alt.hn

4/5/2026 at 1:19:49 AM

SpaceX Pushes Back Crucial Starship Test Launch

 https://www.wsj.com/business/spacex-pushes-back-crucial-starship-test-launch-e1fb91f5

by bookmtn

4/5/2026 at 4:47:20 AM

Starship velocity seems to have really slowed - over a decade in and no commercial revenue yet.

I wonder if it's a lack of talent? Lack of investment?

by londons_explore

4/5/2026 at 2:38:00 PM

Doing something 10x as big is 100x as difficult. And the last 10% takes 50% of the work. With that in mind, Starship is right on schedule. Something will be operational by 2030.

by jaybrendansmith

4/5/2026 at 7:07:17 AM

Motivation has declined with realization that it's not about Mars, but normal military industrial complex drudgery..

https://ioc.exchange/@muskfiles

by infinitewars

4/5/2026 at 7:28:51 PM

The "million people on mars in my lifetime" dream is dead.

Might happen, but certainly not in his lifetime unless we discover an asteroid headed directly towards earth...

by londons_explore

4/5/2026 at 5:01:03 AM

It's a harder problem.

by weregiraffe

4/5/2026 at 12:26:00 PM

At much larger scale

by dzhiurgis

4/6/2026 at 12:54:07 AM

The talent that was originally driving SpaceX is gone. And I don’t mean Elon’s brain. I mean the real engineers designing the rockets.

by 7e

4/6/2026 at 12:07:23 PM

The talent has mostly gone because the US is fiercely politically divided, and musk changing teams from democrats to republican pretty much meant his whole staff were forced to jump ship because he no longer aligned with their values.

by londons_explore

4/6/2026 at 7:30:21 PM

Do you have any evidence of this? I don’t think there have been a lot of high profile departures in the past few years.

by rlt

4/6/2026 at 7:44:25 PM

Every single xAI exec left...

Same with most top Tesla execs since he changed political sides.

That's pretty high turnover for a company with RSU's tying people in seats

by londons_explore

4/5/2026 at 12:39:06 PM

It's the cyber truck of space.

It's what happens when Elon jumps into the k-hole and convinces himself that because he owns a company that successfully did a thing, his genius will make those companies do an even better thing. He's wrong. And he can stay wrong for years and decades even.

Starship is too big for orbital payloads, and too heavy to go beyond orbit. Yes and only if it actually achieve target payload capacity, it takes 15 refueling missions to refuel to do anything other than an orbital mission. If it doesn't achieve target payload capacity, it's cooked.

by Zigurd