Government I can see, but as a tech worker I wouldn't move to a state where my partner couldn't get adequate medical treatment if pregnant, where there's poor labor laws, and the general Alabama stigma. I'm sure there's nice areas, and it's beautiful, but..yeah hard pass. I'll stack checks elsewhere.

Here's more of elons genius input

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oa_mtakPlfw

How is that inflated? They're literally designing, building, launching, maintaining, and recovering their own products. The only difference between a customer launch and their own are tolerances, mission design, and who's paying them. If rocketlab (also love them) was building and putting up their own satellites weekly, we also wouldn't discount their achievements.

He developed the software for his first company, zip2. Enough to get the POC off the ground and attract investors and hire additional developers to clean up the code, sell it off, build up X.com, sell it off, and fund SpaceX.

No matter how skilled you think he is at it, he is by definition a self taught software developer, who then learned rocket science through the people around him and his employees. People seem to think spending 20 years around literal rocket scientists who are building things for him doesn't cover what you'd learn in 4 years of university.

People dont seem to realize SpaceX is also a software company.

You think he'd what, come back in and fuck it up? Make the f9s do flips and swap propellant to concentrated blue checkmarks? He's been CEO there for 20 years, him and Shotwell got that shit down tight, if there were problems for him to smooth over he'd be there doing it, he's just having fun and looking forward while starship is in development.

Ya that would be insanely interesting to be able to go up and just...scoop whole sats for refurb and return. Calculating the conjunction, the entire landing leg with enough-but-not-too-much fuel with the added mass, and securing it in the vehicle to survive re-orbit wold be... challenging.

Yep, also people aren't factoring in that the initial approval is best effort. Maybe they applied for 42k and claim they have a 5 year lifespan, but the reality is they want them to last longer and would be much happier doing it with fewer satellites. 5 years is under certain conditions and likely lowballed, if they don't need to do collision avoidance maneuvers could be longer, if there's a lull in space weather could be longer, if there's a lot of that could be shorter.

The gen 2s require starship, which is much MUCH larger than falcon, meaning fewer launches to expand the network and more users per satellite, more fuel per satellite which extends the lifespan, etc.

Amazing, love me a healthy fern and these are wonderful.

Do these ferns have stalks? They're so tall