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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!
Well, when you're telling investors how great your company is going to be doing, because of a hot new product you're working on, which then proceeds to flop (as per the expectations you set yourself) I would call it a dimlater fire.
There's also something special-pleadingy about calling it a whole new market segment. It's a pickup truck. It competes with kther pickups.
Yeah... maybe it was a bad idea to bet on an electric piclup, then?
Oh, the Cybertruck fits that criterion as well:
https://mashable.com/article/every-cybertruck-recall-full-list
It does not -- if I want a pickup, I will go buy a regular 1/2 tonne 4x4 from a major manufacturer -- Ford alone sells nearly a million of these per year. Cybertruck/Rivian/F150L compete in this segment in the same sense as caviar competes with hamburger.
Hard to know until you try! Anyways, it really depends on how much the bet cost and what the margins are like on the trucks that they are selling -- 'making less money than planned' is not a dumpster fire; 'losing money' might be. I don't know what these figures are, do you?
You will note a distinct lack of recalls related to issues of spontaneous combustion on that list -- really puts the 'fire' in dumpster fire!
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