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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.
Yes, but how fast? Money can be spent to reduce failure probability (even if just by taking more iterations to fix failures), but it can't always be spent to reduce time to success. SpaceX had $24B cash on hand at the end of 2025, but still spent 7 months in between the last Block 2 and the first Block 3 launch, roughly the same as after the Test 1 launch pad debacle, probably because the regressions between the last Block 1 and the first Block 2 weren't a cycle they wanted to risk repeating. Even after that delay we still saw some regressions, albeit not such serious ones: an upper-stage engine-out, though it was compensated for and left them on target, also left them paranoid enough that they skipped a planned engine relight test; a wildly overpowered boostback burn attempt led to mass engine failures, though that was in their first attempt at something envelope-pushing and non-mission-critical.
I think it all depends on two things:
what kind of cadence can they keep up with Block 3 this year? It looks like they'll only have a couple months between the first and second launches of it, which is a good start. If nothing goes wrong and we get Flight 15 this year too then I'd bet at least that goes orbital.
what do they want to "spend" this years tests on?
On the one hand, though I don't yet know if they've hit their engineering goals (only
44 metric tons payload in that last test, and although in prior tests they've only launched 20-60% of their claimed max to LEO, I'd bet their max is still under 100, their goal for fully-reusable launches) block 3 is at least impressive enough (compare to17 tons for Falcon 9 reusable; Falcon Heavy's same-as-9 fairing means it's only been useful to launch stuff farther, not to launch more stuff) that they'll be tempted to use it operationally while tweaking the design, same as they did with Falcon 9 (originally9 tons and expendable). This would mean going to orbit ASAP, except:On the other hand, their political goal is "put a manned lander on the Moon before China or Blue Origin can", and refueling a lander of Starship scale requires a serious combination of payload and cadence. Even if they can launch 90 or 100 tons to LEO soon, only doing that every month or two won't cut it. They need some combination of more infrastructure (which they're working on, with multiple additional pads and much bigger factories, but this itself is a timeline risk), more payload (not as crazy as it sounds; Gross Lift-Off Weight is over 5000 tons, and small fractional improvements in dry mass have outsized effects), or rapid reusability (which seems achievable with the booster at this point, but the upper stage still has me worried). The latter two options both would benefit from risky testing, not just gradual tweaking, but the trouble with risky testing is that you don't want to leave any test failure in orbit if you aren't absolutely certain you can get it down safely, which means that they're going to want to stay suborbital with any test that includes a major system upgrade or a major flight profile change. That wildly overpowered boostback burn attempt in Flight 12 might have been born from a hope to shave off many tons of extra boostback fuel that get expended in a more gradual burn, and although they're not getting too wild (e.g. upper stage engine-out compensation capability is another extra expense and it's a good thing they didn't risk forgoing it), they're at least still in "major testing" mode, not "fine-tuning" mode.
I do think they'll be in orbit by the year's end, but it's nowhere near a guarantee at this point. One sufficiently nasty explosion in the next test, and that's that.
I have to agree with your chances now, but do note I said "sending an unmanned (save for Optimus androids) one-way ship or two in the 2029 launch window, albeit probably to crash on arrival", which is not quite the same as "make it to Mars". Mostly the distinction is "probably to crash on arrival", but there's also a finer distinction where, if they actually do make an attempt but miss the launch windows on the "nice" side of the porkchop plot, it's not impossible that they'd launch a later-starting longer trajectory that only reaches Mars entry (or failure-of-entry) in 2030.
It wouldn't be too crazy for them to make such an attempt, in the admittedly-unlikely event that the rest of their timelines are going perfectly at that point. Counter-intuitively, a trajectory to Mars is much cheaper (under 3 km/s ΔV at the best times) than HLS (3 km/s just to get to the Moon, then another ~5 km/s for descent and ascent under the current plans). Yeeting an upper stage interplanetary might be worth it just to get Mars-entry-with-Starship-heat-shield data a couple years earlier, even if they're not ready to land or do anything useful if they do.
And that's even before you get into the other racers. There's probably an effortpost worth of new detail out there about the New Glenn static fire explosion, and their dedication to repair the wrecked pad and launch again before the year is out, and/or about RocketLab/China/etc, if I only found time to write it up.
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