Bottomless pockets lets him treat aerospace like firework bottle rockets. Problem is billions of tax dollars are keeping those pockets full. It also helps that the cult following him makes excuses for those failures whereas NASA’s work had/s a massive stake in national pride and accountability. Musk isn’t accountable for anything.
So many gullible kiddies in these replies, jesus christ. “Expected to fail” is absolute nonsense PR talk, and everyone is eating it up.
Y’all got the spirit but reusable rockets are SOOOOO much cheaper for customers to put something in orbit. That’s why nasa uses them so much.
How is it reusable if they all fail?
Just Google it before you speak lmao
Not pictured (that’s called cherry-picking): Falcon 9 has 469 successful launches for a >99% success rate right now.
I’m all for shitting on Musk but this is a very poor comparison. The Starship is very much still being developed and failures are expected. The Falcon 9 rocket is what is currently used to launch LEO satellites into orbit. From wikipedia:
As of 24 May 2025, rockets from the Falcon 9 family have been launched 490 times, with 487 full mission successes, three failures, and one partial failure.
I’d say they’re doing pretty damn well, especially since they’re doing what nobody else has ever done and the first stage comes back and is reused. Also from wikipedia:
A total of 47 boosters have flown multiple missions, with a record of 28 missions by a booster. SpaceX has also reflown fairing halves more than 300 times, with some being reflown at least twenty times.
Still, fuck Elon.
The Starship is very much still being developed and failures are expected.
Every failure is a success! We’re learning! Every negative is a positive if we cheer loud enough to keep the investors happy and the nerds defending our insane waste of taxpayers’ money!
Failures aren’t expected, actually. What’s “expected” was that crewed missions to Mars were done regularly by 2025.
Meanwhile, every orbital flight ends up in the ocean.
considering the growing footprint spaceX represents to national launch priorities, they should be nationalized imho.
keep them independent enough to maintain development but get musk out of the decision tree entirely.
The design for the Saturn V wasn’t handed down by the rocket gods. Several of those Saturn V launches were test flights and there were 3 ground tests before them. Starship has been in development for about as long as the Saturn program took to develop and fly 3 different models of rocket.
Still, the whole reusing the same boosters bit is pretty significant.
No FEA is also very significant.
Musk isn’t a rocket engineer
We can’t claim SpaceX has nazi scientists, just that they are run by a Nazi
If you work for a nazi, I have bad news for you…
Fuck musk and everything he does, but this seems like a bad avenue of attack given SpaceX’s history of success. They’ve shown they can do things that like catch rockets to reuse. They will probably get this rocket to work sometime. Which is bad because it is going to be very lucrative and terrible for the environment and it will enrich a fucking nazi.
Past performance is not a guarantee of future performance. Especially considering how much employee turnaround happens at his corporations. I think it’s unlikely that someone with the ego of musk would interfere in company business for Tesla, but be smart enough to keep his hands off SpaceX.
Fuck Musk but those are test flights while developing the rocket. they expect the rocket to fail. seems ultra hard for so many people to unterstand…
they expect the rocket to fail. seems ultra hard for so many people to unterstand…
Move Fast And Break Things, people. It’s not rocket science!
That sure is a lot of money spent on something you know will fail. People can’t afford groceries, but Musk can afford to just blow up rockets to see what will happen?
How are these two things related?
A rat done bit my sister Nell
With whitey on the moon
Her face and arms began to swell
And whitey’s on the moon
I can’t pay no doctor bills
But whitey’s on the moon
Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still
While whitey’s on the moon
The man just upped my rent last night
Cause whitey’s on the moon
No hot water, no toilets, no lights
But whitey’s on the moon
I wonder why he’s upping me?
Cause whitey’s on the moon?
Well I was already giving him fifty a week
With whitey on the moon
Taxes taking my whole damn check
Junkies making me a nervous wreck
The price of food is going up
And as if all that shit wasn’t enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell
With whitey on the moon
Her face and arm began to swell
And whitey’s on the moon
Was all that money I made last year
For whitey on the moon?
How come I ain’t got no money here?
Hmm! Whitey’s on the moon
Y’know I just 'bout had my fill
Of whitey on the moon
I think I’ll send these doctor bills
Airmail special
To whitey on the moon
yes. they have a roadmap and for now it is not their exact target to have a full flight with payload until flight X
musk is not an engineer, hes a nepo baby that throws money at things.
Let’s be a bit more truthful: the Starship had some successes with booster recovery and the first stage. The issues are currently with the upper stage. The Saturn V did not have even that potential to fail. The new projects are close to what can be done with current engineering and aim for commercial success. It is mich more difficult to do that engineering as you can test less. The Saturn V did not try to be as efficient as possible but to get to the moon.
The Saturn V didn’t have near as much existing knowledge to build off of, and doing what it did with the technology available at the time was absolutely incredible.
The manufacturing of rockets out of stainless steel also does not have much existing knowledge behind it. Nor does landing a rocket booster or first stage back on earth. Or staging a rocket this large and reusable.
What the engineers at SpaceX are pulling off on a regular basis is crazy. Having a reusable rocket system of this kind and size was unthinkable at many points in history. Just a shame their work gets overshadowed by a guy who takes all the credit while doing almost none of the work.
In their defence. SpaceX have the mentality of test and fail rather than simulate. It’s proven remarkably effective so far. Starship, as a concept it mildly insane. If they can pull it off, it will be amazing. Blowing up a few rockets on the way is expected.
I just wish they didn’t have an idiot Nazi at the helm.
Pretty sure that’s just PR talk so the stock doesn’t take too big of a hit when the rockets do blow up.
It’s a legit way of doing it. The old adage applies
“In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there’s a huge difference.”
NASA is hyper risk averse. They simulate the hell out of everything first. This is, however, quite slow. It can also incur a lot of time based costs. SpaceX is jumping quickly to practical testing. This lets them refine and calibrate their models far quicker. It’s less efficient with hardware, but they are also going for low cost hardware, so this is far less of an issue than it would be with NASA.
And that’s why SpaceX were the first to put a lander on the moon.
That’s great and all, except when test and fail means littering our planet with exploded rocket bits. Every failure is only accelerating the destruction of our ecosystem.
Musk = POS Nazi.
Saturn V killed 3 people before its first launch.
What
I assume they’re talking about the apollo 1 fire.
Yeah but that’s not the rocket
Here’s a scary thought, what if Elon fully follows Von Brauns career but in reverse?
