light up so bright.

papadage · Mar 13, 2025

MilleniX said:
SpaceX raised loads of external investor capital to fund Starlink. That's now cashflow positive. Their Falcon launches for not-Starlink are also prodfitable. It doesn't seem like any of their liquidity is coming from Musk.

Until competing satellite constellations start eating into Starlink's overseas markets due to his behavior and politics. And if TSLA stock crashes enough to force margin calls, he'll be looking for more sources of liquidity.

Xavin · Mar 15, 2025

papadage said:
Until competing satellite constellations start eating into Starlink's overseas markets due to his behavior and politics.

Nobody's competing constellations are within 5 years of competing with Starlink as it is now, much less as it will be once they start launching the bigger satellites on Starship. Unless someone come sup with at least an F9 competitor, nobody will have the capability to launch enough satellites to compete.

Megalodon · Mar 15, 2025

Xavin said:
Nobody's competing constellations are within 5 years of competing with Starlink as it is now, much less as it will be once they start launching the bigger satellites on Starship. Unless someone come sup with at least an F9 competitor, nobody will have the capability to launch enough satellites to compete.

Kinda baffled at the "unless" qualifier here given there's at least two launchers with likely superior economics to Falcon 9 coming to market shortly, New Glenn and Neutron. Starship's economics are to me still rather speculative, both in the sense that it's not clear to me there's the demand to sustain a launcher like that, or that it will ever achieve the kind of reuse success rate or launch cadence necessary to keep it flying.

continuum · Mar 15, 2025

Megalodon said:
Kinda baffled at the "unless" qualifier

I'd say it's fair, at least at this point in time. If either competitor is able to demonstrate reusability sooner rather than later (which seems likely a requirement to me* to have competitive economics) then I would agree that you could remove the "unless" qualifier.

* = usual disclaimers on opinions here

Megalodon · Mar 15, 2025

continuum said:
I'd say it's fair, at least at this point in time. If either competitor is able to demonstrate reusability sooner rather than later (which seems likely a requirement to me* to have competitive economics) then I would agree that you could remove the "unless" qualifier.

* = usual disclaimers on opinions here

I think in that case my objection would shift to "comes up with". New Glenn has been to orbit! It's not a speculative TBD vehicle.

BrangdonJ · Mar 15, 2025

Megalodon said:
I think in that case my objection would shift to "comes up with". New Glenn has been to orbit! It's not a speculative TBD vehicle.

It will be lucky to launch a second time this year. If it does, it will cost similar to Falcon Heavy. It won't be a competitor to Falcon 9, not in price nor in cadence.

Ecmaster76 · Mar 15, 2025

Megalodon said:
I think in that case my objection would shift to "comes up with". New Glenn has been to orbit! It's not a speculative TBD vehicle.

It hasnt landed. It hasn't launched more than once per 25 years yet

Economics and cadence are definitely TBD as is Kuiper

UserJoe · Mar 15, 2025

BrangdonJ said:
It will be lucky to launch a second time this year. If it does, it will cost similar to Falcon Heavy. It won't be a competitor to Falcon 9, not in price nor in cadence.

According to news reports, New Glenn's next launch will probably be late spring.

Skoop · Mar 15, 2025

Megalodon said:
it's not clear to me there's the demand to sustain a launcher like that

There will be some demand for sure, but the intended mission is to colonize Mars, which will require a lot of sorties.

Megalodon said:
achieve the kind of reuse success rate or launch cadence necessary to keep it flying.

Not dependent on external customers. Starlink, Mars, and the owner's money will determine its longevity.

Ecmaster76 · Mar 15, 2025

UserJoe said:
According to news reports, New Glenn's next launch will probably be late spring.

I believe "late spring" is an industry term for September

Megalodon · Mar 15, 2025

Skoop said:
There will be some demand for sure, but the intended mission is to colonize Mars

If that were true they'd be developing the payloads now, which they aren't, so it's not.

Megalodon · Mar 15, 2025

BrangdonJ said:
It will be lucky to launch a second time this year. If it does, it will cost similar to Falcon Heavy. It won't be a competitor to Falcon 9, not in price nor in cadence.

Suspect it'll end up between the two because it's two stages rather than having to deal with boosters, but for constellation work I think the capacity makes up for that. It's not just the payload, it's also the payload volume, Falcon Heavy doesn't have the volume to make the best use of its potential LEO payload.

Ecmaster76 · Mar 15, 2025

Megalodon said:
If that were true they'd be developing the payloads now, which they aren't, so it's not.

They've been low key working on ISRU for a while. Boring Company's machines are smaller than the diameter of starship and could probably be delivered in sections. Electric vehicles work on Mars too

BrangdonJ · Mar 16, 2025

UserJoe said:
According to news reports, New Glenn's next launch will probably be late spring.

That's what management want, but from what I've seen from the workforce they're deluded. They've fired a lot of their workers and destroyed morale, making it harder for those left to get stuff done. They are increasing worker hours without offering more pay or other benefits. Obviously this is a judgement call, and we'll have to wait and see who's right. I expect them to launch a second time this year, but not a third time.

BrangdonJ · Mar 16, 2025

Megalodon said:
If that were true they'd be developing the payloads now, which they aren't, so it's not.

Mueller said he spent 5 years working on Mars ISRU up until he left in 2020. Presumably part of that was in the form of something that could actually be delivered to Mars. There will be other stuff that we can't easily tell from outside the company because it doesn't involve building a 123m tell vehicle in a field. SpaceX can be pretty secretive when they want to be.

Tom the Melaniephile · Mar 16, 2025

Skoop said:
There will be some demand for sure, but the intended mission is to colonize Mars, which will require a lot of sorties.

Well, it was the mission anyway. The owner seems to have moved on to other pursuits.

We'll have to see whether the focus on Starship and Mars returns.

BrangdonJ · Mar 16, 2025

Tom the Melaniephile said:
Well, it was the mission anyway. The owner seems to have moved on to other pursuits.

We'll have to see whether the focus on Starship and Mars returns.

He still posts about it a lot. For example, twice yesterday. It's one of his few sustained interests, now climate change has fallen by the wayside. Not sure what more you could expect.

Tom the Melaniephile · Mar 16, 2025

BrangdonJ said:
He still posts about it a lot. For example, twice yesterday. It's one of his few sustained interests, now climate change has fallen by the wayside. Not sure what more you could expect.

A few seconds spent on tweets instead of the massive amount of hands-on time and focus he had been spending at Boca Chica.

If that wasn't one of his account curators tweeting, of course. The wording was awfully bland for actual Elon.

SpaceX is on Autopilot. We'll have to see whether he actually set up the structures for that to work.

Skoop · Mar 16, 2025

Megalodon said:
If that were true they'd be developing the payloads now, which they aren't, so it's not.

Of which we know.

Anyway, the most visible building of anything right now is at Boca Chica. I think that that's where they'll build the ships and send them to Florida. Launching from Texas will be for testing and proofing. Payloads will be built elsewhere.

Edit: Not defending that aspiration here. While there is still rhetoric about it going on, I'm assuming it's still in play.

UserJoe · Mar 16, 2025

Tom the Melaniephile said:
Well, it was the mission anyway. The owner seems to have moved on to other pursuits.

We'll have to see whether the focus on Starship and Mars returns.

I think they're waiting to finish the Tesla full self-driving system so that they can use it to control automated Boring Company machines that will build the hyperloop transport system on Mars. The plan will all come together soon. Just a theory.

bthylafh · Mar 16, 2025

UserJoe said:
The plan will all come together soon.

Soon™.

Skoop · Mar 16, 2025

Also, they are building out the launch site at Florida, too, so they will launch from there, maybe next year.

Whatever they do, I do believe that anything launching to Mars other than maybe the flyby of a ship for appearances sake is going to take much longer than the fans would like. Figuring out how to manage cryo fuels is going to be a big challenge for them, I suspect.

And that will limit what they can do and how soon they can do it. Whenever there is a tweet about the 2026 launch window--be skeptical. That 's what might be a flyby. But I doubt it will be much of a functional ship that gets there on that occasion, if it happens.

UserJoe · Mar 16, 2025

Skoop said:
Also, they are building out the launch site at Florida, too, so they will launch from there, maybe next year.

Whatever they do, I do believe that anything launching to Mars other than maybe the flyby of a ship for appearances sake is going to take much longer than the fans would like. Figuring out how to manage cryo fuels is going to be a big challenge for them, I suspect.

And that will limit what they can do and how soon they can do it. Whenever there is a tweet about the 2026 launch window--be skeptical. That 's what might be a flyby. But I doubt it will be much of a functional ship that gets there on that occasion, if it happens.

Anyone else remember when Musk said they would make the 2018 launch window with Red Dragon?

Xavin · Mar 16, 2025

Megalodon said:
Kinda baffled at the "unless" qualifier here given there's at least two launchers with likely superior economics to Falcon 9 coming to market shortly, New Glenn and Neutron. Starship's economics are to me still rather speculative, both in the sense that it's not clear to me there's the demand to sustain a launcher like that, or that it will ever achieve the kind of reuse success rate or launch cadence necessary to keep it flying.

New Glenn has made it to orbit once, but they failed to land. Neutron hasn't even flown yet. There's a massive gulf between test launches and the cadence Falcon 9 has.

As far as Starship, given the buildout they have already done and the success with the engines and catching the booster, it's only a matter of time before it's operational. It will be cheaper to fly than Falcon 9 because it's fully reusable and much easier to turn around with both parts going back to the pad. That's why they want to transition Falcon 9 launches to it as soon as possible. Even if it never has more launches that Falcon 9 it would still be more cost effective.

Tom the Melaniephile said:
Well, it was the mission anyway. The owner seems to have moved on to other pursuits.

The media basically ignores it completely because they think it's boring and weird, but Musk still won't shut up about Mars if you talk to him for more than 5 minutes about anything. I wouldn't even be surprised at all if his foray into government is entirely in service to making the US more friendly to his Mars plan. You can draw a clear line back from basically everything he has done in the past 20 years (aside from buying Twitter, but he's a huge shitposter so that also seems kind of natural) to his plan to colonize Mars fast.

UserJoe said:
Anyone else remember when Musk said they would make the 2018 launch window with Red Dragon?

They abandoned that pretty early in favor of Starship. Presumably looking at the numbers and seeing that sending something that small doesn't make any sense.

Megalodon · Mar 16, 2025

Xavin said:
As far as Starship, given the buildout they have already done and the success with the engines and catching the booster, it's only a matter of time before it's operational.

I don't think it's true that every engineering program will inevitably be successful given enough time and iterations. There's always finite resources in the limit, and architectural mistakes can't always be undone with more tweaks, as eg the Shuttle program demonstrates.

Xavin said:
The media basically ignores it completely because they think it's boring and weird, but Musk still won't shut up about Mars if you talk to him for more than 5 minutes about anything. I wouldn't even be surprised at all if his foray into government is entirely in service to making the US more friendly to his Mars plan. You can draw a clear line back from basically everything he has done in the past 20 years (aside from buying Twitter, but he's a huge shitposter so that also seems kind of natural) to his plan to colonize Mars fast.

It's mostly his way of juicing the Tesla stock to mess with the shorts. It's a pretty well established pattern, his net worth comes proportionally almost exclusively from being a meme stock, and he's figured out the memes don't even have to have anything to do with Tesla. He does it to monopolize the press cycle, that's been the pattern for a long time now and there's an entire media ecosystem dedicated to it. He's admitted to doing it with hyperloop (which was an effort to stymie California HSR), and it's increasingly obvious that's what's happening with Mars stuff, whether or not it started out that way.

Ecmaster76 · Mar 16, 2025

Megalodon said:
He's admitted to doing it with hyperloop (which was an effort to stymie California HSR), and it's increasingly obvious that's what's happening with Mars stuff, whether or not it started out that way.

This is a serious thread. Could we maybe not with the HSR conspiracy theory? The HSR phase 1 is approaching 20 years and $100 million/mile and that's got nothing to do with someone running a few college design competitions in a parking lot

Megalodon · Mar 16, 2025

Ecmaster76 said:
This is a serious thread. Could we maybe not with the HSR conspiracy theory? The HSR phase 1 is approaching 20 years and $100 million/mile and that's got nothing to do with someone running a few college design competitions in a parking lot

I didn't say he is responsible for the high cost, I said he announced hyperloop to try to get it cancelled, and that is well supported.

BrangdonJ · Mar 17, 2025

UserJoe said:
Anyone else remember when Musk said they would make the 2018 launch window with Red Dragon?

That depended on having propulsive landing for Dragons, because Mars doesn't have oceans or much atmosphere. They thought they could develop propulsive landing for Dragons the same way they did for Falcon 9, by using paid-for customer flights. Specifically, cargo return trips from ISS, paid for by NASA. What changed is that NASA (quite reasonably) refused to let SpaceX risk their down-cargo. For SpaceX to test propulsive Dragons on their own dime would have been expensive. So it got cancelled, in favour of going all-in on Starship. One of SpaceX virtues is their willingness to change their plans when necessary.

Starship landing on Mars in 2027 was plausible when the first propellant transfer tests were happening 2Q 2025, which itself was plausible in 4Q 2024. Now the setbacks with V2 Starship are making it look much less likely. The orbital propellant transfer tests may not happen until next year now, and of course they need to land Starship on Earth before attempting it on Mars. I still wouldn't rule it out. They'll surely pull out all the stops to avoid losing the 2-year transit window.

Zich · Mar 18, 2025

Oh FFS, the "Gulf of America" was just referenced on the webcast for the dragon return.

The SpaceX Thread

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