If it stays in the realm of the ultra wealthy I don't see how it will succeed in the end. Commercial aircraft are really expensive to design and qualify, and you need to have a lot of sales to justify a new model. Ultra wealthy people are willing to pay more, but they also demand luxuries that take up a lot of space.

The only reason Concorde did as well as it did, economically speaking, is the respective governments footed the bill for development.

This will either fail or the entire law will go. Microsoft will spend a lot of money to make sure it's not at a disadvantage.

Today is full of evergreen headlines.

Boy, that's an evergreen headline.

that headline uses a subjunctive verb mood "_could_ <verb>" and those titles are seemingly always clickbait

Companies are laying off experienced developers 10,000 at a time with no end in sight. It's pretty irresponsible to be telling people it's a good time to get a Computer Science degree.

Agree. Ai has placed the writing on the wall. killed this as a profession. I wish it wasn’t true. I have 15 years experience in the industry.

Do not learn computer science these days. We all are f***

And I’m a guy who solidly believes in understanding the fundamentals.

AI coding wouldn't even be an idea if you engineers hadn't turned everything into a peyote nightmare of distributed nodes. Stable, reliable, well-thought-out, debugged libraries are what we need. Write them!

I think you should be complaining at management and leadership not valuing human life.

Too little, too late.

As I understand it he will retain control of the company in a similar arrangement to the one Zuckerberg has at Meta. Anyone who buys SpaceX stock is just along for the ride.

From what I've read there was "unintentional mixing of fuel and oxidizer" which caused a fire in the engine section, so the engines automatically shut down. I don't thing we have official word yet, though.

Shuttle tiles were also bonded to the body, which I don't believe is the case with most of the Starship tiles.

All what tiles breaking and needing repair? There was remarkably little visible damage this time around compared with previous flights.

There's no materials science breakthrough needed -- the shuttle used ceramic tiles successfully its entire service life. What's needed is engineering work, and that's what SpaceX has been doing.

You know a whole the size of a quarter can wreck the entire spacecraft and make it effectively throw away? Also, you'd want to use this many times. Making a system robust while not requiring months of refurbishment is really really hard.

The Space Shuttle had that problem because it was aluminum with a much lower melting point. It’s one of the reasons they’re using steel.

We’ve seen much larger holes than that in previous tests. Some of the control fins burned completely through.

For some of the tests, they removed a few tiles before launch, presumably to test that. Starship did fine.

I remember this being the same argument used against the Falcon 9 when it first stuck its landings.

"Oh, they'll need to do it 10x to be profitable!"

Now they do, as a matter of course.

Yes reusing falcon 9 was hard too.

Being a cynical naysay isn’t hard.

uncritically believing this design will succeed, despite having all the signs of Elon interfering and massively shifting requirements, isn't "hard" either

They already demonstrated that entire tiles can be removed without wrecking the spacecraft.

The quarter thing may have been true for the space shuttle, that doesn't make it true in general.

Deliberately testing its survivability with that failure mode over different parts of the vehicle has been one of the major foci throughout the entire test campaign, and it has proven remarkably resilient. That generalisation pretty much does not hold for starship.

I doubt that. It's made of stainless steel. If it gets home safely they can patch it.

Weren't the tiles one of the worst obstacles to quick turnaround times for the shuttle? It was something like 18 months before one could be launched again, and that's if they were in a hurry.

SpaceX has been specifically engineering both the tiles themselves (e.g. manufacturing) and the way that are used on the ship to be much more rapidly repairable than the Shuttle.

By the end they could turn a shuttle around in ten weeks.

>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.

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.