[PittleyDunkin]

> Putting a starship in low earth orbit right now would be a bit reckless, because if the engines fail to relight it's going to come down at some point in a completely random spot along the trajectory, and it's quite a large piece of debris that is designed to not burn up.

More relevantly—it's harder to make a marketing stunt out of a fallible mission.

[MarkusQ]

What exactly do you think they're marketing?

And don't say launch services, 'cause you're using "it's a marketing stunt" to explain why they aren't taking payloads. "It's R&D" makes a heck of a lot more sense.

[rogerrogerr]

Is it your position that flight 6, or the Starship program, or SpaceX is a marketing stunt?

[davidguetta]

As if Space X needed more marketing than being the cheapest and more consistent launch provider for the past 10 years

[GuB-42]

> More relevantly—it's harder to make a marketing stunt out of a fallible mission.

SpaceX is well known for making a marketing stunt out of their failures (see "How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster"). In fact, Elon Musk is known to make marketing stunts out of anything.

But that's not it, they could have launched a dummy payload if they wanted to, they have already done it for other rockets, and yeah, they made it a marketing stunt. Famously, they launched Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster in the direction of Mars. But here, launching a payload at this stage of development is just not the best thing to do.

[odirf]

In fact, IFT-6 had some payload. They put a banana into the payload bay.