I'm John Batchel with my colleagues, David Livingston, Dr. Space of the Space Show,

and Eric Berger, senior space correspondent for Ars Technica.

And we're discussing the unknowns of test number eight for Starship,

as we are discussing the unknowns of test number seven and what

I understand David, Eric, is that what we have here is a demand for re-engineering or rethinking

the whole starship. Now I have this from not a good source. It was an anonymous tweet in these last hours, very critical of the rush at SpaceX.

One thing it doesn't say, and that it occurred to me while as I was reading it is,

is there politics involved here?

You will recall that early on Mr. Musk brought along the then-then president-in-waiting and now President Trump to witness a launch.

That was the test in which they did not recover the first stage.

I think they took it down over the Gulf for whatever reason.

But the starship did perform.

So is there political pressure?

Is there talk about that, Eric?

I think there's a couple of things.

First of all, yes.

I think there's definitely political pressure from Elon Musk on his team to perform.

There's a lot of eyes on Starship now as NASA is sort of reconsidering its future of what

type of lunar program it's going to have, what type of Mars program it's going to have. And so he

wanted, especially if the figure of Flight 7, he wanted Flight 8 to fly and fly successfully. Now that

it hasn't, you know, clearly I think it was a mistake to move that quickly.

But, you know, in the backdrop of all this, John, is the fact that from day one back in 2002 when SpaceX was founded,

...