As it stands today - Starship Flight 14 just deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites, 52 tonnes total. At around $110M marginal per launch, that is about $2.1M per tonne. A Falcon 9 at $30M carrying 15 tonnes is about $2M per tonne. So even as a fully expendable rocket, Starship is already basically in Falcon 9 cost-per-ton territory.
> and they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system.
Or increase performance in the engines and elsewhere. Falcon 9 Block 1 was 9000kg to LEO. The Block 5 that is flying now is 22000 kg to LEO. It's not magic. They already have a path forward with Raptor 4 and other improvements.
> needs a launch cadence fast enough so that refueling doesn't take 15 separate starship tankers
They don't need to launch special tanker missions for a depot. Their goal is to start launching Starlinks and AI inference sats en-masse. Once they demonstrate on-orbit fuel transfer, the easiest way is to fill the depot during normal missions. They can cut out some payload from specific flights to carry excess fuel and top off the depot. The sheer scale of their other flights is enough to keep it full. It is infrastructure that they need for higher energy missions. I doubt they are going to launch 15 dedicated flights just to fill up the tank.
> just a minor milestone on the way to that launch cadence: catching both stages.
They can hit massive cadence even fully expending every Starship, still work out kinks with reusability in the process and still make a profit off of Starlinks given their pace of production.
And given what they have shown so far, I think they are going to try to catch both in the next 2-3 flights barring unforeseen issues.
> Once both stages are reliably caught after a mission, refurbishment needs to be minimal
Nope. Even a cadence of once a week means that by the time they have 10+ launch pads up (in LA+FL+TX), they can be launching once a day if not more frequently. Their rate of production can already sustain that. What's missing is fuel source which will get built out in Louisiana.
> really big blind spot for the project management implications
Lol. The guy got partially reusable rockets and human rated spacecraft working at a cadence unheard of in the aerospace industry. Quite the accomplishment with such a blind spot for the project management!
This mindset kills projects. Even worse it prevents capital allocation to productive projects by keeping dead projects as zombies walking around consuming resources. This happens in software development all the time on projects that are months to years late yet every status meeting shows incremental progress. Usually it takes some kind of specific crisis like a customer walking away from a product in development to get senior management involved enough to ask whether a project actually converges on completion. You can also see how that kind of clarity is not obtainable here.
Now that the most recent test flight is complete, we can see a glaring hole in the optimistic projections: everyone is celebrating that an orbital insertion was possible even with an engine out on the upper stage, and multiple engines failed to light on the booster when it ran a simulation of a return to launch. It's nice that the mission did not fail due to failed engines. But it also means that it will likely take years of further development to attain rapid reuse.
This person is living in the same days of future past when people didn't utterly dismiss the PowerPoint Mars colony. We now know better, and even the stans have limited themselves to touting an oversized rocket for orbital launches.
Opportunity cost is not exclusively a financial concept. For example, the opportunity cost of smart people working on Facebook Ads is immense, despite probably actually being one of the best-remunerated things they could do.
It's still not really clear where any of this SpaceX stuff goes besides "rockets cool and scifi planetary settlement cool". Planetary settlement is an absolutely dogshit idea that doesn't survive first contact with any reality.
> Most people reading this have been on a software development project that fits this pattern of ignoring massively missed milestones and hoping to catch up.
And some of us work in the industry that is in the form it is today, as big as it is today, majorly due to the one company alone. The one that puts more mass into orbit every year than any other entity in the world - nation states included.
As for "massively missed milestones" - it is easy to predict milestones when you are making CRUD apps in React. Not so when building the largest rocket that has ever existed, and making it fully reusable.
> coherent business case that can no longer be supported.
Lol. They operate the most successful and most profitable rocket in history, and they are confident enough that they have stopped taking bookings for it. And they just demonstrated a system that can bring the cost down another 1 or 2 orders of magnitude with nearly zero competition even close to them. No coherent business case indeed.
And that means nobody can make money off of their derivative work? If I open source my work, that means it is open source (by definition). It is a gift[1] - to everyone. If someone uses it to create value, good for them!
I have done a few open-source projects (none of those took off, but that’s OK). I did them because I wanted to give to the people, not greedy corporations. It was an implicit contract with the world, which has been broken by AI. You can say “but it was never written!” Maybe. It still hurts. (And it is also not really true: for example MIT requires attribution, which I’m still waiting to see in all of the AI-generated/AI-helped projects…)
It was also a joy to write things and know certain like-minded people would like it.
Now I don’t really want to do that anymore.
And corporations are made up of people. People who decide to organize to form a legal entity so that they can operate as a business. Some people may choose to run it as a solo proprietorship - others want to raise money and form groups so they can do bigger things. They are still people.
I feel amazing that code that I wrote contributed to development of this amazing technology. "Greedy corporations"? I can download Qwen 3.8 27B today for free and run it myself and not pay for anything but electricity. I get the same performance that I would have had to pay $20-$100/mo. ~6 months ago (which frankly, was pretty cheap for what it got me).
The "greedy corporations" btw, also spent billions and did a lot more than just dump the code into a gradient descent algo (RLVR and more) to get the models to the place they are at today. Simply dumping GitHub into a transformer neural net would not give you a coding model even close to what exists today - open or proprietary. For $20/mo., I can now explore subjects that I wouldn't have even considered looking at before. For me, personally, that is a good tradeoff.
> For most Americans it might add up to 7-10 hours a week or more.
I live in a major city. It is more like ~4 hours/wk for me. The car drives itself. It is very relaxing. It is my alone time for either thinking or listening to podcasts. I am in a nice air-conditioned, HEPA-filtered cabin and I can be on my own schedule.
> Nvidia ships a new architecture roughly every year, and the competitive life of a given generation is plausibly two to three years, while hyperscalers depreciate the hardware over five to six
I keep seeing this take about how GPUs are going to lose value and yet somehow they don't? Why is it that A100s (released in 2020) are still in high demand and fetching high prices? E.g. RunPod is still charging $1.40-$1.60/hr for A100s and making money. Lambda Labs is charging $2.00-$2.80/hr for the same GPU.
The arguments I've heard around GPUs losing value is based on resale. So long as the first party can utilize or lease them at a high rate, it's not a risk. The idea is you don't know the environment they were used in or how hard they've been abused. The first party knows this, so long as they can continue to lease them without suffering anomalous failure rates the financials are OK.
The lingering question is something like "Coreweave declares bankruptcy, how do they liquidate all these GPUs?"
Nvidia still manufacture the A100. The argument I hear isn't only about computing power value of older gen GPUs but about their 3-5 life expectancy under continuous use.
I can count plenty of incredibly ambitious announcements from them that have turned out amazing! In fact, they are an outlier in how many they have challenges they have taken on and succeeded in.
[x] Partially reusable rocket that dropped cost to orbit by an order of magnitude. And no, the space shuttle (while an amazing piece of engineering), doesn't really count. It cost a billion+ to refurbish and did nothing to make space more accessible. Now we have businesses that exist purely because the Falcon 9 exists. Heck, the entire new space industry got validated (and hence got investment) due to SpaceX's success.
[x] Returning human spaceflight capability to the US at a fraction of the price, using the same reusable rocket platform after the old defense primes failed to do so. And then making it cheap enough that it has now also flown about half as many private missions as it did for NASA.
[x] Global satellite constellation providing gigabit-scale internet with 10000+ satellite (once written off by "experts" as yet another "incredibly ambitious project" that will never happen).
[x] Commercializing and bringing down the cost of electric cars to the point where they are actually a viable option now (unlike the compliance cars made by OEMs 10 years ago).
[x] Building the largest rocket to ever exist that now has a clear path to being the first ever fully reusable launch vehicle.
[x] A BCI implant that has now brought back mobility and communication ability to multiple patients with debilitating conditions.
Given that each of these were things that no one had done successfully before, or had failed spectacularly - I don't really care that they took longer than initially planned.
There is, in fact, a graveyard here. It is mostly filled with confident predictions that his companies would never do the things they have since done.
Both things are true. Musk's companies have done quite a few remarkable things people didn't think were possible, and Musk overpromises to an absurd degree and has left a trail of abandoned projects in his wake.
People often cite Hyperloop but he explicitly said he wasn't going to build it himself. They often cite FSD but it is far from abandoned and is driving my car today. What other projects are you thinking of which are actually abandoned? The Tesla solar roof is the biggest one I can think of, I think it's fair to count it as abandoned. I guess the project to make building bricks out of Boring tunnel dirt didn't pan out either, seems pretty minor though.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/888053175155949572 "Just received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. NY-DC in 29 mins." (July 2017, years after saying he wouldn't build it himself.) Technically it's not a commitment to build, but any other leader in the market would be considered to have failed if they made such a statement and then quietly abandoned it.
Yeah under that post he also says "If you want this to happen fast, please let your local & federal elected representatives know" and "Still a lot of work needed to receive formal approval, but am optimistic that will occur rapidly". Not just "technically" not a commitment to build. Clearly dependent on other factors.
Go ahead and count it as "abandoned" if you want. He did talk about building a Hyperloop and is not currently pursuing it directly. But I think failing to win required government approval/funding is a bit different than capriciously giving up on an idea, and The Boring Company itself is far from abandoned. Very different from the solar roof which is unambiguously a commercial failure.
Feels a bit like saying I can provide lots of free electricity, if someone just gives me some perpetual motion machines. Political viability is as important to building something like this as the laws of physics are.
TBC's continued existence isn't very relevant; the point was they/he have yet to build a lasting, full-scale hyperloop, despite his statement they would try. He stopped trying, and I'm fairly sure government approval is far from the only significant obstacle to making a functional and profitable hyperloop anyway.
I might even let go of the hyperloop concept, if they built something else of DC-NYC scale that beats the alternatives in a few measurements.
Boring company maybe? It's not abandoned, but they likely gave up the idea of an underground system of roads under a city, and just focus on single project individually like traditional construction company.
It's far from abandoned. They're actively building TBMs at their factory and tunneling in Vegas and it's pretty different from any other transportation project I'm aware of.
DC to Baltimore tunnel, LA tunnel network, Chicago airport tunnel. New Roadster, possibly Tesla Semi. Battery swap stations. “Alien dreadnaught” factory with no humans on the production line. Dragon 2 propulsive landing. Self-driving ought to qualify at least partially, because although the project continues and is doing quite well, a huge number of cars were sold with hardware that was promised to be capable of it and turned out not to be.
TBC is still pursuing government permits and contracts to build tunnels. Not having succeeded in every case is not the same as abandoning the project.
The new roadster is delayed, not abandoned. It's known to be in active development and is very likely to be demoed this year. Wrong timeline but not abandoned.
The Tesla semi is on the road daily and the factory to build large quantities is almost complete. They're hosting a "factory inauguration" event next month. Certainly not abandoned.
Tesla has already committed to replacing hardware as necessary on cars that purchased FSD in the past so that they can run unsupervised as promised, after Tesla has unsupervised FSD working. Certainly the timeline was wrong but again, clearly not abandoned.
The DC tunnel was billed as a hyperloop, so it's not good faith to both excuse him for never intending to build one and also claim it takes time and will eventually succeed.
Did TBC ever pursue government permits and contracts for the DC tunnel? The nonsense "verbal govt approval" they mentioned makes me skeptical of the whole thing.
New Roadster is over six years late and has basically gone silent at this point. Maybe it'll still come, just extremely late, but I'm very skeptical.
Semi might be real, we'll see.
If cars that were built with AP2/2.5/3 get upgraded to unsupervised FSD, I'll eat my hat. They don't even know what hardware will be needed yet and some of those cars are now a decade old.
I'd be happy to take a bet on Roadster or Semi. As for older AP versions, Tesla will either be upgrading those cars or providing significant compensation to owners who purchased FSD, and I'd bet on that too.
Wait, is hyperloop not a Musk failure because he never said he would build it, or is it not a failure because his company is still building it? You've said both.
I see my logical flaw and agree (to the specific arguments about tunnels made in this subthread), though I made an adjacent post showing Musk later expressed intent to build a hyperloop in DC, so you can't also say he never claimed to try.
SpaceX is the most successful Musk company because it is the one he has the LEAST direct involvement with. Compare SpaceX to how Musk is causing Tesla to crash and burn.
Gwynne Shotwell is the actual reason SpaceX is as successful as it it.
> SpaceX is the most successful Musk company because it is the one he has the LEAST direct involvement with.
> Gwynne Shotwell is the actual reason SpaceX is as successful as it it.
Weird take. If you read any of the biographies or books about SpaceX, you would know that many key personnel at SpaceX (e.g. Tom Mueller [1], Hans Koeniggsman[2], Tim Buzza [3], Jim Cantrell[4], Garrett Reisman [5]) have all mentioned his major role in the engineering decisions there.
Gwynne has done an amazing job at running the company - but she doesn't make the engineering decisions. You cannot deny the achievements of the company - so you just say that he had no role in it. This sort of retconning of history just because people don't like him, is super weird.
> When we first started he didn't know a lot about propulsion. He knew quite a bit about structures and helped the structures guys a lot. Over the twenty years that we worked together, now he's practically running propulsion there because he's come up to speed and he understands how to do rocket engines, which are really one of the most complex parts of the vehicle. He's always been excellent at architecting the whole mission, but now he's a lot better at the very small details of the combustion process. Stuff I learned over a decade-and-a-half at TRW he's picked up too."
> Musk "didn't know a lot about rockets initially, but he learned a lot over time," Koenigsmann said. Musk picked knowledge up quickly, which was "amazing to watch," he added.
"I really enjoyed working with him and learning how he sees things," Koenigsmann said. "He sees things from a different perspective."
Musk provided a "unique perspective" on scenarios involving basic physics by asking what the limiting factor was, according to Koenigsmann.
An example of this was when Musk pushed his engineers to shorten the time it took to fuel SpaceX's rockets. Musk said SpaceX should aim to reduce the time from 30 minutes to eight minutes — the same time it takes to empty a rocket tank, according to Koenigsmann.
SpaceX uses propellant at very low temperatures to increase its density, allowing engineers to cram more into each rocket, Insider previously reported. Rockets need to be fueled quickly before launch so the propellant doesn't warm up.
As a result of Musk's direction, SpaceX's rockets are fueled "in a remarkably short time," Koenigsmann said."
> Elon Musk is our chief designer. I think between himself and the technical design teams, they came up with the initial concepts of the size of the vehicle, how much propellant's on board, what the engine thrust is going to be, two stage rocket, that kind of stuff.
> The thing that impresses me the most is his ability to reach very, very, very deep into particular technical topics, but across an incredibly wide scope. He’s the only person I’ve ever seen that can really do it with that level of acumen. He can jump from talking to our electronic experts about the arcane details about the architectures of the processor inside the flight computer, and then talk to our structures guys about a particular type of alloy in their welding techniques. His ability to switch gears and interact at such a very high technical level with experts in each of these subjects, and not only keep up, but surpass them in many cases, is remarkable.
We are talking about the same moron who made the Cybertruck fiasco. I can only imagine how many people told Musk how bad of an idea it was to make a body out of hard stainless steel, and how he probably fired them all. and he shut down one of Twitters data centers after being told not to by the engineers who built Twitter. This directly caused many outages because the IP addresses of that data center were hard coded all over.
Wow! Was there a Musk company dedicated to building that? Where is the press release announcing it? Surely it must have been a big deal if you are so excited about it's failure!
> And FSD is coming next year now
It is already here. You can hail one right now in multiple cities.
And in my own car, I use it every day and have for 2+ years. For the $3k I paid in 2019, I definitely got what I paid for. It's also gotten dramatically better since then. It drives me to and from work every day without having to so much as touch the wheel. And there is no 2018/19 non-Tesla that can do what it does.
So yes, by all means, keep listing the things you think prove Musk is a fraud. You're mostly just making my point for me.
I did make a PR to the official llama-cpp repo some time back (about a month or so), but abandoned it as there seemed to be too much community concern that the mechanism would degrade model performance... Perhaps i'll polish it up and put some effort into benchmarking and revive the project in the near future.
The same one that needed me to show them the smog sticker to show that I didn't need to do a smog check ... for my out-of-state Model 3
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