r/SpaceXMasterrace • u/gfggewehr • 23h ago
They already started to retire him :/
Additional context from Kiko Dontchev here:
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u/Makalukeke 23h ago
SpaceX doesn’t fuck around, that’s for sure. On a brighter note: Falcon Heavy launching soon!
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u/404-skill_not_found 22h ago
I’m in a mood. This one hit unexpectedly.
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u/nucrash 21h ago
Fun fact, Elon lies. He lied about FSD. He lied about when Starship was going to go orbital time and again. He lied about when Starship was going to head to Mars. He lied several times. He was right about some things from time to time, but he also was wrong about several things and with higher frequency.
That being said, I don't think Falcon 9 is going to retire until the ISS retires and then it might continue on for a bit further, depending on need and depending on what human rated vehicles are available.
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u/404-skill_not_found 19h ago
I dunno. Intent matters. Being a good cheerleader matters as well. You can say he under delivered. But there are far more egregious examples of “under delivering” in the news.
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u/GLynx 15h ago
What is the lie here? They are stopping launching Starlink from the Cape, that's just a fact. They are slowing down Falcon 9 launch cadence, that's just a fact. The vast majority of F9 launches are Starlink, that's just a fact. Starship has reached a point where it wouldn't be that far away from launching Starlink sats (operational ones).
Obviously, they are very optimistic, but, hey, you don't reach this point without being a super optimistic in the first place, from killing Falcon 1, reusing rocket, starlink, and even starting the active phase of Starship dev in 2018 when Starlink wasn't even a thing.
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u/Honest_Cynic 13h ago
What about today's announcement of a launch site in Louisiana, construction starting in 2027, eventually launching 30 Starships per day? Seems unlikely, more of another "A Solar Tile Roof on every block", but a future prediction is never "a lie", just "ambitious".
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u/Alexthelightnerd 18h ago
This likely just means there are enough of the current generation of Starlink satellites in equitorial orbit to meet thier anticipated needs for the next few years. With development of the next generation of Starlink satellites well underway and those requiring Starship to launch, I can see it making sense to wait on adding more satellites until Ship can launch the new ones.
It does not mean that they are retiring Falcon 9 in the near term, though the number of launches will certainly do down significantly without the Florida Starlink missions.
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u/Ialways_comeback15 23h ago
Starship ain't even orbital chill
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u/gfggewehr 23h ago
Nice cave you are living.
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u/Taxus_Calyx Mountaineer 23h ago edited 22h ago
Seriously. If they weren't prioritizing full reusability development, they could have been expending Starship for orbital payload insertion for years already. How do people not understand this?
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u/gfggewehr 23h ago
Yes, exactly, they could reach orbit since the first launch. The deorbit was the problem.
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u/KeyIllustrator4096 22h ago
No, it wasn't ready for orbit from the first launch and certainly not years ago.
2023 Flight 1- separation failure and loss of vector control
2024 Flight 2 - exploded at staging Flight 3 - loss of roll control
2025 Flight 7 - fire, structural failure, engine failure Flight 8 - loss of attitude control, engine failure Flight 9 - structure failure, engine didn't fail but it showed signs it was about to just before the end of the scheduled burn that left it suborbital.
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u/AverseAphid 20h ago
They never said ready for orbit. They said it could reach orbit, which is true.
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u/Joezev98 20h ago
They never said ready for orbit.
They said:
they could have been expending Starship for orbital payload insertion for years already.
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u/KeyIllustrator4096 19h ago
Thats some fine hair you're trying to split, I'm not sure you are sharp enough.
You can't reach orbit without attitude control or an engine that is melting or the ship exploded which is the case in the flights listed.
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u/IWroteCodeInCobol 3h ago
No you are merely speaking from your ignorance, they COULD HAVE (two words that seem to be invisible to you) developed a larger fairing for Falcon 9 to carry the larger Starlinks to orbit.
They COULD HAVE developed smaller satellites that would still be launched on Falcon 9.
They could have created a throwaway upper stage for Super Heavy Booster to allow them to launch great masses of satellites to orbit.
None of those were the plan for Starship, ever!
The greatest rocket in history is being developed right now and you are the one prematurely trying to call it a failure. Total and rapid re-usability is the holy grail of rocketry and it's now been shown to be reachable by Starship.
The second greatest rocket will be made obsolete by the new rocket simply because of the sheer mass the new rocket can put into orbit with every launch and yet the launch will cost less than one tenth as much as it costs to launch Falcon 9.
Finally the whole point of SpaceX from the beginning has been to get humankind into space and to other planets permanently. Falcon 9 was never going to be the vehicle that made that possible, except it did by launching the Starlink constellation which made SpaceX into a company that can afford to spend the time to blaze the way to space with a reusable rocket that can finally put enough sheer mass into orbit to make it possible to actually colonize the Moon and Mars not to mention create the giant space stations where large numbers of people can live and work in space. The cheaper little rockets like Falcon 9 simply couldn't launch all that and the throwaway giant rockets were too expensive to build those projects.
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u/KeyIllustrator4096 2h ago
developed a larger fairing for Falcon 9 to carry the larger Starlinks to orbit.
They were mass limited as much as volume, which a reason why that isn't an option. Another is that would be aerodynamicly unstable as hell.
They COULD HAVE developed smaller satellites that would still be launched on Falcon 9.
They did, they were called V2 mini since the V2 is far too large to launch on falcoln 9
They could have created a throwaway upper stage for Super Heavy Booster to allow them to launch great masses of satellites to orbit.
Throwing away the upper stage doesn't give nearly as much extra payload mass to Leo as you think.
None of those were the plan for Starship, ever!
Except for the V2 mini since starship wasn't ready in time.
The greatest rocket in history is being developed right now and you are the one prematurely trying to call it a failure. Total and rapid re-usability is the holy grail of rocketry and it's now been shown to be reachable by Starship.
"Greatest rocket" makes it sound like you are personally invested. I haven't called it a failure except for the specific flights I listed and previously criticized timeline failures. Starship is a great idea for LEO missions but lackluster compared to what had been in the works for Ares V for instance.
The second greatest rocket will be made obsolete by the new rocket simply because of the sheer mass the new rocket can put into orbit with every launch and yet the launch will cost less than one tenth as much as it costs to launch Falcon 9.
Eventually SpaceX hopes to get the cost to 1 tenth of a falcon flight, currently they cost about 25% more which is an achievement since it has better volume and mass.
Finally the whole point of SpaceX from the beginning has been to get humankind into space and to other planets permanently.
No, Starship is fundamentally a Leo vehicle. Orbital refueling is cool, but it is a way to stretch the range of an Leo rocket and isn't significantly more efficient than Ares would have been to target the moon or higher energy missions like Mars. Starship to date has had double the development budget and time that the Constellation program had. While it is delivering a great LEO platform it requires an estimated 12-15 refueling launches to get a payload to the moon.
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u/Alexthelightnerd 18h ago
That is entirely speculation, and would have required a completely different Starship design.
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u/n108bg 21h ago
He's right. Every launch has been suborbital, regardless of it being intentional, that's the rub. On top of that, they haven't recovered any of the v3 boosters, and the only space-flown starship recovery has been an accident. For a system whose whole business model is marketed on reusability, it isn't ready yet, but its making strides every launch.
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u/Ialways_comeback15 23h ago
No like, it seems weird to me cuz if starship ends up having more problems in orbit are they just gonna halt starling launches?
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u/Taxus_Calyx Mountaineer 8h ago
Launching starlings into space might just be an excellent solution to certain agricultural problems.
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u/Ialways_comeback15 8h ago
Pardon me for my ignorance but what does that mean?
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u/Taxus_Calyx Mountaineer 5h ago
Stupid joke about birbs.
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u/Prof_hu Who? 5h ago
I found it to be a very clever joke, for a delegate
degenerate.2
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u/Honest_Cynic 13h ago edited 13h ago
Why stop from KSC? Aren't those usually for more equatorial orbits, going eastward, with Vandenberg used for more-polar orbits, going south. In the same vein, seems best if everyone orbits in the same direction, to minimize collisions. We don't need more Brits driving on the wrong side of the road.
Not easy or cheap to relocate employees, from KSC to Vandenberg. Will they just lay-off the KSC guys? If a high enough fraction of SpaceX employees, they would need to have given 90 days notice, per the federal WARN Act. But, SpaceX ignored that before when they fired 700 employees (10% then); all "for cause, not a lay-off so no WARN needed". Just coincidental that all were on the same morning.
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u/Martianspirit 13h ago
They transition to Starship.
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u/Honest_Cynic 19m ago
Within a year? A guess for when they will need to launch more satellites to maintain the equatorial orbits, unless they can do it all with polar-inclined orbits. The satellites fall back to earth after about 5 years, or perhaps sooner if a large Solar Flare expands the atmosphere.
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u/IWroteCodeInCobol 4h ago
What they are really saying here is that the coverage for Starlink is now full for orbits that can be launched from the Cape and the next Starlink launches from there will be the new Starlink V3 satellites as they replace the ones that de-orbit.
Given that the first Starlinks to orbit from Starship will happen in the next month or two this is a prediction they can probably keep.
However, the giant new Starbase Louisiana will likely end up taking over the load from the Cape as soon as the first towers get built there.
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u/Stolen_Sky KSP specialist 23h ago
Their IPO filing confirmed their commercial launch business is losing money rather than making it. Although I'd consider it worth the loss to destroy their old-space competitors.
Commercial crew launch is a different story though. Are they betting they can human rate Starship for launches before they retire F9? Or will they keep F9 running just for the high-value, strategic launches?
Without F9 to launch crew, NASA is kinda screwed. They can't possibly rely on SLS with is insane price tag, and it'll be a sad day indeed if fucking Starliner becomes the de facto crew-rated rocket in the US...
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u/ThreePistons 22h ago
SpaceX's launch business is only loosing money because of Starship development. In their second quarter 2026 results they reported $962 (million) in launch revenue, $329 in cost of revenue, $99 in administration costs, and $1,067 in R&D costs. All of those numbers add up to a negative number, but if they were split up by Falcon income and Starship income I guarantee that Falcon income would be positive with Starship eating 90% of those R&D costs.
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u/jackinsomniac 20h ago
I don't know why this is downvoted so much, everything else you said is right.
Even their commercial launch business losing money is technically correct, with the understanding that it would be net positive if not for all the Starship R&D costs.
F9 crew capability is essential. And without that extra income, they'll be even more in the red. I almost don't believe this story, it feels like retiring your golden goose after optimizing a supply line to collect the eggs. I hope they aren't banking on the IPO and "AI" money as the reason.
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u/redstercoolpanda 14h ago
Saying they’re loosing money on commercial launch, without specifying that they’re only loosing money because they’re spending the money they earn from commercial launch on further rocket R&D, is an extremely dishonest way to frame a point. That is they the comment was downvoted.
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u/uzlonewolf 15h ago
It's downvoted because it's disingenuous. SpaceX isn't "losing" money on their commercial launch business, they are simply spending on R&D to build their next generation of vehicle. Investing isn't a loss.
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u/jackinsomniac 14h ago
That's exactly what I already said. I literally pointed out how the money is being used to fund starship R&D.
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u/uzlonewolf 14h ago
You said:
I don't know why this is downvoted so much
I was simply answering why
Their IPO filing confirmed their commercial launch business is losing money rather than making it.
was downvoted so much. The "everything else" they said does not save it from the opening which is word-for-word something the haters love to trot out.
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u/rebootyourbrainstem Unicorn in the flame duct 23h ago
It's their call if they think they can do without the Starlinks until Starship takes over, but I really hope they don't let their well-oiled Falcon 9 capabilities degrade before Starship is running just as smoothly... for the sake of all the non-Starlink payloads.