I'm Engine Rich, and I'm exhausted.
Joined August 2017
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Within the past year, we've gone from
"there might be data centers in space"
to
"there will be data centers in space"
to
"basically everything we send to space will be a data center".
Engine Rich retweeted
So your contention is that SpaceX is such an incredible company that they can build the first spacecraft in 50 years to land people on the moon, just as a casual side quest.
They're so skilled, so overflowing with talent and resources, that you (as a hater) predict they will accomplish one of the greatest engineering achievements imaginable, as a low priority vestigial side project. Incredible.
🤦♂️ There is no hope. How are we supposed to have a substantive discussion about this topic when people say things like this?
You know what I think should be nationalized? The US post office. And the CDC. Probably the Navy too. While we're at it, can we nationalize the supreme court?
Oh wait, all of those things are already completely owned and operated by the government.
Feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
No! You are making a fundamental mistake that I've seen you make before on this topic.
You are using the past demand to assume that future supply is sufficient.
What you seem to fail to understand is that if we only meet the demands of the past (the 39 launches you mention) then we are woefully stagnant as an industry. Meeting-but-not-drastically-exceeding the demands of the past decades of space flight would be a MASSIVE FAILURE in the 2030s.
I honestly think this is a fundamental point in this discussion, and it is why I am emphatic about the launch crunch where your position is more like "yeah it'll get a little crunchy but it'll be fine in a few years".
The reason you think that is because you're using past demand as the bar. That bar is so pathetically low compared to what will be needed in the 2030s.
You shouldn't be asking "can our non-spacex rockets meet the prior demand of 39 launches?" You should be asking can they support 10x that demand at a minimum, because that's what is happening to demand in this industry.
Some people legitimately think that Starship will launch thousands of times from Earth, *and* will land people on the moon, *but* for some reason will not launch people from Earth.
We don't need SpaceX to further assure us it will launch people on Starship from Earth. It is very obviously in their plans.
No company is a charity, but given that NASA took a chance on SpaceX and saved them, it would be a nice gesture for one of the most valuable companies in the world to continue being a great partner to NASA.
Give a guarantee of human launch on Starship, and a timeline for standard Starship payload bay. These things would do a lot to ease people’s minds right now, and honestly it’s beneficial to SpaceX anyways. Just move it up a couple years earlier than you’d like and give it some lip service. Boo hoo
Engine Rich retweeted
Good questions! @grok what presidential administration was in power when the Starshield contracts and terms were established and implemented?
Engine Rich retweeted
The combination of Ukraine politics, Elon politics, and SPCX being a public stock has resulted in massive volumes of the dumbest space takes you'll ever see.
Notice that they don't want to use the word "Starshield" because then they would have to explain the difference, which would cut at the central narrative of this accusation.
So instead they refer to something they're calling "a military-grade version of Starlink" which adds confusion rather than clarity, intentionally.
Unreal. Chief Correspondent for Ukraine from The Economist. Doesn't understand the difference between Starlink and Starshield, and apparently doesn't think it's worth reporting about.
He's supposed to be helping people understand this situation, and yet he brushes off the idea of even distinguishing between Starlink and Starshield as "academic"? This is bizarre!
SpaceX spent roughly $20-$30B total to build Starlink.
The DoD yearly budget is about $960B in 2026. *Yearly*
Instead of saying the US should take away Starlink, why not just build your own?
Launch Crunch Wrap Supreme™️
scoop: SpaceX declined to offer Falcon for three future Space Force missions, and no other company offered to fly them either — an early sign of the launch crunch politico.com/news/2026/10/22…
What's your intelligence/W/$/s?
Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas in new @SpaceX note:
“Getting other people to pay for your own compute infrastructure that you will ultimately use to train your own robots is a good idea. We see the neocloud build as more of a 'funding strategy' where SpaceX can exploit its comparative advantages in maximizing intelligence-per-watt-per-$-per-second relative to peers.
We agree with Elon that the Physical Intelligence Economy (PIE) is economically multiplicative - if not by an order of mag. We believe $SPCX’s ability to help improve the rather challenging PR image of the AI/SI
trade is quite under-appreciated today.
SpaceX is undergoing a metamorphosis largely undetected by a stock market that still views the company as a neocloud with exo-atsmospheric chops, and not a vertically-integrated, full-stack AI player.”
