Like its not even that these Flight 8 stories didn't make the front page, they just aren't visible at all dozens of pages in on the non-new view despite having more visible 'points' than a lot of posts that are visible out there.
But it's insane that Starship experimental launches were once more popular than how Apple M3 is right now as recent as few months ago, and now it's less popular than Nissan R35 GT-R being discontinued or even "Automatically tagging politician when they use their phone on the livestreams" article. Even if it had been actually manipulated, there should be a lot more comments here through search and inflows from other social media, if there _were_ public interest for it.
It's the biggest flying object on Earth, in a while and for a while. And it's getting just 30 or so comments. It's insane.
(Re the antics see for example a Tesla story - 537 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43170090 and personally I'm not keen on his Ukraine stuff eg https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/2/21/musk-vows-to-fix...)
I love space and used to love what SpaceX is doing but Musk made it a lot less appealing. Will still read about it but watching a live stream for hours? Forget about it.
I also like EVs and I have been close to getting a Tesla for a number of times but didn't yet, and at this rate, probably won't get one at all.
In my view, Musk turned quickly from a goofy geeky optimist to down-right repugnant. Not interested in any of his business.
Not that landing rockets is easy, but proving it could be done was the hardest part.
Of course, SS/SH is supposed to change the equation completely, but as it stands...
A lot of Musk's "power" is simply the fact that Trump listens to him. Trump may at some point decide to stop listening. And even if he doesn't, in four more years Trump won't be President any more (ignoring any possible attempt at a third term, which frankly I think is very unlikely). Even assuming a Republican wins again in 2028 (far from guaranteed), will that Republican (whoever they may be) listen to Musk anywhere near as much as Trump does? Power is fleeting.
Take away Trump, and what power does Musk have? Okay, he's a centibillionaire and CEO of a couple of major companies... how is that hugely different from what Zuckerberg or Bezos have? And he owns a social media network... Zuckerberg does too – and Zuckerberg's network has 10 times the user base, 60 times the revenue...
SpaceX gives Musk a lot of influence over the US space program - but that isn't readily transferrable to other domains. The kind of power he recently seems to have been wielding over unrelated parts of the US government has nothing to do with SpaceX, it is all about his personal friendship with the President and his donations to the President – which in principle any other centibillionaire could have done – it is just they weren't trying, or not as hard, or maybe they were but didn't have the same luck
Winners write history. Elon Musk and SpaceX have been on a losing streak for quite a while. Starship Flight 8 is basically Starship Flight 3 (loss of roll control), but with a booster catch.
I'm personally perplexed by the insistence on re-entry for the 5th flight in a row. This is very much unlike the Falcon 9 development strategy. If SpaceX had insisted on landing Falcon 9 before sending a payload, then there would be no SpaceX today.
This one felt tantalizingly close. I’ll be interested to read what happened. The short text at SpaceX just says they had an “energetic event” — it seems like that can only mean oxygen was accumulating somewhere it shouldn’t have been? They are certainly in the “dealing with fuel leaks” phase of development if nothing else.
On dev strategy - I have no idea why they are doing it this way but I think if you can afford them end to end tests are pretty great. You’re going to have to do them at some point, and if you are confident enough on most of the intermediate steps, why not? Either way this is the greatest commercial space company of all time, I’m 100% sure they’ve talked through how they want to test ship extensively.
Shot down I mean a laser