January 12,2019 3:30PM EST UPDATED by SZM

It’s been a wild ride at SpaceX this week. A mixture of monumental successes coupled with news of layoffs leave spectators reeling. What are fellow humans to think of all this?

All within a week or so, Spacex launched and landed another Falcon 9 (while completing a 75 satellite network for Iridium), landed another Cargo Dragon (CRS 16) returning from ISS with cargo, and spectators captured an array of photos from Boca Chica in south Texas revealing the Starship hopper test vehicle. Elon Musk later confirmed the hopper sightings Tweeting a rendered prototype image, and later an image that appears to be a mostly completed hopper airframe. Fans on all venues of social media pour over photos at the Boca Chica site trying to make sense of what they’re seeing. The airframe build defiantly has that classical bullet shaped fuselage with aft fins that double as landing legs. The form could easily fit into science fiction comics, cartoons, and novels. There’s a good reason for that, it’s obvious and utilitarian design is an intuitive choice for dreamers planning to visit other terrestrial worlds. Left with all the facts of recent events, the soaring successes and milestones, the layoffs, and Boca Chica, where do we begin to add this up? One obvious reason could just be success. If those Falcon 9 block 5 boosters are performing as designed, the necessity to manufacture large numbers of them has disappeared. With the exception of customer demanded single flight boosters, such as the USAF flight, and perhaps new boosters for the upcoming Crew Dragon flights, the ‘fleet’ of existing boosters should be able to service customer flights for the next few years. If that’s true, then the army of technicians and engineers previously needed to build 10-20 boosters per year have engineered themselves out of a job with success. The shift in focus, towards development of Starship and Starlink, and the ongoing Crew and Cargo Dragon flights, might have required the company to save $50 million or so on labor. Once the Starship moves to high altitude, sub-orbital, then later orbital flights, look for SpaceX to expand once again. All descriptions point toward a huge fleet of Starships required meet the Mars goal.~