05 January 2023

Rodney Brooks: “Predictions Scorecard, 2023 January 01”

The first stage is massive, with 37 Raptor engines that are a generation later than the Merlins used on Falcon 9. So far it has not flown, nor has it successfully lit as many as 30 of its engines in a ground test.

Over US Thanksgiving in 2021 the CEO of SpaceX urged his workers to abandon their families and come in to work to boost the production rate of these engines. In his email he said:

What it comes down to is that we face genuine risk of bankruptcy if we cannot achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year.

“Next year” would be 2022. There have been zero test flights of either the second stage or the first stage and it is the end of 2022. The first stage has never flown at all. Not even powered up all its engines. The first stage is much more complex than any previous booster ever built. It is not flying once every two weeks. Does that mean SpaceX is in danger of bankruptcy? Or was the SpaceX CEO using hyperbole to extract work from his employees?


I am concerned that Starship will not be ready for the proposed 2025 Lunar Landing of astronauts and that will really delay humankind’s return to the Moon.

Rodney Brooks

I’ve consumed the article for his expert opinion on ChatGPT – which doesn’t disappoint and pours a good bit of cold water on the recent hype – but ended up discovering a completely unrelated troubling fact: SpaceX’s next generation Starship had zero launches for the entire year! At this point, NASA should be having serious second thoughts about gambling the entire Artemis program on a single, highly erratic partner.

Falcon Heavy firing 27 engines
If the Falcon Heavy can fly with 27 engines—can 37 be that hard?

Musk’s quote about the threat of imminent bankruptcy is ironic as well, considering he’s made similar remarks about Twitter recently, after taking over the company. Seems it’s one of his favorite whips to keep employees under constant fear and stress and push them to work harder on impossible deadlines that he himself discards on a whim when another distraction comes along.

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