DarmokJalad1701

> So why did Elon sell Tesla

Elon didn't sell Tesla. He owns 20-30% of it. Not sure where you got that. And Tesla has nothing to do with Starship.

> Starship is so close to the Moon and the Mars which his own words claim will create muiltiples of the earths value

And he owns ~48% of SpaceX which will reap a lot of the benefits from this.

> If you introduce these advantages Apollo is not 20x more expensive its actually much closer with todays Starship cost. Starship with all these modern advantages should have been on the Moon a long time ago.

That's a lot of pure speculation. Apollo was difficult and expensive due to a lot of reasons. But it was also a flags and footprints mission and never aimed at permanent settlement. Throwing away a rocket as complex as the Saturn V with every flight makes it absurdly expensive if you want to large amounts of mass into orbit.

> Starship with all these modern advantages should have been on the Moon a long time ago.

"should have been on the Moon a long time ago" - based on what? Nobody has developed a fully reusable launch vehicle yet - and Starship is the closest yet (as demonstrated by the multiple flights/recoveries so far). That is the path to cheap, sustainable access to space. Putting arbitrary deadlines on such projects from the sidelines is absurd.

The SLS is the only rocket than can be said to be "owned" by the US govt. Everything else is contracted out to companies like SpaceX, ULA etc. And without SpaceX, the rest of the US launch sector is a rounding error at present.

> I mean something which motivates us as humans to actually wanting to go into space.

The fact that it is there and that only a tiny tiny fraction of it has been explored is reason enough.

> if there is nothing?

How can you know there is nothing without actually exploring first?

> I mean breakthroughs in like technology which brings us to mars in an hour and to other galaxies

These don't happen magically. The work has to come first and breakthroughs happen as people live and work in challenging environments.

After consuming ~4.5% of the federal budget at one point. And then stopped. Because it wasn't sustainable.

Project Apollo cost ~$340B of taxpayer money in 2026 dollars. The entirety of the Starship development program has been ~$15B so far, almost all of it private investor money and revenue from Starlink.

Holy Nostalgia Batman!

> California unable to change emissions policy

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

Indeed, it is simpler when the beancounters who can't see past the next quarter are not in charge.

> 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.

> or any commercial use

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 was such a long time coming!

> to the people

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.