As much as I do love the ‘SpaceX is just burning money for no reason, Elon Musk is personally designing these rockets badly, the whole company is a joke, Elon’s going to blow up on his way to Mars’ banter, I think it’s important to reckon with the actual reality of SpaceX as a military contractor.
Their ‘Starship’ is not, and never was designed to fly to Mars - that’s a marketing scheme, and it makes no sense if you actually look at the vehicle. SpaceX is able to throw money at this project because they’ve got a military contract to produce it as a military cargo drone. Their ‘Starship’ is designed to deliver a C-130′s load of US military cargo to anywhere in the world within an hour.
SpaceX, from before its first ever launch, has been partnered with the US military - as noted in the incident where the company stranded its workers without food on an island owned by the US Army. SpaceX’s constant failures with their rocket come from a simple calculation - cost versus time. To slowly and methodically design a rocket such that, by your first test flight, you’re confident in it, is just that: slow. Blowing up rocket after rocket and iterating is fast, but expensive - but when you have military contractor money, it’s worth it.
This is far from SpaceX’s only time contracting for the military, having launched military payloads with their Falcon rockets, and even designed satellites for the military. There’s a reason only USAmerican citizens are allowed to work at SpaceX.
The image of SpaceX as an eccentric billionaire’s quest to colonise Mars serves as a marketing ploy which distracts from the company’s real existence as part of the US military industrial complex, beholden not to the Reddit-fueled whims of an egocentric moron, but to the massive economic and structural forces of modern capitalism.
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