Starship's Sixth Flight Test
spacex.com
spacex.com
Imagine that every time an airliner landed its cockpit was destroyed and you had to build a new one. A fully reusable airplane would be a transformational improvement. That's the level of achievement we're talking about here.
Other use cases include launching and maintaining satellite constellations (Starling / Starshield), and launching singular large payloads like space telescopes.
Even for smaller payloads, having both the first and second stages be reusable will reduce launch costs.
In the near term the biggest reason to do multiple launches in a day will be orbital refueling. This is required for sending much, much larger payloads to the Moon and Mars. It will require on the order of 10 launches to fuel up one moon lander in orbit, and obviously doing that as quickly as possible will be beneficial. NASA has already committed to this plan for Artemis.
Require, or just make comfortable? Saturn V had the lift capacity of "only" a couple of Falcon Heavies, but was enough to carry astronauts, a car, a lunar lander with enough fuel to take off, and a command module.
If you really got order-of-magnitude gains from an expendable upper stage, it wouldn't be that exciting to have reusable rockets (which are more complex and still only fly one order of magnitude more times) in the first place.
200 years ago, there was no need to use electricity. 100 years ago, there was no need to use a programming language. 30 years ago, there was no need for gigabit wireless Internet.
Counterexample: space stations. We've had small manned space stations for decades now, but no real application for them. They're national prestige items only.
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/five-space-station-res...
We have the means to build pyramids or moa statues (Easter Island-style) much more quickly and efficiently that the ancients did, but we don't feel the need anymore.
It takes a heavy launch rocket to launch heavier things into space or missions, refueling, and to goto other planets.
The HLS (Spaceship) will need many refuels at orbit in order to get to the Moon and back. That means at least a dozen of fully-loaded Heavy launches to LEO just so each one of them can load a bit of fuel into HLS. The fuel in orbit can't sit idle for too long, or it deteriorates; I haven't found a limit on days for that, but a week-long launch window is considered a dealbreaker, we're talking a dozen Heavy launches in a week.
It's either a short launch window, or at least 6 Starships built and launched twice in ~10 days. Don't count out on SpaceX building 12 Heavy Starships just for that Artemis mission.
We are insatiably curious explorers. The cosmos calls to us. Many are willing to do anything they can to answer that call.
Besides, Elon is the first to go after supervillain territory.
That seems like a stretch. What is the actual turnaround time for Starship? fwiw the Shuttle had a lot of lofty promises of reusability that were technically true as long as you didn't consider how long the turnaround time was.
When they manage to do the intended landing it should be pretty unharmed, but I'm sure it will take a while before same-day reuse is attempted.
Starship has work to do, but it's hard to argue they're not at least on the right path.
It's also worth noting that Booster (the first stage), Starship (the second stage) and Raptor (the rocket engine) were all designed with the benefit of the above experience and with the goal of same-day reuse in mind. They know where all of the refurb time went and where the bottlenecks are.
I have no doubt that they can reduce the turnaround further, but the goal of same-day re-flight does seem mighty ambitious.
[0] https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-falcon-9-new-booster-turnar...
It was never a fully reusable design, just more reusable than before.
SpaceX plans to have no parts that are lost each flight and is working to make the tiles mostly standardized and less sensitive to faults.
No doubt SpaceX has very smart people working on this and I'm not an expert in material science, but I just find it hard to believe that same day turnaround could be possible. If true, that would really make us a confirmed space faring civilization. We could actually start colonizing Mars.
Falcon 9 has reflown in just over 4 hours [1]. (EDIT: Operational turnaround. Nozzles have been turned around allegedly without refurb in 3 weeks.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_...
https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-launch-doubleheader-ju...
They've since done two flights in about an hour with https://spaceflightnow.com/tag/starlink-9-5/ and https://spaceflightnow.com/tag/starlink-8-10/
I think the first-stage turnaround record is something like two weeks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-stage_b...
> B1062 booster holds the record for fastest turnaround at 21 days. It launched on 8 April and again on 29 April 2022.
Seems like the actual record for turning around the same booster is 21 days, which is still quite impressive.
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-falcon-9-new-booster-turnar...
Other factors that work in SpaceX's favor are 1) that most launches will be unmanned, meaning they can take bigger risks than the Space Shuttle program; 2) that the steel body of Starship can handle higher temperatures than the Space Shuttle's aluminum, so a compromised heat shield is more tolerable; 3) for now they have a secondary ablative heat shield below the tiles (that does have to be replaced when it gets used, but that should only happen when tiles fall off)
Consider operators living on Mars and operating drones near their habitat each day. It would be like modern day drone operators and robot assisted surgery. Like remote operators of mega-trucks today.
Those robots could interact with the operators - driving into a "garage" that can be pressurized for maintenance, upgrades or science.
StarShip promises to reduce the cost of mass to orbit, making larger and more complex scientific, industrial and habitat options feasible.
You can go to the official govenrment website and look at the contract, it tells you exactly how much has been paid out and how much has not been. The money is getting out as SpaceX hits development milestones.
I don't remember, exactly but about 2.x billion $ were paid out so far. The money is spread over 40ish milestones. And they have done like 25 or so by now.
To get the full pay out, they will be required to land on the moon and take off again. Those are likely the last couple milestones.
some of the best weasel words ever laid to print. Enron accounting vs PWC vs your mom using Quickbooks for her side hustle type of depending?
We are going to see massively increased space activity of all sorts. It is almost impossible to predict all consequences thereof.
SpaceX has demonstrated being able to fly the same rocket stage dozens of times with minimal refurbishment with their Falcon 9 family of rockets, but they still have to build and discard the second stage of the Falcon 9 for each launch.
Starship scales that up in magnitude and adds second-stage reusability.
That'd be pretty cool right? The dawn of a new era in global trade.
This is that, for space. (Booster as container ship, Orbital vehicle as container, launch tower as literal crane, launch complex as port)
Why is there a port here? Because of the unusual tidal pattern? Deep water? No. People. The other reasons are reasons to put the port here maybe in particular rather than a few miles in either direction, but the people are why there's a port. In 1024 there were thousands of people, today perhaps closer to half a million depending on how you count.
There are no people on Luna, and no people on Mars. Visiting these barren rocks is like going up Everest.
This damp rock is where our species was born and it's where it will die. It's not much, but its ours, and there's nothing like it within any plausible travel distance.
Similarly, moon or Mars bases will be where they are if the location has some useful(1) industry and sufficient resources to support a population servicing that industry.
(1) 'Useful' to them, and not necessarily to everyone everywhere all the time.
[0] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st...
- Starship is actually launching now
- Boeing's reputation and credibility are in tatters
- Trump won with heavy support from Musk.
Expect a new head of NASA who is pro-Musk, and a cancellation of the Senate Launch System.
On the other hand, it's not clear what a Moon base is good for. The ISS isn't very useful.
not letting China do it first
Great article, but that's not what economists do. It's more what cost accountants do.
So, for the cost of a single SLS launch ($4B), Starship would be able to put the mass of the battleship USS Texas into orbit.
If the cost is reduced to $1M/launch, it could put the mass of four Nimitz-class nuclear aircraft carriers into orbit.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st...
Until very very recently the roughly bus sized ISS modules were the largest habitable spaces we could ship to orbit (although Skylab in the 70s were basically repurposed Saturn V fuel tanks and also big) so now it's possible/probable we can ship 20 people to space, and have moderately comfortable accommodations for them.
We can also ship mining equipment and substancially more supplies to the moon. Or mars. We went from using pack goats to 18 wheelers to ship stuff in space. The pack goat can ship a handful of hand made silk scarves and Faberge eggs over the Himalayas, but the 18 wheeler can deliver everything from socks and tshirts to cell phones and big screen tvs and trucks and lawn mowers. This really opens up space to more than the highest, most bleeding edge science and we might actually see more than 100 humans in space at the same time, in our lifetimes.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Solar_sy...
Personally, I can’t wait to see a massive, kilometer-wide telescope in space or nestled in a crater on the Moon. We might finally figure out dark matter, dark energy, anti-gravity.
It's just an outlandish overly optimistic mishmash of different concepts.
Let's start with your analogy:
> Imagine if a round-trip flight from the US to Europe didn’t cost $500, but only $5, unbelievable, right?
If you mean to use this to explain that what today costs X will in the future cost 0.01X, you're probably right.
But a more accurate analogy is "Imagine if a round-trip flight from the US to Europe didn't cost $50,000,000, but only $500,000, unbelievable, right?"
Same ratios, but deeply different implications.
Today, the idea of setting up a continuously settled Mars colony - hell even a Moon colony - is unfeasibly expensive. It's ACHIEVABLE - we have the technology and the money - but it would cost an intolerable percentage of the GDP of the world to accomplish.
A 100x reduction in costs means that it becomes a fundable endeavour that countries like the US could still justify.
We're still talking about generations - maybe a century - away from someone being able to just pop over to Mars for a summer vacation, the way that a college student could to do today with an intercontinental flight.
> Many things we see in sci-fi, like lunar and Martian cities or orbital cruise ships, could soon become reality.
For a very generous definition of soon and for a highly implausible definition of what a "cruise ship" is - it'll never be as accessible to the average person as earth cruise ships. Not as long as you keep using rockets.
Regardless of reusability, there are realities of fixed FOSSIL FUEL costs associated with getting into gravity. They're not cheap, and they're not frivolous. If you want to be able get things into orbit as cheap as you're suggesting, you need to start investing in a space elevator, which noone is right now.
> Personally, I can’t wait to see a massive, kilometer-wide telescope in space
Cool, yeah, that's true, that becomes more available.
> or nestled in a crater on the Moon.
..why?
> We might finally figure out dark matter, dark energy, anti-gravity.
And the final cherry on the cake. Humanity becoming inter-planetary is important on a macro scale. And trying to go further and further into space will INCENTIVISE research into these concepts.
But in no way does getting to orbit cheaper make it easier to figure out any of these concepts. There's nothing we can do from Mars or on the way to Mars in terms of this science that we can't do from Earth.
Don't forget the dynamics. Costs of all such projects drop further when early steps become affordable. Like, with 100x reduction on the sticker price, US might feel Mars colony is still too expensive a project, but 100x reduction on trying out some adjacent space tech may just be in range of NASA budget or some private interest. Steps get made, iterated on, making next steps cheaper and more likely to happen. Derisking compounds.
I do agree it'd still be a decades long project at least (with a settlement established early on; it's the tail end that will drag on).
>> or nestled in a crater on the Moon.
>..why?
Having some gravity and hard surface to build on simplifies engineering challenges, particularly on large scales, as in free space, tension becomes a big issue. And, perhaps more importantly, the Moon would shield the telescope from all the electromagnetic noise produced on Earth, and also by the Sun.
A little less, if nestled in the crater as the quoted idea would have it.
I hope you don't mean hydrogen and methane. Those are downright easy to make without fossil fuels. And kerosene isn't all that hard.
It is still a remarkable technical achievement and I think the people who have designed and built these systems deserve some celebration for their accomplishments. It has the potential to lower costs and increase the capacity for greater commercialization, militarization and exploration of space.
I think the extent you see that as something positive is subject to your faith in humanity. I tend to think technologies connection to social progress is a three steps forward, two steps back sort of thing. We have certainly made gains in my lifetime but we could have gone a lot further.
But just as soon as it was completed, it changed everything overnight.
This is what Musk is doing.
An operational Starship should be very impactful on space exploration but it won't be shipping cattle back from Mars. There is a difficult to discern line between reality and bullshit that Musk likes to blur. The "vision" stuff is there to hype up the troops and investors. You don't need to swallow it to appreciate the technology. It isn't narrow minded to reject stuff that just doesn't add up. The scales, time, distance, energy, investment involved in space colonization are incomparable to settling the USA. The railroad was bringing people to a land that was already successfully settled by neolithic peoples tens of thousands of years earlier.
> The railroad was bringing people to a land that was already successfully settled by neolithic peoples tens of thousands of years earlier.
That's what people thought before the railroad was completed.
See "Nothing Like It In the World" by Stephen Ambrose:
https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Like-World-Transcontinental-1...
Quite bizarre how some people genuinely think he's just some guy who allocates capital. Or rich dad or whatever. I guess his dad was probably rich but that's clearly not enough.
So nearly two orders of magnitude cheaper, but you still can't really do anything too fun in space at $1k/kg. The goal with Starship (and its rapid reuse) is to bring costs down another couple of orders of magnitude to where we could eventually even see costs drop into the single digit per kg.
And at that point suddenly space becomes open to things that sound difficult to even fantasize about today, like colonizing Mars, taking suborbital flights to get from Texas to Hong Kong, or setting up industrial systems on the Moon, to say nothing of space tourism that doesn't start with the prerequisite of being a billionaire.
Especially the catch is awesome!
And the whole point of this thing was to do that on the moon, which is never going to happen at this rate.
They should be applauded for this, along with their iterative approach.
Note that this next test will demonstrate re-light of the engine in space at micro-gravity. This is the demonstration needed prior to putting the StarShip in orbit. We'll probably see a full orbital test for the flight after this one.
They could have easily put previous tests into orbit - it's a fairly minor change to their existing regime and they have plenty of fuel to use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzXcTFfV3Ls&t=3s
Edit: Another link with probably better info
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC1wgWi9WWU
TLDR: DC-X (Delta Clipper X)
Doing something cool once doesn't impact civilization. Doing it affordably at scale does. If Space X can do the chopstick landing reliably and integrate it into their operations, then that will be impactful - and change civilization.
Did Apple invent the touchscreen or the cell phone or high dpi displays?
The first video that really got to me was when they landed multiple boosters. This one as well, especially seeing the rocket take off with every booster firing when compared with the first Starship launch when you could see that some failed to light. It's like watching your child take their first steps, and then seeing them win an Olympic medal for running. Just incredible stuff.
There's so much more to it than money.
As an alternative to what? I don't understand how the first part of the comment is connected to the rest.
It is not crazy to believe that in the medium term that SpaceX will be one of the only viable ways for America to access space. In that position SpaceX will have a lot of leverage and ability to extract concessions from anyone wanting to go to space.
Why my tax dollars should go to help the worlds richest man build a toll booth between earth and space is beyond me.
EDIT: typo, removed redundant 'long-term'.
Is that correct? They're launching in the afternoon this time?
From the linked article.
The sixth flight test of Starship is targeted to launch as early as Monday, November 18.
The 30-minute launch window will open at 4:00 p.m. CT
"An additional objective for this flight will be attempting an in-space burn using a single Raptor engine, further demonstrating the capabilities required to conduct a ship deorbit burn prior to orbital missions."
The feasibility of building big rockets was already demonstrated a long time ago. Given the reliability of the Falcon 9, it looked plausible that a big rocket could work with many engines. And SpaceX had already shown that they can reuse boosters economically. But reusing orbital spacecraft – the entire upper stage with engines, fuel tanks, and whatever – without expensive and time-consuming refits is something nobody has done before.
SpaceX can launch satellites using Falcon9 and do it routinely. Starship needs to be developed and reach milestones, so they can get paid by NASA. Having a payload is a complication (unless it's a fun payload, remember the roadster car :D)
Yeah you might lose the payload, but SpaceX has the cheapest satellites in the business from what I understand.
Why? Remote detonation wouldn't work in that case?
If you did this to a Starship in orbit, you'd likely have large chunks of steel reentering and reaching the ground intact.
As you say, the other part of it--and probably more important--is that if it's turned into orbiting pieces, there's no control over where it lands. Some of it could easily land on the ground rather than the ocean, who knows where. That of course has happened with other satellites and their final stage rockets in the past (notably by the Chinese), but Starship is bigger, and therefore the pieces that hit the ground could be bigger. By launching it sub-orbital for now, and turning off the engines so it lands in the middle of the Indian Ocean, the risks of both orbital debris and unknown ground landing points are avoided.
Unlikely in general, no at LEO and definitely not at the suborbital velocities IFT-6 contemplates.
Obviously not a problem for IFT6 since it's sub-orbital, but the original comment was about why we need a deorbit burn rather than just triggering the flight abort system.
If you have debris in geostationary orbit, it will stay there basically forever whereas in low earth orbit it will burn up within a few years at worst.
No. In LEO orbits degrade in single-digit years at most. There is no known solution for rendering an orbit in LEO inaccessible with a Kessler cascade—the best you can do is blind an area with repeated ASAT fire.
In higher orbits debris last longer. That makes cascades possible, though again it only denies a limited area and requires almost active effort.
> Debris in orbit collides with other objects in orbit, creating debris in orbit. That's a cascade
For the same reason not every nucleus that fractures on neutron bombardment sustains chain reactions not every orbital configuration supports a Kessler cascade. In LEO, it’s virtually impossible: you get a nuisance, not SOL.
Note that Kessler posited his syndrome before we could computationally verify it. We can now. It’s not a real threat in the long term, and is more of an insurance question than existential issue for spaceflight in the medium term. It’s pertinent in the very short term, militarily, which is partly how we know it’s very difficult to trigger across even limited orbits.
A Starship second stage stranded in orbit would be a problem because detonation would cause a bunch of orbital debris, but simply waiting for natural re-entry would result in an unpredictable landing location that could result in large debris reaching populated areas.
Reliable, controlled re-entry to a targeted location is very important for Starship to be an operational launch system.
If you must watch on youtube, NSF or Everyday Astronaut typically have good (unofficial) livestreams.
The delay was between SpaceX recording and uploading an event and Everyday astronaut decoding it at their mixing desk. Their own feeds from their cameras and microphones had less delay than the SpaceX stream did. Everyday astronaut then had another delay between when they encoded this result and you saw it.
If you had opened up the SpaceX stream directly you would have found it was ahead of the stream shown inside Everyday Astronaut.
BTW I was also watching EA's stream.
I was cycling between the "official" stream and EA to try and catch the most-live and I found EA was a couple seconds ahead.
https://mashable.com/article/fake-elon-musk-crypto-scam-yout...
I recently reported a bunch of the SpaceX ones that were running for long time. Nothing happened. I think Google/Alphabet is just happy with the extra ad views.
This aspect needs regulation.
But, yes, they should be easy for YT to detect & block automatically - it's frustrating they (and other scams) get to stay online so long.
> But, yes, they should be easy for YT to detect & block automatically - it's frustrating they (and other scams) get to stay online so long.
It's the Google way. It's impossible until it suddenly isn't.
Break up this monster company and regulate the resulting companies until they behave.
Uh, seen the news lately? Not really going to happen.
It amazes me that NASA Space Flight managed to rip off the names of both the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Agency. Their coverage is good but that name is really misleading.
Love the diamonds in the exhaust!
But you can freely watch them live on Twitter. Just follow the official @SpaceX account.
SLS is around $ 37000 / kg to Orbit
Falcon 9 is around $ 2700 / kg to Orbit
Starship build cost is currently estimated at $90 million [1]. Let's call it $100 million to make the calculations simple. So even if they can't reuse anything and the payload is at the low-end of what they expect, so 100t from the 100-150t range, that would be $1 million per ton or $1000 per kilo. So 1/37th of SLS even when fully expendable.
With full reuse, the cost should come down to around $10/kg.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/rocket-report-a-new-es...
>Falcon 9 and SLS are not in the same class.
Not:
>Starship and Falcon 9 are not in the same class.
I just did, so you clearly can. And it is also meaningful.
In theory, a heavier vehicle should have lower cost to orbit, not higher, all else being equal, as some costs are constant overhead. And this theory turns out to be true when you have a comparable vehicle, the Falcon Heavy:
Falcon Heavy: $ 2,100 / kg to LEO (fully expended)
SLS: $ 37,000 / kg to LEO
If you only need 50t to LEO, price for the Falcon Heavy drops to $1,800 / kg as they can then reuse various components.
So SLS is already completely outclassed as things stand right now.
Then comes Starship. A fully expendable Starship, which they have pretty much demonstrated already, would be a further incremental improvement. Slightly lower cost, double the payload of Falcon Heavy, so around $1000/kg. Add even partial reuse, and you're probably in the $800/kg range.
And then you have full reuse, which they look to be close to demonstrating, which is a complete game changer. In the $10 / kg cost range. 3700x cheaper than SLS. That's two decades of Moore's Law kind of improvement. Absolutely crazy.
Human with food, water and air for a couple of days would be what, $5000?
That's my whole damn point. It ain't here yet. You're comparing SLS to a fantasy rocket. Starship needs to materialize before we compare IMO.
I personally don't think Starship will ever deliver humans to the moon (but I wouldn't mind being wrong).
Incorrect. I also compared SLS to both (a) Falcon 9 and (b) Falcon Heavy. Both of which dramatically outperform it in regular commercial flight.
Whereas SLS has had exactly one test flight.
And of course Starship exists. It has flown 5 times, which is 4 times more than SLS. And has landed both parts at least once, which is infinitely many times more than SLS ever will.
So which of these is the "fantasy rocket"?
Full rapid reusability is not.
SpaceX is focusing on the unsolved problem, and making significant progress.
Orion alone costs another $1 billion per shot [1]. Project cost is $21 billion.[2]
OTOH: "Since 2020, when Dragon 2 flew its first crewed and uncrewed flights, it has proven to be the most cost-effective spacecraft ever used by NASA." [3]
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/03/nasa-inspector-gener...
The moon architecture has been designed so that it requires SLS, not the other way around.
No rational planner would ever even consider SLS if they had a choice.
You would much rather launch distributed into LEO, assemble and go from there. The 2 billion $ a year could be spent on important things for the transition and the lander.
Cargo runs to ISS, bringing astronauts to and from ISS, NROL missions, scientific missions (like Europa Clipper recently).
As far as I understand the super heavy launch market doesn’t yet exist. Even if in payload mass capacity Starship can do it, we still need to see one with a payload door rather than a pez-satellite dispenser.
Ye of little imagination!
Just imagine how differently you can do space exploration when launch costs are not in the multi billion (SLS) or hundred million (Falcon Heavy) dollar range, but more like a million dollars.
You can send much bigger, heavier and cheaply constructed probes. And you can give them lots and lots more fuel, especially if you refuel them in-orbit, so less travel time.
Have a heavily shielded/armored Starship that launches small nuclear propulsion units into orbit that are then connected to the probes.
When launching a super heavy ($1 million for 100-150t to LEO) costs a small fraction of what a Falcon 9 launch costs today ($90 million), you can take over that entire segment as well, even without ride sharing.
Or consider CubeSats. They currently weigh around 2kg and ride share with a primary launch.
At $1 million per launch and 100 tons, you could launch 1000 CubeSats at 100 kg each, for $1000 per CubeSat. Though I am not sure if that would work out logistically.
Maybe 200 CubeSats at 500 kg each would be easier, $5000 a pop. Still very doable.
For me, it’s compelling but I’m no expert. Anyone got any background that can prove this guy is wrong?
On the first two he’s right. Starship was, per SpaceX’s proposal to NASA, supposed to be almost ready by now. It’s not. But neither is any other leg of Artemis, and there is no unforgivable delay in the timeline. (To the degree there are stupid delays, it’s because the FAA was playing water cop.)
Recapture is the easiest technical challenge of the programme. Partly because SpaceX already demonstrated most of the tech with Falcon 9. Partly because in-orbit refuelling is unprecedented. The lunar lander was one of the easiest parts of the Apollo programme, by similar measure—that doesn’t make it unimpressive.
The last—bad bang for the buck—is a value judgement. Do we want a heavy lift booster or more Mars rovers? If we want sustainable access to space, we need cheaper launch. If one doesn’t care about that, rovers are better spend, but at that point I can start arguing for feeding the hungry with those bucks.
I stopped watching when the criticism of Falcon 9’s price came up. Why should SpaceX, a private company, undercut itself? It’s already the cheapest (PSLV gives it a run for some orbits), most reliable and most frequent launch provider in the world. It makes sense to capture the delta as profit, in part to fund things like Starship. (There is also no inflation adjustment.)
In summary, the technical criticisms are accurate but out of context. The value judgement is subjective. If you don’t value cheap, frequent space launch of course Starship won’t make sense for any amount of money.
EDIT: Kept watching. The energy math on second-stage reëntry is okay as a first estimate. But we don’t have final numbers for anything. And there are a lot of unknowns, e.g. final dry weight, how much energy the heat tiles can store and dissipate, if transpiration cooling could work, how plasma could dissipate energy, whether compression heat could be redirected away from the craft, whether firing mid-descent could reduce heat, et cetera. We certainly don’t have enough data to reject it ex ante. And the second stage being unreadable doesn’t tank Starship, though it probably does Artemis.
Exactly, this is such an egregious claim that it proves there is no way this guy is arguing in good faith.
He says SpaceX only saves a tiny bit of money due to reuse because the retail price for F9 expendable is only a bit more than F9 reuseable.
That's like saying because the Big Mac costs $6.29 and the Big Mac combo costs $11.69, then therefore the drink and fries must cost McD's $5.40 to make. Just ridiculous.
They've taken the lion's share of the market by being quite a bit cheaper. It makes plenty of sense to keep the price there and put the resulting profits into R&D.
It had to deal with a lot of uncertainties which were unresolvable from a distance. But conceptually and developmentally it was one of the simpler elements. Certainly simpler than keeping humans alive in space or a launch vehicle programme.
Better analogy might be Gemini. One could similarly criticise Gemini (or any of the early Apollos) as being breathtakingly behind the task of landing humans on the Moon and then getting them back alive.
So by its own contract, it is just about to be over-budget, behind schedule, and thus a failed project. You can argue about the pandemic blowing their timing, but the fact remain.
But SpaceX is not treating the Starship as solely a moon landing project. They are using NASA's money presumably alongside other SpaceX and Starlink monies to produce a workhorse for a number of projects alongside the moon lander part. In the closer-term it will become the launch vehicle for Starlink (the next-gen of which is too big to be launched on other vehicles), and in the (very) long-term as a vehicle to Mars.
So SpaceX probably sees the Starship project as behind schedule (par for the course, both for space projects, and for Elon Musk), but not out-of-budget. Whether their customer, NASA, agrees with this outlook is something you would have to ask them.
So I think that the video's points are true, but lack some context.
Also, for a project like HLS, you don't fail until you stop trying (or get someone killed, but SpaceX has been pretty good at not killing astronauts).
The guy is just blinded by his hatred for Elon to even acknowledge one of the historical achievements SpaceX engineers worked their asses off for.
"musk wasting some $3 billion dollars of taxpayer money"
appears (2:49)
but that's not the deal. The actual deal, from Wikipedia:
>On 16 April 2021, NASA selected only Starship HLS for crewed lunar lander development plus two lunar demonstration flights – one uncrewed and one crewed – no earlier than 2024. The contract is valued at US$2.89 billion over a number of years.
and as far as I know they are still working on that. Compared to the last moon landings:
>According to The Planetary Society, The United States spent $25.8 billion on Project Apollo between 1960 and 1973. Converting 1965 dollars to 2024 dollars, that is $255 billion
it's a bargain. It was also a fraction of what Bezos and the other bidder quoted. Starship is not just a NASA funded project. SpaceX use their own funds and it will be used for things like Starlink commercially and maybe also Mars.
Thunderf00t on youtube goes on and on slagging Musk. I thought I'd count how many videos he's done slagging him but got bored counting at 37. There are better things to spend time on.
Saturn V went to the moon with crew on its sixth flight. Space X have yet to complete a flight without an accident or lift any payload at all, putting aside their claimed capability.
People seem so dazzled by the hype that they fail to see this system isn’t working.
Each rocket costs the taxpayer billions and this far they are being destroyed. Even worse the cost per seat with Space X in Falcon is not cheaper than Soyuz in real terms despite the reusability.
Wonder why the cost of refurbishing these rockets isn’t shared?
This will be downvoted but it doesn’t make any of it untrue. Space X is failing in front of cheering crowds who think they are inventing what they have copied.
It's also making meaningful progress with each launch. Comparing it to Saturn V seems like apples and oranges. This is a functional full flow liquid fueled rocket and booster at the current stage of development. They've also always been open about an iterative development approach (i.e. blow up more rockets). It's not Saturn V, so I'm not sure why we'd expect the same number of launches during development? Seems like a pretty arbitrary metric.
If it's not possible, I'm pretty sure this site is breaking the EU social media laws.
news.ycombinator.com##:matches-path(/^/item\?id=/) tr a.hnuser:has-text(/^dpifke$/):upward(tr)One example off the top of my head:
https://earthsky.org/space/final-parker-solar-probe-flyby-of...
Howevever, it's hard to view an announcement of the next launch with some minor additions to the experimental flight, as the most exciting space news today. Future launches, once they get the license updated, will he more exciting.
Launch costs significantly reduce what we can build in space and what research we co do there. Decreasing launch costs makes our research funding more effective and reduces the capital costs and projected profit margins needed to build space based infrastructure.
SpaceX has already enabled significant economic growth and innovation with the launch cost reductions brought by the various falcon rockets and their reusability.
If Starship can accomplish it's reusability goals, an ever greater reduction of launch costs is possible. This would jump start an even bigger space industry boom than the one we are in today.
The rest of your statement only indicates that Starship is indeed a fat pig when it comes to budget. This “boom” is all private for profit companies spending investment money. Not a “boom” in the sense that any man can get involved and benefit in the tangible future.
Pretending that everyone is going to be better off because of this space dream delusion doesn’t really answer my question.
Lower launch costs are a force multiplier for all of those technologies and more.
> This “boom” is all private for profit companies spending investment money. Not a “boom” in the sense that any man can get involved and benefit in the tangible future.
It sounds like your issue is more with capitalism than space...
But lower launch costs decrease the capital needed to particpate is space, so you point still doesn't make sense.
> Pretending that everyone is going to be better off because of this space dream delusion doesn’t really answer my question.
Everyone is already better off because of the soace dream. You don't seem to actually want an answer to your question.
Please give me the benefit of the doubt and help me understand what lower launch costs help with the average american today. I am asking an honest question to a different poster who originally indicated that the benefits were easily imaginable.
> We can easily imagine the things it will make possible.
I am trying to imagine how building reusable rockets leads to improving GPS and weather systems that decades of other fields that use those technologies couldn’t improve on already. What is this special low cost rocket sauce that enables it?
I can see the blind Marvel-movie-like fandom of “but it’s science” and “its our destiny” and “imagine all the wonderful things but don’t let me tell you ;)” but I do not see the actual details of what this will enable besides allowing Musk et al to hollow out planets for mining operations for their own gain.
Why would I want to answer my own question when I don’t understand what the original poster was suggesting?
You seem at a loss for these easily imaginable ideas.
Cheaper launch means more weather satellites covering more spectrum from more angles than otherwise.
> What is this special low cost rocket sauce that enables it?
Everything is dependent on cost. If we had a medicine that gave an extra 10 years of healthy life to everyone but cost $100,000,000 per person, it would be utterly infeasible to give to the masses. If it cost $100,000 - now that's an easy decision.
If something is cheap you can do more of it.
> I am trying to imagine how building reusable rockets leads to improving GPS
GPS satellites are incredibly expensive because they need to be light enough to fit in existing heavy lift launchers and reliable enough to last for 20+ years. Cheaper, heavier, more frequent launch means you can dramatically reduce the cost per satellite in a constellation, and thus send up more. Having more GPS satellites reduces time to first fix, improves coverage in adverse environments (cities in particular) and improves accuracy.
Is there some evidence that what we have now is not enough or wouldn’t ever be replaced? I cannot find anything online about that.
So I still do not see how this will necessarily improve my daily life as the weather information I have now is already good.
There are 3 new GPS satellites being launched by the US in 2025. Satellites do regularly need to be replaced; fuel runs out, batteries die or there os damage or failure. We also are developing newer and better satellites.
Satellite based internet is currently going through a revolution that is bringing internet access and economic opportunity to isolated small communities all over the world. This is a great example of new deployment that simply wasn't economically feasible with pre-SpaceX launch prices. This technology has so many potential positive impacts that it alone should justify reusable rockets. This is another application that could save the life of someone you love (better acess to emergency services in remote locations or deadzones).
Another incredibly valuable satellite industry is satelite based imaging. Timely, high precision satellite imagery is currently very expensive. Significant drops in the price would enable a unimaginable plethora of usec ases. Better wildfire monitoring, more efficient farming and ranching, search and rescue, etc.
On top of all this, starship development is actually comparatively cheap compared to how valuable space is. Losing GPS would cost the US alone 1 billion dollars a day which is why the US is planning on spending 2 billion building a backup. Starship RnD costs are estimated to somewhere near 10 billion total spread out over a decade or two.
For further comparison, I'll also note that the 2024 US presidential election cost us more 50% more than that. The entire space industry is worth about as much as the entire semiconductors industry (~600 billion) and McKinsie estimated that to triple in the next 10 years.
Finally, I'll say that what I've listed is the merest drop in the bucket compared to the uses we haven't figured out yet because space launch was so expensive.
An second order of magnitude drop in launch costs on top of the ond SpaceX has already delivered would be a big boost the the global economy in many ways, including some that are hard to predict on advance. If SpaceX can deliver a third order of magnitude drop beyond that (which has been claimed as possible with Starship) then the results would be staggering, completely transforming how we view and use space economically and enabling completely new types of space exploration missions.
The biggest problem right now is that nobody else is keeping up with SpaceX. We need more companies doing the same thing SpaceX is.
It’ll get much worse when you factor in the next four years.
You have to acknowledge that we could also spend a bunch of money and time doing this to no benefit at all for the average earth dweller.
I like the positive attitudes about it but the whole “this’ll be good in the long run, you’ll see” talk is just talk.
It was beneficial previously when we had 0 rockets and 0 sattelites, that was easy to see. Now that we have it, it’s just an R&D playground for the rich and those willing to invest in the dellusion.
I listed spefic gains from lower launch costs that are not theoretical and directly improve the lives of everyday people.
As I said before, you don't actually want an answer here.
It is very clear YOU don’t want to consider any other perspective than “of course everything is perfect and good from Starship”.
I will gladly eat my words when it is proven otherwise.
You've made up your mind so I'm not going to convince you. I'm only trying to debunk that for the sake of other readers.
More precise, more timely weather forecast will definitely affect your day. Better crop, more efficient cargo transport definitely have the potential to improve your life, your health, and lower your cost of living.
Starlink V2 is capable of gigabit internet, and it can only be launched on Starship. That can potentially affect your quality of life.
Starlink cell services can potentially save your life, if you're stranded on Everest. Maybe that isn't your game, but still.
Next time, when consider what may affect your life, think a bit deeper. The world is a lot more than just you.
Starship is not a new piece of tech, perhaps it’s refined tech but we were building rockets before. So the continued insinuation that we can only improve weather and gps via Starship is absolute snake oil.
Starlink also isn’t new tech, it’s just Musk’s flavor.
Yes thinking deeper and asking questions then asking how the answers can possibly be true will really affect my life. As evidenced by this thread where Starship enthusiasts are getting irritated and talking down to me. How’s the advanced weather prediction up their on your high horse?
Putting the same satellites into orbit for $1 million instead of $100 million means we saved $99 million. Which can then be put to other uses.
Lower taxes, spending on other programs, repaying the national debt, your pick.
The inventors of the internal combustion engines likely didn't imaging interstate systems and long distance freight shipping - and the economic boom they allow.
The original ARPANET engineers didn't imagine everything the internet could become - from this very site to youtube to Bittorrent.
No one at Apple thought of all of the things that would be built in the iPhone App store.
When prices become cheap enough, it unlocks other peoples creativity. By providing ever cheaper access to space, Space X (and hopefully soon competitors) is providing a new arena where entrepreneurs and engineers can invite entirely new things.
> ...but I do not see the actual details of what this will enable besides allowing Musk et al to hollow out planets for mining operations for their own gain.
Resources mined are useless if they aren't used for something; if asteroid mining makes money, it's because someone else is buying those resources so Musk isn't the only person benefiting. If there is large scale mining in space, there's probably broad economic benefit to that.