No that is a straw man. Nobody is complaining about SpaceX having a monopoly on a reproducible good, that is completely illogical. It's like saying McDonald's has a monopoly on the restaurant business. What SpaceX has is something like an internal monopsony that has swallowed the entire supply of their own launch capacity.

Starship doesn't work right now because it doesn't follow the Falcon 9 development process.

You first make it work, then you optimize and then you do the impossible.

The starship development process is: attempt the "impossible", then watch it not work out (which it didn't for Falcon 9 at first), and then optimize, then make it work.

Like, why exactly is full reusability necessary for Starship's success as a Starlink launcher? Why can't they do the reuse of the second stage after they've been flying payloads?

Something tells me they would be in trouble of they had to tell investors that their rocket is not as good as they advertise it. There is this strange incentive for them to delay their success as far as possible, which the exact opposite of the Falcon 9 development process.

It seems like SpaceX depends on Falcon 9 more than even its external customers otherwise they would have cannibalized its internal usage much sooner.

The main negative coverage I've heard is actually that starship is clearly optimized for the commercial LEO market while it has received to date $3B (of $5B) of government funds intended for space exploration as part of a contract it may never deliver on (at least, as it was originally envisaged), delaying Artemis by years and costing the government at least a further $5B in funding of gateway projects which will also be delayed and require expensive re-engineering if/when they are ever deployed.

This could be seen as either straightforward corruption or a gamble on the Starship platform for future Mars exploration.

There are very sound economic reasons why rockets for Moon exploration like Saturn-V were built the way they were. Saturn-V was around $35-40B in today's money for 13 rockets and 6 landings (excluding lander, crew costs). It took 5.5 years from greenlight to first successful orbital flight (which was also its first flight). Starship will likely meet this target of 6 landings after about 20 years of development, $25B R&D (excluding crew/lander contracts), and possibly about $5B in launch costs. Asymptotic costs will of course be much lower, but launch costs do not dominate space exploration costs. The platform might be capable of Mars missions one day - but it's not clear how far out that goal is.

> majority of reporting has been of the "Starship can't/doesn't/won't work" ilk

> The very same groups are now crying about a potential monopoly.

Be a realist: we should be thankful they don't do it simultaneously.