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Comment by GMoromisato | Hacker News Reader

Starship is, essentially, Space Shuttle done right: fully reusable booster without solid boosters (avoids Challenger disaster) and orbiter stacked on top instead of on the side (avoid Columbia disaster).

The original designs for the Space Shuttle had the booster (with wings!) return to the launch site, but the cost for two new crewed vehicles was too large, so they scaled it back to the compromised version.

Even more revolutionary, compared to Shuttle, Starship is built on an assembly line. They can build a booster ever 4 weeks and a ship every 2 weeks.

The future we were promised in the 1970s is about to become real.

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I agree this is a good approach.

But the Shuttle became what it became for reasons that Starship doesn’t have to deal with. Shuttle had multiple masters (NASA and DoD) driving a bastardized design. The non-assembly line of NASA is a feature, not a bug: by spreading work across many congressional districts it mitigates political defunding risk. Im not defending those, but they are important context for those who pretend the differences are a signal of government incompetence.

not to mention shuttle as we knew it was never supposed to be its final form. the Block 1 Shuttles were more or less intended to be a MVP and they would follow along with Block II orbiters. But of course Block Two never happened, and we just got incremental updates of the block 1s.

Politicians don’t understand project development. “What do you mean we need to develop a new shuttle? We just spent billions on this one!”

I understand what you’re saying, but in a larger sense the fact that distributing labor and increasing costs is necessary as risk-prevention against our own politicians is a sign of a broken system of incentives and representation

Consider this: had they not, NASA may not exist. Considering Musk himself said SpaceX would not exist had NASA not bailed them out, it also means SpaceX likely wouldn’t exist. In other words, SpaceX also needed those distributed wastes, they just were externalities to the company. A broader context of the system is important when diagnosing systemic issues.

For me the takeaway of all of this is that you need both government and private sector involvement to produce a thriving space industry.

I usually agree that the hybrid approach gives the best outcomes. The govt is necessary when the risk is too great for private industry to bear and the private side tends to move faster on innovation.

NASA did not bail out SpaceX.

NASA paid SpaceX for a service, and SpaceX delivered that service on time and vastly cheaper than their competitors who were also paid by NASA (ISS resupply).

In the case of transporting humans to the ISS, SpaceX did it vastly cheaper than the competitor who was also paid by NASA. That competitor has never done what they were paid to do.

If there is anyone or anything to be angry at, it seems mighty strange to be angry at the company who actually did what they were paid to do when another company took much more money and didn’t deliver.

What anger are you talking about?

Fair, “bailout” is not a good term for an era where taxpayers give loans to floundering companies.

What Musk admitted to was NASA “saved” SpaceX with a last minute contract to prevent their bankruptcy. I would make the argument that SpaceX would not exist without all those early government contracts. It’s a shrewd business move: use a self-insured entity (the govt) when risk is the highest because it pushes the financial risk to the taxpayer, and gradually move to more privatized customers when risk is lower and insurance costs can make such launches economically viable.

I do agree Boeing CST was not run well and I’ve thrown plenty of ire there way. But that is an entirely different argument and a bit of whataboutism.

Taxpayers did not give a loan to SpaceX anymore than they gave one to any contractor they pay for a service.

The government paid SpaceX for a service, which was delivered as promised. This happens hundreds of thousands of times a year with tons of companies being paid to do things for the government.

I was clear that it was a contract that saved them from bankruptcy. A contract they could leverage for loans, but I clearly said contract. I wish HN would limit accounts that are very new and seem to misrepresent other posts.

You use the descriptor “broken system” to mean “the world is more complex than my fantasy of how it should be”

  >reasons that Starship doesn’t have to deal with

Good job SpaceX for avoiding the mistakes of the past!

They didn’t avoid them, they just passed them on to someone else

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50503535

Isn't the fact that spreading work across many congressional districts is necessary rather evidence of government incompetence?

That's not a mitigating factor!

"Before you walk away thinking the government is incompetent, please remember that the government makes bad decisions on purpose" ??

There’s a common theme in HN discussions where people mistake understanding a system for evangelizing it. Really nothing could be further from the truth.

this is well and truly common all over the internet -- you explain how some system, something fairly non-technical even, say, a common social failing, some institutional bias or what-have-you, works, and you have a bunch of people go on the offensive as though you've just endorsed the thing. so you have to hedge practically anything with a token virtue-signal, even in communities where it's pretty strongly implied that you're on the same page about considering the thing bad.

if you'll indulge a tangent, i can only chalk up the increase in this phenomenon over the time i've been online to the consolidation of online discussion to a handful of sites that have become ever more adept and efficient at creating filter bubbles. and it's always the sites where that hasn't taken root, where everyone's seeing the same thing, that then catch a reputation for being hellholes full of terrible people, because naturally, the majority of people engage with those sites not directly, but through screenshots shared on the major socials, and those major socials are incentivised to push you content that you engage with. then, as we all know, angry people click more. so of course as a user of one of those major socials, a majority of those screenshots the site pushes you end up being those that depict speech your own filter bubble cohort finds abhorrent. hn is actually subject to this dynamic a little bit.

It’s evidence that they are solving different problems. Does the fact that Musk spends hundreds of millions on election cycles mean he’s incompetent, or he’s trying to mitigate a political risk you and I don’t have to deal with?

Sure every system has its unique problems but when you cut to the results, one is clearly way more efficient.

As said elsewhere, that simplistic take falls apart when you realize there would not be a SpaceX if there wasn’t a NASA.

I'm not super convinced that the commercial aerospace industry really needed NASA once super high value satellite services came about in the 90s.

The ideal of a good government industry program, is to create a domestic industry, and A: maintain it at a minimum level for whatever goal is in focus (defence, technology familiarity, investment certainty). And B to help it grow to be independent of the government, so the profits and funding can go elsewhere.

To me, most of what NASA did after Skylab are a bit questionable. With most of the high profile stuff being of limited value compare to the RF and solid state electronics projects.

I mean, Musk himself stated SpaceX needed NASA. New entrants especially benefit from a self insured customer because private industry won’t accept that level of risk.

I agree with a lot of your point, but would probably caveat a lot of the JPL work.

NASA did not invest in SpaceX. What they did was buy launches from SpaceX. Musk risked everything he had on SpaceX.

I mean, considering nothing like it had been done before (or since) kinda proves the inefficient approach worked. I'm not defending gov inefficiency but often it still leads to good results somehow (and also major disasters, sigh)

What does worked mean in this context? A barely reusable craft that risked human lives to launch mundane satellites and was so unreliable DOD stopped using and was so expensive NASA couldn’t afford to keep it running?

One system is way better at doing the thing that it was designed for.

The other system is way better at doing the thing that it was designed for.

And since both of the design goals are important, having both systems is a good thing.

It really depends to what degree you're willing to ignore the externalities.

Can see your point, that spreading the constructions sites across different states was necessary in order to get it built, but in terms of pure engineering, this is probably a negative.

Guess the point is that generally speaking, large scale engineering is typically not done at efficient and creative-levels when directed by the government. Governments have too many stakeholders that have needs that have little do with with engineering that need to be satisfied

...And of course, there are exceptions -guessing the Gemini and Apollo programs would be a good examples.

... oh, and am not trying to call you out, just trying to think through this for myself as well.

What makes you think Gemini and Apollo are counterexamples? They were successful, but were also heavily dependent on contractors and occurred when NASA funding was many multiples of today’s budget when measured by percentage of GDP.

Well, they seemed like highly effective government programs as they were able to get people to the moon under a very tight deadline (and also knew they were extremely expensive programs. Kind of crazy the amounts relatively to gdp they were spending).

And, if they weren't, backs up that the government is not typically a good overseer when it comes engineering programs

(although, still seems like when there is a very strong need, governments can be very good partners).

There is nothing inherently wrong with 'government' providing the source of funding for these programs, and there's nothing wrong with spreading parts of the program across different regions. In fact, in a way it can be cheaper. With the Apollo testing facilities in Mississippi, the Apollo program being built out of Huntsville, and the other 7 locations across the US--you can adequately tap higher end talent while moving some components to cheaper locations to work on.

Agree actually. The government basically funded Spacex for Falcon 9 through the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, and probably some of Starship's development too. Yeah, the funding wasn't the question, it's whether the government is a good overseer of programs like this.

Regarding spreading the parts of the development/manufacturing across different regions, am sure there are good benefits to doing this, and cost efficiency is definitely one of them (Boeing's manufacturing is a great example, as well as most auto companies). So yeah, you're right there. But when the government does it, it often is for political reasons, so you wonder if they really do gain cost efficiencies? Hmm...

Personally, my take is the earlier in the development process you are of a product (or vehicle), the better it is to keep everything tight knit (yeah, am a believer in the major concepts of agile development - small, integrated teams working close together, able to iterate fast). And feels like this is also true for design teams in general, no matter what the size of the company. It pays to keep them together as much as possible.

But the more mature a product gets, like a car company that's been building cars for decades, it seems like spreading out manufacturing could be a cost savings.

No, he's trying to bully his way into forcing the government to do what he wants, and he can because he is extremely wealthy. It just happens that in this case, it yields something useful. That is a poor model, the rich should not arbitrarily get their own way.

“Solving different problems” means intentionally creating inefficiencies in an engineering project so that voters can get a little cut of the government funding. It’s a roundabout way of buying votes.

It shows that the government’s incentives are not aligned with the project’s goals and why privatization works better for this type of project.

Solving different problems is a good way to put it, but to even be in that position implies they’re trying to meet false objectives and artificial constraints that are beyond the scope of the original endeavor even if there’s some intersection remaining. These extra constraints I imagine have a high likelihood of compromising the original objective by forcing tradeoffs that don’t move the needle and carry costs with ill spent efforts.

It's more like the cost of the political system we run. Yes, it's not the most streamlined, but it's stable. Quite a number of people yearn for the efficiency of a system under one will of an enlightened monarch. We have a bunch of examples, from Lycurgus and Cyrus back in the day to Mr Putin today; there is a cost to such a system, too.

It’s always entertaining to hear engineers ridicule inefficient government programs while simultaneously setting up a load balancer, backups, or a high-availability db cluster. Completely unable to generalize the lesson that redundancy and overhead aren’t necessarily bad, and that efficiency is in tension with other desirable attributes in every system, political, biological, computational, whatever.

I wouldn't call it incompetence. It's more a sign of government misalignment.

I see misalignment as a form of incompetence.

It's evidence Congress is/was little more than a bunch of clowns.

The government engineers and scientists that worked on the space shuttle were not.

Also it's trivial to be an armchair expert decades removed from actual events.

publicly funded means funded by the people. its not really unreasonable that people demand the economic benefits of investing their money to be spread around a bit.

its not ideal from logistics POV, but it is not what I would take as the prime example of incompetence. its just the government way of doing thinngs.

If the economic benefit summarized as employment, then the goal is wrong. And indeed space conquest oftem just makes our child brains dream, instead of being something useful per itself. So we tout employment and side-effects as a prime benefit of space. Why not create a broken-window factory, it will create more jobs.

The "government" doesn't make those decisions, it's the political class that chooses to do those choices of putting money in each district.

> Isn't the fact that spreading work across many congressional districts is necessary rather evidence of government incompetence?

Government issue? Or, let's be more honest, the issue here is with the people expecting government programs to become job programs?

Everything you said sounds like arguments for government incompetence to me.

> The original designs for the Space Shuttle had the booster (with wings!) return to the launch site, but the cost for two new crewed vehicles was too large, so they scaled it back to the compromised version.

Can you cite a source for this claim? My understanding is that the control algorithms for landing a rocket did not exist at the time of the space shuttle. The algorithms were invented in 2010s[1] and space shuttle operated from 1981-2011[2]

[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6428631

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle

Private industry tends to be far more efficient at making “stuff that works” than a non-profit governmental organization.

Even for all the genuinely good and smart people that worked for NASA over the decades, the bureaucratic machinery that makes it run eventually becomes so convoluted, corrupt and bloated for its own good.

I should know; I worked there for over a quarter of a century. Nothing beats the private industry for “making shit that works.”

I really think it depends. For long running projects with high ongoing costs like a launch vehicle, I agree. The issue with government projects of this type is that they eventually turn into jobs projects, and that can compromise the main goals of the projects.

But NASA has had some phenomenal successes in their science expeditions - the Webb Space Telescope (and its Hubble precursor, despite its need for "glasses"), the Mars rovers, Voyagers, etc. Those projects would have largely been impossible in the private sector because there is no monetary return.

> Private industry tends to be far more efficient at making “stuff that works” than a non-profit governmental organization.

If that were true, then why doesn't the US have a single high speed train?

NASA projects are well-known to be expensive because they, similar to military procurement in the US, are handled like inofficial job creation projects involving as many states as possible.

> If that were true, then why doesn't the US have a single high speed train?

Because building/modifying rails crossing many states and cities means having to deal with a unending shitload of bureaucrats at single every level of power.

While sending something up straight in the air and then into space means all those little bureaucrats from all those cities/communities/states do not get a say in the matter.

A big reason for the lack of new US trains is that it's very hard to buy all the needed land under the US system.

In most of the world the landowners have far less rights.

The decade(s) long environmental reviews of every piece of land used for the project is also a huge force agains any such projects.

If the legalities were handled, I expect US train builders would excel at building high speed trains. In reality, we'll never know.

Apparently it's also a problem for people building ICBM silos.

> If that were true, then why doesn't the US have a single high speed train?

Planes are faster, cheaper, safer, require much less infrastructure, go anywhere to anywhere, scale elastically with demand, and have less emissions per passenger mile than high-speed trains.

> and have less emissions per passenger mile than high-speed trains

The optimal high speed train is about two orders of magnitude more efficient than the equivalent flight on a passenger mile basis. Might look a little different for crossing oceans or thin routes where it's really not worth building a thousand miles of rail to replace a flight a day, but lack of demand between nearby cities or is not why the US doesn't have any high speed rail network...

Efficient in what terms? Dollars per mile? In the usa?

> Planes [...] have less emissions per passenger mile than high-speed trains.

This claim is not even in the right ballpark.

The US rail network was created by private industry, including both freight and passenger. This included many of the fastest passenger trainsets at the time, like the Zephyr. In 1971 the US nationalized passenger rail into Amtrak, and Amtrak stopped using off-the-shelf trainsets and managed the development of their own, similar to NASA developing the Space Launch System (the space shuttle) for their use. At that point, the US started falling behind on rail speed records.

In short, the US had stuff that works, including the fastest trains, when run by private industry, but after nationalizing the industry into a non-profit governmental organization, they stopped producing stuff that works.

This is an overly simplistic take. In many cases, the private industry moves and innovates faster. In many others, it injects its own forms of waste (regulatory capture, profiteering over mission, etc)

Then why didn’t private industry beat NASA to all the space milestones?

No profit in going to the moon or putting people in space.

The government was the customer, so it was up to them to decide what to do in house and what to hire out. They chose to manage the project in house, creating specific design requirements and contracting out work to meet those requirements, not to create the designs.

Private industry did do most of the work, but they had no leeway to influence the design. Even when they tried to make choices, e.g. Morton Thiokol's Engineers' no-go decision on the Challenger launch due to low temperatures, NASA administrators effectively overrode that decision, by directly calling unqualified employees at Morton Thiokol, until they found one they could pressure into giving a go.

Who do you think designed and built all those NASA ships that made the space milestones? Mostly Boeing, Rockwell, and Lockheed

Space shuttle was a reliable recovery vehicle too.

I see a need for maintenance crews and large payload recovery in the future.

Starship doesn't seem like the tool for that, and no tool is in development for it TMK?

no reason you couldn't make a starship with a cargo bay for recovery, it would just cost a considerable amount of payload mass

Sure, and the starship is just a scaled up falcon with more raptors..

But here we are 12-15 years later and it's still not operational.

This would require it being safe for and having facilities for crew. Tool and machinery for service and recovery. The vessel would need to handle re-entry stress with return payloads on board. The heat tiles would need to support the extra mass. The vehicle capture system. Etc. Etc.

Could it all be built on the starship "platform"? Maybe.. One day. But that day is not this day.

Recovery never paid dividends for Shuttle, due to satellites' degradation in orbit, and SPCX seems to have driven the industry even further from 'exquisite systems'. I love the idea of in-orbit servicing, but I am not sure it will ever work for unmanned objects.

The economics and use cases have and are evolving.

I don't see this as "space shuttle done right" as a vehicle or "program" without the ability to carry out maintenance and recovery missions. As expensive as it was, for various reasons, it was actually used for those missions.

For example I don't think "space data centers" are going to work if the upgrade path for the hardware is vaporize it all and replace it vs recover and recycle/resell.

I don’t believe economics works for upgrading of space data centers. Sunlight is free, you can still use it with prev generation gpus just fine.

Recycling costs money and reselling isn’t worth it so ground data centers won’t be different.

Once you get mass into orbit it's more economical to keep it there so rather than recovery to Earth it would be better to build the facilities in orbit to perform maintenance, refurbishment and refuelling. Starship should make that feasible.

That is predicated on it being expensive to get mass to orbit.

> and no tool is in development for it

The more cost effective approach is now repair-in-place. Startups in early orbital testing include Starfish Space (autonomous satellite life extension, orbital repositioning/inclination changes, and active debris disposal) and Katalyst (Multi-arm robotic capture, hardware upgrades, and orbital repositioning).

The question on my mind is; does repair-in-place make economical sense for commercial satellites?

Old-space satellites are expensive, so on-orbit repair theoretically makes sense here. The largest obstacle to cost-effective repair in that domain is the one-off nature of these vehicles. This means each repair mission requires R&D, manufacturing, and testing before launch. So for this method to be effective, the repair mission needs time before any faults become lethal. I'm not super confident about resuscitation either; off-nominal thermal/power can cook electronics beyond repair. Plus, any RPO mission risks accidental damage.

And on the other hand, new-age satellites like Starlink are build cheap(er) and designed for replacement. Why bother with repair when you can just build and launch another?

It seems like you're also a satellite repair nerd, so I'd love to hear any thoughts you might have :D

the satellites are life limited whether they have noticeable faults or not (mostly by the remaining propellant, but also by TID radiation and payload obsolescence), and any sensible repair-in-place mission aims to proactively repair satellites near the end of their practical life rather than reactively responding to issues. The robotics (and fluid transfer for refuelling) are basically there, you just need satellites with an architecture that enables repair/replacement/refuelling to move beyond demonstrators. And most satellites are not built in that way.

As for whether it's worth it, it depends a lot on the satellite and the orbit. Starlink: probably not worth upgrading. Geostationary satellites: there's a reason why what goes up there commands oldspace prices (long way up, intensive radiation environment) and that reason also justifies serviceability. Hypothetical LEO datacentre with most of the mass being solar panels and radiators that last a lot longer than the chips are commercially relevant: yeah, probably makes sense to have the chip payload swappable and the thrusters refuellable.

A mission for one satellite to repair a lot of others is complex (it's basically an extra-hard version of the travelling salesman problem) but when the alternative is inserting many entirely new satellites into n orbits, sending a tiny fraction of the mass to n orbits via a reusable servicer starts to make a lot of sense...

Exactly, the scale and scope of payloads is increasing as launch costs are decreasing.

If starship launches ever get anywhere near the 2m-10m claim.. Suddenly fixing or retrieving that 500m-2bn satellite. Or rotating the compute modules on that 150bn space datacenter constellation..

Honestly I could envision regulation requiring it at some point.

It could conceivably capture near-dead satellites and bring them back, deorbit them, or send up a payload of multiple repair ships.

The cost to launch may get to the point that it is cheaper to replace than repair, and we can build 10 of a satellite instead of 1 bespoke unit per program.

What about recovery as a means of espionage? One of the Shuttle use cases floated was to recover Soviet satellites and other tech like film imagery.

That’s what the X-37 is presumably for.

X-37 can and has launched in a Falcon Heavy.

Is that possible within the prop margins?

I don’t see the need, but why isn’t Starship a fit for that?

Because it can't do it?

I see no reason it can’t?

Other than it can't? Where is evidence? It's not there yet.

It can fly up, back, and has payload capacity in both directions.

The Space Shuttle took 2 people into orbit on its first launch and returned them safely to earth. On the first attempt. On the first test of any of the hardware into space. In 1981.

Starship did not and has not done that and until it does I will continue to hold reservations.

I do not see this Starship and its mission profile ever being a human-rated system in this incarnation, ever.

A really cheap way to launch mass into LEO? Sure, I'll give it that.

> I do not see this Starship and its mission profile ever being a human-rated system in this incarnation, ever.

May I know why ? And if the feat was done by NASA or China, would you change your conclusion?

The system architecture seems to be more fragile than simple capsules with parachutes or even the shuttle (which was already pretty dangerous). There’s no parachute, if you don’t hit the tower during landing you’re in a lot of trouble (unless they can soft-land the ship without the tower and without the bottom exploding?).

“the system is more complicated” is not a good argument for it never working.

A passenger airliner is vastly more complicated than a parachute, yet both work.

(You’re also in a lot of trouble if you don’t hit the runway in an airliner)

The problem isn’t “it’s more complicated” but more “if something goes wrong there’s not a lot you can do”. There’s basically no redundancy and a lot of single points of failure. Having two sets of Parachutes is a lot harder to screw up than a powered landing.

With a normal capsule, you have multiple fuel tanks and redundant RCS thrusters so you’ll practically always be able to deorbit and land (since you also have redundant parachutes). If starship has a fuel leak, how are you going to land, even if you’re able to deorbit?

If they reach the launch cadence they're aiming for, the fix for a lot of things is going to become "just send another Ship".

That's not an answer to the "is this safe for humans?" question.

Gliding into a large body of water, or maybe just a flat stretch of land? Planes do that sometimes.

Problems detected during orbit? Sure.

But during landing? You can't send another ship to rescue the crew that is aboard another Starship that just failed being caught.

An airliner has layers upon layers of safety redundancies.

There are multiple flight computers. Practically every essential sensor has copies. Oxygen generation, ram air turbine, life jackets, inflated boats. Onboard radar. TCAS. The airplane itself glides. Then there are thousands of procedural rules and regulations for safe operation.

A system like starship that relies on precise active propulsion has no such room for error.

You've clearly padded your list to look more negative because your last sentence only applies to the glide part... Starship obviously has the same redundant flight computers and sensors and radar and TCAS and will have thousands of procedures for safe operation.

Starship’s been in development for over two decades and the design keeps being changed and failing.

Soyuz has a very impressive record, Starship has been horrifically mismanaged by comparison. The falcon heavy flew 14 times and SpaceX is all in on a heavy launch vehicle because what? Even if they hit every target perfectly from now on it was a wasteful project.

The design changing and the development _failing to meet its stated deadlines_ is not a good argument for the system never working. Especially given we know the deadlines were unrealistic to begin with, yet significant milestones have been achieved in (deadline-ignoring) impressive time frame - like landing a second stage rocket from orbit within 8 years of development (by a private company, not a national effort).

Not paying off isn’t the same thing as never working.

Opportunity cost is a real thing. The obvious alternative buying stock (or handling out dividends to investors who buy stocks) would have created a new revenue stream larger than a working starship in 2027 represents.

Thus even if nothing else fails, the project was a poor investment. The market just isn’t big enough that making launch cheaper would be worth it at this point, profits might grow in the future but the deficit keeps growing in the meantime.

Falcon 9 had numerous landing failures early on.

They're averaging over 2 successful launches+landings per week now, and it's so routine that nobody cares.

An addendum to this is that Falcon's 85th launch was Demo-2 (30 May 2020)... 10 years after Dragon Spacecraft Qualification Unit.

> Starship’s been in development for over two decades

What? The first version of something that looks anything like Starship was the ITS announced back in 2016, later "BFR" in 2017 and the stainless steel version (which is now flying) in December 2018.

Eight years is very reasonable for a fully reusable heavy lift system - something no one has built before.

The Space Shuttle took roughly 12.5 years from formal concept studies to its first flight (and 9 years from official program approval)

Space Shuttle was an even harder project. Amendments to the Starship project were all directed towards making it fly better. Modifications which various departments demanded from the Shuttle project made it a worse and worse spaceship. They even had to let go of the emergency recovery capability, which eventually led to death of 10 astronauts.

It would not change my conclusion at all.

If you asked me if I wanted to return to earth on something that glides like a plane and lands on a runway with no propulsion... or a pressure vessel that needs it's engines to work perfectly to get you back to a single spot at the pad, within a few meters, to be 'caught', and if that doesn't happen, you hit the ground vertically and explode...

I know which one I'm taking. Yes I know the shuttle had no 'go-around' as a glider. But wings and wheels and a big runway in the desert.... versus the insane acrobatics of Starship...

We haven't seen how Starship would deal with crosswinds in the atmosphere being predicted wrong. What happens when it knows it is off course on the way down and can't make it back to the pad? If there were people onboard? I assume there would be a contingency where it just vents fuel and hits the ground and hopes to act as a crush-can at terminal velocity but I don't know how people survive that. By comparison, ditching the shuttle like a plane with an engine-out failure seems easy by comparison.

I am not demeaning the amazing achievement of the Starship and its booster and this ability to catch it and reuse it. I think that is indeed an amazing achievement that should be celebrated. But I don't see this as being a thing to put people on that can somehow be intrinsically safer than the Shuttle, just yet. These are just my basic opinions, I think they are opinions with some merit, and I don't feel that deserves downvotes.

that's not going to happen, Artemis is using Orion with parachutes to land in the ocean

I mean, I could see an option being a detachable landing pod for human missions. Or, more crazily, and I'm not sure of the dimensions but some space-plane like the Dream Chaser or whatever that could fit in the cargo bay then deorbit separately after it's done it's mission? There's a lot of ideas. And we're going to learn so much about how to do reusability now that we just didn't know before. But I would not be surprised if some cockamamie version of this wasn't human rated eventually.

Obviously, we're a really long way away from that from a reliability standpoint? But you know, if they launch 10,000 of these over the next decade... we're going to know a lot more about the safety of this design. I'm sure they'll clobber one in to mechazilla eventually? But what if they don't?

Agree with this:)

> We haven't seen how Starship would deal with crosswinds in the atmosphere being predicted wrong.

Winds are not a significant factor in the trajectory of the ship. Reason is that it spends almost all of it's time very high, above all weather, and only descends to the less stable areas of the atmosphere at the very end, when it's in a vertical belly-flop, going very rapidly through all the different weather layers. You can see this clearly in the return video, at 2 minutes before landing it was still 15km up. And when it's high, it has much more ability to steer by adjusting drag than any winds can move it up there.

What could actually be a problem is sudden high winds or other problems at the landing site. The ship commits to a landing when it does the deorbit burn ~60m before landing. at L-20m, it has about 1000km of cross-range capability, at L-10m only 200km, and after that it goes down quickly, with only 50km at L-5m.

If it's coming back with something valuable, you'd better have plenty of divert options.

Hmm, interesting question. Just brainstorming there, but it seems like there are going to be specialized versions of starship: - a tanker (for in space refueling) - a moon lander

Could see one that is specialized for taking humans into space and then returning them to Earth. It could have a dedicated abort vehicle that takes over the top half of the ship (similar to the abort vehicles they have now on most human-rated rockets). And maybe it uses landing legs instead, because they're more fault tolerant than a catch tower. All this might take up a ton of weight, but starship can carry so much tonnage to space, they'd probably still have a lot of tonnage left for humans and cargo.

Yeah, it could be pretty amazing, able to to take hundreds into orbit instead of just a handful.

Two of the 135 total SLS (space shuttle) launches were destroyed. Two of the last 600 Falcon 9 boosters were destroyed on landing.

If I had to ride along in one of them, I'd choose the Falcon 9 booster over the space shuttle.

Also, the Columbia failure occurred because it was a glider. The Starship doesn't have any leading-edge tiles for debris to fall onto. Arguably, the Challenger failure also occurred because it was a glider, which required the odd fuel tank and booster mounting that failed.

Because it blows up more than gets into orbit.

You're saying a development rocket that is pushed past the expected limit fails? Amazing...

Even taking you seriously, it has made it to effective orbit more than it has exploded. Nearly all 'landings' have exploded, because that's what happens when you intentionally land a 30 story building full of fuel in the open ocean

> You're saying a development rocket that is pushed past the expected limit fails? Amazing...

Where did i deny it was not a work in progress ?

So why pretend it is a success until it is ready ?

> Nearly all 'landings' have exploded, because that's what happens when you intentionally land a 30 story building full of fuel in the open ocean

Thanks for agreeing with me.

Huh? Space shuttle killed 14 astronauts. It was a flawed design from the beginning and never delivered on its original promise.

Starship has its own design trade-offs, as any engineered object does, but it has the benefit of 50 years of technological development since Shuttle.

I'm not as certain as you about whether or not Starship will ever be human rated. But if successful, it will be launching a couple of hundred times per year. Talk to me in five years and we'll see where we are then.

I don't think it makes sense to make starship human rated. They'd likely give up too much. Probably better to have a different cheaper rocket for the people.

Like you don't build a barge to ferry standards, it would defeat the point of the barge.

Maybe you're right--I don't know. But large freight airplanes are the same as large passenger airplanes, except for the seats, etc. I think the same might be true for Starship.

Freight airplanes have additional reinforcement to increase max takeoff weight and manage uneven floor loading.

Starship is a lot cheaper than it looks, because they're mass manufacturing the engines. They're targeting $250k per Raptor 3. The RS-25 used on NASA's SLS/Space Shuttle costs about $100M to make currently, comparable thrust.

I'd rather have something that's well-tested before I put people in it.

The most damning thing I've seen on starship was a video that described how little space there is inside for the humans Elon said it would hold. Something like urban transit personal space.

Reeeally scraping the bottom of the grievance barrel there.

That is practically all spaceflight. The Apollo LEM - which landed on the moon - had ~2.3 m^3 per person. The command module had ~2 m^3 per person. There is nothing unusual there and depending on how you configure the interior it could be relatively spacious.

I believe the question was lack of space for food and water to go to Mars.

How is incremental development and testing related to human-rated flight?

As is, your comment has a bold claim backed by seemingly unrelated fact.

My comment was in reply to the parent comment saying "Starship is, essentially, Space Shuttle done right" , and my claim is that this is not the case, that comparing Starship to the Space Shuttle is a category error, in that I don't see Starship actually being replacement for the Shuttle as a human-transport vehicle, and thus it cannot be considered 'Space Shuttle done right'.

> that comparing Starship to the Space Shuttle is a category error

Both are second stages that return from orbit to Earth. Seems a pretty valid comparison on these fundamentals to me.

(Yes, I know you're extending the comparison to human-transport but that is not fundamental to their ability to take payload to orbit and return, as the Starship can fly without on-board pilots.)

isn't the whole "we put a human into space" symbolic anyway? There's no air up there. If we had a full supply chain of robots that brought us back regolith from the moon wouldn't that be more useful than being able to send a person up there?

nah humans going is the point. the science is interesting but not of that tremendous value. we don't view archaeology as the highest human endeavor do we?

It can be both, right? Like, we can put humans there and expand the resources available to humanity immensely by sending teams of robots out to manufacture the future habitats, etc.?

Personally, I'm looking forward to joining the Elench. Humans are allowed to join the Elench aren't they?

What exactly is “the point” of humans going there, other than science? Telling a hero story that ignores the contributions of hundreds of thousands that made this possible? Gratifying a few mammoth-sized egos?

You have to start with a justification for "the point" of human life at all which is a struggle with some people who only see utility in whatever their equivalent of a quarterly balance sheet is (this includes publishing papers in academic journals).

I don’t understand why justifying human spaceflight supposedly requires grand philosophical ramblings about the meaning of life. Justifying brushing your teeth doesn’t require that either, does it?

What is the point of humans here on Earth exactly? Some consider that humans can be replaced by AI today/in near future. Should we just give up and live space to a more advanced civilization?

The shuttle had a 2/135 death rate. If Starship becomes the core infrastructure for Starlink, it'll be able to afford hundreds of launches before putting humans on it. You won't have to trust some theoretical calculations, you'll just be able to see in practice what the risk of a Starship launch is.

More importantly, those deaths were both caused by substantial design flaws, not by freak accidents.

Bad things happen, and spaceflight is a hard problem. But that’s not what killed two Shuttle crews.

Design flaws that you don't know about yet are still design flaws.

I'm sure there are plenty of "accepted design flaws" in SpaceX vehicles. Hopefully SpaceX engineers are better at calculating the probabilities than NASA was, but I would not volunteer for early missions.

The two programs don’t manage risk the same way. You’re picturing a younger NASA trying to do the same process as led to the first space shuttle launch.

With the Challenger disaster, the contractor's engineering team that developed the booster gave a no-go for launch and NASA administrators showed off their engineering skills by using social engineering to trick an unqualified and unapproved employee of the contractor into signing the form to go for launch. That's far worse than being bad at calculating the safety risks; the specifically overruled the decision by the people that were good at calculating the safety risk.

Source: Truth, Lies, and O-Rings by Allan J. McDonald, James R. Hansen, and Jonathan Yen

dumb question, but at what point does the cost of fuel start to become an issue with such frequent launches? today I imagine launch cost is dominated by the price of the nonrecoverable parts, but fuel will become the floor no?

Yes, but it's an order of magnitude difference. Today a Falcon 9 launch cost ~$20 million, mostly because they throw away the second stage.

Propellant for a Falcon 9 launch is ~$500K.

Starship is more efficient than F9 but in terms of multiple launches per day, the supply chain is indeed a factor. An hourly launch cadence is going to consume roughly as much natural gas as Houston.

All back of envelope here just to get a rough order of magnitude:

Starship needs 10kg (0.5mcf) of methane and 36kg of oxygen per kg to orbit. The oxygen takes 22kWh to liquefy or about (0.16mcf to generate that onsite). So 0.66mcf/kg to orbit and 66,000mcf from to fully fuel.

That is the daily gas usage of a midisze city, say 200k population, per launch.

For liquid oxygen, Spacex is building an air separation plant at its facility in Texas to grab it from the air.

For methane, didn't know this but looked it up, methane is one of the cheapest propellants, but rocket grade methane needs to be purer (starship is estimated to cost $300k to $1 million to refuel)

Isn’t starship supposed to be integral to the Artemis project in say… a year.

Sure but it doesn't launch or land humans on Earth, which is the hardest part. And that's fine for now. Once it's launched and landed a few hundred times we can think about launching people on it.

For political reasons. SLS is far less safe a vehicle than Starship, but it is injected into Artemis for political reasons.

Eh.

I like the rocket less, imho solids have no place in human spaceflight, but the Orion has a LES, which elevates it to being more safe than any spacecraft without one.

I'm a big Starship fan but I'm not convinced it's safer than SLS yet.

Liquid fueled rockets are intrinsically safer than solid fuel rockets. There is a floor on just how low you can get the risk level with solid fuel, you can't test the rockets you fly, and the failure mode is catastrophic blow-up à la Challenger.

It's like saying flying is safer than driving per passenger-mile. It is. By orders of magnitude. I don't care how safe your new Volvo or electric vehicle is, flying in a helicopter is still safer, and a passenger jet vastly more so.

"But Starship blew up 5 times!" Yes, and flying a test plane is dangerous too. Apples to oranges. Starship and SLS have vastly different design certification strategies. SLS spends 100x as much to deliver something that works as reliably as it ever will by the second or third launch. SpaceX gets Starship flying quickly and discovers bugs in prod. So you see more failures. But even now, Starship is probably safer than SLS ever will be. If not now, then very, very soon.

You're telling me starship is safe for humans when they failed to land the booster?

How about we let them succeed first before pressuring them to perform and inevitably embarrass themselves because the silly SpaceX fans were too smug on the internet.

SLS has an abort mechanism. That alone mitigates most risks of the first stage in a way starship never can, meaning the latter has to fight an uphill battle to deliver the same safety through flight numbers and experience.

Not only that, but Starship is a robust system from an architectural point of view (not saying they don't have some bugs to work out of it). As we saw in the previous launch, they can go to orbit with an engine missing. An engine down on the shuttle would have been a catastrophic situation.

The Shuttle did have limited engine out capability. The only in-flight engine-out (as opposed to a pad abort after SSME ignition and before SRB ignition, which happened five times) was STS-51-F with a successful abort to orbit. The various other engine-out contingency modes were never used, but they did exist.

Initially only single engine out was broadly survivable; after the Challenger disaster new abort procedures were developed that made two engines out survivable during all of flight and even all three engines out at some points.

The big caveat here is that most of these modes were never tested, and the risk of failure during the more demanding aborts was substantial. RTLS abort was famously not tested on STS-1 because it was considered riskier than going all the way to orbit on the Shuttle's first crewed flight.

To put it in perspective, the Falcon 9 has had 702 launches and has only lost one payload during launch. A couple didn't make it into the right orbit, but there's contingencies to deal with that in manned missions.

Since 2022, there have been 601 booster landings, with two losses. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-stage_b...) That means that if you could have snuck onto one of the last 600 Falcon 9 boosters, with appropriate life support gear, your chances of survival would have been over four times higher than if you had snuck into the cargo bay for an SLS (space shuttle) launch, and that's with the SLS being designed to be manned, unlike the Falcon 9 booster.

Safely??

The Challenger disaster could perfectly well have been avoided if they had been willing to look. There was a clear indication of substantial deviation from design and the joint could have been engineered to stay in compression during the twang.

But Columbia was fundamental. There was an awful lot of insulation aerodynamically before the heat shield. Once again, multiple warnings, but keeping the insulation from being torn off while keeping the weight down was problematic. Columbia was the beginning of the end as they realized they couldn't sweep it under the rug anymore and they couldn't truly fix it.

Challenger could also have been avoided simply by not launching in conditions that were known to be out of spec.

> The Challenger disaster could perfectly well have been avoided if they had been willing to look.

The tragedy of Challenger is that Morton Thiokol engineers did look enough to know that the O-ring design was likely to fail under cold weather conditions. This was already a known issue and the engineers specifically recommended that Challenger postpone launch because of the temperature at the pad the night before the launch.

They got overruled... almost certainly for what amounts to political reasons as the big bosses didn't want to throw off the timing of the media-hyped "first class taught from space".

Still remember watching the Challenger launch on a CRT TV propped up on an AV cart in an 8th grade classroom and it being a big deal that a teacher was going up in space.

The decision to ignore the Morton Thiokol recommendation not to launch wasn't made at NASA HQ. There was a late night teleconference between Morton Thiokol, Marshall Space Flight Center (where the SRB program was managed) and personnel from Marshall and Morton Thiokol on the ground in Florida. The Marshall leadership put a lot of pressure on Morton Thiokol execs to withdraw their recommendation, and Morton Thiokol caved. My recollection is that it's unclear how much if anything was communicated to NASA HQ. These were the people who had taken over after von Braun's retirement, so very much from an engineering rather than a political background.

I don't think that the "teacher in space" part was much of a factor in Marshall's decision-making. There was clearly plan-continuation bias, and there was a clear directive that Marshall should not be responsible for delaying a launch. The management style they had inherited from von Braun also meant that disagreement was highly discouraged. The data was ambiguous enough that they could convince themselves that everything was fine and Morton Thiokol was coming up with a new launch requirement at the last minute.

The person at Morton Thiokol who caved was neither qualified nor authorized to make the decision. The Morton Thiokol engineers said no, and their executives backed them up, but NASA administrators kept asking Morton Thiokol employees that were out of the loop, until they could pressure on into saying yes.

There's a really well written and researched book on the topic, that I highly recommend, called Truth, Lies, and O-Rings by Allan J. McDonald, James R. Hansen, and Jonathan Yen

I concur. Everyone is acting like Starship is fully developed and finished and flying humans as we speak.

I don't think anyone is saying that?

There was a guy saying Starship is safer than SLS right now.

Since SLS's only human rated payload is Orion, that's basically saying that Starship can land on earth coming from the moon, right now.

I was just talking to my son about how absolutely incrediblw it was that apollo 11 1anded on the moon, and here we are we with by comparison unlimited compute and its launch 15 to do the first orbit. I absolutely get its a very different beast, and catching is amazing, but still, serious respect to the apollo program.

One cost, what, 30% of all government spending over several years?

The other's total was less than just the Senate Launch System.

One was 60+ years ago, the other is built with knowledge learned from building the first.

> 30% of all government spending

In your fucking dreams. NASA’s entire budget has never been more than 4 or 5% gov spending a year.

I appreciate your point and correction to who you are responding to, but that's not a very HN way of expressing it. You can do better.

This is a weirdly pedantic hill to die on.

How many people died in the nasa space program vs the Starship one?

The Space Shuttle program started in 1969, the first test fight happened in 1981, 12 years in. The first outline of Starship appeared in 2016, first kinda flight in 2022 (6 years), and a full-scale orbital flight, in 2026 (10 years). As a bonus point, it's nearly 100% reusable.

It's not human-rated yet, but I bet that in 1981, at the height of the Cold War and with Star Wars unfolding, it would be.

    > I do not see this Starship and its mission profile ever being a human-rated system in this incarnation, ever.

Any sentence with such a superlative is bound to be wrong at some point. As they say in finance: "On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."

Did you feel similar before the crewed SpaceX Dragon 2 flew successfully?

And because the government said the shuttle was “safe”, six astronauts and a schoolteacher got blown up in front of millions of schoolchildren five years later. The Shuttle never should have been a human-rated system.

Reusability is all about cost savings. The real question now is how much does it cost to turn Starship around for reuse - how much heat shield replacement, how do the vaccuum raptor engines survive the thermal cycling, what is the lifetime of parts involved in the catch mechanism, etc.

In any case, a cool spectacle.

So losing up 100 starships to reuse one that gets to the moon, is saving money ?

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Which guidelines are they violating? Just because their commentary is unpopular with the usual shills doesn't mean they're violating guidelines at all. I'm certainly not seeing much at all that's violating any guideline.

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The comment he is responding to didn't deserve the dismissal.

100 launches per landing is wrong. It's 40 launches at most and even that is somewhat pessimistic because it assumes a return starship to bypass Orion.

Perhaps they will lose 150, but eventually they will make 1000 that work.

In order to get passing tests, they have to fail first.

That not how science works.

Hope is not physical reality.

Something is only successful when success is delivered.

Cost savings are one of the drivers for reuse, but not the only one. Maximum practical flight rate is another. F9's peak flight rate over the past couple years would not have been attainable without first stage reuse, simply because of the manufacturing bottlenecks on stages. And fairing reuse was openly driven by a limited capacity to manufacture fairings fast enough - it's not even clear that SpaceX is overall saving money there, but they are saving time, and their business model is based around putting as much mass in orbit as they can as fast as they can.

I thought the same, the catch was nice and impressive but I’d say it would be a fair bit of stress on the structure too. I’m guessing one day we will actually see these things have landing gears and not need a tower but until then…

I get similar vibes to watching this spectacle to that of the “Tesla flying car” demonstration. Amazing stunt , but is that the primary goal ?

Landing gear is really really heavy. To compare it to a building, the upper stage is 17 stories tall and 700sqft crosssection (9m⌀). The rocket is top-heavy, so you have to have wide legs. Wide legs need big triangular structures that articulate outwards, which dramatically increase the load (torque = force*distance) needed to hold up the 17 story building without breaking when it hits the ground, and are complex and get in the way of all the engines.

In comparison, adding more steel to the tower is effectively free. Additionally the hardpoints on the rocket are at the top (no top-heavy problem to deal with) and very close to the rocket, so the torque is minimal. And the hardpoints already exist, in the form of the attachments to the wings, which already need to be strong.

It is crazy but... it makes some amount of sense? I mean we'll see landing gear when/if it gets to the moon, but there's a lot less gravity there.

I think you forget that in Apollo time all people ever wanted was to get out of earth and see what's actually out there, with human presence. All the other stuff, would be done later, like this.

I don't think you intended to dis the space shuttle (much) but it's important to recognize that half a century has passed since the start of the shuttle design process. Comparing the two is like comparing the 747 to the Ford Tri-motor.

No, it’s not like that at all because airplanes improved significantly between the 1920’s and 1960’s whereas spacecraft improved marginally in some respects and regressed significantly in other respects between the 1970’s and 2000’s.

The 747 is more then a decade older than the Shuttle. You would have to compare the 747 to the 787.

What’s the alternative to building on an assembly line? Is there a “theory” of the assembly line building relative to more ad-hoc approaches?

Incredible, had no idea they were assembled so quickly.

> Starship is, essentially, Space Shuttle done right

There's lots to praise here, but they haven't flown a single manned mission yet

(Also hindsight is 20:20)

> without solid boosters (avoids Challenger disaster) and orbiter stacked on top instead of on the side (avoid Columbia disaster)

We know of the failure modes of the Shuttle, we don't know about the failures of Starship

Or better, the two obvious ones: it will fail to be caught or it will fail to bellyflop

And of course Starship benefits immensely from computers getting thousands of times better and lighter (and cheaper)

> Even more revolutionary, compared to Shuttle, Starship is built on an assembly line

Yes this is a big win

It's funny how people can look at the exact same program and draw wildly different conclusions. From where I'm sitting, Starship is a deeply flawed and highly risky program with an uncertain future. There are two keys problems:

1. It's not clear what the product-market fit for Starship really is, specifically there is limited demand for these super-heavy payloads. What's my evidence? Falcon Heavy. It averages about 1 launch a year, typically by the military, compared to >100 for Falcon 9.

There are five standard counterarguments to this:

a) "You can carry multiple payloads." Most of the time this simply isn't true. The payloads have to be on almost identical orbits for this to work. Different inclination? No shot. Different altitude? Almost no shot. This brings us to the second;

b) "But Starlink." Yes, Starlink can take advantage of this although to justify its massive expansion, Starlink really has to launch a satellite-based handheld mobile phone network and it has to be pretty much global. It's unclear if this can be from a legal and regulatory standpoint or if it will be able to effectively compete with traditional terrestrial 5G networks. It's unclear what customer density can be supported;

c) "It will induce demand for bigger payloads." Falcon Heavy is relatively cheap, particularly compared to the alternatives from Ariane and ULA yet launch cadence is still particularly slow. Satellites, which are the bread and butter of commercial rocketry, just don't need to be that big;

d) "Starship will replace Falcon 9 launches." Yes, but other companies will fill the Falcon 9 gap if SpaceX abandons it. If you're only carrying one payload to LEO (or even geostationary orbit) and you can do that with a smaller launch system that you can reuse, it's simply going to be better eventually; and

e) "Space based AI data centers." This is never going to happen. it doesn't make any sense. You can't get enough power or distribute the heat. You're subject to cosmic rays and solar radiation, which the atmosphere otherwise mostly protects you from, and you have no way to economically service the inevitable failures.

2. The whole Mars thing is BS, basically, kinda like space-based data centers. It's not happening. There's absolutely no reason to go;

3. Starship isn't suited for lunar missions, which is one reason (IMHO) why Elon tried to scuttle NASA's lunar program [1]. Basically, a 40 meter high vessel that has to land horizontally is hard to land, hard to get in and out of (with your astronauts 40 meters off the surface) and much harder to get off the Moon and back to Earth.

4. Between (2) and (3) a whole lot of new capabilities have to be developed anyway, none of which have even begun yet (eg in-orbit refueling).

Now the one really useful thing from the Starship program (IMHO) is the Raptor engine. For context, the Falcon 9's Merlin engine used oxygen and RP-1 (kerosene, basically). Only the oxygen had to be kept really cold. But it has coking issues (ie solid carbon build up from the RP-1 being consumed). Raptor replaces RP-1 with LNG. No coking but now you have two cryogenic fuels instead of one.

[1]: https://futurism.com/elon-musk-scrap-nasa-moon-program

I'll float a use case, which I admit though borders on science fiction. Still, it could be done without breaking the laws of physics.

"Construction of a multi-generational ship, in orbit, designed to travel for hundreds of years between stars".

Discussing this in-depth would take a book, but by necessity this ship would be very (very) large and would require an extraordinary amount of mass to be ferried into orbit.

Of course this unlikely to happen during starship's lifetime, but hey, it's at least a legitimate use case.

They don't need super heavy payloads, it seems pretty clear that they'll be able to launch even just a Falcon 9 payload in this for less than Falcon 9, because they're not throwing away the expensive upper stage.

Also, my understanding is that Starlink v3 just doesn't fit inside F9. The larger phased arrays that that enables lets them make much better use of spectrum than the v2 minis. There are lots of potential uses for larger payload volumes.

The space DC thing has been beaten to death online, with tons of very confident commentators claiming it will never happen for the reasons you've mentioned. Some counterpoints, Google just launched their first ML infra to space with their Project Suncatcher launch, and if you actually run the numbers, the radiators are smaller than the solar arrays, so obviously it's feasible to launch the radiator if it's feasible to launch the solar array to power it. Who knows if it'll make economic sense, but it seems pretty clear that it's getting harder to build DCs on the ground in the US, there's a lot of backlash against it, we just saw what it did to Abbott. Many areas don't have the spare power, and doing it in space makes solar into reliable baseload power rather than 1/8th nameplate and intermittent.

Anyway, I don't work in that industry, I've just been following along with them because I've been an investor since before Starlink was a thing, but I really think people should keep an open mind about whether SpaceX can pull off things that sound a bit nutty.

I'm having trouble going from the facts I know to your conclusion ("Starship is deeply flawed"). I supposed "deeply flawed" is subjective, so I doubt I'll change your mind, but I can't help myself when "someone is wrong on the internet."

You say, "It's not clear what product-market fit for Starship really is" but then you list a pretty good market fit: Starlink. Starship is the only vehicle that can launch Starlink v3 satellites, and one single Starship launch can put up as much bandwidth as 10 Falcon 9 launches.

The internal launch cost of a Falcon 9 launch is ~$20 million, so effectively, one Starship launch is replacing $200 million worth of Falcon 9 launches. Current speculation is that it costs $100 million to build a Starship stack, so even if they never recover either booster or ship, they would still be saving $100 million per launch.

That's pretty good product-market fit, if you ask me.

Next you talk about Mars. I assume the argument is basically: Starship was designed to go to Mars, but there's no reason to go to Mars, ergo Starship has no purpose. But that sounds like a self-refuting argument. If Starship was designed to go to Mars, that implies that Musk wants to go to Mars (which I actually think is true), which means Starship has a purpose: to go to Mars.

Alternatively, let's say Musk is just conning and he doesn't really care about Mars. He's really just building Starship for Starlink or Starmind or whatever. In that scenario (which I don't believe but can't disprove) then Starship still has a purpose: Starlink and Starmind.

Your next argument is that Starship isn't suited for lunar mission. I actually agree with this--Starship was designed for Mars, which is why it runs on methane (for in-situ propellant generation), and relies on a aerobraking to enter Mars orbit. But the same architecture that can take Starship to Mars will be able to land 50 tons on the lunar surface--something that no other lander can do.

[Your arguments about landing difficulties and astronauts descending 40 meters are not very strong. Starship is bottom-heavy because of the engines, so very hard to tip over, and elevators are a 100-year-old technology.]

Lastly, you bring up "a whole lot of new capabilities" to be developed, but you only mention in-orbit refueling. That's true: in-orbit refueling is yet to be demonstrated. But that's a new capability that (a) no other vehicle has performed, and (b) would open up the solar system to exploration. That's a case of Starship being more ambitious than any previous space vehicle--almost the opposite of "deeply flawed". And even if in-orbit refueling never works (which I doubt), Starship would still be revolutionary for being reusable.

We both have wildly different conclusions on Starship. Maybe one way to see who's right is to make predictions. I think Starship will continue to launch Starlink satellites and that SpaceX will continue to make a profit from Starlink. My guess is between 10-20 Starship launches in 2027 and 50-70 launches in 2028. I also predict that Starship will land on the moon, with astronauts, before the end of 2030.

If my predictions come true, I think that would make Starship a very successful program.

Challenger and Columbia were caused by Normalization of Deviance and groupthink. How did they solve those problems?

Elon. Government is groupthink and normalization of silos and tolerance of incompetence. Elon forbids either.

Elon lies about being a good path of exile player, like a 10 year old might. What else do you think he's lying about?

I can't reply to your question "what else is he lying about." Jensen's a good person and apparently likes sex with people other than his wife.

Your ad hominem attack doesn't take away from my point.

The same Elon who keeps promising things his companies cannot deliver and obviously exerts incredible pressure on his underlings? You think that doesn't create incentives to claim things are better than they are?

> The same Elon who keeps promising things his companies cannot deliver and obviously exerts incredible pressure on his underlings?

Failing to deliver a ReactJS + web services project, and failing to catch a steel cylinder weighing thousands of tonnes, full of combustible liquids, hurtling down from space with two metal arms mounted on a pole are two different things.

If you're a billionaire and not failing enough times doing absolutely crazy things, that's a net loss for humanity. I want billionaires to fail 80% of the time. Heck even 100x millionaires should be failing a lot.

> If you're a billionaire and not failing enough times doing absolutely crazy things, that's a net loss for humanity. I want billionaires to fail 80% of the time. Heck even 100x millionaires should be failing a lot.

Ah, yes. Others should do more for society so I can benefit!

You should just get straight to the point: you want higher taxes on those wealthier than you.

Quite the opposite, I was actually defending people who make super risky bets.

I'd rather billionaires not exist at all, personally. Before you say something absurd like "SpaceX wouldn't exist without billionaires" I suggest you check the timeline. Falcon 9 was operational before Elon Musk officially joined the 10 digits club.

Innovation will always happen and Elon didn't personally inject billions into SpaceX either.

Let's cap wealth at 999M and anything over the gets redistributed to poor entrepreneurs.

Billionaires are the economic equivalent of software memory leaks.

When was Elon promising ReactJS projects? He promises cars, full self driving, etc. etc. Extremely consistently overpromises and underdeliver.

Anyway, "I want billionaires to fail" is fine, cool, I probably agree, but the question being argued was "is Elon running things inherently safer than the situation that led to Challenger etc.". I do not agree with the idea that Elon's companies have a culture where it is safe and repercussion-free to report that things are busted.

> Extremely consistently overpromises and underdeliver.

That's what I'm saying. Promising to deliver brain-computer interfaces and failing at it is not the same as, pretty much anything else.

> I do not agree with the idea that Elon's companies have a culture where it is safe and repercussion-free to report that things are busted.

And this is different from say Apple (or the majority of large corporates) how?

How is apple relevant? If you read up in this thread, the argument was that Elon is safer than NASA.

I was responding to your broader statements, which as stated were not strictly about the original narrow context about Challenger. Every company has pretty much the same or similar repercussions with respect to speaking up/out. Apple, or say Timnit Gebru at Google.

> If you read up in this thread, the argument was that Elon is safer than NASA.

There's nothing to decide either way. There have been failures at his companies, and at the same time 13 crewed missions on SpaceX rockets without human casualties.

Normalization of deviance happened because there was so much deviance!

The number of Criticality 1 issues on STS was incredible--literally thousands. Booster seal--yup, they knew about that; foam strikes? check; also turbine blade cracks, reaction control short-circuits, and hundreds of other problems.

They couldn't fix them because (a) the design was locked--they weren't building more orbiters, and (b) Congress controlled the budget and the Shuttle was not a priority.

The point of Starship is to build enough ships and fly enough missions that problems get fixed. And since losing a ship costs the company money, they have a strong incentive to fix the problems. That's exactly what they've done with Falcon 9, and the result speaks for itself.

It's more egregious than just knowing there were flaws. After Morton Thiokol engineers, the manufacturer of the boosters that failed in the Challenger disaster gave a no-go for the flight, because the temperature was too low, NASA administrators cold called a bunch of Morton Thiokol employees that weren't qualified to give go/no-go decisions, and most of them declined, until they found one that gave into pressure and gave a 'go' for launch.

They actively forced deviance.

For more details, check out Truth, Lies, and O-Rings by Allan J. McDonald, James R. Hansen, and Jonathan Yen

Starship is effectively another falling car that doesn't crash.

It's taken 100 years for humans to build a rocket that lands itself.

Gonna take even longer to establish a humans on Mars.

Ya need supply lines, radiation shielding, water... all in the next 2-3 decades if you want any shot at seeing it.

There's no guarantee future generations can justify the effort, resource use.

Yall gonna stay around 2-3 more generations to make sure they do?

Obligatory “what’s wrong with space shuttle” link: https://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm

The space shuttle is infinitely sexier sorry

Yep, this thing is the beat up Toyota Hilux to the Space Shuttle's hand built Ferrari. Still reminds me of the first flying grain silos.

But a fleet of Hiluxes is a whole lot more useful for actually getting shit done than a couple Ferraris.

>> Even more revolutionary, compared to Shuttle, Starship is built on an assembly line. They can build a booster ever 4 weeks and a ship every 2 weeks.

Note that they are also scaling up production in a big way, because they want to launch weekly soon, and then daily. Not sure if we will get to the latter anytime soon but I'm also not going to bet against Elon.

When Falcon 9 was making its early landing attempts, I'm sure people would have struggled to believe that they'd soon be doing over 120 launches+landings per year with very few mishaps.

The reusable Starship will carry 100+ tons of weight or 1100 cubic meters of volume per launch.

Government had to get out of the way. A visionary from Private Sector like Elon Musk was needed

The US government realized this in the late 90s-early 2000s and started pushing NASA to go outside to utilize private industry in more a competitive way (instead of giving contracts to the same tiny group of gov contractors). This started initially under GWB and later Obama expanded it, which helped open the door to companies like SpaceX and X PRIZE type competitions.

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

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

The defense industry could use this sort of thing, which we saw with the costs/shortages of missiles in the Iran war.

From SpaceX Wiki page[1]:

    > The first three launches of the rocket, between 2006 and 2008, all resulted in failures, which almost ended the company. Financing for Tesla Motors had failed, as well, and consequently Tesla, SolarCity, and Musk personally were all nearly bankrupt at the same time.

    > The financial situation started to turn around with the first successful launch achieved on the fourth attempt on September 28, 2008. Musk split his remaining $30 million between SpaceX and Tesla, and NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract in December, thus financially saving the company.

Yeah, bad gov't (NASA). Get out of the way for private industry. Or, wait, help us when we are desperate and nearly bankrupt. Which one? The correct answer is "both, in harmony".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX

I feel like I’m not reading the same passage of text. NASA didn’t give SpaceX anything. They were a customer, paying the best company for the best service. That’s how free markets work.

Let me know when Starship makes it to the moon. Apollo got there after 2 launches. and only had 1x problem and everyone got home.

Launches are irrelevant. Much more useful metric is "total $ spent on the program before it makes it to the moon", not launches.

That's funny, I count about 20 Apollo program launches before anyone went to the moon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apollo_missions

And of course Apollo 1 incinerated it's entire crew.

Seems like you're only aware of the highly publicized successes and not the difficult development history.

What else might you be unaware of?

Peace to the men and families of Apollo 1.

Sorry Apollo 1, 4, 5 and 6 were unmanned, 7 got men to LEO, 8 orbitted the moon and 9 landed Neil and Buzz.

Starship is up to 15 and is not man rated nor has it achieved a moon orbit or moon landing.

Which is the more successful ?

So you're leaving out SA-1 through 5, AS-101 through 105, AS-201 through 203, QTV, Pad Abort Test 1 and 2, A-001 through 004, and the Mercury and Gemini programs before them to be intentionally deceptive? Or... just disrespectful?

> Which is the more successful ?

Who thinks like this? Who sees what I just saw and has this thought? A wasted opportunity for some wonder and joy.

The Apollo 1 crew begs to differ.

Also, Apollo had Gemini before it and Mercury before that. It was an iterative process.

It's wild that Dunning–Kruger extends to rocket science and astronautics.

"fully reusable" is highly aspirational.

They have barely reflown a handful of tiles, and have not reflown any engines.

Essentially, the two things you'd expect to break will probably still break.

You're allowed to compliment technical achievements, even if its done by a republican.

It's done by thousands of people, who are employed by a republican.

Reducing their work to the (self-serving) political alignments of the CEO is a big part of the optics issue.

Given how Americans tend to self-sort into political castes, I suspect that the majority of SpaceX employees are now ideologically aligned with their CEO. Working there would be too risky for them otherwise.

That may well be true, but it doesn't really change my point.

You got me figured out completely. I hate Elon so much I have watched every launch stream since 2010, own stock in his companies, buy his car with $10k beta software, and voted as a shareholder to give him the biggest pay package in human history.

I hate him so much I'll even agree with his quote from this year saying that “Starship Version 3, I think this design can be fully reusable.”

Don't sweat it. Lots of Starship fans (myself included) are overly sensitive because there is so much bad-faith criticism out there.

Still, I think you're discounting the accomplishment here. Boosters have reflown after a catch, so re-usable engines is already demonstrated. And heat shield reuse is going to be iterative: the first few will require lots of work, but they will keep improving until the tiles last for many missions.

But you can't iterate if you don't get the ship back in one piece. That's what makes this accomplishment important.

Landing the damn thing (and almost landing the booster) seems to point in the general direction of full reusability.

It's like how F1 cars can make it through the full track, but will need a new engine pretty regularly.

Something something Ship of Theseus.

My understanding is that the real fly in the ointment has been that Starship isn't anywhere near its target payload capacity, and it may be difficult to get it there. I don't know if that's changed with this flight or not.

This launch put 50T in orbit, which is half the stated goal. If it never improved past this, it'd continue to be the largest and least expensive heavy lift rocket into the foreseeable future.

Due to the nature of spaceflight, payload tends to be around 1-3% of total mass. You don't tend to max payload during testing for stuff you expect to have a reasonable chance of going boom.

This was the third heaviest payload ever put in orbit. None of the others had a reusable first stage, second stage or fairings, so they cost vastly more (throw away the entire stack each launch)

Even if they never increase it from here, this is an enormous achievement and success.

That's because when launching from Texas, they have to do a dogleg maneuver to avoid populated islands such as Cuba. If they launch from Florida, they claim they'll get 100 tons.[1]

> Flying Starship from Florida, he said, will further improve capacity compared to Texas launches. Launching from Florida offers more favorable trajectories to certain orbits, potentially allowing Starship to carry more satellites without expending propellant on dogleg maneuvers. Dontchev said a single Florida Starship launch will be able to carry up to 20 times the bandwidth of a single Falcon 9.

SpaceX currently claims that each launch is 10x the bandwidth of a Falcon 9 launch, and is 50ish tons of payload, so launching from Florida would be around 100 tons of payload.

1. https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/11/spacex-now-fundamental...

They did fly reused engines a year ago

Yes. But not the engines they are flying now.

Kind of a strange response. Yeah, most people would think spacex will eventually be able to reuse v3 of the raptors too.

That's like saying a 2026 F150 is safe because a 2023 trim passed a crash test, despite a full overhaul of all the crash structures taking place in between

hmm, think it's more like saying a newly redesigned f150 will eventually pass the crash test, because it's basically 80% the same design as the previous generation. It might be in 2027, but if not then and the engineers keep at it, then in 2028 or 2029.

Only booster engines though. What remains to be seen is how the vaccuum raptors hold up for reuse - pretty brutal temperature cycling.

It'll become real whether we want it or even benefits us or not. Nothing we can do but trust the billionaires.

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