• ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    But but … you can hear people cheering maniacally every time one of their rockets comes back to land! It must be a legit company.

    • Dave.@aussie.zone
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      4 days ago

      Well, from a technical standpoint they now routinely do weekly what was never ever done before by anyone. Both in launch cadence of their booster fleet and the recovery of them, and they’ve pretty much fully transitioned to only making their Stage 2’s and just using their existing fleet of boosters. So from a rocket company perspective, SpaceX is a legitimate company, and they’ve made legitimate advances in the field of rocketry, and now they outpace the rest of the global market combined in tons to orbit.

      Then you fold in Starlink, which needs those weekly launches to maintain the constellation… and then you fold in Starship, which is the next generation launch platform, and it’s like “Ok… that’s still rocket-y, that’s cool”.

      And then along comes xAI tacked onto the side like a 100 billion dollar dead weight and that is where things get a bit wobbly.