Hate Elon Musk as much as you want, but SpaceX denial still isn’t a good look
Last week’s catastrophic explosion of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket didn’t just incinerate that heavy-lift launch system and much of its support infrastructure at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Launch Complex 36; it also sparked a new round of Space Billionaire Schadenfreude.
Which is understandable. Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos may not have groveled for President Trump’s favor as obsequiously as such fellow tech CEOs as Apple’s Tim Cook or Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, but he seems more than content to be seen in Trump’s corner. And around my city, Bezos has richly earned D.C.’s contempt for his incompetent lackeys’ wanton dismantling of the Washington Post.
But Bezos is nowhere near the worst space billionaire. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to convince voters to return the worst president to office, oversaw the DOGE ransacking of large parts of the federal government, and continues to exploit his overlordship of X to broadcast racist, misogynistic, transphobic, antisemitic and Islamophobic garbage while amplifying some of the stupidest people on the Internet.
Musk’s accumulation and abuse of economic and political power far exceeds Bezos’s and strikes me as much more dangerous. So my first reaction to Blue’s bad day, after sympathy for engineers who saw years of work go up in a fiery mushroom cloud, was that it represents an unfortunate setback to competition for Musk’s space company on multiple levels, from inflight WiFi to landing astronauts on the Moon. I wrote as much at PCMag and, in compressed form, on Bluesky.
I should have known the reaction that post would get: people bashing not only Blue Origin but also SpaceX and the entire concept of NASA inking commercial contracts to send astronauts to space. Each mishap of SpaceX’s Starship rocket–I have written up every launch of that heavy-lift vehicle in my unofficial role as a PCMag space scribe–reliably generates comments along those lines, suggesting that not only is Starship a doomed design but that SpaceX is a failing exercise in crony capitalism.
That sentiment seems to be widely felt. And it’s nonsense.
Fact: SpaceX’s partly reusable Falcon 9–the core of its launch business, the vehicle on which customers from NASA to would-be rivals to SpaceX’s Starlink keep buying rides–is one of the most reliable rockets ever made.
Per the count at Wikipedia, out of 644 Falcon 9 launches through Thursday, only three have failed to deliver a payload to the right orbit; just one has ended with the loss of a rocket and payload. Only United Launch Alliance’s soon-to-be-retired Atlas V can beat that among launch vehicles with more than 100 liftoffs. The Space Shuttle, as much as I loved seeing it fly, was nowhere near that safe.
SpaceX also deserves credit for terminating a Russian monopoly on crew transport to and from the International Space Station with the Falcon 9-launched Crew Dragon capsule. NASA privatizing that role, years after SpaceX successfully took on delivering supplies to the ISS with the cargo version of Dragon pictured above, stands as an extraordinary accomplishment for the agency.
And yet the Obama administration struggled to sell that notion to Congress 14 years ago; many legislators, leery of a startup proposing to fly even cargo to the ISS, wanted NASA to give all that business to Boeing. Instead, that aerospace giant won one of two commercial-crew awards, and now Boeing’s Starliner capsule has yet be certified for crewed missions six years after Crew Dragon’s debut with astronauts strapped in.
To opine as if this history didn’t happen in public view–or to suggest that NASA could have procured itself an ISS crew system using the traditional contracting processes that yielded the Space Launch System’s years of delay and billions of dollars in cost overruns–is to exhibit a MAGA level of denial.
That doesn’t mean I have the same confidence in SpaceX developing a version of Starship’s upper stage as a Human Landing System for NASA’s Artemis missions to the Moon. More than three years after Starship’s failed debut–followed by 11 more launches that have yet to reach orbit–Starship looks a little star-crossed. I imagine that people at NASA now wonder where we might be if SpaceX had proposed a simpler, smaller lander that could fly on the Falcon 9-derived Falcon Heavy system that NASA already trusts for some of its most important robotic planetary missions.
And yet with New Glenn grounded until at least the end of this year, probably longer, NASA now needs the complex Starship HLS concept to work more than ever. If you would rather not have the next words spoken from the lunar surface be in Mandarin, this should not be a confidence-inducing scenario.
But asking nuanced questions–about whether SpaceX is aiming too high with Starship, if Musk has lost his focus from spending too much time engaging with sycophantic superfans on X, or if recent minor issues with Falcon 9 launches suggest SpaceX is nearing its speed limit for aggressive iteration–clearly can’t be as exciting as posting hot takes on social media.
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Rob Pegoraro
Astro Hawk (Ian Kluft) ✅🚀🛰️
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