I'm completely aware. But this is the third flight in a row with a half payload. If this trend continues, it's not a good sign for Starship block 3's performance capabilities.
That has been the narrative about every single step spacex has ever taken.
And you know what the trend is?
They are kicking fucking ass. Annihilating old space and the writing the game one incremental win at a time.
Yes, the trend is incredibly good.
Now the actual question: why is block 3 flying half loaded? You got a technical reason, or just vibes?
I’m an Engineer, I don’t speculate.
> I’m an Engineer, I don’t speculate.
You also said:
> Yes, the trend is incredibly good.
So you do speculate. Just not when someone asks for a reason.
You’re making stuff up (your entire first post is 100% speculation)
Noone knows other than SpaceX, my guess is they want to reduce risk.
Since this is a test, maybe they want a good workload out of it, but if things go wrong they don't want to lose too many.
It could very well work fully loaded if they tried it, we don't know. Maybe they're waiting for this test to try fully loaded next.
Stay tuned and don't get too disappointed watching other people figure it out!
Starship is literally a boondoggle project by a space company that was the new kid on the block and now has the same hubris as the old kids on the block.
Nothing about the Starship development process is remotely close or has any similarity to Falcon 9.
Starship SpaceX is "old space".
The Falcon 9 philosophy was as follows: Make it work, then push the envelope and learn from the failures.
The Starship philosophy: Let's set ourselves ambitious goals that push the envelope from the start. Partial success is a failure. The cathedral must be finished before we can launch the first customer payload.
Hint: SpaceX doesn't want to cannibalize their cash cow Falcon 9. Typical old company thinking.
They've already stopped booking new Falcon 9 launches for customers.
And it just did[1]. Putting the bandwidth equivalent of 1% of entire internet into orbit - representing nearly $500M annual revenue.
> SpaceX doesn't want to cannibalize their cash cow Falcon 9
That must be why they are no longer taking reservations[2] on the Falcon 9 - not even from the govt. Killing their best product, when competition is years away from matching it, and building the an even better product is indeed old company thinking.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_flight_14
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/analysts-find-looming-...