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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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Interesting. I hadn't seen SpaceX talking about orbits higher than GTO, so I assumed that was as high as they went. If SpaceX is putting the craft in trans-lunar coast, they can definitely claim credit and blame for the lunar mission if they want, but they still don't get to cherrypick.

they can definitely claim credit and blame for the lunar mission if they want

I'm a huge SpaceX fan, but you're being more generous now than I would be! Beresheet crashed. Hakuto-R 1 and 2 crashed. IM-1 tilted. IM-2 tipped over. Yay for Blue Ghost (and for IM-1, honestly, and for the survivors of the similarly mixed lunar lander record with other launchers and countries), but the success of any full lunar lander missions is clearly resting in large part on the success of a very difficult mission phase that SpaceX has yet to attempt themselves and can't claim credit for. SpaceX can only claim credit for their own (also difficult!) contributions to those missions. SpaceX does have a pretty amazing record these days with vastly larger autonomous rocket-powered landers, ones that are fighting 6 times the gravity and infinity times the wind, but looking at those Intuitive Machines results I still worry about the future. I hope we'll see the uncrewed Starship HLS land perfectly before we try putting any humans on such a tall lander aimed at an unprepared landing site.

I hadn't seen SpaceX talking about orbits higher than GTO

I thought that was pretty much all Falcon Heavy turned out to be good for, after Falcon 9 payload growth ate its lunch from below. Looking at the FH launch list, I guess I'm wrong, and there were a few GTO launches (for satellites that would have been too heavy to use its upper stage for the apogee burn while still recovering boosters? simply for conservative customers?), but otherwise there's a bunch of GEO, plus the asteroid belt and Jupiter, with Earth-Sun L2 and the moon slated for later this year. Aside from the moon, Falcon 9 has already done Earth-Sun Lagrange points and the asteroid belt. It's just that LEO/GTO/GEO are where the money is for now.