I don't think that's how the people at Valve think. These people usually have lifetime dreams to work at Valve well before they do because they admired those early games so much, which if you know the story were held up to very high standards internally and repeatedly. They spent their lives being hyper critical of their own craft and admire Valve because they don't a release subpar product as a rule. So collectively they'll have a LOT of collective ego tied up in whatever that product is, but it's not like "I own this", that would be highly anathema.
I think that fits with how they think. HL3 has mythical status. We've already seen Valve devs make a major game in the HL universe and intentionally avoid "making HL3" due to this mythos. It takes a lot of confidence to say "Hey guys, I'm putting together the team to make Sistine Chapel 2."
(To be clear, I'm not saying it's a matter of ownership and personal brand. But someone needs to start the project and form a team around it. I don't think they're worried about personal brand, it's more an issue of reverence for the franchise.)
That was my interpretation of that talk. It seemed like a regurgitation of opinions of an old aerospace engineer. But that's probably unfair to Dustin, I believe that he actually came to that conclusion himself. But it was a really incorrect take that SLS was somehow the "safe bet" in comparison to betting on Starship. The whole talk just seemed insane based on what I knew about both programs.
The payload capacity of Starship version 2 is around 35 tons to LEO. The propellant capacity is 1500 tons. This means it takes 42 tanker loads to fill up one Starship. This means Destin was extremely optimistic with respect to how well Starship is going to perform.
Even with the projected 100 ton payload for V3, the minimum number of flights to refuel a V2 HLS Starship is 15 flights and 26 flights for V3 HLS.
If we are optimistic about New Glenn and the cislunar transporter, then it will take 4 flights to refuel the transporter for each moon landing plus one flight to launch Orion on New Glenn and another three flights to push Orion using the cislunar transporter. There is also a hypothetical option to use a second Blue Moon MK2 between LEO and NRHO plus a crew capsule launch that says in LEO.
Given a budget of 4 billion USD, this could pay for 50 New Glenn flights assuming falcon 9 pricing. 8 flights per moon landing means one moon landing every two months.
That seems pretty promising unlike SpaceX, which is locked entirely behind a functioning reusable second stage or they don't get to participate at all, because expending 15 to 26 upper stages is not viable at all.
But you do you. SLS only has to launch a few times until the cislunar transporter gets established, which means it is exactly the safe bet that the US needs to reach the moon.
That’s interesting. I’ve always held SvelteKit in high regard for greenfield projects because it balances capability, developer experience, and performance, but I’ll have to give Marko a look. I’d love to see a similar deep dive into Electron style desktop frameworks since that space still feels underexplored compared to mobile. I honestly wouldn’t know where to start for a video game interface, and that bothers me.
