Why? This is the worst version of starship and booster that will ever fly. It isn't unreasonable to look at the giant rocket factory they have produced and think "yeah, I reckon they will continue development at the lightning quick pace they always have done"
> This is the worst version of starship and booster that will ever fly.
That is true for any rocket.
Remember that Starship V1 was announced to have a payload margin of 150 tons to LEO, by around 2021 if I recall correctly. Now it's late 2026 and the payload is something like 50 tons. You may still call this "lightning fast", but it is far less progress than what we thought would happen several years ago.
The difference is the cadence. Also the rapid pace of development, they aren't afraid to change things and go through multiple blocks, getting data by flight testing and making improvements. Look at Vulcan Centaur and how long it has taken and compare it to Starship.
"ULA began development of the new launch vehicle in 2014, primarily to compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and to comply with a Congressional mandate to phase out the use of the Russian-made RD-180 engine that powered the Atlas V. "
"The Vulcan Centaur conducted its first launch on January 8, 2024, carrying the Peregrine lunar lander as part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. Its second flight, conducted on October 4, 2024, as part of the U.S. Space Force's National Security Space Launch (NSSL) certification process, achieved its planned orbit despite the loss of a nozzle on one of the GEM-63XL solid rocket boosters, which resulted in reduced and asymmetrical thrust. Following a five-month review, the Space Force certified Vulcan for NSSL missions in March 2025. In February 2026, a second issue involving a solid rocket booster occurred, after which launches were paused pending investigation."
Centaur has flown 4 times since 2014. SpaceX began active development of the Starship program in 2018.
I have every confidence they will work this out. I would hate it if people benchmarked my code whilst it was still in development and extrapolated the future performance from that.
Well said. I'd also add not everything is unachievable just because it hasn't been done yet. A lot of people won't even update their priors once something is done (belief perseverance). I've lost count of the number of older people that tell me electric cars won't work whilst there is a perfectly functional one sat on my driveway.
Also don't forget what a state their launch facilities are in. Just because they could do something before does not mean they can do it now. They haven't invested properly in their infrastructure.
Wouldn’t this imply the SpaceX costs need to adjust for the infrastructure they didn’t pay for? Not slighting them, just acknowledging an apples to apples comparison is hard
Vendor lock in is quite well understood, most larger companies (the one's I have worked with anyway) are aware of the risk and take steps to actively avoid it. Once bitten, twice shy.
Posting a job ad isn't the onerous part of the process though to be fair.
It does make me wonder what would happen if you put out 100 different job adverts split apart by £1,000 increments. I'm sorry you aren't suitable for the 100k job you applied for but would you consider our 97k role instead?
It makes sense for multiple job ads if there are completely different roles applied by completely different people. But, for the sake of hiring, it doesn't make sense to invent new titles just to justify differently negotiated salaries. For example, I was once hired as a "Senior Software Developer" who essentially got paid twice what the least senior Senior got; they were to some extent mislabelled: They were senior in another capacity than software, and had transitioned inside the company but kept their titel because people are vain. Our responsibilities were vastly different: He was a frontend tokenmaxxer, and I migrated strategic customers to on-prem Kubernetes by negotiating contracts, bootstrapping clusters, and adapting applications to run without autoscaling. They could have given either of us a different title, but for the sake of the value we added, the salary made sense.
A title like "Senior Software Developer" can range from 5 years of general-purpose web development experience to 20 years of highly specialized experience. Those "Principal" and "Staff" titles don't necessarily make sense outside of larger corporations.
Most recently I've seen salary ranges up to 30% of the upper bound. Completely reasonable.
This is why I am so careful about what I click and what signals I send to the algorithm. If you don't want to see car crashes then don't rubber neck with morbid curiosity at the first one.
I have never seen a Hitler post but if I saw one I would immediately block that user and the algorithm knows that. It doesn't show me people arguing it shows me debates and tech. Because that's what I taught it to do. It is not even hard it just requires a little discipline.
When a friend sends a link I refuse to click on it unless my VPN is on and I'm using Mullvad Browser. I don't want their taste (which is quite often look at this outrageous thing) ruining my feed.
One trick I have is if I see a video in my sidebar on YT that I don't want to taint my profile, I copy the url without going to it and open it in mpv directly. I tend to watch all my videos in mpv, but I do usually like to have them in my browser history and save them to playlists to find later as well, so I'm just skipping that part. I don't know if this method is perfect, they should still see my IP, but anecdotally I think it's been fine.
I've had their top level personal account for years (visionary or something equally wanky). What are others using instead? I'm not sure I want to continue funding someone that is behaving like this (if it is confirmed).
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