He has no credibility at all, like literally 0. Nobody that follows this topics, even if they don't like Musk or SpaceX consider him reputable.
He is literally a professional hater. He just continually moves the goal-posts to always present himself as 'the reasonable skeptic'.
> Currently, around 80% of SpaceX's rockets are dedicated to launching Starlink satellites.
And the other 20% are still more launches then the whole of the Western world would have had before SpaceX.
SpaceX is simply so fucking successful that you have to totally reconsider how you look at the numbers.
> and things like starship don't really have a reason for existing
And if Starship is cheaper, then Falcon 9, and that's literally the whole reason it exists, then making Starlink and other launches cheaper still makes sense. Stopping innovating because of market share is an idiotic thing to do. Its what people argue who don't understand the difference between absolutes and %.
The market for space launch and space economy will be much bigger in 10-30 years. Now we can argue how much bigger, but its defiantly gone be bigger.
And also, Starship literally needs to exists because the government want's to land on the moon. And using Starship and sharing lots of technology with a launch vehicle that is needed for Starlink anyway just makes a whole lot of sense.
> Also, in spite of massive improvements in technology since the 1960s, they're vastly underperforming the track record of the Apollo program.
What an absurd criticism is this? In the 1960 they basically had no regulation, 100% political support and literally unlimited money.
SpaceX had barley any money at all until like 2020 for this project and even then they could only invest a fraction of that into Starship.
If you compare Apollo, the NASA budget was around 20-40 billion $ per year compare to SpaceX who only crossed the 1 billion $ per year in like 2022.
So this is exactly what I mean when I say ThunderF00t has 0 credibiltiy. Nobody should talk arguments like this seriously. Its just arguments from bad faith. I suspect he knows that he is fully of shit, but he has makes a lot of money from continually telling everybody what they want to hear.
> My view is that Tesla, SpaceX, etc. are just cults of personality. Sure, they've produced a non-zero amount of technological progress, but for the most part they're leading us to dead ends.
ThunderF00t is closer to a cult of personality. He has achieved absolutely nothing, he can't even edit videos as well as most 13 year old on tictac. He is a man in his 40 and his humor is even more childish then that of Elon Musk.
And your claim is simply bananas. Calling landing rockets and Starlink 'non-zero' is the understatement of the century. Starship has literally revolutionized space internet and global connectivity, and literally everybody, including all their competitors and every government in the world understands and reconizes that.
And literally some of the largest cooperations on earth, plus major nations are trying to replicate it. Amazon is investing 10+ billion $. Europe, China, Russia all will try to replicate even part of it, but they all know they can't match it.
Lower LEO internet will basically not go away for the rest of human history, unless civilization crashes or somebody comes up with something even better, but we have no idea what that would even be. But somehow you call it a 'dead end'. What are you even talking about.
I mean seriously, please break out of your bubble and look at the world with objective eyes.
