This approach had worked with the R7 rocket (the Sputnik and Gagarin's booster, predecessor of Soyuz). But at this larger scale, it seems things break apart much easier if not properly tested in parts.
Also compared to Super Heavy & Starship, they had more stages (4 vs 2) and most importantly, were not able to test the stages separately - which was possible for the Saturn V & IIRC all its stages exploded on the test stand at least once.
Both Super Heavy and Starship can be tested separately & Starship exploded during such testing, without taking the rest of the rocket with it, like N1 regularly did - including demolishing the super expensive launch pad during at least one occasion.
My fav Apollo-era fuckup is when they tested the launch abort system. The test went bad, but was 100% successful in demonstrating it worked. Heh. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DpdKxv9WINY
Getting to Apollo involved a lot of big booms, too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13qeX98tAS8
But we learned and improved fast.
Now that we have decades of rocket knowledge, we shouldn't be wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on giant explosions
I'm inclined to see Constellation/SLS/Orion/etc. as at least as wasteful as the explosions, at least so far. Which one wins out will depend on the end results.
I'd also note Apollo 13 was definitely a failure.
I might be a little bitter that NASA doesn't get that money instead.
NASA also got much cheaper launches out of it. They’re just fine.
It’s a very reasonable argument for little tchotchkes you sell to tourists but much less so when talking about critical technologies.
I mean, I would note that the first stage of this has 33 engines (N1 had 30, Saturn V had 5).
I suspect that Musks desire to have everything reusable has severely eaten into those margins though. I personally think he'd have been better off making only the first stage ('booster') reusable for the first few years, which then lets you develop more things in parallel later (the first landers can be on mars whilst you're still figuring out second stage reusability)
Going fully reusable may change that equation, but first stage reuse probably isn’t enough to make the program even close to worthwhile.
Questions like rate of successful launches, amount of payload sacrificed, etc really change the economics of the whole process. If the total payload is worth 1 billion a moderately more expense launch with higher success rate can be cheaper.
It's pretty clear there is barely enough commercial launch demand for falcon 9 (it already has ~100% of the non-foreign launch market, and there isn't a huge amount of price elasticity), so no reason at all to develop starship, apart from humans in space.
Mars is at best a long term goal for Starship, and far more likely to be just a nice story that Musk uses to motivate his engineers and investors.
It’s a terrible design for anything else, because it can barely get beyond LEO without in-orbit refuelling.
None of the competing rockets (e.g. New Glenn) resemble Starship in the slightest, because none of them are intended to fly to Mars.
Given SpaceX's business, it seems safe to assume that Starlink was a design goal with at least a similar priority to the Mars goal.
Another use case it'd work fabulous for would be a LEO space hotel business.
Finally, it's also a great rocket for any use case that involves returning large masses, even if the return is from higher than LEO. Yes, it'll be a thirsty beast requiring many refuelling trips, but the tyranny of the rocket equation makes it hard to do any better. If you want to return dozens of tons from the moon or elsewhere you'd be hard pressed to do better than Starship.
Then again, Musk is also big on reusing components as much as possible, so he might have opposed multiple fuels on principle.
You need much larger tanks, so the mass advantage is pretty much completely eliminated. Hydrogen engines generally have much lower thrust for a given size too. Falcon9 or Starship style staging is infeasible with a hydrogen second stage. Rockets that use hydrogen for their second stage separate a lot higher and faster than Falcon9/Starship to make up for this reduced thrust. This makes Falcon/Starship style 1st stage recovery impossible.
Hydrogen would be great for a 3rd stage. If you want it to be recoverable, design a third stage that fits within the Starship enclosure. This would be a fabulous way to do small BEO missions without requiring a whole bunch of refueling.
Blue Glenn stages much higher and further than Falcon; it's caught much further off shore. More significantly, it doesn't have a return to launch site option like Falcon does and Starship always uses.
For most purposes the customer does not care one iota about the booster, they are interested in the cost per kg to get where they are going. For low orbit hydrolox imposes more handling nightmare costs than it saves in amount of rocket, it is not the fuel of choice unless you're trying to impress.
(Now, things change considerably when you looking at deep space. But methalox or even kerolox fueled in orbit still beats hydrolox fueled on the ground. And hydrolox is much less storable--your rocket costs weight, necessary to reach orbit but once you're up there a smaller engine means less wasted mass. The only advantage to a bigger engine is Oberth and that is only truly relevant if you either care about time (Apollo took an inefficient path for this reason), or because you are going to carry velocity into deep space. Look at the flight path of the Webb. The booster flew higher than the maximum efficiency path because the deep space stage was puny. It wasn't powerful enough to circularize normally, the telescope fell back quite a bit before the engine had built up enough velocity to stay up. But it was worth wasting some energy on that in order to not lift as much engine away from the Earth.)
Settlement on Mars is out of one gravity well into another, so it's not clear if it's the best first location of a extraterrestrial human territory - Moon might be easier and more reasonable.
So the camp is split between Moon and Mars, and Musk has to be on Mars.
There is zero chance of building a self-sustaining base on either within the next fifty years, and probably within the next century.
It's not a freight problem, it's an ecology problem. Designing a life support system that is stable and self-correcting and isn't in danger of running out of some essential raw material or element isn't just an unsolved problem, it's a barely considered problem.
Ironically - or perhaps not - it would be much easier to create a self-sustaining population of machines on Mars and/or the Moon than any project that relies on incredibly complex and messy human biochemistry.
Earth science closed loop ecologists since the 60s would like a word with you...
The entire point of Biosphere 2 was to run a closed system for long enough to discover unexpected causes of failure.
Aka science.
Its not like its just some small details that need some fine tuning or funding to achieve and just around the corner. The scale of building just an empty multi-acre structure off earth to start would by itself dwarf all our previous space projects combined.
So unravel the major dynamics on Earth, and as on another body with gravity and sunlight (to a first approximation).
I don't think that's even ironic. It's the only viable path.
It should be like: robots keep 3D printing and launching giant capsule parts into L1/L2, which are to be robotically welded with captured asteroid inside so that the inside can be filled with all sorts of minimum viable tools until it's good enough to host life, and then interested life on Earth can choose to inhabit them.
We are not going to be welding space sailboats in an Apollo suits on Lunar surface and taking breaks on space prefab shacks. That just is not going to work.
Falcon Heavy put a car in a trans-Martian orbit, and Musk has been about Starship-like things going to Mars before SpaceX managed to launch the Falcon 1, let alone them getting a chance to bid for the return-to-Moon mission.
But the Artemis mission isn't really about doing things sensibly, it's about pork barrels. You can tell by looking at the wild disparity between the vehicles, where there's this complex process to put a handful of astronauts on a space station and transfer them to a landing vehicle… but the Lunar Gateway is smaller than Starship, and I think small enough you could fit all the parts of the Lunar Gateway inside the payload volume of one Starship.
If the USA wants to go to the moon for its own sake, they could do it cheapest by just paying SpaceX for a ride, not all the other contractors.
What sort of technologies become enabled when putting things in space gets cheaper?
The current wave of problems is likely caused by optimizations in the v2 of the rocket. Starship v1 was very conservatively built and mostly worked. They are trying to squeeze extra 25 per cent of payload capacity from v2 (from 80 to 100 tons on LEO), and they are running into the edges of multiple envelopes.
Raptor v2 BTW seems fine, the main issues are around the plumbing that feeds propellant into the engines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectron_(locomotive)
Now that would be high-speed rail.
For example 2 of the legendary JGR Class 8620 (nicknamed hachiroku) Japanese steam locomotives could be comfortably launched to orbit in 90 tons. :)
An Abrahams tank would be one designed to carry the Holy Hand Grenade.
:)
Why can't they be? NASA seems to test them on Earth. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19960007443/downloads/19...
Government-run vs private-run (partially govt-bankrolled). Single use vs fully reusable. Moon vs Mars. Traditional development vs iterative ("hardware heavy") development. There's just no parallels whatsoever.
Will the result be the same? We'll see. But the history says don't bet against Elon.
Btw N1 was a failure arguably due to Korolev's death, not his ineptness.
I don't think the comparisons are very apt.
The parts are not what are failing. It's the overall system.