NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission

That is assuming Starship succeeds. Elon's track record hasn't exactly been stellar as of late.

> Elon's track record hasn't exactly been stellar as of late

SpaceX's, on the other hand, has been.

stellar :)

Except it kinda was stellar? When the test pad blew up I was absolutely sure we won't be seeing a V3 this year, but they recovered amazingly, with the last V2 test checking pretty much every goal they set for it.

Wasn't Elon kind of treated like a child to be distracted and kept at arms length at Spacex? He is apparently really really good at fundraising, marketing and publicity (well he used to be anyways). But the stories that have come out of Tesla, and Paypal and SpaceX seem to me like the people actually running the show have tried to distract him as much as possible, and any of his actual decisions have been awful. I recall a story from PayPal's early days where he wanted to swap the servers to windows, and then he got canned as the CEO.

But only if you are looking at the revised goals, if you look back at the original goals, things look different. It was supposed to fly around the moon with people on board two years ago.

Funny thing is, even Starship's failure (to make a reusable upper stage) would be hailed as a spectacular success by any other company (since now that any other company would have at least a cheap, partially reusable superheavy launcher of unprecedented capability).

Falcon 9 is a massive success. Raptor is currently the best engine for a first stage (unless there is something I am not aware of), and at least a very good one for an upper stage. The Starship itself is almost operational, being able to deliver dummy payloads into orbit, though it does require some reliability improvement.

SpaceX may not be stellar, but it is definitely out of this world ;)

Elon Musk is just a guy, a key figure for SpaceX, but there are 10000+ other people, including Gwynne Shotwell who most people say is really in charge. In fact, I am not sure if Elon Musk does any actual work at SpaceX and Tesla now.

When something goes wrong a one of Elon Musk's companies, it's clearly his fault. When something goes right, it's because he isn't actually running the company. Schrodinger's CEO!

But let's pretend for a minute that you're right and all Elon Musk does is hire great people that then do all the work building the company for him and keep him at arms length doing nothing. The skill to hire like that alone still puts him in the top 0.01% of CEOs.

Musk got SpaceX to build a reusable rocket booster. It launches spacecraft and then flies back to Earth in a controlled manner, landing safely without blowing itself up as well as everything else around it.

That alone overshadows everything NASA has done since the moon landing.

The point of the OP is that SpaceX is not performing; we don't need to infer or speculate.

If believing these things makes you feel better, great.

The one about PayPal and a switch to Windows isn't all wrong.

Comment was "of late".

If you want to look long term, well, they're still stellar :) Considering everything they're achieving, and how they're so much better than everybody else in the field.

It's a failure only if you look at a rather small time range and criteria. Which I don't think was a surprise for anybody - Elon is famous for going for moon shots and failing, but still delivering better than anybody else.

Yep, he was wrong about that one. He was also 20 something, I think.