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Elon's (Other) Colossal Con [1]
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Date: 2025-04-08
And that’s what a rocket trying to reach low Earth Orbit (C) does. It carries enough fuel to eventually achieve a sufficient velocity all the while the weight of the rocket, its cargo, and fuel yet to be burned are holding it back. It gets a little more complicated than that, with stages and how gravity changes as you go up higher. But that is pretty much it.
Now SpaceX has some real accomplishments. They made tremendous strides in partial reusability and affordability, the former reinforcing the latter here. The Falcon 9 Block 5 is the most prolific launch system in the World, can be partially reusable, and can place 18,500 kg in low earth orbit at a cost of about $70 million. United Launch Alliance has the Atlas V 551, which is not reusable, and can place a similar payload in Low Earth Orbit for a cost of $153 million per launch.
but there’s an m.o. here
Then again, you can’t really trust anything Elon Musk says, especially when it comes to cost.
Via SpaceX’s hand-in-hand of low costs and Internet hype, the US Government is now almost entirely dependent on SpaceX. And as Oliver Willis pointed out yesterday, the US Government just paid Elon billions more.
I strongly suspect those low launch costs are, at least in part, subsidized by investor hype, just as Tesla’s (even still) outrageous stock price is buoyed by Elon’s promise of full self-driving, another technology that may not ever materialize. Tesla, which sold 1.8M cars last year, is worth more than the next nine largest automakers combined, who sold a total of 44M cars. But SpaceX is a private company, and so we can’t know for sure…
Or can we? SpaceX (with the promise of Mars) exhibits the same pattern as Tesla (a promise of full self driving), and hyperloop (promise of hyper fast travel). And with SpaceX and hyperloop, there’s an ideological bent: killing off government investment in infrastructure. Elon has been clear about killing NASA’s upcoming mission to the moon and deorbiting International Space Station. It’s all just a little too coincidental.
Why does SpaceX promise Mars? Well, to be the real world equivalent of a meme stock. While the investing world seems woefully bereft of people with technological common sense, even investors know that the Falcon 9 Block 5 isn’t getting anything but a robotic probe to Mars. 18,500kg isn’t enough of a payload capacity. So Elon hypes starship, as if the name could be self-fulfilling.
the seeds of destruction
In the image of orbital mechanics, above, achieving (E) is much, much harder than (C). Even in low Earth orbit, despite gaining tremendous velocity, you still have overcome only a fraction of Earth’s gravity. If not for the illusion of zero gravity due to motion, in low earth orbit, you would weigh about 90% of what you do on the surface of the Earth. In other words, you still have a lot of gravity to overcome if you want to get to Mars.
Oh, and if you want your spaceship to be reusable, you need to devote weight to the fuel that will slow the craft down and make for cool videos. You spacecraft has to be reinforced to survive reentry, which is a brutal process, and that costs a lot of weight too. And that’s why Starship keeps exploding. Will Lockett has an amazing article explaining why.
Musk’s impotent attempts to get his giant shiny phallus to work are the perfect metaphor for the man. Indeed, Starship seemed promising at first if you didn’t ask too many questions. But, after back-to-back failures and having never come close to completing its design brief (including actually landing Starship and making the spacecraft fully reusable), as well as a litany of painful design flaws, such as only being able to take 50% of its promised payload capacity to orbit, many are starting to question the viability of this idiotic machine ... And so they should. Indeed, with the most recent launch failure as context, it becomes evident that Starship was doomed from the get-go and that SpaceX might never be able to rectify this mess.
But what about all those super awesome videos showing the Super Heavy booster landing? Doesn’t that mean SpaceX is most of the way there? No. That image is more like being 1/15th of the way there. At best.
Landing the Super Heavy Booster is a far, far easier task than landing the Starship from orbit. The Super Heavy Booster weighs 160 tonnes dry, doesn’t make it to space, and its peak speed is only roughly 4,600 mph. Meanwhile, Starship has a dry mass of around 150 tonnes, makes it to space, and reaches an orbital speed of at least 17,500 mph. This means that during landing, Starship has over 13.57 times the kinetic energy of the Booster! And that doesn’t account for the fact that Starship carries significantly more propellant during landing than the Booster. All that energy has to go somewhere, and managing that is one hell of an engineering challenge. On top of that, Starship’s landing is also far more complex, as it has to reenter the atmosphere at those speeds. Not only does this process present significant aerodynamic challenges, but it also exposes Starship to enough heat energy to literally melt every gram of steel it is made from.
The problem isn’t the reusable booster, which is a technological achievement. The problem is that Elon Musk, in his hubris, tried to reinvent the Space Shuttle.
Does this concept ca. 1969 look familiar?
Now, the space Shuttle had several fatal design flaws, and certainly was a design that could have been improved upon. It also could not achieve full reusability as originally envisioned (only the solid rocket boosters and the orbiter were reusable, and with great effort). But the best engineers in the world made it work, and the space shuttle could deliver 27,500 kg to low earth orbit.
SpaceX is using a less powerful (but safer) fuel. But SpaceX is promising that Starship will deliver 50, 100, 150, or even 200 tons to low earth orbit. And be fully reusable. That’s 3.8 to 15 times the payload using less powerful fuel. The Elon fanboys will tell you that materials have improved, but the SpaceX starship and space shuttle orbiter weigh almost the same! Maybe it runs on Elon’s genius?
And that’s what’s causing starship to suffer these rapid unscheduled disassemblies.
Both [recent] tests failed when an uncontrollable fire broke out in the aft section, [due to a] weak fuel line issue... But why has SpaceX failed to solve this problem? Well, it’s because of the bane of any rocket scientist: physics... ...[the recent] tests confirmed that SpaceX’s engines couldn’t produce the mythical levels of thrust Musk promised, and as such, the projected payload to LEO was cut in half. These faults would render Starship utterly useless. Musk needed a solution… ...SpaceX is [now] having to make the rockets too light, resulting in them being fragile, meaning that just the vibrations from operation with a fraction of its expected payload would be enough to destroy the rocket…
In other words, Elon has already squeezed too much weight out of Starship, so that simply launching it is enough to result in its destruction.
.. making a fully reusable rocket with even a barely usable payload to space is impossible. Musk knows this: Falcon 9 was initially meant to be fully reusable until he discovered that the useful payload would be zero. That was his iterative design telling him Starship was impossible over a decade ago, as just making the rocket larger won’t solve this! But he went on ahead anyway. Why? Well, through some transparent corruption and cronyism, he could secure multi-billion-dollar contracts from NASA to build this mythical rocket. But, by going for full-scale testing, he could not only hide the inherent flaws of Starship long enough for the cash to be handed over to him but also put NASA in a position of the sunk cost fallacy. NASA has given SpaceX so much money, and their plans rely so heavily on Starship that they can’t walk away; .... This is why Starship, in my opinion, is just one massive con. That is the real reason why Starship was doomed to fail from the beginning. It’s not trying to revolutionise the space industry; .... Instead, the entire project is optimised to fleece as much money from the US taxpayer as possible, and as such, that is all it will ever do.
real world implications
There was no way NASA would be brave enough, a decade ago or today, to call out what many of us suspected: that the math for Starship just doesn’t add up. The whole Starship concept is a farce.
So Elon has been busy using his platforms and power to bully and hype, and NASA went with SpaceX to provide a modified Starship as a lunar lander for the Artemis III mission. How could they not? Look how cool it is!
Thankfully this Starship lunar lander variant doesn’t need to return to Earth, and can thus be much lighter. But I’m not confident even this lighter version could successfully make it to orbit. Artemis II is launching in 2026, and Artemis III is rapidly coming up. NASA is already delaying Artemis III over concerns with lack of any real progress with the lunar Starship, and those concerns aren’t nearly enough.
So Elon hoodwinked the US Government with cool videos and legions of tech fans, and is now hamstringing the US Space program, because, sooner or later, he would have to reveal that he isn’t a genius, just some rich guy who conned the space exploration community. Or he could get Trump elected and call for the cancellation of the entire program and gesticulate wildly in the direction of Mars. After all, if we cancel everything and talk about Mars (which will never happen), Elon never has to reveal his shortcomings. The con goes on. I always said that just as Donald Trump is the con man for people who watch reality television, Elon Musk is the con man for people who shopped at the Sharper Image.
Not to end on such a dour note, but there are solutions. The Artemis program also has a litany of issues that shouldn’t be overlooked. But that is the only US existing heavy lift launch system that can take humans to the Moon. New leadership who can clearly call out Musk’s mendacity and stupidity would help. A new Congress or Administration could inspect and audit SpaceX, revealing the impossibility of Starship and Mars thereby ending the con. Heck, why not even nationalize SpaceX. After all, it was NASA who gave them their start.
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