Today's current thing: Aug 27
Also: we rounded up everyone's opinion on the Intel-WH deal
Happy Wednesday, we are live. The current thing is Starship 10’s launch and landing.
We rounded up everyone's take on the US government's deal with Intel on our Substack — read them all here.
Here’s John’s run of show. 👇
SpaceX Starship Flight 10 Makes it Back!
Yesterday around 6 PM Pacific, SpaceX’s Starship Flight 10 launched from Starbase, South Texas. It executed a successful flip maneuver, deployed a mock payload into orbit, survived re-entry, and splashed down on target in the Indian Ocean. They even re-ignited a Raptor engine in space.
The Starship program is a lot more ambitious than the original Falcon program. It’s also seen more unsuccessful test flights, and much more negative media attention. SpaceX is big enough now to have haters, but yesterday was a bad day to be one. After scrubbed launches on Monday and Tuesday, the general vibe around Elon — and SpaceX by extension — was that things weren’t going well. “Elon is distracted by politics” and “Elon is too focused on AI romantic companions,” etc. But yesterday’s success shows that the team at SpaceX is still locked in and making real progress.
It’s important to remember that the goal of Starship isn’t just “get a big rocket into space.” It’s to build a fully reusable system that, over time, becomes orders of magnitude cheaper than anything before it. Elon really does want these things launching every hour. The tradeoffs you need to make this work are insane when you think about the impact they’re having during this test phase.
The space industry has always been able to build one-off, exquisite systems to reach orbit, the Moon, or even Mars — so long as the plan is to do it a handful of times at taxpayer expense, for a multi-billion dollar bill. But the goal of Starship isn’t to build a rocket. It’s to build a highway to space: an endless flow of rockets with each flight reliable and profitable.
I was listening to David Senra’s latest episode of the excellent Founders Podcast about “How Elon Works,” and it really contextualized how insane it must be to work on Starship:
“When an engineer told Elon the air cooling system for the Falcon 9 would cost $3 million, he shouted over to Gwynne Shotwell to ask her what an air conditioning system for a house cost. About $6,000, she said. So the SpaceX team bought some commercial air conditioning units and modified their pumps so they could work atop the rocket.”
I’m sure the $3M air cooling system is nice to have. It’s probably reliable, tested, and comes with a support team. It might even have sped up a single launch. But that’s not the goal. Elon is building a system.
David goes on:
“Elon’s just constantly questioning things and trying to find the limit. ‘Why do we have to have four bolts there? Who set that specification? Can we do it with two?’ They would say, ‘No.’ ‘We'll try it, see if it fails.’ And then on and on and on, he just moves down the line. You need to be decisive or you're going to be dead. Elon calculated that he made 100 command decisions a day as he walked the floor. ‘At least 20% are going to be wrong,’ he said, ‘and we're going to alter them later. But if I don't make decisions, we die.’”
Looking back at all the Starship tests, the design gambles often seemed almost irrational. But over time, the bad concepts get scrapped, the workable ones refined, and what emerges is a system capable of reliable, reusable, and affordable launches on a scale no one else has imagined.
Ad astra per aspera — to the stars through hardship — never hit so hard.
Today’s lineup
Zipline Co-Founder & CEO Keller Rinaudo Cliffton at 12:45 PM
Prime Intellect Research Lead Will Brown at 1:00 PM
Arena Magazine GM of Books Julia Steinberg at 1:30 PM
a16z AI Partner Olivia Moore at 1:35 PM
In other news…
Labubu seller Pop Mart CEO net worth grows by $20B this year…
Amodei’s comments on Anthropic P/L raise eyebrows…
Conversation around Zoomer “App Mafia” heats up…
GPT user signups appear to drop sharply at GPT-5 release…
Brian Halligan mulls private equity takeover of Sonos…
Anthropic releases browser AI…
Timeline
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