Starship velocity seems to have really slowed - over a decade in and no commercial revenue yet.

I wonder if it's a lack of talent? Lack of investment?

Motivation has declined with realization that it's not about Mars, but normal military industrial complex drudgery..

https://ioc.exchange/@muskfiles

The "million people on mars in my lifetime" dream is dead.

Might happen, but certainly not in his lifetime unless we discover an asteroid headed directly towards earth...

It's a harder problem.

At much larger scale

It's the cyber truck of space.

It's what happens when Elon jumps into the k-hole and convinces himself that because he owns a company that successfully did a thing, his genius will make those companies do an even better thing. He's wrong. And he can stay wrong for years and decades even.

Starship is too big for orbital payloads, and too heavy to go beyond orbit. Yes and only if it actually achieve target payload capacity, it takes 15 refueling missions to refuel to do anything other than an orbital mission. If it doesn't achieve target payload capacity, it's cooked.

Doing something 10x as big is 100x as difficult. And the last 10% takes 50% of the work. With that in mind, Starship is right on schedule. Something will be operational by 2030.

The talent that was originally driving SpaceX is gone. And I don’t mean Elon’s brain. I mean the real engineers designing the rockets.

The talent has mostly gone because the US is fiercely politically divided, and musk changing teams from democrats to republican pretty much meant his whole staff were forced to jump ship because he no longer aligned with their values.

Do you have any evidence of this? I don’t think there have been a lot of high profile departures in the past few years.

Every single xAI exec left...

Same with most top Tesla execs since he changed political sides.

That's pretty high turnover for a company with RSU's tying people in seats

We're talking about SpaceX, not Tesla or xAI, which only very recently joined SpaceX.

Congratulations Elon, 2026 is the 20 years anniversary of broken promises. What an achievement.

https://www.wired.com/story/theres-a-very-simple-pattern-to-...

"We should be able to do 90 percent of space flying [autonomously] within three years.” - Elon M. probably 2026