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Comment by saberdancer | Hacker News Reader

It is the largest rocket in history and it is planned to be fully reusable.

If SpaceX manage to make this work they will have a launch vehicle capable of launching much more mass to orbit which will open up space exploration.

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It also provides us with a kind of access to space that we lost when the Space Shuttles were grounded. It's interesting that the Shuttle was considered a hugely wasteful boondoggle in its day and age, yet now a private profit-seeking enterprise is making something that's just as capable on a way bigger scale.

The shuttle ended up having a cost of $1.5B per launch. Starship is aiming for a cost of $2M per launch. They'll likely miss that goal, but even missing by an order of magnitude will be a huge game changer. And obviously price will be very different from cost.

We're looking at the cost of a tonne to orbit being similar to what a kg was during the shuttle era.

the problem with the space shuttle is that it's minimum payload was an airplane with room for 7 people. it's like if you wanted to mail someone a letter so you put the letter in a van, and called a towing company to send the van.

The shuttle was hamstrung by DoD and senate requirements.

Arguably the entire concept was flawed, fueled more by a sci-fi concept of "wouldn't it be cool if" rather than a sober cost-benefit analysis. It was a space station, built into a rocket, built into an airplane that is also a reentry vehicle - most of the motivation to reuse the vehicle in the first place goes away if you don't make it so damn complex!

It just makes so much more sense to launch big payloads on heavy lift rockets, humans separately on human rated craft, and leave the space station part (robot arm etc) in orbit.

(The one type of mission you can't do without something like an orbiter is satellite retrieval. This capability was used a total of 4 times. Not really worth it.)

I am 100% good with NASA pursuing "wouldn't it be cool if" and leaving sober ROI-gated developments to private industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Transportation_System

The actual concept was actually pretty decent (even kerbals would say so!), except somehow it got cut down to the point of uselessness.

It is the same idea that they had for a Space Shuttle. Reusable vehicle that can be used many times and make space accessible. Unfortunately, Space Shuttle did not make that a reality as it was too complex and required a large multi month refurbishment after each mission.

Starship should be able to solve that issue and make space accessible. At least that is the idea. We will see how it ends up.

I would argue that the Space Shuttle was mostly wasteful because it really wasn't that reusable. You had to fully refurbish the SRBs, you lose the tank, The Shuttles required a ton of refurbishment themselves, all for a rather small amount of mass to orbit.

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