A recent article about the next intended launch
mentioned a booster crumpling while testing last November. I don’t remember hearing anything about that.
Musk thinks he can send up to 5 unmanned starships to Mars before the end of the year. Which would require something like 40 or 50 launches to fuel them.
“Musk thinks” doesn’t really mean anything though, right?
Absolutely! They would have to step up the launch cadence dramatically beyond the last couple of years to do that.
Large grain of salt…
They keep upping the Starship version– we’re on 3 with 4 on the drawing board, when we still haven’t seen a recovery of an orbiter yet. This looks worrisomely less like “bigger and better!” and more like “we discovered that the previous version just wasn’t going to work”. At this point the new versions are starting to look like having to start over again, the way the initial upper stage flights revealed the deficiencies of the block one Raptor engines.
We’re coming up on three years since the first Superheavy test; we should have seen an orbiter recovery by 2025 and it didn’t happen. Frankly I think 2026 is going to be make-or-break for the program. Yes, iteratively moving fast and breaking things is a valid approach but it would be nice to see all of that institutional knowledge gained to produce something.
And we still haven’t even had one of them do a single orbit yet. Just getting up to “space height” isn’t the same thing.
Starship hasn’t just reached “space height” (like the Blue Origin space tourist hopper, etc), but has reached orbital velocity. If you’re at orbital velocity but your orbit is intentionally eccentric enough that the perigee is inside the atmosphere, that’s the same thing as getting into a proper, stable LEO aside from the specifics of the thrust vectoring of the second stage burn.
Now, it is true that if you’re re-entering halfway through your first orbit, you haven’t demonstrated that your engines will relight after several complete orbits, and that sort of thing.
More importantly, no orbiter has yet returned to Earth in undamaged reusable condition. I know that there have been things like deliberately omitted tiles to test the robustness of the underlying structure but an orbiter that can be reflown is proof that the concept is going to fundamentally work.
Remember when Russia threatened to withdraw from the ISS space station in 2024. The threat meant we wouldn’t be able to keep it in orbit without their help boosting it as needed.
Musk said he would intervene and boost it with a Dragon. Which he first did in Sept of 2025.
SpaceX started in 2002. In 23 years it has surpassed NASA and every other country in rocket technology while reducing the cost of that achievement.
Tesla is the reason electric cars are now a mainstream reality. Musk did this before China could steal the technology and bury it with cheap labor.
He’s built large scale municipal batteries as well as batteries for home use to augment modern power production without fossil fuels.
His robots are state of the art and will advance tasks like surgery or dealing with dangerous products.
His experiments in boring technology will likely project that technology into the future.
His co-sponsored investment in Neuralink started in 2016 and involves robotically implanted chips that will revolutionize medical science allowing those who are paralyzed use their limbs.
What “Musk thinks” doesn’t just matter, it happens.
Ok now ask ChatGPT to tell you all of the predictions and milestones Musk made that never happened. Man on Mars in 2025!
If says he’s going to Mars, he’s going to Mars. If you’re faulting him for missing a deadline that’s at the cutting edge of technology then I don’t know what to say.
His achievements have outstripped that of any other human being alive today and that includes the combined efforts of entire countries.
Bro my comment was specifically about an unrealistic timeline. If you agree that he busts timelines then why are you arguing?
It’s hard to meet a deadline for technology that doesn’t exist. But making a guess for that deadline is more of a benchmark to strive for. It’s just a guess. He has no way of knowing all the unforeseen events that delay success.
I’ll leave you to your criticism.
If he’s as smart as he thinks he is he’d be able to reflect on his past mistakes in estimation and adjust accordingly. So either he’s incapable of learning or there’s another reason he’s constantly throwing out hopelessly optimistic estimates that will ultimately be wildly wrong…
It is discouraging upon rereading my posts in this thread that I was looking forward to orbital flights and recovery two and one-half years ago.
Kinda discouraged, seems like the 21st century version of the Spruce Goose
I actually started the thread in July 2022. Progress does seem to have been a lot slower than they seemed to be expecting back then. 
So you’re saying it’s taking longer than they thought? 
More seriously, Starship + SuperHeavy is really a huge bite beyond a Falcon 9. That they nailed that project on a pretty quick timeline is not proof they can pull off the same trick again but now with the difficulty knob cranked from WAG 10 to 100.
They’re clearly struggling to get over a hump here. Whether the problem is funding at the rate needed to advance quickly, or they’ve (secretly) discovered they’ve painted themselves into a corner and need some major rethinks remains to be seen.
In any new-tech engineering minefield there’s the possibility that you sorta need to step on every mine to find them all. That feels a bit like what’s going on here; something different holds them up every time. Suggesting they don’t have insight into all the as-yet undiscovered ways their design is inadequate. If so, it might be cheaper and faster to continue crashing the current design in novel ways rather than pause long enough (and expensive enough) to fix every known shortcoming, then resume crashing from as yet unknown unknowns.
It’s hard to say whether they have a reputational risk to worry about. They don’t seem to act like they do. Not needing to later take the company public after the current angel vulture investors are paid off buys them a lot of room to look foolish. As long as they’re not actually foolish.
True of course. If you don’t play, you can’t win. But after a certain amount of time perhaps it is time to think about going back to the drawing board and starting over?
I’m not sure that Starship is quite at that point….
The Starship was never a single rocket. It was designed to scale up in size and payload as well as be multi-rolled. Along the way they’ve created a new recovery system to integrate into the program. And build new launch pads. And change to a stainless steel skin… It’s designed to get away from last century’s expensive/disposable system like we’re seeing with the Artemis II.
It’s not your father’s rocket motor.