Our rules

How we decide what to say

These are the rules we hold ourselves to. If something on the site breaks one of them, that is a mistake and we want to hear about it. The short version: write down what “done” means first, keep every old date, link every claim, and say “we don’t know” when we don’t.

Status definitions

Every milestone has explicit completion criteria written before a status is assigned. Status is a judgement against those criteria and nothing else.

Announced: A plan has been stated publicly and this site has found no evidence that work toward it has been demonstrated yet.
In progress: Evidence shows work toward the milestone — tests, hardware, contracts or partial demonstrations — but the completion criteria are not met.
Achieved: Evidence matches the milestone’s stated completion criteria in full. A successful test alone does not qualify unless the criteria say so.
Partially achieved: Evidence meets part of the completion criteria but not all of it. This status is never upgraded to achieved for presentational tidiness.
Paused: A primary source indicates work has been suspended without the plan being abandoned.
Cancelled: A primary source indicates the plan has been abandoned.
Uncertain: Sources conflict, are missing, or do not settle the question. This site prefers saying so to guessing.

A successful test is not automatically completion of the broader capability. If a demonstration meets part of the criteria, the record says partially achieved and stays there until the rest is evidenced.

Target precision

Targets are recorded at the precision the source used. A target stated as “2027” is stored as a year, not as 31 December 2027. A target stated as a quarter stays a quarter. Where a source gives a date, the date is used. Where a source gives no timing at all, the target window is recorded as unknown and nothing is inferred — not from planetary alignment, not from launch manifests, not from previous patterns.

Announcement dates and target windows are calendar values. They never shift with your timezone. Only exact recorded instants, such as review times, are converted to the timezone you choose inpreferences.

The elapsed-window flag

“Stated target window has passed; outcome not yet verified” is a computed flag, not a status. It appears only when all of the following hold:

the current target has a window that can be given calendar bounds;
those bounds are entirely in the past;
the milestone is not already achieved or cancelled; and
no recorded outcome evidences the full completion criteria within that window.

Calendar bounds are derived using a UTC convention: a month runs from its first day to the first day of the next month, a quarter from the first day of its first month, a year from 1 January. Those bounds are this site's calculation for the purpose of the flag. They are never presented as something a source said.

Targets with no determinable end — open-ended descriptions such as “starting with Flight 14”, and unknown windows — never produce the flag. Silence from a company is not evidence of cancellation, delay or deception, and this site does not treat it as such.

Source hierarchy

Sources are typed: company statement, regulator, filing, mission partner and independent reporting. A company statement establishes what the company said. It does not, by itself, establish that what was said is true. Where an outcome matters, this site looks for evidence from a party other than the one making the claim, and says so in the record when it has not found any.

Every source carries a locator — the section, heading, page or timestamp that actually supports the claim — plus the date it was accessed and an original note on what it supports. A bare URL is not evidence.

Where sources conflict, the conflict is published rather than resolved in favour of the more flattering account. If a source goes offline, it is flagged as unavailable; that is not evidence the claim it supported was false.

Review, review-due and corrections

Each published record links to a review record naming who reviewed it, when, which sources were checked and what each claim check found, along with the limitations of that review. Where review was AI-assisted, it says so; AI assistance is never described as independent human review.

Active records carry a review-due date. Once it passes, the record shows a review-due flag and keeps its existing content — an old record is not deleted or downgraded for being old. Achieved and cancelled records are archived and do not become review-due merely with time.

Corrections are published on the record, stating what changed and why. Historical targets and outcomes are never rewritten to make the record look better in hindsight; superseded targets stay visible in the target history.

What this site does not do

No percentage-complete scores or composite credibility ratings.
No share prices, valuations, price targets or investment advice.
No claim to be a complete inventory of SpaceX commitments; this is a curated, evidenced selection.
No automated publication. Nothing reaches these pages without passing the content gate and a review record.