It's so much further advanced than anything anyone else is working on, does it really need to be on schedule? I feel like "on schedule" only pertains to non-research-intensive projects.

The issue is cadence. SpaceX is the king of cadence with Falcon 9, but if it takes >10 Starship Tanker launches to get all that excess mass of Starship HLS to the moon... prior to boil-off of the Starship HLS... holy crap, this is really hand wavy.

Even SpaceX will have a really hard time launching ~10 Tankers in the time required. What are the lower and upper bounds of that time required? Nobody knows. But, if it's less than many weeks, it's gonna be tough. That's ~weeks of HLS on orbit, getting refueled, with boil-off occurring.

SpaceX has many things correct, except for the vehicle size and design, as far as HLS goes.

> but you have to admit it's way behind schedule

Shouldn't even be phrased like this. We can cheer for progress without simping so badly that we can't acknowledge failures and missteps.

Space is hard and over promising and under delivering are real possibilities that a hype-person cannot run from. Just moderate the hype and let the engineers cook - is that so hard??

The engines are so awesome that test flights are loaded with 10% of the promised capacity of the rocket. Someone is blowing smoke up your ass.

The warp drives in Star Trek seem awesome too, we're just behind schedule.

Starship excels at funneling tax money into Musk's various enterprises. Whether it actually reaches orbit, much less the moon or Mars, merely incidental, the sexy marketing photos for an imaginary island resort.

By the time Starship does actually achieve orbit it will likely get damaged by all of the debris SpaceX has parked around the planet.