惯性聚合 高效追踪和阅读你感兴趣的博客、新闻、科技资讯
阅读原文 在惯性聚合中打开

推荐订阅源

V
Visual Studio Blog
量子位
大猫的无限游戏
大猫的无限游戏
Hugging Face - Blog
Hugging Face - Blog
S
SegmentFault 最新的问题
Blog — PlanetScale
Blog — PlanetScale
月光博客
月光博客
Google DeepMind News
Google DeepMind News
小众软件
小众软件
WordPress大学
WordPress大学
宝玉的分享
宝玉的分享
MongoDB | Blog
MongoDB | Blog
B
Blog RSS Feed
博客园 - Franky
奇客Solidot–传递最新科技情报
奇客Solidot–传递最新科技情报
B
Blog
博客园 - 聂微东
The GitHub Blog
The GitHub Blog
Recent Announcements
Recent Announcements
Y
Y Combinator Blog
Microsoft Security Blog
Microsoft Security Blog
雷峰网
雷峰网
Jina AI
Jina AI
酷 壳 – CoolShell
酷 壳 – CoolShell

Futurism

Ordinary People Fear AI, While the Tech Leaders Working to Create a Permanent Underclass Say They’re Extremely Psyched About It Scientists and Lawmakers Horrified at Trump’s Brutal Budget for NASA Grimly Cyberpunk Video Shows Ukrainian Soldiers Leaning Out of Propeller Plane to Obliterate Drones With Rifles AI-Powered High School Scrapped After Protests Erupt Against It Eric Trump’s Crypto Company Is Falling Into Total Disaster Elon Musk Just Got Badly Humiliated in Court If You Bet on Polymarket, This New Study May Cause You Physical Pain If OpenAI Loses This Trial, It Could Effectively Be Eliminated in Its Current Form D4vd Bought Chainsaws and Body Bag on Amazon After Murder, Prosecutors Say, in the Most Grisly Case of Internet Brain Rot We’ve Ever Heard How to Get Rid of Reddit’s Giant App-Shilling Popup That Breaks Its Entire Mobile Site Mark Zuckerberg Just Got Shot Down by China, Again Reddit Intentionally Breaks Its Mobile Website, Demanding Users Download Its App Instead AI Spy Cameras Suddenly Blanketing America Man Trapped in Dystopian Nightmare Thanks to AI Surveillance Cameras Flagging His Every Move Sam Altman Caught in What May Be His Most Spectacular Lie Yet Woman Convicted for Attacking Police With Swarm of Furious Bees If You Thought Mark Zuckerberg Was a Pathetic Little Worm Before, Wait Until You Hear About His Latest Move A Tiny Town Is Building So Many Data Centers That There’ll Be Almost Nothing Else Left The War in Iran Is Causing China to Sell So Many Solar Panels That Your Jaw Will Drop Bitcoin Developers Are Debating a Move That Could Send Crypto Markets Into a Tailspin Waymo Has a Bike Lane Problem Tinder Scanning Users’ Eyeballs to Prove They Aren’t Creeps Two Delivery Bots Blunder Into the Middle of a Police Incident, Have Awkward Standoff Ransomware Negotiator Pleads Guilty to Deploying Ransomware Himself NASA Planning to Set First-Ever Fire on the Surface of the Moon Your Former Employer Is Selling Your Slacks and Emails to Train AI Tesla Quietly Buys Mysterious $2 Billion Entity The Number of Drones Being Deployed to Surveil Anti-Trump Protestors Is Staggering The US Military Just Arrested One of Its Soldiers for Making Ghoulish Polymarket Bets, and It Shows How Deep the Moral Rot of Prediction Markets Really Goes Elon Musk Fans Increasingly Disgusted by His Toxic Outbursts
If Starship Explodes Again, It Could Derail SpaceX’s Enti...
Frank Landymore · 2026-05-19 · via Futurism

Illustration shows Elon Musk wearing a black cap, resting his chin on his clasped hands. The image has an orange overlay and a blue circular grid pattern in the background.

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Win McNamee / Getty Images

Sign up to see the future, today

Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech

SpaceX has enjoyed a lot of leeway when its Starship rocket has failed or exploded because of the sheer ambition of its vision — and because CEO Elon Musk has framed “breaking things” as an opportunity to quickly make progress, an approach that’s worked well for the space company in the past.

But at some point the world’s largest rocket needs to deliver, and that point is fast approaching, a new Bloomberg piece argues. SpaceX is seeking a $1.75 trillion IPO, the largest in history, and investors around the world will be watching like a hawk to see how its flagship product performs when it embarks on its twelfth test flight this week.

The pressure would always be on with an IPO of such proportions, but Musk has more or less staked SpaceX’s entire future on Starship’s success. After folding his AI company xAI into SpaceX, he revealed a new vision for deploying one million orbital AI data centers, which he considers a stepping stone towards building a “sentient sun.” SpaceX has also “shifted focus” — in Musk’s words — to establishing a “self-building city” on the Moon. To carry all those satellites into orbit and build infrastructure on the Moon, he needs a huge rocket like Starship that can haul at least 100 metric tons of cargo at a time. A version of Starship is also supposed to serve as the lander that will bring astronauts down to the lunar surface for the first time in over half a century on NASA’s Artemis 4 mission, currently slated for early 2028.

So far, though, Starship prototypes have only launched with a 35-ton payload, which is barely more than its Falcon 9 rocket, Bloomberg noted. And that’s much lower than the 95 metric tons hefted by NASA’s Space Launch System, the rocket that recently put four Artemis 2 astronauts on a journey around the Moon.

And for launches at anything approaching Musk’s promised scale to be cost effective, Starship needs to be fully reusable. No rocket in history has ever been fully reused, but Musk said last August that he was “cautiously optimistic” that Starship “will achieve full reusability” this year.

Putting a dent in Starship’s economic feasibility in the long run, even if the rocket is completed, is its need to refuel in space. To get Starship to the Moon, it could require over a dozen refueling flights, the costs of which add up significantly. If it’s much higher, “it may ultimately not be a very good architecture for going to the Moon relative to another company’s architecture that perhaps may have less launches,” Alex MacDonald, senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former chief economist for NASA, told Bloomberg.

That’s why it’s all the more important that Starship puts on a good show on Wednesday, when it’s slated to launch. Like previous tests, it will involve sending its upper stage into a suborbital trajectory where it will deploy twenty dummy satellites before making a splashdown in the Indian Ocean, while a heavily-revamped Super Heavy booster will land in the Gulf of Mexico. Whatever happens, it’ll leave a fresh impression in investors’ minds. According to Reuters, SpaceX is aiming to release a prospectus officially outlining the IPO on Wednesday — the same day of the Starship launch.

More on SpaceX: Explosion Reported on Site as SpaceX Prepares Starship for Another Launch