While the Starship project may be struggling, Falcon 9 is still a massive success, with a successful launch every couple of weeks, making up most of humanity's access to space/LEO right now.
And Starlink is a pretty big deal, particularly in a time of conflict where undersea cables are very vulnerable.
If Elon hadn't shifted so far to the right, these threads would be near-universally praising SpaceX despite Starship's struggles.
Falcon 9 is a serendipitous technical success for a rocket that wasn't designed to land and be reused. It is an operational success. Whether that makes it a financial success is very questionable.
Starship is meant to answer all those questions about design intent and financial viability and then some. It could readily turn out to be an example of second system syndrome.
> If Elon hadn't shifted so far to the right
A symptom of his fickle nature and erratic behavior, as well as general poor impulse control, all of which rightfully make people skittish with their money and question his judgment.
I dont think he was fickle with this one. He was remarkably consistent.
He had period where he though he can become hero for the democrats due to green cars. It did not worked, neither democrats nor left accepted him as unconditional hero.
The racism, the villingness to cause harm to get more power for himself were there whole time. He was far right the whole time, just became more extreme and open when it stopped being disadvantage.
He also loudly proclaimed support for trans rights and called out people on Twitter who didn’t, as well as other progressive issues. It wasn’t just “green cars.” So either he was just being a cynic/lying, which is bad. Or he suddenly became a bigot, which is also bad.
But it’s at the whim of someone who I think nobody can describe as stable or trustworthy. Starlink the technology is great, Starlink the company has a massive weight attached to it.
Interesting definition of "struggling", as in "managed to catch the largest booster rocket ever built with by snatching it mid air, and land the largest space ship in the ocean using a belly flop maneuver that everyone said was crazy and would never work".
The 'struggle' is that they seem to have regressed from that point, and that the scale of Starship is perhaps too big for a 'fail fast, iterate rapidly' approach.
Especially now that every failure results in a massive wave of negative publicity