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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.
I haven't been following Starship progress over the last 12 months, and all your bets are essentially bets about timing, which is contingent on uninteresting factors like the political environment, Elon's newest distractions (attention and finance wise), stochastic problems and causes for caution, so I won't comment on them. Ignore if you're in this for the pure love of the game.
But bets aside, you make a categorical prediction:
Have you elucidated your logic anywhere?
I'm afraid you have a case of Musk Derangement Syndrome. I see it a lot on X. Musk has a lot (as in, millions, a significant percent of X population) of extremely annoying fanboys of the lowest castes – crypto bros boosting #grok who got rich off $DOGE pumps, bots, edgy right-wingers, desperate $TSLA investors who are literally, well, invested in his success. He is obnoxious himself, prone to making false promises, grandiosity and loathsome behavior. So there's a reactionary cohort that naysays everything he does. But isn't this beneath human dignity to let that influence the judgement of the technical project such as Starship?
Starship, at this point, essentially can't not work. We know of no compelling reason why it won't, and a plethora of reasons why it will. Exactly a decade ago, there was vigorous skepticism that Falcon program can work. Russians in particular, being pathologically proud of Soviet space industry, dunked on the idea of rocket reusability with our typical overwrought literary wit, which hopefully can evoke some cringe in you today:
It goes on for a while but the conclusion is obvious already: Falcon is Another American Grift, the metal will get le tired, defect inspection will be prohibitively costly, the construction is suboptimal modulo reusability, and anyway the first landed unit didn't qualify for reuse, so QED. Coming from an engineer by training, this all sounded persuasive to my engineer friends at the time. To me, it sounded like status anxiety. It sounds quaint today, when Booster B1067 has a record of 35 launches, when Falcons provide the majority of LEO lift capacity for the planet, when the shortest turnaround is a bit over a week, and the safety track record of Falcon has exceeded that of Soyuz, painstaikingly built over half a century. The metal seems really vigorous and not tired at all. My understanding is that Elon's hypothesis was: all of the industry was thinking too small, these paranoid quality standards and laborious procedures are mostly downstream of cost ker kilogram to orbit, you can just do propulsive landing well enough that the vehicle takes negligible damage, and this unlocks a whole different regime of unit economics; and this is a mere issue of engineering. Seems like he was just correct. Then Starlink happened. Similar dismissals, similar outcome, SpaceX acquires the perfect demand sink and revenue stream and can seriously invest into what is functionally and economically near-equivalent to a reusable SSTO with 100+ tons of payload. But you know Starship's pitch, of course, and how it renders SLS and all other alternatives obsolete. Mars or Moon – in the context of full reusability with these payloads, does it even matter? These are mission details, what is important is what kinds of missions you can begin to plan at all at $1000/kg to LEO, at $100/kg, at $50/kg… and, much as I loathe to agree with @Shakes, the military can come up with quite a few. «Spy catellites» is thinking too small, for sure. On the civilian side, the space compute idea will genuinely work too, given political and logistic problems with terrestial datacenters in the US – and the objections to it are more motivated thinking, not solid engineering or bottom-line costs analysis; and this can trivially become another Starlink. You can start to actually think about microgravity manufacturing, as well. There is a lot to do in space, once you can get there cheaply. The last Starship feat that I've watched was the chopstick capture, it looked like they're really close to maturity. It can take a year or 5 years, but the probability of Elon running out of capital on the way there in the American system is… remote. So what's the actual crux? You say it's not scaleable and cite an article about Raptor production from 2021. They're on Raptor 3 now, all the concerns in that email are, far as I can tell, obsolete. Do you have some physics-driven argument as to why Falcon works but Starship does not? I am confident that you don't, because I've never seen any and apparently neither have SpaceX's investors, for all the hate Elon gets.
There is another strong reason to think that Starship can work. We had more ambitious designs in the 20th century, and today other companies are doing similar things. New Glenn works, 9x4 will haul 70 tons, and although they've had a setback with explosion on the pad, Bezos will see to it that they recover, they have their own constellation program that adds urgency, and will need heavy lift capability. More saliently, LandSpace has a pretty well-validated engine of roughly Raptor 2 class, and plans to use it in a Starship-class rocket somewhere after 2030; this far they've been fast-following SpaceX at a crazy pace, they've started in 2015 and have actually put the first methalox-powered rocket in orbit (3 years ago), so I'm optimistic about this schedule. Within a month they will likely make their second attempt at landing ZQ-3, which is basically a Falcon-9 with Starship characteristics (steel body, methalox). The first one failed in Dec 2025, but it was close and Elon himself said it's potentially better than Falcon. If they succeed, no doubt this boosts Elon's standing with the government and military again, because that'll make China the second power with reusable rocketry, and we can't allow a reusable rocket gap, can we? And if Starship doesn't work, then the gap is extremely likely - China can weld steel cylinders at scale and mass produce engines like nobody's business, like look at their shipbuilding or the recent pace of fighter jet delivery (they make ≈100 J-20s per year now, which above the total F-35 program output in 2024, though 2025 was a big year for LM with 191; and recall that J-20 is a massive twin-engine). They have something like 20 private companies competing for the launch provider market. On the state side, CASC's CZ-10B likely does its own launch and barge landing (very interesting mechanism by the way, initially explored by the US, abandoned) this week. CASC has a whole family of partially reusable Falcon-esque rockets in the pipeline (10A, 12A, 12B, maybe 8) and a very Starship-like superheavy CZ-9. They even have plans for space-based solar and compute. Regardless of how all this goes (I'm personally bearish on Chinese rocketry aside from LandSpace), it obviously bolsters Elon's narrative. In light of this, I don't even think the speculations about future Democratic hostility are convincing – the US has strong bipartisan support for any anti-China and arms-race-with-China initiative; Biden tightened the screws of Trump-1's trade war, Trump-2 didn't touch Biden's export controls. So Starship will almost certainly keep being funded and the only thing that can kill it is physics.
In sum, I'd like you to spell out your bear case that survives these objections.
P.S. SpaceXAI (what a lousy name) has just released a frontier LLM, I can vouch for it being genuinely on the same tier as Anthropic/OpenAI's latest (Fable/5.6 excluded), and with Chinese open source costs. Elon: «Grok groks engineering. Next month’s release will be another step-change improvement, as we close the loop on solving real-world engineering problems at Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and Boring Company.»
I have seen enough of his empty promises, but it does feel qualitatively different, an unexpected closing of the gap. He's still got it.
You won't see this because you've blocked me, but this isn't true and several people have tried to do the math. Here's the most recent. To sum up, cooling even a 1MW space datacenter (tiny by terrestrial standards) would require a radiator of 2000 square meters. The article doesn't discuss solar panel sizing, but using star cloud's numbers of 400 W/sqm we're talking about 2500 sq m before we consider redundancy. And that's just power and cooling for a single MW. In fact, it seems to me that it's the space DC boosters who refuse to engage on this and show their work.
I agree. I actually also agree with the main thrust of his post, but orbital datacenters make zero sense unless you’re wrongly thinking “space = cold” instead of “space = vacuum”. Power needs could theoretically be solved by using nuclear reactors instead of solar panels (which is still pretty impractical compared to just… building a reactor on Earth) but the absolutely ludicrous size of the necessary cooling radiators (and what happens if/when that radiator gets hit by a micrometeor or a piece of debris? how easy is it to repair? how long can you wait?) makes it a non-starter, barring some borderline-magitech advancement in cooling that would surely also make it easier to build on Earth. Cooling and especially power are the limiting factors of datacenter construction, above the raw land requirements.
Maybe there’s a future case for datacenters on the moon, using some sort of geothermal-esque cooling system with boreholes? I imagine the underground temperatures of the moon are pretty damn cold, I bet we could use it as a heat sink. But there a whole lot of steps to cover before there’s any benefit at all to doing that instead of just building a normal datacenter.
I think the only real economic case for what we’d recognize as sci-fi-level space development is mining, whether that’s helium on the Moon or rare earths from asteroids, etc. I think this would require launch economics to get vastly cheaper before anything could come of it, but it could potentially take off as both a sovereign and zero-pollution (on Earth anyway) means of acquiring certain resources. I think it’ll happen eventually. But not very soon. Near-future space development will be all about communications, GPS, and surveillance — perhaps with a bit of weaponization thrown in to deal with the surveillance.
Have you actually done the math on this, or has someone else? My understanding is that it's totally doable with relatively modest radiators; I'm open to this guy not knowing what he's talking about, but all I've seen from the other side is sneering.
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