> Starship has as much chance of working to spec as the Theranos machine. Don't get me wrong, I'm skeptical about SpaceX's business model (I really must make m

> Starship has as much chance of working to spec as the Theranos machine. Don't get me wrong, I'm skeptical about SpaceX's business model (I really must make more time to work on that blog post about orbital compute…), but no, that's just plain wrong. And I agree with you there's a real risk about going past LEO: between the booster still not landing reliably, and the team being still so lacking in confidence that after all this time the orbits still have not been circularised, there's a decent risk LEO is all it is good for. But even in expendable mode, where it's not going to be any good at all for the Moon or Mars, this is still a cheap LEO solution. And so far, Starship has actually been to space and back. It's taken so many test flights and cost so much during development (so far) that I think it compares mediocrely to the Soviet N1, and the US Saturn V and Space Shuttle, but that's a huge improvement over Theranos. Now, it may fail for unrelated reasons (spoiler from blog draft: data centres should not be in space), but the going-to-space part of SpaceX seems reasonably sound.