alt.hn

5/20/2026 at 9:41:54 PM

Starship's Twelfth Flight Test

 https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-12

by pantalaimon

5/20/2026 at 10:48:51 PM

There is a lot riding on V3. SpaceX cannot afford to take too many launches to get V3 solid. If 2026 is another 2025 (3 V2 failures in a row followed by 2 V3 successes), then they can forget about landing on the moon before 2030.

My hope is that Flight 12 goes nearly flawlessly (at least gets to soft splashdown) and they can start testing in-space refueling in July/August.

If they can demonstrate in-space refueling by the end of 2026, then they have a shot at a lunar-landing demo in 2027 and a crewed-landing in 2028. But a lot has to go right for that to happen. Here's hoping it does.

by GMoromisato

5/20/2026 at 11:09:55 PM

> then they can forget about landing on the moon before 2030.

A crewed Moon landing before 30 is really implausible. Everyone is late, but the latest NASA OIG report put the Axiom suits very late (somewhere ~2031 if everything holds, but it notes it might not hold).

by NitpickLawyer

5/21/2026 at 12:39:07 AM

Were any of them actually failures? My understanding is they push limits and create intentional weak points to see where it fails, and something failing isn't a mission failure but rather part of the research process.

by brynnbee

5/21/2026 at 1:02:05 AM

The goals of the V2 flights were to test the improved heat shield and to test satellite deployment. The first three V2 flights did not make it far enough to test either of those goals. It wasn't until Flight 10 that they could actually test that, and that was 9 months later.

Effectively, SpaceX lost 9 months due to problems with V2.

Sure, one could argue that it's still research (no customer was affected), and there was no way to know V2 would fail until it was tested.

But watching the stream, it was clear that the SpaceX team was very disappointed with the outcome. I remember watching Flight 1, which nearly destroyed the launch pad and didn't make it to SECO, but still SpaceX was ecstatic with the results.

2025 was supposed to be the year SpaceX tested in-space refueling. The V2 failures delayed that, and whether or not a different company could have done better (my guess is no), SpaceX still felt like they failed.

by GMoromisato

5/21/2026 at 5:11:30 AM

Your standards of success are unrealistic and don't reflect the history of spaceflight. Designing and building rockets is incredibly difficult and has always been marred by a high failure rate. The early years of the US space program had an abysmal mission failure rate. Vanguard (1957-1959) was a disaster with 9 failures out of 12 attempts. A 25% success rate. Ranger (1961–1965) had 6 failures in a row out of 9 missions. By Apollo the US cleaned up its act, but had multiple high-profile failures (Apollo 1, 6, and 13).

The Soviets were not better, the Luna program failed 11 missions in a row out of 12 missions. The N1 rocket went 0 for 4 and its failure ended the Soviet lunar program.

SpaceX Falcon 1 failed three of its first five launches, which nearly bankrupt the company. The rocket's successor, the Falcon 9, ended up becoming the most reliable rocket ever produced.

The fact that Starship even functions with so few test flights is an engineering marvel.

by tristanj

5/21/2026 at 5:22:32 PM

Absolutely--space is hard, and Starship is the most ambitious rocket ever, and SpaceX is, pretty obviously, the most talented and capable space company today (and maybe ever). I'm not arguing anything different.

I'm just saying that SpaceX themselves expected V2 to work better than it did. I don't think they would disagree that the first three launches of V2 were failures relative to their expectations.

But none of that contradicts your point that, even with failures, Starship is an engineering marvel. I do agree with you on that.

by GMoromisato

5/20/2026 at 11:22:34 PM

Small edit, 2 V2 (not V3) successes (flights 10 and 11).

by russdill

5/21/2026 at 1:04:11 AM

Thank you! [Wish I could edit, but for some reason I can't, or I can't see the link to edit.]

by GMoromisato

5/21/2026 at 2:11:20 AM

HN only allows editing for a fairly short period after a comment is posted.

by mrec

5/20/2026 at 11:52:33 PM

I am pretty sure that at least some SpaceX engineers are reading HackerNews.

But I don't think I ever seen any insiders comments here, even anonymously.

by stephc_int13

5/21/2026 at 12:33:39 AM

I assume they'd be covered by a ludicrous NDA.

by helterskelter

5/21/2026 at 1:55:34 PM

Assumption not required. US ITAR regulations mean you're federally "encouraged" to be tight lipped. Add in the fact SpaceX is ahead of pretty much everyone else...

by chainingsolid

5/21/2026 at 2:24:27 AM

>SpaceX cannot afford to take too many launches to get V3 solid.

Why do you say that? I'm sure they'd love to have everything go right, but I doubt they're going to go out of business if it doesn't.

by laughing_man

5/21/2026 at 3:24:50 AM

That's a fair point. I'm just projecting my own hopes. If it takes them too long to get V3 reliable they will not be able to land on the moon by 2028. I don't think SpaceX wants to feel responsible for China beating the US to the moon.

by GMoromisato

5/21/2026 at 1:20:30 AM

It has a new engine design. If it can make it only a minute into launch, it'll provide a lot of useful data.

by dlcarrier

5/20/2026 at 10:54:51 PM

question: what will happen if orbit refuelling goes wrong? Won't it destroy everything in orbit?

by john_minsk

5/21/2026 at 12:02:38 AM

All Starship test launches are suborbital so if anything goes wrong, the ship and debris fall back to Earth.

Even if it was put in orbit, debris are not an issue because orbital decay at Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is significant. A satellite orbiting below 250km will fall back to earth within a few hours, and at 400km within a year. LEO below 500-600km has enough atmospheric drag to be self-cleaning.

Orbital debris are more significant issue at higher orbits 800km and above.

by tristanj

5/20/2026 at 10:56:44 PM

> what will happen if orbit refuelling goes wrong? Won't it destroy everything in orbit?

No. What is the mechanism through which you suspected this could happen?

by JumpCrisscross

5/20/2026 at 10:58:52 PM

Kessler syndrome presumably?

by bragr

5/20/2026 at 11:33:26 PM

Keeping the orbits low enough, and/or intentionally going suborbital after docking/before starting the fuel transfer, will make the chances of that being possible very low.

It's also worth considering that they have demonstrated cryo propellant pumping between two tanks within a ship, so, AFAIK, transfer between two ships is more about testing the docking systems, than it is about the pumps. They could probably rig the system to first pump some inert gas to verify the quality of the docking, then try to pump propellants.

by hgoel

5/20/2026 at 11:35:16 PM

...caused by what?

by margalabargala

5/21/2026 at 2:44:24 AM

Colliding tanks full of oxidizer and fuel?

by hilsdev

5/21/2026 at 2:51:23 AM

No, for the same reason that the explosion won't destroy the earth either.

by margalabargala

5/20/2026 at 11:28:36 PM

Presumably the effect of any explosion would decrease proportional to the volume as it expands. Is there much volume in space?

by Lerc

5/21/2026 at 8:25:44 PM

the clue is in the name

by librasteve

5/20/2026 at 11:01:32 PM

Liquid handling in microgravity has always been weird. Big gas bubbles in the fluid, surface tension effects causing liquid to float in balls in the ullage, stuff like that. Turbopumps break if they ingest a larger bubble.

There could be some odd failure modes I would think. Failure to pump the liquid, broken pumps, who really knows? My guess would be that a failure mode would be a big spill, a failure to pump, only partially refilling, or broken turbopumps before an explosion.

by bediger4000

5/20/2026 at 11:55:00 PM

For something like a transfer between Starships you can resolve a lot of those problems by (very) gently spinning the 2 craft. It won't take much force for the liquids to settle at the bottom of their respective tanks where you would presumably put the intakes.

by MadnessASAP

5/20/2026 at 11:30:25 PM

A probably very naive question: why not pistons?

by pmontra

5/20/2026 at 11:47:14 PM

Because there’s a much, much simpler and easier way:

1. Connect the two ships

2. Connect the liquid valves from both cryo tanks together.

3. Spin the ships about the short axis

4. Open the vent valve for the cryo tank to receive liquid.

5. Lock closed the vent valve for the cryo tank to supple liquid.

Steps 2, 4 and 5 are how you normally transfer cryo fluids between dewars on earth. You just to create pseudo gravity / acceleration in the body frame of the ships to make it work in space.

by labcomputer

5/21/2026 at 1:36:12 AM

NASA has used tanks with a bladder. Pressurizing gas on one side of the bladder, all fluid inside. Cold liquids (methane in SoaceX case) means materials are crucial. A big piston is heavy and could jam.

by bediger4000

5/20/2026 at 11:23:26 PM

Seems like you could use peristaltic pumps

by idiotsecant

5/20/2026 at 11:27:01 PM

That would take ages!

by pants2

5/21/2026 at 1:39:27 AM

Why?

by idiotsecant

5/21/2026 at 3:03:25 AM

There's not going to be a moon landing any time soon, regardless. Nobody knows how to do in-space refueling; it's a research project. And they're damn well not going to do it a dozen times in the next year.

Furthermore they don't have a lander. Landing on the moon is hard. So hard that almost everybody who tries it fails, especially if the lander is top-heavy. And the SpaceX lander idea is very top-heavy.

Finally, the NASA budget has been hollowed out. Even if the two big show stoppers above were easy, the lack of money would stop the project.

by dreamcompiler

5/21/2026 at 4:41:20 AM

I suspect Space X has a pretty strong inkling about how to do in-space refueling. They know how to dock in orbit, they have conducted internal propellant transfer tests, they know how to offload payload from ship in orbit and keep control of it, they know how to make autonomous quick connect/disconnect couplings for propellant transfer.

They haven't strung everything together yet and it's clearly much more complex than that. Still, pieces are coming together. Why couldn't they do it a dozen times in the next year? They could have an orbital ship launched in Q3 (flight 14), test a tanker and refueling in Q4, and start fueling in the next 3 months.

That implies all the test flights go well which is a pretty long shot, but not out of the realm of possibility. Although I think it will ship reuse that will be the problem keeping them from that within a year, rather than in-orbit refueling which I suspect won't take them more than a couple of tries to get right. Reentry still looks like a beast of a problem. It's one thing to have enough of your vehicle hanging together to land it, quite another thing again to have it back in a condition you'd be able to start fueling it up again ready for the next launch and reentry to do it all again, even in days or weeks instead of hours like Space X are aiming for.

by stinkbeetle

5/21/2026 at 10:43:51 AM

My theory for why they have been failing so much recently..

2018.. Young brilliant engineer starts working for spaceX, absolutely the most exciting space company, on an awesome new rocket that will finally be a better launch vehicle than Saturn 5 and be able to enable all sorts of cool space stuff. Just a naive young nerd, dont really know anything about Elon, not into social media.

2024.. The Elon stuff in the media is unavoidable and obvious, they guy is a freaking nazi, suporting trump, supporting right wing parties in EU.. The talented engineer either leaves or stops giving a shit and quiet quits.

This process times several 100, in an experimental rocket design project, where any tiny flaw can make the whole thing fail. ---

by everyone

5/20/2026 at 10:53:04 PM

[flagged]

by everyone

5/20/2026 at 10:58:20 PM

Have you met hardware guys? This is not how they operate, in my experience.

by rpmisms

5/20/2026 at 11:03:21 PM

I mean I might be a hardware guy myself depending on your definition. I've never dealt with rocket engineers.. Are they "hardware guys" according to you? If so it seems you are using that term incredibly broadly.

by everyone

5/20/2026 at 11:09:35 PM

Are you trying to say that "hardware guys" don't care if they're working to advance the agenda from a Nazi?

by malfist

5/20/2026 at 11:38:10 PM

Historically, that has been true about rockets.

by rpmisms

5/21/2026 at 9:27:50 AM

But SpaceX went out of their way to define themselves against the old school defence-focussed companies.

So some rocket engineers might very well have made a positive choice to "work at SpaceX to get humans to Mars" rather than to "work at Lockheed to build missiles".

Anyone in that group is likely feeling rather disillusioned right now, which will inevitably lead into demotivation.

by roryirvine

5/20/2026 at 11:17:27 PM

I mean, rocket guys have a long history of not minding advancing the agenda of a Nazi.

by saalweachter

5/20/2026 at 11:02:22 PM

[flagged]

by Recurecur

5/20/2026 at 11:16:59 PM

[flagged]

by deanCommie

5/20/2026 at 11:30:38 PM

[flagged]

by hcurtiss

5/20/2026 at 11:04:14 PM

[flagged]

by everyone

5/20/2026 at 11:09:31 PM

[flagged]

by dbeardsl

5/20/2026 at 11:08:13 PM

That's makes a lot of sense becuase the Nazi's were notorius for not having good rocket engineers

by wonderwonder

5/20/2026 at 11:15:08 PM

[flagged]

by deanCommie

5/20/2026 at 10:14:43 PM

This is the first flight of the new engines. They look so much sleeker and simpler than the previous two generations:

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQGMtnP...

* And supposedly with a 20% power increase to boot!

by sfjailbird

5/20/2026 at 10:20:04 PM

Oh wow that photo is from years ago but you’re correct, this is the first flight of that design

by MattDamonSpace

5/20/2026 at 10:18:33 PM

The stats are pretty out there. Iirc just the fuel pump, which you can probably pick up and put on your desk, generates 100k HP.

by chasd00

5/20/2026 at 10:26:18 PM

Well, it's powered by bleeding exhaust from a very big rocket.

by jvanderbot

5/20/2026 at 10:42:17 PM

One of my favorite clips to give a sense of scale for rockets is this one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70u748VALt4

I show someone and then I tell them, that's not the rocket exhaust. That's the exhaust for the engine that runs the fuel pump for the rocket.

by TomatoCo

5/21/2026 at 1:33:49 PM

To me the coolest thing about rocket engines from an engineering perspective is the tyranny of efficiency that the physics mandate.

Because weight is so critical, there's no luxury of "another component". If something can be repurposed, it is!

And the power opportunities afforded by continually dumping that much fuel through are mind boggling. Even regenerative cooling with combustive fuel blows my mind.

by ethbr1

5/20/2026 at 10:47:53 PM

Nope, Raptor is full flow staged combustion, so both the fuel and oxidizer have dedicated preburners and turbopumps each.

by jasonwatkinspdx

5/20/2026 at 11:31:29 PM

Thanks for that correction!

by jvanderbot

5/20/2026 at 11:25:02 PM

Booster dry mass savings of around one ton per engine iirc.

by Culonavirus

5/21/2026 at 3:32:45 AM

Raptor1 looks like the steampunk or mad max version

by dylan604

5/20/2026 at 10:10:50 PM

> The two modified satellites will test hardware planned for Starlink V3 and will attempt to scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to test methods of analyzing Starship’s heat shield readiness for return to launch site on future missions

Hope we get to see those images. Would be awesome to see a 3rd person view of starship in space.

by valine

5/20/2026 at 10:07:15 PM

These are always exciting, even if it's more of the same. I love that we live in a time where we can regularly watch huge rockets launch into space with intentional issues just to see what might go wrong and how best to monitor/solve them.

Congratulations, everyone, at being alive at the best point in human history so far!

by cooper_ganglia

5/20/2026 at 10:09:36 PM

With super high res onboard camera footage too.

by olliepro

5/20/2026 at 10:01:39 PM

Dang, they aren't catching the booster this time, but I guess V3 is practically a new vehicle and validating the next Starship launch is probably too critical to risk damage to the launch site for now.

by maccam94

5/21/2026 at 2:29:54 AM

I think it's a few things:

They're already highly confident that if they have sufficient control over the booster trajectory they can execute the chopstick catch, so they don't particularly need to demonstrate that part more. Executing a pseudo-landing at sea lets them validate their booster flight controls perfectly fine without risking the launch tower and associated hardware. They can also do stuff like stretch the trajectory and control mechanisms to their limits to see how much they can handle, and not too big a deal if something goes wrong. Presumably any actual landings will be well within the known safe limits on all parameters.

I bet this first booster also has a lot of minor weird things associated with shaking out the manufacturing process, and they don't entirely mind testing to destruction the first one to get rid of it permanently and use the ones coming from a more proven manufacturing process for important work.

by ufmace

5/20/2026 at 10:05:31 PM

Oh hey, you're right! Somehow I read "water landing" and interpreted it as landing on one of the barges (ocisly or jrti) any clue why that isn't the case? Is super heavy just too big for the barges maybe?

by amarant

5/20/2026 at 10:31:34 PM

They won't use barges because the booster has no landing legs (to save weight), and because the booster is massive compared to Falcon 9. Also Starship is meant for rapid reusability, and it can take days to return a barge to port and unload the booster. Getting barge landings to work would be a distraction from the goal of Starship, and SpaceX already has Falcon 9 for current payloads.

And they won't attempt a catch with the first V3 booster because it's not worth the risk. They can build a new booster every couple of months. It takes much longer to build the launch/catch tower, and they don't have any spare towers yet. A catastrophe during a booster/ship catch would set them back a year, so they'll only attempt a catch if they're confident it will succeed.

by ggreer

5/21/2026 at 5:45:21 AM

I agree with everything but nitpick: SpaceX currently has two launch/catch towers in Texas, and they are building a third in Florida.

by tristanj

5/21/2026 at 6:24:52 AM

Only one of them is working right now. Their original tower needs to be overhauled to support Starship V3.

by ggreer

5/20/2026 at 10:07:49 PM

It doesn't have landing legs so it has to be caught by chopsticks. They're skipping the barges; either it lands back at the pad or it doesn't land.

by wmf

5/20/2026 at 10:07:14 PM

Superheavy is 10x larger than the Falcon. Its thrust would sink the barge.

by pixl97

5/20/2026 at 10:15:33 PM

Yeah. Rocket first stage Approx. unfueled mass:

Super Heavy: 200000 to 280000 kg

Falcon 9 first stage (without Falcon Heavy side boosters): 25600 kg

by robocat

5/20/2026 at 10:49:25 PM

So 200-280 tons. A standard barge can support 1500-3000 tons of cargo. Even with the added weight of a catch tower and a healthy factor of safety thrust isn't gonna sink the barge. Far more likely the major hurdle would be stability issues with how tall it is.

by jjk166

5/20/2026 at 11:09:43 PM

It's not 280 tons... it's a falling object with kinetic energy so that rocket thrust is going to be very problematic for that boat especially if it' hitting unevenly.

That and there's no way for it to stand without a catch tower.

by pixl97

5/21/2026 at 1:37:52 PM

Hypothetically, what's the effect of that much thrust close to a water surface?

I.e. if they cut a hole in the middle of a barge and it was burning at touchdown "against" the ocean

I imagine water doesn't have the kinetic problems that chunks of concrete do, but also that's a LOT of energy for even water, so maybe there'd be steam issues?

by ethbr1

5/21/2026 at 12:13:48 AM

The booster catch is a useful trick but when the focus is just getting SS3 into orbit without incident, you can drop a few of the boosters in the ocean with the intent to fix at a later point.

by HerbManic

5/20/2026 at 10:06:35 PM

There is a 70% chance for storms in the area tomorrow so it's very likely going to be a scrub tomorrow.

by pixl97

5/21/2026 at 12:15:36 AM

Possible, but that is still reasonable odds.

Reminds me of the line from The Naked Gun "Doctors give him a 50% chance of living, but there is only a 10% chance of that."

by HerbManic

5/20/2026 at 11:10:46 PM

AccuWeather has it at the infamous 51% probability level for thunderstorms at 5 CST, so there’s still a decent chance for success tomorrow.

Time will tell!

by Recurecur

5/21/2026 at 1:11:45 AM

The percentage isn't the percent of it occurring but the area affected. So 51% of thunderstorms means 51% of that town/county/etc. will experience thunderstorms.

by PyWoody

5/21/2026 at 4:17:25 AM

That's not how it works. Probability of precipitation means exactly what it sounds like: the probability that precipitation will fall in a specific forecast area.

Here's the definition from the NWS: https://forecast.weather.gov/glossary.php?word=probability%2...

by robhlt

5/21/2026 at 1:32:37 AM

the real question is what is our probability of Launch Commit Criteria Violation at T-0. i've seen them be no go at t-10 with a 10% chance of go and watched it lift off on time.

by ericcumbee

5/20/2026 at 10:15:05 PM

Really looking forward to seeing raptor 3 fly. Those engines are insane.

by chasd00

5/21/2026 at 2:46:03 AM

I wonder what's holding them back from attempting to land...on land (as opposed to another splashdown in the ocean). They must have their reasons but there have got to be engineers dying to get their hands on a returned vehicle to see exactly how the tiles held up and if there's any other damage that doesn't show up so easily on the video feed.

by staplung

5/21/2026 at 2:47:41 AM

No legs. Gotta verify the vehicle can land with the precision necessary for a tower catch

by iknowstuff

5/21/2026 at 3:16:11 AM

Will be interesting to see how the market reacts in real-time to flight tests going forward post-IPO. Usually big events (either good or bad) are announced pre- or post-market but launch windows don't care about market hours.

by mattas

5/21/2026 at 12:12:33 AM

Sergei Korolev's ghost is looking at those 33 raptor engines and crying.

by gcanyon

5/21/2026 at 11:52:44 AM

Because his ideas for the N1 were not good.

The engine was designed to fire once, so they couldn’t test every engine. They tested samples in batches, to the terrible results of the N1 rocket.

Every engine at SpaceX is thoroughly vetted.

by philistine

5/21/2026 at 12:42:57 PM

Korolev built the N1 in a cave, with a box of scraps. In the '60s.

by gcanyon

5/21/2026 at 9:34:00 AM

Jarring to see the Gulf of America in print.

by cogogo

5/20/2026 at 11:05:51 PM

They have really invested focus in creating mass market content lately - like, actually having someone spend some time creating the text on this page. Didn't really see that earlier.

And a number of long form videos (like "Test Like You Fly").

IPO time: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg4pe2953q1o and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48213933 (in the last few hours)

by lysace

5/21/2026 at 1:33:41 AM

they Typically put out a hype video before each flight at least the last several.

by ericcumbee

5/20/2026 at 10:33:25 PM

I don't know why they aren't doing more booster catches. Kind of a bit disappointed they keep skipping. Either they can land them or they can't. If it's not consistent then they're avoiding the possible failure so their stock price (launching soon) stays up, otherwise just prove it's solid and actually works.

by purpleidea

5/20/2026 at 10:45:14 PM

They can build new boosters pretty quickly. New launch/catch towers take a lot longer, and they don't have any redundancy yet. Also they weren't going to reuse their V2 boosters once V3 was ready, so they could learn more by testing things like intentionally disabling an engine during the landing burn or flying at a higher angle of attack.

by ggreer

5/20/2026 at 10:39:59 PM

V3 booster has a lot of changes, including a brand new downcomer, an integrated hot-staging ring, and 3 instead of 4 grid fins. Chances of a RUD are not 0.

If Flight 12 blows up in space, they've already got Flight 13 almost assembled. It might delay them a month, maybe. But if a returning booster destroys the launch pad, it would delay them much longer--maybe a year.

With those stakes, it makes sense to not try a booster catch until they're sure it's going to work.

by GMoromisato

5/21/2026 at 12:06:51 AM

>Either they can land them or they lose a billion dollars and 9 months when they crash the tower.

by pixl97

5/21/2026 at 4:18:20 AM

The new rocket engines mounted up to the first stage look like this:

https://cdn.xcancel.com/pic/orig/B4150BF393BC9/media%2FHIyEI...

What is incredible is that rocket engines traditionally looked like this:

https://www.l3harris.com/sites/default/files/styles/896_x_50...

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/SXEOVufxOyY/sddefault.jpg

These new Space X engines look so minimalist that the CEO of another orbital rocket company mistook them for being incomplete. This is despite them being the most technologically advanced rocket engines ever made.

It's probably not that other companies necessarily would be incapable of doing similar (previous iterations of this same Space X engine architecture looked similar to the "traditional" engine category). But I think the cost structure for other rocket engines never supported a significant push to optimize for manufacturing and unit costs, hard tooling, cost optimization, etc.

by stinkbeetle

5/21/2026 at 10:44:16 AM

I am a big space and tech fan, I have a crazy amount of hours in KSP and realism overhaul. I used to follow starship very closely, finally a rocket that's actually better than Saturn 5!

But I cant separate space-x from elon. He is, for want of a better word, evil; supporting trump, supporting extreme right party in Germany, DOGE illegally and irresponsibly causing chaos, flouting the law at every turn. He is a tech-fascist. If we want democracy and egality its imperative that people like him are stopped.

I want everything elon does to fail more than I want starship to succeed. It's fine, the rocket tech genie is out of the bottle now, someone else will make a good rocket.

by everyone

5/21/2026 at 3:24:21 AM

[dead]

by isaisabella

5/20/2026 at 10:42:55 PM

[flagged]

by everyone

5/20/2026 at 10:35:13 PM

[flagged]

by everyone

5/21/2026 at 12:01:15 AM

Wake me up for the launch of the v7 engines. SpaceX is like an incompetent AI agent, blundering their way to convergence, one painful launch at a time.

by 7e

5/20/2026 at 10:14:07 PM

I am watching Elon give a long speech about the launch, scarily delivered at high speed, without pause. Including a Bitcoin marathon promotional informercial complete with an on-screen scan code. "That QR code is your boarding pass." He just repeated several paragraphs verbatim from a few minutes ago.

He occasionally mentions the aspirational 100x reduction in launch costs.

AI slop. Yuck, Youtube. Surely Google could have AI moderators catching this crap.

by Nevermark

5/20/2026 at 10:20:50 PM

That's a fake youtube channel that is somehow allowed to squat the SpaceX channel name. It's been going on for years, including the crypto scam. Baffling. Maybe a big middle finger from Google to Elon.

by sfjailbird

5/21/2026 at 1:34:36 AM

the scammers steal channels, rename them and run those until google shuts them down. which they typically do but its swatting flies.

by ericcumbee

5/21/2026 at 1:03:27 AM

You know Google owns a big part of SpaceX right?

by Pedro_Ribeiro

5/20/2026 at 10:24:35 PM

It probably is AI generated.

My very first exposure to "AI spam" was trying to watch one of the Starship test launches, the second one if I remember correctly.

That was around the time that Elon bought Twitter, so he removed all publicity video streams from third-party platforms like YouTube and moved them to Twitter's streaming service.

I wanted to watch this on my big TV, so I was hunting through YouTube for the stream. I found the most likely looking one and watched as Elon got up on a stage, started waffling on about how this is the "future of humanity" and then with 40 seconds to go before the launch the (entirely realistic) AI voice was dubbed over and started offering "double your Bitcoin if you transfer to this account", with the obligatory QR code in the corner.

I was actually impressed by the audacity!

The really frustrating thing was that YouTube then promptly blocked all content even vaguely related to the launch! It was impossible to keyword search for anything that said "starship", "spacex", etc.

It was a scary preview of instant corporate censorship.

I'm sure the person (or bot!) at YouTube "meant well", but sheesh... they just erased the online presence of dozens of legitimate space-fan channels like NASA Space Flight. And NASA. And SpaceX's official channel too!

Ironically this meant that the only remaining matches were 100% scams.

by jiggawatts

5/20/2026 at 10:31:45 PM

> Ironically this meant that the only remaining matches were 100% scams.

I am wondering if some of this is unmarked paid advertising. I can't imagine any other incentive for Youtube to effectively align its brand with Ick.

Ads, as one of the prophets said, are the Devil.

by Nevermark

5/21/2026 at 8:01:19 AM

The problem with ads is that practically 90% of the cost of a scam is user acquisition costs and the remaining 10% are the labor needed to execute the scam.

When you consider how lucrative scams are, you will realise that the advertising budget of scams is high enough to outbid legitimate ads and since the ad platform only cares about money, they'll deliver said to you.

by imtringued

5/20/2026 at 11:22:13 PM

The incredible thing to me is that I've reported one of these videos to YouTube and got an answer back via email saying "we checked the video and it's fine for us". This should be enough to sue Google on the basis that they made an active choice to keep it up.

by throw310822

5/21/2026 at 10:24:32 AM

I do think it is "criminal", in the social sense.

I find it hard to identify the incentives. It isn't simply playing anything for pay.

There are blurred lines or hidden effects between the situation they see vs. the apparent situation we see.

by Nevermark

5/20/2026 at 11:49:37 PM

Ignorant eyeballs are also eyeballs. One might argue - sometimes even more profitable eyeballs.

Silicon Valley built this machine. Many tens of thousands of software engineers worked on this.

by lysace