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.
Bad things happen, and spaceflight is a hard problem. But that’s not what killed two Shuttle crews.
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.
Source: Truth, Lies, and O-Rings by Allan J. McDonald, James R. Hansen, and Jonathan Yen
Propellant for a Falcon 9 launch is ~$500K.
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 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
May I know why ? And if the feat was done by NASA or China, would you change your conclusion?
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)
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?
But during landing? You can't send another ship to rescue the crew that is aboard another Starship that just failed being caught.
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.
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.
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.
They're averaging over 2 successful launches+landings per week now, and it's so routine that nobody cares.
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)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The other's total was less than just the Senate Launch System.
In your fucking dreams. NASA’s entire budget has never been more than 4 or 5% gov spending a year.
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.
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.
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.
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
As is, your comment has a bold claim backed by seemingly unrelated fact.
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.)
Personally, I'm looking forward to joining the Elench. Humans are allowed to join the Elench aren't they?
> I do not see this Starship and its mission profile ever being a human-rated system in this incarnation, ever.
Did you feel similar before the crewed SpaceX Dragon 2 flew successfully?
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.
Like you don't build a barge to ferry standards, it would defeat the point of the barge.
How many people died in the nasa space program vs the Starship one?
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.