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SpaceX loses contact with Starship rocket after ninth test flight launch
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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I remember a NASA engineer saying that if NASA had half the failures that SpaceX has had in its early days they would have been disbanded as an organization and their funding pulled completely.
Yet this private org somehow gets bailed out again and again and again and again and again all while not only wasting massive tax payer money, but also causing a hell of a lot of waste. SpaceX is the waste fraud and abuse that should be trashed, not the national park service.
thats why he moved to texas, less regulations there.
Less workplace rights and employee protections
NASA’s cost of failure in the past was significantly higher, and their development lifecycle was designed to support this. SpaceX’s cost of failure is orders of magnitude less, and their development model is designed to support that. They can throw all the money at the development of the system they want. If they were too in the hole between private investment, Starlink proceeds, and yes, government contracts, they would go bankrupt.
~~SpaceX is still hitting the milestones on their NASA contracts, which were awarded well before the work started. How much it costs to reach those milestones is not a factor the government cares about. By definition, this is not a bailout or waste of taxpayer money, as it was fairly competed on the open market, and approved by the congresspeople who were voted in by the public.~~
On the other hand, if you think the entire Artemis endeavor was a waste of taxpayer money, that would be a more fair argument, but that has little to do with any SpaceX hardware failures.
Edit: corrected some misconceptions on initially proposed milestones. Engineering lifecycle points still stand.
SpaceX has missed every single HLS milestone and is the primary reason the Artemis program is delayed:
SpaceX famously hired William Gerstenmaier and Kathy Luedens right after they awarded them billions for the falcon and crew capsule. They barely skated by the government's "revolving door" conflict of interest regulations because SpaceX put them on "unrelated" projects.
The contract awarded to SpaceX and Starlink under the Trump FCC was rescinded after Biden's FCC decided that they weren't meeting the requirements of the contract.
Now SpaceX is awash in newly minted federal contracts from Trump's new federal agencies and Musk's "special employee" status.
SpaceX's funding has never been "approved by congress" outside of some confirmed cabinet positions, nor has it ever been what one could call completely "fair."
This was the most ridiculous thing ever.
The money was to provide ABC service by XYZ time. Nowhere in the contract did it say you had to provide that service ahead of that deadline, and when they weren't meeting that service on some random test years ahead of that deadline, they said, you're not gonna make it and rescinded it.
No one else had that requirement put on them, and that money was to help accelerate the delivering of said service.
Edit: Had SpaceX been awarded the money, their first deadline would have been sometime in 2025/2026 and they'd have to be serving 40% of the population they said they would.
It was rescinded because there was no reason to believe at point of rescission that it was possible to meet the benchmarks. To simplify if you intend to drive 1000 miles in 5 days and on day 3 you are 200 miles in there is no reason to believe you can meet the deadline.
In your analogy, they were on day 0.
They had not been awarded any money, money that was meant to help accelerate the deployment. The 3 year deadline only starts AFTER they would have received the money to do it. The service doesn't work without satellites launched, and the money was to launch said satellites.
No one else had this limitation put on them.
The government is legally allowed to make that judgement. Satellite internet is a tremendously dumb way to provide rural internet.
And yet the big telco's have gotten billions of dollars to do it over the years, don't do it or come nowhere near the requirements, and ask for even more money, meanwhile SpaceX has done it, and it's profitable.
This is an argument for giving them less money not spacex more. A huge swarm of LEO comsats that must be constantly replaced is a poor idea compared to fiber + 5G towers for most environments. The latter is much much cheaper.
If we could run fiber to every home or close enough that an area can be covered by 5G towers, of course that would be ideal, but it's not profitable and hasn't happened.
The big telcos don't want to do it, and barely/don't do it when given money to offset the costs. Giving them even less money isn't going to speed it up.
In a perfect world, the infrastructure would be nationalized, and it could be built at a loss as a service, but that's not the world we live in.
You say it's a poor idea, but it's the idea that is actually working today, and is profitable today.
It might not be an ideal solution, but I wouldn't call it a poor idea.
Edit: and if the telecos ever get their act together and build the infrastructure, then starlink wouldn't be needed, would become unprofitable, and could wind down.
If running fiber to everyone for 5g towers is unprofitable, the much more expensive satellite arrays that would be necessary for the same level of coverage don't sound like a better option.
Those satellites cover the entire orbit. They can offer service to multiple countries for consumers and then provide commercial services for airplanes and marine craft. It makes up for the cost, and I imagine the commercial side is actually a big part of how they've become profitable.
Spending millions to build fiber/5g infrastructure to support a hundred or so people just isn't as appealing, which is why no one wants to do it.
They're not profitable yet, though. They're already raising prices beyond what you would need to expand 5g and they'll need to do much more to keep sending up new satellites as they die off.
Something no one seems to be acknowledging is the upkeep for a 5g setup would be significantly less than putting up new satellite constellations every few years.
Gwynne Shotwell (in case you don't trust Elon) has stated that Starlink is profitable, and Elon has said it as well
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUAunM6abeY (Shotwell video)
From a profitability standpoint, it doesn't matter if they have to keep re-launching satellites every 5 years, as long as the business with launching satellites is profitable. If they spend 5 billion doing launches every year and then after all their costs have any profit they can just keep spending 5 billion every year to replenish the network and keep making whatever that profit is.
Their profit gets capped by the amount of bandwidth and customers they can find, but it is predictable as they know their bandwidth and how many customers they can support per launch. By the time they are replenishing the network, if it was simply the same satellites and launch count their growth would begin to plateau, however every 5 years they can upgrade the satellites to the latest tech, so each 5 year cycle they're actually able to increase their service capacity which means more customers and more profit. There's already a big difference in capacity between their v1 and current satellites in orbit in terms of overall bandwidth per launch, and SpaceX keeps increasing their launch cadence.
Further, if Starship is successful, they'll start offering gigabit services to consumers, and their costs would be dramatically reduced as now they have a reusable 1st AND 2nd stage. Starlink is already profitable with a disposable 2nd stage.
Just trying to compare it to fiber+5g completely misses the point that these LEO networks can provide internet to other things as well. Planes, boats, military, government services, remote areas fiber and 5g will never go, like a remote base in Antarctica. In critical setups people even use it as backup internet in fiber connected areas. All of that extra stuff is what helps make it profitable. It probably wouldn't be profitable if it was simply servicing rural communities.
You are right that the upkeep of a fiber+5g system is less, but it costs millions of dollars to support a very small amount of people, so it takes a very long time to recoup that cost, but once the cost is covered, then the profits start rolling in for a very very long time. The problem is the big telco's would rather spend less money to connect more people in urban areas and recoup that cost faster. (edit: On the other hand Starlink has to be able to recoup that cost (and more) in 5 years or the business simply doesn't work)
Starlink isn't meant to compete with this kind of service if it's installed, but the Teclos don't want to install it due to the high upfront costs and very long pay back time.
Edit: Just to be clear, they still have to make back the cost of the original network when they weren't profitable, but as long as they are profitable in its current state, they'll get there. While we don't know the exact cost for the existing network, it's probably around $8 billion dollars as we have rough ideas of launch costs + dish costs. In 2025 they're going to make over 10 billion in revenue. They haven't publicly disclosed how much of that will be profit.
For the record: Why did you lie about them hitting their milestones on the NASA contract?
SpaceX's cost to launch Starship just got substantially cheaper as well.
They just launched Starship into space for the cost of fuel/minor refurbishment/operational cost instead of the cost of a whole new booster this launch. They reused the booster and 29/33 raptor engines (1 of which has flown 3 times). The only reason it went kaboom was they were doing a very aggressive test increase performance to see if it would fail since their modelling showed it may or may not work. It did not.
SpaceX has designed, launched, landed, and reused an orbital rocket TWICE before anyone has done it once, and yet people just see failure. (And NASA's doesn't really count as it cost just as much to refurbish it as making a new one)