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So, SpaceX lobbed another one of its giant metal silos into the sky. The eleventh "test flight" of Starship. The headlines, predictably, are breathless. The one I saw just said it "successfully" made it "halfway around the world."
And I have to ask: What in the hell does that even mean?
This isn't a question of engineering, it's a question of language. It's the kind of carefully constructed PR phrase designed to sound like a home run when, for all we know, the batter tripped over his own feet rounding first base. "Successfully" doing what? Not exploding on the launchpad? Great. That’s the bare minimum, like a chef "successfully" not burning the water.
Making it "halfway around the world" is a geographic statement, not a mission objective. My pizza can make it halfway across town, but if it shows up cold, upside down, and stuck to the top of the box, the delivery wasn't a success. We're watching a multi-billion-dollar game where the players get to define what a "point" is after the play is already over. And the media, bless their hearts, just prints the score.
The Shell Game of 'Progress'
Let's be brutally honest. This whole Starship saga is starting to feel less like a groundbreaking engineering project and more like the world's most expensive fireworks display, funded by a bizarre combination of government contracts and fanboy enthusiasm. Each launch is an episode in a long-running reality show. Will it blow up this time? How spectacularly will it blow up? Tune in next time to see another shiny tube either ascend majestically or turn into a glorious fireball!
This is a bad look. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a masterclass in narrative manipulation. They launch a rocket, it flies for a while, and then... what? The press releases are suspiciously silent on the messy parts. The landing, the recovery, the actual condition of the vehicle. We get the triumphant shot of the liftoff, like in the Video SpaceX launches 11th test flight of Starship mega rocket, the cameras cut, and we're told to applaud the "progress."
It's like a magician who asks you to focus on his dazzling right hand while his left hand drops your wallet into his pocket. The spectacle of the launch is the distraction. The real trick is getting everyone to accept "didn't catastrophically fail" as the new definition of success.
What’s the actual goal here? Is it to build a reusable rocket, or is it to generate enough hype to keep the funding spigot wide open? Because from where I'm sitting, they're doing a much better job of the latter. They've created a system where even the failures are spun as "valuable data." Offcourse they are. My failed attempt at baking a cake last week also provided "valuable data"—namely, that I shouldn't bake. But I didn't get a NASA contract out of it.
This whole thing reminds me of the dot-com bubble. I remember all those geeks in turtlenecks promising to "revolutionize the pet food industry with the power of the internet." They had no product, no profit, just a slick PowerPoint and a story about the future. And for a while, that was enough. The money poured in. SpaceX is selling a story, too. It’s a much cooler story, I'll grant you—Mars, humanity's future, all that jazz—but it's still a narrative sold in installments. And each "test flight" is another chapter we're expected to buy without question.
Then again, who am I to talk? I'm just a guy hammering away at a keyboard in a dimly lit room. They're actually, you know, launching skyscraper-sized rockets. Maybe I’m the cynic who’s missing the forest for the exploding trees. Maybe this messy, iterative, explosive process is the only way to do something this big. It just ain't pretty, and they sure don't want you looking too closely at the sausage being made.
Where Does the Buck Stop?
So, another test is in the books. Another qualified, asterisk-laden "success." We, the public, the taxpayers who indirectly fund a chunk of this via government partnerships, are left to wonder what comes next. Another flight that goes 60% of the way around the world? Another launch where the vehicle performs a "rapid unscheduled disassembly" over the ocean and we're told how much was learned?
The lack of clear, publicly stated metrics for success is the most brilliant part of the whole strategy. If you never define the finish line, you can never technically lose the race. You can just keep running, pointing to how far you've come, and asking for more money for better running shoes.
They want us to believe this is all for humanity, for making us a multi-planetary species, for the grand cosmic destiny of mankind, but at the end of the day... it feels like we're just watching a very, very slow and expensive commercial for a product that doesn't exist yet. The product is the dream of Mars. The test flights are the ads.
When does a "test" stop being a test and start being a mission? When does data collection turn into actual capability? These are the questions that get lost in the smoke and fire of the launch. We're so mesmerized by the rocket going up that we forget to ask if it can ever safely come down.
So, We're Just Clapping for Takeoffs Now?
Look, I get it. Pushing the envelope is hard. It's messy. But let's stop pretending these are unmitigated triumphs. We're celebrating the first half of a process and conveniently ignoring the second. We're being sold a highlight reel of a game where we never get to see the final score. It's a performance, a spectacle of progress that cleverly hides the actual results. It’s time to stop grading on a curve and ask what "done" actually looks like. Because right now, all I see is a really long, expensive runway with no airport in sight.
