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They already recovered a ship from that one time they accidentally landed one in the ocean. SpaceX got to have a lot of heatshield endurance data by now.

Fuel transfer seems like a trivial problem next to the reusable heat shield. And even if for some weird reason it never works, the program could likely pay for itself just launching Starlink/Starshield with full reuse.

Only for going to the Moon or Mars. As a launch system, Starship will still be a phenomenal success even if they struggle with fuel transfer, which is really an entirely different problem.

Fuel transfer isn't needed to launch to LEO at much lower cost.

Even without enabling missions requiring refuelling this is still a huge step change in orbital capabilities.

Orbital refueling seems like a small problem compared to a reusable starship.

No really it can now launch 20x the Starlinks per flight and StarMind is possible now economically.

plenty of use cases were fuel transfer is not needed.

It changes cost to put up satellites, which is very significant.

It might not change much for mars

We went outside in our Orlando office to see the flair up in the sky, and then were looking for the re-entry, by the time we could figure out where it was our coworker said it was already standing upright.

You don’t want it more aerodynamic

Do you think Space Shuttle landing is equivalent because you like all the extra weight and complexity of a landing gear, or because you like having to build a giant runway?

Yes, though not an engineering one. At SpaceX she handles business development, strategy, and ops, though she was trained as an engineer and did it previously in her career. I think this is almost the more impressive feat here, not to diminish the engineering leap.

Definitely a name that won’t be forgotten anytime soon.

Also, landing it on the chopsticks makes rapid turnaround easier.

Starlink is pretty amazing tech which can be used for both good and evil - from enabling reliable communication in disaster zones to letting civilians browse social media from remote locations to communicating with weapons of war.

I unfortunately agree. Years ago I realized the Mars talk was just talk when I noticed that Musk and SpaceX were not funding any of the other stuff you’d need to fund if you wanted to “make life multiplanetary.”

Continuing to iterate on self contained biospheres and long term closed cycle life support? (Not a solved problem!) Working on construction techniques for the Moon or Mars? Studies on the dose response curve for gravity, like sponsoring a spin lab for the ISS to at least see if mice can reproduce in 0.3g? Self contained industrial infrastructure leaning heavily on 3D printers? Psychological research on the best way to build interiors and run social units?

Musk could personally fund all of that with little impact on his net worth.

It’s also decades of work. Some of what I listed is harder than the rockets. Better get started if you want to have a settlement on Mars this century.

Nope. Nothing. Just rockets, the a satellite network that is clearly “dual use.” Then Trump 2.0 and lots of “golden dome” (Star Wars 2.0) talk.

It’s not to go to Mars.

I love space and I hugely admire the engineering achievement, but it’s disappointing to learn for this and many other reasons that the people behind it were not the visionaries they pretended to be. They’re just more territorial apes obsessed with ape tribal stuff like race and nationalism and fighting over dirt at the bottom of a gravity well. Small minds with big toys.

I think I’m convinced that VTOL is a better engineering trade off for space ships rather than making space planes.

It was extremely cool 45+ years ago. But the space race ended, and while government-funded space programs did some fantastic work beyond that (space telescopes and Mars landers), it took capitalism to develop the resuable rocket, then scale it up to Starship proportions.

It also had a large stupid factor. Like one of von Braun's Germans was reported to have said: "they reinvented the wheel -- and made it square."

The problem with space planes is they are terrible planes, terrible rockets, and feed the egos of pilots.

To be fair to NASA and the astronauts, NASA needed humans who behave like military test pilots. In physiology, in reaction time, in crisis management, in following chain of command. And the armed forces were willing to give them access to known quantities.

We didn’t know how control systems would evolve over the next three decades, but the pilots wanted to pilot, and did not trust the control systems. And the irony of it all is that the Space Race was a proxy war for nuclear armament, so control systems needed to be made autonomous anyway.

Better control systems, wider telemetry, and not worrying about incinerating employees let current generation rocketry iterate faster, and do more fucking around and finding out. We found out twice with the shuttle and it killed the program.

It’s curious how much the upper stage now resembles a space shuttle on a ballistic trajectory instead of a glide angle. Very different landing strategies for those two modes of descent…

They surely would have been watching. Unless that wasn't an option :-)

I was seven, and I happen to have had a profoundly different experience than you. There was a massive rocket mania and all the kids I knew wanted to see the landing.

Russ Olsen does a great keynote about the life-changing experience for those of us so affected. I happened to be in the audience for this edition and it was something special to be old enough to remember it much as he remembered it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMZBA7KHnHQ

Cool. And people thought he wrote this himself!

Probably next to nothing compared to what we fish out of the ocean constantly.

idk, i'll take a look after i finish eating my steak dinner

They need another cheaper tower just for catching. Much less mass when landing.

And if the landing footage is any indication, it sure looks like they would have made the catch anyway if they'd gone for it.

At the last moment the exhaust turned green. That's consistent with the fuel running out, the engines running oxygen rich, and subsequently "engine rich". So I would put my money on actually running out vs a measurement error.

I heard somewhere the engine efficiency is still somewhat variable so they burned more fuel than anticipated.

Would be nice if the good news got some room on the front page, no wonder people are so hopeless when the things that would give them hope and optimism are buried under a pile of doom

I am not a cynic, but a realist. It is easy to do things when you put a ton of money towards the effort so I find this nothing special. Maybe when I was a child these things would fascinate me, but they are just engineering.

So, what would amaze me? Ending homelessness in the United States. Because that takes more than money. I would like to swap the "passion" or engineering for the "compassion" of ending suffering. Very easy to shape and change material things, very hard to change the heart.

The people you want to share your excitement might be suffering under the same separation of wealth that made this landing possible. (Yet there is little talk that they failed to catch the booster and it exploded).

It is important to recognize what technology will be used for and demand it won‘t be used for evil.

Is it? I mean, I’m loving this historic event but if someone wants to remember the stupid parts, what’s wrong with that?

What was the issue that delayed Issacman's nomination/confirmation? Why was his nomination withdrawn and then renominated?

We will need nuclear propulsion for a lot of that, but the good news is that it has already been built and demonstrated back in the 70s.

edit: Rate limited so adding link to interview the reply mentions here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujfF_SnxvZQ

yes exactly

“Full flow engines can’t be made!”

“Okay, they can, but the engines are too complex and expensive!”

“Okay, they can be made much simpler and cheaper, but they’re not powerful enough!”

“Okay, they’re powerful enough but the heat shield won’t work!”

“Okay, it works, but catching a rocket is impractical!”

“Okay, catching a rocket is practical, but…” <—- we are here.

> damn, I just don't see what we're trying to achieve when there are so many issues we can't even figure out on earth

Earth issues are mostly coordination problems. Space issues are technological problems. Elon Musk has been very successful at solving technological problems: electric vehicles, space flight, mind-machine interfaces.

It makes sense that people like him who can solve technological problems point their attention and substantial agency to the things that their unique skills place them in a position to solve.

The Elon Musk of coordination does not currently exist. One must imagine that the kind of person or school of people who instituted NATO and the US-Japan MDA and turned our one-time enemies into our staunchest allies were people of such caliber but there’s no one I know today who qualifies for that.

Musk definitely has mastered firm-level coordination but clearly national coordination (let alone international coordination) is a problem beyond even him. His teams nearly religiously point the same way, and they have achieved wonders. It is truly remarkable what these people have done. Good for them, and I’m glad to see them at it!

Perhaps you don't have any clue that earth and it's inhabitants are very, very likely to be the only one, - - or, of the very few planets in our known universe, with such a sequence of events over millions if not billions of years that allow us to be living beings, evolving - - while out in space is a vacuum, intense radiation, no oxygen, no food or water for many hundreds if not thousands of light years distance away. Incredibly few of our species grasps this fact and actually appreciates it ...

If you don’t get it, nothing anyone says is going to convince you otherwise.

The people who “had an interest” in pursuing the unknown built the entire modern world that you exist in, since so many things have some connection back to the space program, including ironically the very device you’re using to express your opinion. So it’s probably worth paying them a little respect.

Well considering we gave SpaceX a contract to get us to the moon and for that to happen it needs to do something ridiculous like 20+ in orbit refueling yeah it's a pretty important thing to criticize.

What's the point of heating sand - we barely have enough food to feed our pre-industrial society.

>They are pretty cool as well.

That remains to be determined. The math with blackbody radiation cooling borderline works. So they may be cool, but whether it is enough ...

But I don't think we will see success before the craziness down here has settled down and they don't face the political headwinds they currently do. And I don't think that they can compete with ground based per unit cost no matter what kind of black magic they do.

The top engineers are already there. The top engineers care more about engineering than politics.

Source: Everyone else in SpaceXs rearview mirror - If the top engineers were elsewhere they would be ahead

If a carsales man can do it, you can too. Go on. Open up your own SpaceY and do better. I'm sure all the top engineers will flock to yours.

The Space Shuttle has four parts, namely the Orbiter, the External Tank, and the two SRBs. Only the Orbiter is reusable and actually lands, the rest are jettisoned in flight. (SRBs are recovered, the ET is not.) However, the Orbiter is completely incapable of flight without the other three, so it's not a rocket stage on its own, just part of one.

As for why it's harder to catch Starship than Super Heavy, where do I begin:

* Super Heavy is suborbital, its maximum velocity is far, far less than Starship.

* Super Heavy returns upright. The Starship does the famous but aerodynamically very complex "belly flop" to reduce speed.

* Super Heavy only has two static fins to guide it. Starship has four actively controlled fins that need to survive the extreme forces of launch and re-entry.

Do you want more cool stuff like James Webb in orbit? Fully reusable huge rockets like Starship is how you get them there.

Also, remember how JWST had to do that incredibly complex and fiddly in-orbit expansion and alignment to fit together the mirror after launch? If Starship had been available at the time, this would have been far easier, since Starship has twice the diameter (four times the area) of the Ariane rocket they used to launch it.

> it doesn't necessarly feels that difficult tbh?

Are you for real?

The course of human life, now much closer to Mars colonization, thanks to reusable launch being so much cheaper than expendable.

If you want the Vulcans to take notice, you gotta get to warp speed. Building the transporter of the parts/pieces of that kind of ship is just the first step.

> It seems like the current valuation is based on people's guesses about the likelihood that space data centers pan out in a big way

The Starship program is one of - if not the - biggest risks here. Making starship work could bring the launch cost down far enough to derisk that whole program, and today just made it a lot less risky

> Why is Space-X undervalued because they can catch a rocketship?

The market values SpaceX over multiple areas of the business and their future plans and it isn't just this event which they have proven to accomplish.

> You do understand that a company needs to have a business case equivilient to its valuation right?

Nope. That is not how this works nor how investors see it. It is about their total addressable market (TAM) which SpaceX can capture over everyone else. So here are some more further questions:

1) Who is paying SpaceX for the compute that they have?

2) How quick is SpaceX building their data centers to support their customers?

3) How many people use Starlink as their primary internet provider?

You understand that almost all of where SpaceX businesses can expand into those areas and grow into that valuation and higher?

> Our whole planet sends 1000-2000t of payload into space, most of it is now starlink.

Your point is?

So who else can catch and reuse a rocketship to frequently deploy satellites into space in a very short period of time? (Don't say Blue Origin.)

Did they catch both of them in this mission?

It was meant to be a dual catch of the booster and the rocketship and only the rocketship itself was caught.

Catching both of them in another mission would top this one.

> Only one company in the world has successfully caught a rocket.

China did that too.

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/10/china/china-reusable-rock...

Starship HLS is estimated to require 22 refueling launches to support 1 moon mission.

> I recommend talking with people who know more about spaceflight.

Yes, because asking on HN if such people would be willing to answer obviously gets you downvotes and comments like this.

But you need more ship to carry that fuel, which is exactly what the tyranny of the rocket equation refers to.

It costs less, but it is not free. The stages need to be designed to come back and that adds weight. Additionally you need some fuel, it is not all air breaking. And every bit of weight is really bad, because of the rocket equation.

Without internal figures no one can say what is ultimately financially better. Especially now that the development is a sunken cost.

I see.

"The booster’s primary objective on Flight 15 will be executing a successful launch, ascent, stage separation, boostback burn, and return to the launch site for catch. This will be the first return and catch attempt for a Super Heavy V3 booster." [1]

[1] https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-15

My understanding is that von Braun was fine with using slave labor to build the wartime rockets. He wasn't just some nerd totally detached from Nazi atrocities.

I don't know what Musk's real politics are, but at the moment at least there is no evidence that he is as bad as von Braun.