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Notes -
Starship bet update
A few years ago I made a series of bets about Starship making it to orbit with other posters, last rounded up here:
The last one is a real nail-biter. When I heard about the SpaceX IPO I first thought it's time to call it a day. My model for my predictions about Elon was that he has a hype-compulsion, making wilder and wilder promises to get money out of investors, and as it becomes clear he won't be able to reach the hyped up goal, at some point they will get fed up with him. So when the news of the $85.7 billion came out, I figured that even if I do win, it will be on a technicality - maybe they won't pull it off by end of this year, but this sort of money will surely be enough to get them over whatever humps they run into on the road.... Then again maybe not! It also turned out that they have $41.3 billion in accumulated losses since their founding, and have burned $4.3 billion on AI in Q1 2026 alone, so maybe I will lose on a technicality instead, where they will indeed get to orbit by end of year, but will be dragged down by the unprofitable parts of the company.
I now believe that such a "loss on a technicality" is a pretty likely outcome, precisely because of the IPO. Like I said last year, if my bet was with Elon, he probably could have ordered the damn rocket to be put in orbit, just to prove a point, and while I'm lucky enough to have made my bet with internet randos instead, the IPO changes the dynamics such that he will be very tempted to do such things just to prove a point. Currently 95% of SpaceX stock held by insiders is locked up and it will be gradually released over the course of the year. Stonks are largely guided by hype, hype is generated with media articles (such as "SpaceX makes history with Starship orbital launch!!!11"), so while a frivolous orbital launch would make little sense before, it could make a lot of sense now. There's already talk of Starship 14 being orbital, and I fully expect them to schedule it just before one of these unlock dates.
That said, it's not over until it's over! Just because they might want to do it, doesn't mean they'll pull it off. This whole bet is starting to feel like an episode of Wacky Races.
Ironically you won your bet mostly due to SpaceX being so far ahead of the competition they can afford to proceed with much more caution that they previously have. Starship has undoubtedly been capable of achieving orbit for over a year now, each launch deliberately bringing it just under that threshold, and the only reason it hasn't is because SpaceX doesn't want to run the minor risk that an uncontrolled re-entry results. This makes it likely that once they are confident that uncontrolled re-entry is a mitigated risk orbital starship launches will go from "never" to "always".
Any guesses as to when?
If test flight 12 had been issue free, my answer would be "in the next 3-6 weeks" but as it stands if test flight 13 (currently scheduled for July 31st) successfully demonstrates reliable in-flight re-light capability for the raptor engine I would expect test flight 14 to go orbital.
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