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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.
This post gets to the heart of what my problem with the space colonization hype train that seems to be popular on this site. What exactly is the profit motive? Starlink seems very useful and profitable. Colonizing Mars? Not so much, unless investors are willing to eat losses for many decades.
This is a great article on that exact question: https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/08/16/the-only-reason-to-explore-space/
The project of interstellar civilization may seem incomprehensibly vast, beyond the ability of anyone to influence. But it is not inevitable. Like any great work, it will only occur through planned and deliberate human action. Given the scale of distances involved, we will need to carry out the work not only with unprecedented ingenuity and mobilization of people and resources but also with generational continuity of mission and succession. This will need to be done without the expectation of economic profit or military advantage. There are many precedents for such projects in history, but they have only been carried out successfully by two kinds of institutions, usually working together: governments and religions.
In all recorded history, states have basically only acted on three motivations: national security, economic growth, and political legitimacy. The first two are unreliable or incoherent for interstellar civilization. The third, however, fits like a charm. Legitimacy is as vital to states as economic or military security. As a result, states have spent immeasurable quantities of resources, for decades and even centuries, on projects that, at first glance, seem to have had no material purpose or value. Think of the bronze ding of ancient China, the ziggurats of Sumer, or the cathedrals of medieval Europe. These projects were not, in fact, useless but fulfilled the need for legitimacy according to the beliefs, values, and tastes of the peoples who built them. In that sense, they were priceless.
The expansion of human civilization to other stars will not be pioneered by lone adventurers or merry bands of hardy explorers, like we imagine the voyages of Erik the Red or Christopher Columbus. This works for interplanetary space, but not interstellar space, whose travel time will require multiple generations of people to survive a journey, including on the first try. Interstellar travel will need to accommodate not just adventurous young men with nothing to lose, but also women, children, and the elderly. In other words, a whole society. The existence of a society always implies the existence of a government.
The thing is I believe there is no accurate comparison to space colonization because it basically completely detethers us from our own ecology and biology in a way that transatlantic voyages did not. The kind of person that thinks that they want to colonize Mars (the cowboy/Lone Ranger archetype) is incredibly ill-suited to such a venture because of the extremely tight constraints that will inevitably exist in terms of resource usage and time allocation in the first mars colonies. The first mars colonists will basically be living under martial law in caves where they rarely if ever see the sun. This sounds much better suited to the corporate drones who already do very well in existing hierarchies here on earth.
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Profit is an extremely powerful motivation but not the only one. There are Olympic athlete whose feats are rewarded with multimillion dollar bran deals, and there are priests.
True, but Musk is responsible to his shareholders now (or at least partially). He chose to make spaceX a publicly traded company, which comes with expectations of profitability, at least eventually.
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Notionally, space colonization removes the shackles of terrestrial resource limits for mineral resources, energy, and space. The long-term possibilities seem open-ended, but you're not wrong that capitalizing on those within a reasonable time frame from a finance perspective seems questionable. Can corporate structures handle payoff periods longer than a human generation? Maybe some of the closer-term prospects (asteroid mining, space data centers), which are all still not close, can make it viable sooner.
There are economic use cases for space, but they’re for ‘oil rig in the ocean’ human presence, not building full scale colonies.
There are civilizational reasons for expanding off earth- dark forest hypothesis, manifest destiny, etc- but even if you agree with them, earth simply doesn’t care. In another age, we’ll care more, when western civilization rebirths itself once more. But that might be in centuries, only this time with mature technology.
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