Yeah I'm just considering actual missions where a customer is paying them to deliver something to space (crew or satellites). If you include tests then they obviously have a much worse record.

Is your argument that SpaceX is a failure?

Wow the slant in this entire thread. When did HN become such a fervent Elon hate machine. Honestly curious, is most of this from his actions at Twitter?

My guess is one or more of the billionaires that Elon pissed off started funding a persistent anti-elon narrative, and that has shown up as bot farms especially on reddit. Then people who don't think for themselves started propagating it wherever they go... Because of how fun it is to argue on the internet and all of that.

It started as an anti Tesla narrative which was obviously paid for by the Tesla shorts, but this new supercharged anti Elon narrative ramped up when it started to become clear he was actually going to buy Twitter. So my guess is it's related to the interests of whoever was benefiting from the old regime at Twitter.

You don't have to go that far. Elon just got more involved in politics than before (or at least more publicly than before - all billionaires are probably influential in politics, just not so explicitly), and the best move in that game is not to play. Politics is a mind killer, and instant enemy-creator.

Not bot here. I don’t have enough digits to count the reasons I loathe him. I’ve yet to understand why the “media brainwashing” crowd never have a response to the very real argument that these types of people have made themselves so obnoxiously loud that you can’t help but see every one of the unfiltered thought they have — no third party media bias swaying the impression needed.

I guess I don't understand because I go weeks at a time without reading or hearing about something Elon said, and I don't loathe anyone.

It was exactly the moment the media started calling him a fascist for supporting free speech. I noticed the immediate transition of the rhetoric about Elon change here overnight.

The NPC meme is real. The media installed a new enemy chip and we witnessed the change in real time.

Legacy media may be dying, but clearly they still have the ability to program millions of brains. Even a lot of smart brains.

Are you talking about starship?

I'm not a big elon fan but that was objectively not a failed mission. They were very upfront that they expected it to destruct, and wanted to see how far it got.

Their entire launch, navigation, communication, engine/fuel/structure, and the self-destruction teams/systems all performed, and they assuredly learned a ton from that - both sensor data - and other things such as concrete debris from the launch pad being a problem.

From my understanding they were primarily were concerned about the launch stages and getting into an ascent and anything beyond that was icing on the cake. There was no payload, it's destination was to crash off the coast of hawaii.