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Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

You mean Starship 2, right? Because Starship top capacity demonstrated was 1 banana. That's why Elon already started hyping how awesome Starship 2 is gonna be. Because it becomes obvious for everybody that Starship will perform below even most modest past predictions.

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Your dislike of Musk is clouding your judgement.

They're not using semantic versioning. SpaceX hasn't even finished a production ready starship, they are still very much in the R&D stage. Just because the latest iteration is know as V2, doesn't mean much.

The fact they haven't achieved the extremely ambitious goals doesn't reflect poorly on the engineering going into Starship, or that "V1" has failed to hit the goals.

Why does every subsequent prediction of anticipated Starship capacity gets lower and lower over the years? You could draw a graph and bet if they manage to finalize the product before payload to orbit reaches zero.

Starship 1's LEO capacity has been stated to be 50 tons to LEO. Which is significantly below the goal of 100-150 tons, but absolutely massive compared to anything else. Starship 2 flies next week, so it's moot.

> Starship 1's LEO capacity has been stated to be 50 tons [...] absolutely massive compared to anything else.

I don't really know much about rockets. Do I read here correctly tha Falvon Heavy has 63,800 kg payload to LEO capacity?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy

> Starship 2 flies next week, so it's moot.

So I guess the OP really meant Starship 2.

Falcon Heavy can nominally do 64 tons to LEO, but it's volume constrained. It's really hard to fit more than 15-20 tons worth of useful cargo in the fairing. What the extra thrust is useful for is pushing 15 tons to beyond Earth orbit.

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