Falcon Heavy is not designed for crew. Starship is but is still under development. On the other hand, this launched today. We can afford the extra cost, I celebrate the success.
Some day Starship will have its moment as well.
Some day Starship will have its moment as well.
This isn't kerbal space program... Fluid's gonna fluid dynamics in a 0g environment...
I bet it won't take more than 5 tries to do a full tank Starship transfer. And SpaceX iterates quickly
Every single person I've heard say this hasn't given a reasonable reason why it's difficult other than "we've never done it before". Also on-orbit refueling has been done, just not with cryogenics. Additionally it's only been done in zero-G with bladders. A slight vehicle spin to settle tanks seems like it would be sufficient to feed some low speed pumps without bladders.
Predicting decades when it took them only 3 years to go from "nothing" to on the pad is a bit much.
If in 2014, when this was said, NASA asked and funded SpaceX to human rate Heavy, they’d have launched already.
But there is; gold standard for human rated missions is 98% reliability rate. This means testing every single component, and making sure that Product(Px) > 0.98 where Px is the probability failure of component x. This drives the cost up exponentially. E.g. if the rocket has Px = 0.99 and the crew capsule has Pcapsule = 0.99, then Psystem = 0.98, barely clearing the threshold.
Falcon 9 had 3.5 failures out of 185 launches, giving it a Pfalcon9 = 0.98; PfalconHeavy then is,at most, 0.98^3 = 0.84, way too low to make it human-rateabale.
The difference between Procket 0.84 and P0.99 is exponential cost.
Falcon Heavy has never had a launch failure. It's 4/4
If you're arguing it's had a failure because it shares heritage then SLS was 133/135 before the launch which is worse and so shouldn't fly crew until it does way more than just one flight.
Second, I am talking about design goals, not track records. You don't evaluate the safety of a large system by running it a lot of times and see what happens - you design the thing towards a goal of safety. So this involves designing each component to the specific failure rate, and testing individually, then then testing together, documenting every step, to provide traceability of every change on every component.
The comparison to historical data on Falcon is not entirely valid, because we don't know the design goals of Falcon, etc. Just because Falcon 9 is human rated, doesn't mean Falcon Heavy is human rated, etc.
The quiet secret is that CCP can bypass a ton of requirements that NASA can’t. That is, until they do something like lose an astronaut and then I suspect they will get much more oversight.
The Orion capsule launched today did not include the ECLSS system.
For example, human-rated system usually are a no-go with a single point of failure that can cause a loss of crew. If that does exist, they either need to redesign or get everyone to agree to the new risk assessment.