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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.
I still maintain that it's not a big deal if Starship is delayed, since firstly they're trying something new (reusable superheavy rocket) so there should be allowances for inherent difficulty. Also they're doing it with their own money instead of asking for gazillions from the US govt and then producing something worse than what came out in the 1960s.
I was responding to your point where 'Losing the Space Race Boogaloo to China seems like a fairly big deal.' but I don't see how this could be SpaceX's fault, even if Starship fails, the US is only ahead in space because of SpaceX. My 'goalpost-shifting' is a response to that.
If the Space Race is about the moon, I'm not even sure the US is ahead of China, and I don't see how you don't see it's SoaceX fault. They were supposed to have a whole bunch of milestones checked off by now, and they didn't make it to orbit yet.
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