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Is there any well-established rule of 'controversial topic of mild significance (because there are legitimate arguments on both sides) gets far more attention than uncontroversial disaster of much greater significance which is somehow considered a faux pas to talk about'. I guess it might just be a simple extension of the power media has to determine the discourse. Constant dysfunction is boring vs exciting rocket explosions and dynamic personalities like Musk or Trump.
There is for example a well-established discourse here and elsewhere about whether or not Starship is overhyped, about Elon Musk being too optimistic in his projections. Elsewhere there's a perception that Musk is a scammer who just takes credit for work that his engineers do and somehow bewitches investors into giving him all this money. I'm fairly sympathetic to Musk, building a whole new class of super heavy rocket is difficult, doing things for the first time is difficult, especially in space. Starship is mostly funded by SpaceX too, so it's not like its a big deal if there are delays.
But the non-Musk US spaceflight program seems to be non-controversially a dumpster fire, a complete clownshow, a world-historical money-shredding operation, grifter central. Orion alone (just the capsule) took 19 years and $30 billion. The rocket it's supposed to go with can't actually reach the Moon, it's not technically possible because Orion is too heavy. They unironically proposed building a space station near the moon to make up for this, make the moon mission even more complicated and expensive.
https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/10/31/nasas-orion-space-capsule-is-flaming-garbage/
Lockheed had the temerity to charge 2.5 billion for the luxury of adding docking capabilities to their capsule! All the money for this garbage comes from the US public.
NASA and the established spaceflight players like Lockheed or Boeing should be ruthlessly purged IMO, how can you get away with stealing all this money? Find the decisionmakers and bankrupt them, jail them, teach them a lesson. Take a lesson from China's purges, you can't just have important national capabilities turned into slush funds for lazy cabals of contractors and bureaucrats. Only during the Boeing Starliner fiasco where astronauts were left stranded was there much public attention given to the dire state of procurement and even then people mostly seemed to go 'Boeing is a shit company' rather than look at things more broadly.
Losing the Space Race Boogaloo to China seems like a fairly big deal.
Not a very good argument in terms of "non-Musk space companies being a dumpster fire", as he unironically proposed having a dozen or two of orbital refuellings in order to send a single rocket to the moon, which they don't even know if they can do. Using Starship as a lander doesn't strike me as particularly sane either.
There are definitely people too invested in painting him as a clown, and I will further say they're almost certainly doing so for political reasons, but he's also definitely overhyped.
SpaceX is the only group capable of competing with China in space though? If it weren't for them, China would be ahead in orbital launch and cost-efficiency... If anyone's to blame for losing the Space Race it should be Lockheed and NASA who've blundered billions and billions on rockets that don't work properly. If SpaceX had been given that money they probably would've done a much better job with it.
Most of his launches are in-house for Starlink, and it's not clear Starlink's model is sustainable. His competition is slowly catching up to him, and much like with Tesla, his ideas to stay ahead are not panning out, to put it mildly. I'm pretty sure the trajectory of the two companies will be the same.
Also, you're shifting the goalposts. Your original argument was that it's not a big deal that Starship is delayed, and I gave an argument for why it is. Looping back to "but look at all the cool things that they did with Falcon" is irrelevant. This is the typical cycle of the conversations about Elon: use hype about the future to claim he's amazing, then claim the past should already be enough for you, when someone questions the claims about the future.
So far this year SpaceX has launched forty non-Starlink missions. That is no longer as many launches as the entire country of China, but it is more launches than any other country in the world, including (by a margin over 50%) the combined non-SpaceX remainder of the USA. It is more launches than all non-US non-China countries combined. It is also still more launched payload capacity than the entire country of China.
The fact that he launches even more for Starlink expands this accomplishment; it does not diminish it.
SpaceX is, obviously, empirically, numerically, by hundreds of percent, the only institution currently capable of competing with China in space.
Oh - but I nearly stopped while still just talking about cargo! Last time we talked about the options to launch humans I was hopeful for Starliner, but last year's flight had continuing reaction control system issues that ended up with its two test pilots waiting for extra SpaceX seats to bring them home again, and Boeing and NASA still haven't announced any potential timeline for an upcoming flight. SpaceX are currently still the only ones outside of China and Russia who operate a manned orbital spacecraft; their 4 manned launches in 2025 exceed China's 1 and Russia's 1 (hopefully soon to be 2).
Early next year SpaceX's US competition plan to put Orion in space with people on board for the first time, which is very exciting but terrifying. I want to use a kinder phrase than "flaming garbage", but I do see the photos in that article where literal pyrolysis tore chunks of its heat shield off like literal garbage. Orion's reentry capability is at the same "well, it did survive" stage as the Starship tests' ... or worse, because much of the Starship tests' damage is intentional, and unless you count ablation none of Orion's was. But, Musk will be flying another few dozen or hundred Starships before they dare put a human on board during reentry; NASA's Artemis policy, by contrast, is YOLO.
Hopefully their future will see a little less gradatim and a little more ferociter.
I am non-ironically excited for the possibility that Blue Origin's upcoming second attempt to accomplish a booster landing is about to succeed. It's unlikely to have any more significant delays (we're just a few days out from the first launch window), and so long as it has no delays worse than have already occurred, their landing attempt will come slightly before the ten year anniversary of SpaceX accomplishing the same. It is awesome (though again I feel I must explicitly state that I'm not being sarcastic) that the leading team among SpaceX's most serious long-term competition may now be less than a decade behind them! But to anyone without a weird grudge against Musk, it's not tempting to overstate the magnitude of that awesomeness.
Uh-huh. How did the competition "being behind" Tesla detract from Cybertruck, Semi, Robotaxi, FSD, and Optimus being dumpster fires, and the Chinese offering as good or better cars for cheaper? How does "being ahead" supposed to magically help Starship?
Is Cybertruck a dumpster fire? I see quite a few of them driving around, about as many as you'd expect for something as niche as an electric pickup truck. It's pretty nearly the only game in town there AFAIK -- is Rivian more or less of a dumpsterfire than Cybertruck?
If you listen to Tesla's earning's calls prior to it's launch, it was supposed to be their "best product ever", they haven't mentioned them a single time in quite a while, and the last time I remember he referred to it as "digging our own grave" with it.
EDIT: Musk was saying they're aiming for 200K sales annually, it looks like they're at ~60K total.
IDK man -- "not going as well as we'd hoped" with a brand new market segment isn't quite a "dumpster fire" in my book -- especially since it's hard to untangle the... political constraints that have come to the fore since launch. It did sell like twice as many units as the electric F150 in it's launch year; looks like Ford is selling slightly more in 2025, but emphasis there is 'slightly' -- maybe electric pickups are just not hot sellers?
Now (this)[https://www.reuters.com/business/stellantis-recalls-over-320000-us-vehicles-over-battery-fire-risk-says-nhtsa-2025-11-04/] is a (Big 3) dumpster fire!
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