Re: Falcon Heavy = 63,8t max to LEO (fully expended)
Only in the minds of those who don't understand the development approach taken.
It's not a "we've launched this, so with just a few tweaks it'll be operational"
It's more of a "let's try this and gather as much data as we can, then see what needs more attention"
So people see a sub-orbital launch and sneer that it can't even reach orbit yet. But it could easily reach orbit, but they don't want it there until they have other aspects production-ready - once things are in orbit it's harder to bring them down if something goes wrong. Yes there have been a couple of mishaps but really not of the scale that the general public perceive.
As a specific example, when testing the heat shield and control surfaces they had burn-through (shown live on camera, which is incredible in itself) - cue responses of "See, it burned all the way through. They're rubbish" when actually it was a deliberate approach to work out how much damage it could sustain while retaining control, alongside testing the limits of the heatshield material itself. They could've easily chosen a different entry profile to reduce the heat, but got far more data by testing to destruction.
