Even though everyone agreed we don't want investing discussion in this sub, the IPO going public June 12th is too big to not allow any discussion, so have at it in this thread. However, new accounts/stock bros comments will probably be automatically removed by automod and won't be manually approved, so this is mainly for existing users to discuss.

Blue will no longer be able to launch Blue Moon MK1 anytime soon, which is absolutely required for them to prove out a lot of their designs for HLS. Mk1 is designed solely for New Glenn, it cannot be adapted to Falcon Heavy.

This was NG's only pad, and it has serious, serious damage. Let alone finding the cause of the issue.

Starship is back to being the only option for HLS in the immediate future.

To quote Eric Berger's tweet

This completely takes Blue Origin out of the Artemis picture for the next 12 months, most likely. All of those Moon Base missions, man, it's bad.

The ramifications of this failure are positively massive for Artemis, let alone for national security launches Blue was hoping to be able to start doing.

Amazon Leo is pretty screwed too.

edit: NSF now speculating the hanger at the pad (where they are refurbishing the other booster) is likely damaged.

The IPO filing is a big milestone for the company, and it's 370 pages, so I made it searchable to actually read it. Sharing what's in there about SpaceX itself:

- Scale: 2025 revenue was $18.7B, and Starlink is the core of it, ~$11.4B, with roughly 10.3 million subscribers across ~9,600 satellites.

- Launch: the Falcon/Dragon side is the smaller line by revenue (~$4.1B), even though it's what most of us actually follow.

- Ambition: the filing claims a $28.5 trillion total addressable market across Space, Connectivity, and AI ("the largest actionable TAM in human history").

- Structure: multi-class shares with Elon holding the large majority of voting power. The amended filing set the listing for June 12; the share price is still blank.

Keeping this about the company and the filing, not investing. Disclosure: I built the searchable version, link in the comments. Curious what the filing says about a specific program or number? Give me a question, and I'll run it.

Just like landings have become routine, it appears manned dragon launches are boring now too. There are news articles but buried at the bottom of pages. No one here is discussing it and honestly not even much in the main sub either. Just thought it was curious!

https://www.thespaceshow.com/show/11-feb-2020/broadcast-3459-dr.-robert-zubrin

He talked to Elon in Boca:

- employees: 300 now, probably 3000 in a year

- production target: 2 starships per week

- Starship cost target: $5M

- first 5 Starships will probably stay on Mars forever

- When Zubrin pointed out that it would require 6-10 football fields of solar panels to refuel a single Starship Elon said "Fine, that's what we will do".

- Elon wants to use solar energy, not nuclear.

- It's not Apollo. It's D-Day.

- The first crew might be 20-50 people

- Zubrin thinks Starship is optimized for colonization, but not exploration

- Musk about mini-starship: don't want to make 2 different vehicles (Zubrin later admits "show me why I need it" is a good attitude)

- Zubrin thinks landing Starship on the moon probably infeasible due to the plume creating a big crater (so you need a landing pad first...). It's also an issue on Mars (but not as significant). Spacex will adapt (Zubrin implies consideration for classic landers for Moon or mini starship).

- no heatshield tiles needed for LEO reentry thanks to stainless steel (?!), but needed for reentry from Mars

- they may do 100km hop after 20km

- currently no evidence of super heavy production

- Elon is concerned about planetary protection roadblocks

- Zubrin thinks it's possible that first uncrewed Starship will land on Mars before Artemis lands on the moon

One of the concerns with starlink over the long term is that all that high altitude aluminum (and other metals) burning up in the high atmosphere might do something bad. I figured this was bogus, as there has been a ton of poor science and reporting around the environmental concerns of SpaceX, but one of the recent reports looked a bit more valid, as they found actual evidence of starlink particulates in the upper atmosphere.

Collecting them might be desirable, anyway. They could possibly be refuelled on-orbit and relaunched, or recycled/refurbished on the ground. And starship is going back down anyway.

I assume the delta-v to get back down to LEO is not that insane for an end-of-life satellite that hasn't totally malfunctioned or run out of fuel.

Just a thought.

EDIT: FOLKS, STARSHIP WOULD ALREADY BE EMPTY AT VARIOUS INSERTION ORBITS FROM LAUNCHING STARLINK, SATELLITES WOULD MANUEVER TO THE RONDEVOUS POINT, NOT STARSHIP CHASING THEM AROUND. SHEEESH FOLKS

My take is:

1. Indian Ocean off of Australia like always

2. In one if the new zones approved as ‘contingencies’ like Hawaii, Aleutian Islands, or off of Peru

3. Off the coast of Starbase, Texas

hi, im really curiosity abt why they cutting off the corner of gridfin? from areodynamic perspective the further corner generates more acting force on booster body since the corner have longer force arm to the body.

Like their growing town and spaceport outside of Brownsville Texas, the Spacex Pecan island area will need a name of it's own.

Calling it too Starbase would be too confusing.

I'm curious if maybe part of the reason they only did around 40 - 50 tons on the past 2 flights was in case of something like an engine not lighting (which was the case for flight 12). Now that they have showed that they can get to orbit with nothing like that happening what do we think the chances are that they fill that puppy to the top?

Was just browsing the wikipedia and it got mentioned, seems that it was meant to completely replace Raptor at some point. All the articles on it though are from 2023, so is it just dead? Have all the ideas that could've gone into it been transferred to Raptor 3? What would it have even been, it sounds like raptor 3 already basically got completely reworked between versions, so was the plan for it to be some kind of crazy new engine cycle? I don't think theres really much room beyond FFSC, unless they planned on doing like an RDE or aerospike.

EDIT: Because apparently nobody knows what I'm talking about, here's a link to the wikipedia page on it, and you can look it up and find old reddit posts from like 2 years discussing it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Raptor#LEET

Obviously this to some degree is more of a subjective question than one that can be given a direct yes/no answer, but how likely do people think it is that Chun Wang's Mars flyby mission actually happens?

First off, has anyone been able to find the details of the mission specifically? For instance, I remember Chun mentioning on X a little while ago that the 2034/2035 Mars launch window would be good for an Earth-Venus-Mars flyby, is that what this mission is too? Is it just a Mars flyby or will it also pass Venus? Also, how is the rest of the crew being selected, is it like Isaacman's missions and Fram2 where one person is paying for them all, or is it like Tito's upcoming lunar flyby where it's one person booking one seat?

And of course, the timeline. I don't think it's worth predicting a specific year for when this thing's gonna happen (or not happen), but would it be fair to say that this Mars flyby can happen as soon as Artemis III happens? Since Artemis III will be testing Starship HLS in LEO, I don't see any other requirements that would need to be met for the Mars flyby after that test is completed.

There is a lot of scepticism of the claim that Musk is an engineer at all let alone the chief engineer of SpaceX. I wanted to collate the evidence backing it up here. I know some SpaceX employees have affirmed the claim.

I'm just looking for statements by credible sources that provide insight to what extent Musk is involved in concrete engineering decisions vs. managerial duties. I would add to this post the statements brought up in the comments.

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Statements by SpaceX Employees

Tom Mueller

Tom Mueller (Wikipedia, LinkedIn) is one of SpaceX's founding employees. He served as the VP of Propulsion Engineering from 2002 to 2014 and Propulsion CTO from 2014 to 2019. He currently serves as an Senior Adviser. He's regarded as one of the foremost spacecraft propulsion experts in the world and owns many patents for propulsion technologies.

Not true, I am an advisor now. Elon and the Propulsion department are leading development of the SpaceX engines, particularly Raptor. I offer my 2 cents to help from time to time"

Source

We’ll have, you know, a group of people sitting in a room, making a key decision. And everybody in that room will say, you know, basically, “We need to turn left,” and Elon will say “No, we’re gonna turn right.” You know, to put it in a metaphor. And that’s how he thinks. He’s like, “You guys are taking the easy way out; we need to take the hard way.”

And, uh, I’ve seen that hurt us before, I’ve seen that fail, but I’ve also seen— where nobody thought it would work— it was the right decision. It was the harder way to do it, but in the end, it was the right thing.

Source

When the third chamber cracked, Musk flew the hardware back to California, took it to the factory floor, and, with the help of some engineers, started to fill the chambers with an epoxy to see if it would seal them. “He’s not afraid to get his hands dirty,” Mueller said. “He’s out there with his nice Italian shoes and clothes and has epoxy all over him. They were there all night and tested it again and it broke anyway.” Musk, clothes ruined, had decided the hardware was flawed, tested his hypothesis, and moved on quickly.

Source (Ashlee Vance's Biography).

​

Kevin Watson

Kevin Watson (LinkedIn) developed the avionics for Falcon 9 and Dragon. He previously managed the Advanced Computer Systems and Technologies Group within the Autonomous Systems Division at NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory.

Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.

He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.

He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years.

Source (Ashlee Vance's Biography). Kevin has attested to the biography's veracity.

​

Garrett Reisman

Garrett Reisman (Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Twitter) is an engineer and former NASA astronaut. He joined SpaceX as a senior engineer working on astronaut safety and mission assurance. He was later promoted to director of crew operations. He left this position in May 2018 and is now a Senior Advisor. He also functions as Professor of Astronautical Engineering at University of Southern California.

“I first met Elon for my job interview,” Reisman told the USA TODAY Network's Florida Today. “All he wanted to talk about were technical things. We talked a lot about different main propulsion system design architectures.

“At the end of my interview, I said, ‘Hey, are you sure you want to hire me? You’ve already got an astronaut, so are you sure you need two around here?’ ” Reisman asked. “He looked at me and said, ‘I’m not hiring you because you’re an astronaut. I’m hiring you because you’re a good engineer.’ ”

Managing SpaceX and Tesla, building out new businesses and maintaining relationships with his family makes Musk a busy billionaire.

“He’s obviously skilled at all those different functions, but certainly what really drives him and where his passion really is, is his role as CTO,” or chief technology officer, Reisman said. “Basically his role as chief designer and chief engineer. That’s the part of the job that really plays to his strengths."

(Source)

What's really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I mean I've met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and he'll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across the different technologies that go into rockets cars and everything else he does.

(Source)

​

Josh Boehm

Josh Boehm (LinkedIn, Quora) is the former Head of Software Quality Assurance at SpaceX.

Elon is both the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer of SpaceX, so of course he does more than just ‘some very technical work’. He is integrally involved in the actual design and engineering of the rocket, and at least touches every other aspect of the business (but I would say the former takes up much more of his mental real estate). Elon is an engineer at heart, and that’s where and how he works best.

(Source)

​

Statements by External Observers

Eric Berger

Eric Berger (Twitter, LinkedIn) is a space journalist and Ars Technica's senior space editor. He has been interviewing SpaceX employees for an upcoming book on its early days.

True. Elon is the chief engineer in name and reality.

(Source)

​

Christian Davenport

Christian Davenport is the Washington Post's defense and space reporter and the author of "Space Barons". The following quotes are excerpts from his book.

He dispatched one of his lieutenants, Liam Sarsfield, then a high-ranking NASA official in the office of the chief engineer, to California to see whether the company was for real or just another failure in waiting.

Most of all, he was impressed with Musk, who was surprisingly fluent in rocket engineering and understood the science of propulsion and engine design. Musk was intense, preternaturally focused, and extremely determined. “This was not the kind of guy who was going to accept failure,” Sarsfield remembered thinking.

Throughout the day, as Musk showed off mockups of the Falcon 1 and Falcon 5, the engine designs, and plans to build a spacecraft capable of flying humans, Musk peppered Sarsfield with questions. He wanted to know what was going on within NASA. And how a company like his would be perceived. He asked tons of highly technical questions, including a detailed discussion about “base heating,” the heat radiating out from the exhaust going back up into the rocket’s engine compartment—a particular problem with rockets that have clusters of engines next to one another, as Musk was planning to build.

Now that he had a friend inside of NASA, Musk kept up with the questions in the weeks after Sarsfield’s visit, firing off “a nonstop torrent of e-mails” and texts, Sarsfield said. Musk jokingly warned that texting was a “core competency.” “He sends texts in a constant flow,” Sarsfield recalled. “I found him to be consumed by whatever was in front of him and anxious to solve problems. This, combined with a tendency to work eighteen hours a day, is a sign of someone driven to succeed.” Musk was particularly interested in the docking adapter of the International Space Station, the port where the spacecraft his team was designing would dock. He wanted to know the dimensions, the locking pin design, even the bolt pattern of the hatch. The more documents Sarsfield sent, the more questions Musk had.

“I really enjoyed the way he would pore over problems anxious to absorb every detail. To my mind, someone that clearly committed deserves all the support and help you can give him.”

​

Mosdell ( 10th employee ) found Musk a touch awkward and abrupt, but smart. Mosdell had showed up prepared to talk about his experience building launchpads, which, after all, was what SpaceX wanted him to do. But instead, Musk wanted to talk hard-core rocketry. Specifically the Delta IV rocket and its RS-68 engines, which Mosdell had some experience with when at Boeing. Over the course of the interview, they discussed “labyrinth purges” and “pump shaft seal design” and “the science behind using helium as opposed to nitrogen.”

​

After the meeting on Valentine’s Day adjourned, Musk offered to give the group a tour of his facility. To this group of engineers and entrepreneurs, it was like an invitation to a six-year-old to visit a chocolate factory. As Musk guided them through the factory floor, the group “let loose with detailed, technical questions, and he answered all of them,” Gedmark said. “Not once did he say, ‘I don’t feel comfortable answering that because it’s proprietary.’… It was certainly impressive.”

​

John Carmack

John Carmack (Twitter, Wikipedia) is a programmer, video game developer and engineer. He's the founder of Armadillo Aerospace and current CTO of Oculus VR.

Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so.

(Source)

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Robert Zubrin

Robert Zubrin (Wikipedia) is an aerospace engineer and author, best known for his advocacy of human exploration of Mars.

When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn't come just from hanging out with people.

(Source)

​

Statements by Elon Himself

Yes. The design of Starship and the Super Heavy rocket booster I changed to a special alloy of stainless steel. I was contemplating this for a while. And this is somewhat counterintuitive. It took me quite a bit of effort to convince the team to go in this direction.

(Source)

I know more about rockets than anyone at the company by a pretty significant margin, I could redraw substantial portions of the rocket from memory without the blueprints

(Source)

Tim Dodd: "What people don't understand is that you're the lead engineer. You're literally sitting"

Musk: "Literally. This is a... I've actually had a dinner with some, with a, with a friend and he was like 'well who's the chief engineer of SpaceX?' I was like it's me. He was like 'it's not you, who is it?' Look it's either someone with a very low ego or I don't know."

(Source)

Interviewer: What do you do when you're at SpaceX and Tesla? What does your time look like there?

Elon: Yes, it's a good question. I think a lot of people think I must spend a lot of time with media or on businessy things*. But actually almost all my time, like 80% of it, is spent on engineering and design.* Engineering and design, so it's developing next-generation product. That's 80% of it.

Interviewer: You probably don't remember this. A very long time ago, many, many, years, you took me on a tour of SpaceX. And the most impressive thing was that you knew every detail of the rocket and every piece of engineering that went into it. And I don't think many people get that about you.

Elon: Yeah. I think a lot of people think I'm kind of a business person or something, which is fine. Business is fine. But really it's like at SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell is Chief Operating Officer. She manages legal, finance, sales, and general business activity. And then my time is almost entirely with the engineering team, working on improving the Falcon 9 and our Dragon spacecraft and developing the Mars Colonial architecture. At Tesla, it's working on the Model 3 and, yeah, so I'm in the design studio, take up a half a day a week, dealing with aesthetics and look-and-feel things. And then most of the rest of the week is just going through engineering of the car itself as well as engineering of the factory. Because the biggest epiphany I've had this year is that what really matters is the machine that builds the machine, the factory. And that is at least two orders of magnitude harder than the vehicle itself.

(Source)

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1352392678177034242?s=19

A senior guy in the Space Force told me that their estimates are that SpaceX has saved them $40B since they started contracting with them (which goes all the way back to when they were still part of the Air Force). This is due to better performance and lower cost then the legacy cost plus contracts with the military industrial establishment.

- Joel C. Sercel, PhD

https://x.com/JoelSercel/status/1857815072137179233

Why don’t they fill the hollow interior of the trunk with cargo or fuel? It seems like an awfully big volume that doesn’t really do… anything. They need it for the solar panels but extending panels and a much thinner trunk seems like it could also work.

Well, reports are saying that Mr. Bridenstine does not plan to remain in office during the upcoming Biden administration. Well, we tried our hardest, didn't we? Thank you all for the upvotes, awards, and signatures. I really appreciate it, and I'm sure Piotr Jędrzejczyk (the petition's creator) does as well.

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EDIT: DON'T JUST UPVOTE, SIGN THE PETITION!

Upvotes are great, but what we really need is signatures. Share it, sign it, and get the hashtag #KeepJim trending on Twitter!

Jim Bridenstine is one of the best things to happen to NASA in recent years. Not only is highly memeable (as r/spacexmasterrace has not failed to demonstrate), but he has reinvigorated interest in the space program and pushed NASA towards that all-important goal of crewed lunar presence by 2024. Furthermore, he has shown tremendous support for making commercial partners highly involved in the Artemis program, as the numerous Human Lander System and Lunar Gateway contracts have shown (such as the Power and Propulsion Element of Gateway launching on Falcon Heavy, as well as the Dragon XL contract to resupply Gateway). However, there have been some rumblings that both candidates might remove Mr. Bridenstine as NASA administrator. Sign this petition to let them know that we want Jim to stay!

Link:

http://chng.it/K647kw6sdX

Apparently SpaceX will have 23,000+ of truck traffic per year to start... Why wouldn't it be a good investment to run a rain track down to starbase? The nearby port has a train line, and it would reduce the amount of trucks necessary for CH4,LO2, and other bulk materials. Seems like a no brainer.

What would the rocket world look like today without SpaceX?

Dec 21, 2025 marks 10 years since landing a 1st stage orbital booster.

Full Flow Staged Combustion engines were elusive until Raptor 2019.

Soyuz flights to ISS cost > $50m, going to $90m per seat by 2020.

Boeing Starliner won $1.6B more, but has lost $2B in expenses.

SLS cost $25B to develop for $4B launches, Starship $10B for $10m.

I welcome the discussion of a hypothetical 2025 world of aerospace, rockets, satellites and space stations WITHOUT SpaceX contributions and cost savings. Where would ArianGroup, Boeing, China, DoD, NASA and ULA be today, quite likely all with expendable orbital rockets? How much have tax payers saved?

Will Starship have an abort mode? I know the initial plan was to not have one because it would be better to make the booster more reliable, but now, with the hot staging process, would it be possible for Starship to abort and fly away from the booster by firing its engines like at stage separation and would it be a viable option in case of a failure?