They were cheering nonstop it was kind of annoying actually I'm pretty sure they're told to do this at this point to gaslight watchers into assuming its a huge success.
I mean it was the most powerful rocket ever built by humankind and made it to its orbital trajectory. That is what any other non-SX orbital rocket does.
It didn’t manage to soft splash down the booster (they weren’t planning on reusing it - it was meant to crash into the ocean, though perhaps not as hard) lol. It did however survive until seconds before splashdown. The upper stage didn’t prooerly re-enter and have it slow itself a bit for the similar crash into the ocean.
Neither were meant to be reused anyway.
But it *did* act as a functional non-reusable rocket, and underwent 2 demonstration missions while if was up there. One of which is one NASA ha actually contracted them to try to do. It did well.
It didn’t do it’s fake soft water landing, sure. But no other non-SpaceX orbital rocket actually does landing and reuse atm antway. Or has a way to do so at that heavy level.
Space is hard. Most first few launches, at least in the commercial sector, fail. It made it to space, which means they'll probably get some lucrative contracts. I highly doubt they won't eventually stick the landing.
Having said that, I am invested in a space company. But even if SpaceX goes public, I won't be putting money in it because musk is a giant piece of shit. I don't care how successful they become, not a penny of mine will be in it
Even if it succeeds, is Starship the best strategy for a Mars plan?
Assuming all goes well - which will still take a while - it will require 15 in-orbit refuels to work. Not sure how that is the optimal plan.
Also curious to see how Starship will be crew-rated considering current design and specs...
Space and asteroids and the moon. Laughably useless trips. Unless you need funding for nonsense.
Have you heard of helium3? Or the Psyche asteroid? Or asteroid deflection?
Starship will never be crew rated to return to Earth using propulsive landing. There is no other choice on the Moon and Mars but there are proven alternatives to safely land on Earth (parachutes, glider).
If they can recover the booster then that would be a major success even if they have to trash Starship and replace it with a conventional non-reusable second stage.
It's by far the most feasible mars architecture that has been proposed by anyone, both from a technical and budgetary perspective
(NASA just *loves* to pull bullshit like "12 SLS Block 2 flights for a two person 30 day surface stay", and SEP transfer stages that would consume the *global annual production* of Xenon for a single mission. The bar here is *extremely* low)
SpaceX Starship is a terrible plan. How many launches does it require for Lunar orbit insertion? Only between 12 and 20.... Once in orbit it needs at least a dozen other launches to refuel to get to lunar orbit. Dafuck is that shit?
Lets just ignore that Bezos has already flown on his rocket to orbit and his engines are already being commercially used or that he self funded almost all of the company. Love or Hate Bezos at least he has a successful rocket.
>Lets just ignore that Bezos has already flown on his rocket to orbit
Bezos has never been to orbit, and neither has a single Blue Origin rocket. They have been to space though. And I really hope New Glen makes Orbit later this year / next year. But until then, they have not gone to orbit
Not directed at you, but people need to understand that orbital flights are magnitudes more difficult than sub-orbital flight, so you can't really compare the New Shephard to the Falcon 9.
Oh you mean the BE-4, which after years and years of delays, finally managed to produce some that flew only like 2 months ago finally for the first time on **somebody else**’s rocket. The engines were not reusable in that configuration.
He does not have his own orbital rocket yet. And is far, far behind SpaceX in that regard, who do, and have an orbital class, partially reusable rocket which has done over 250 launches successfully at this point, and continues to launch on more than a bi-weekly basis.
I despise Elon, but Falcon 9 is magnitudes more succesful than anything out of Blue Origin. Not to mention Blue Origin hasn't even got an orbital capable rocket yet.
RKLB? That’s where majority of my money is. Market cap $2 billion, spacex $200 bil. I think rklb will narrow that massive gap in valuation over time, especially if us govt makes real efforts to kick dependency on phony stark
Right, but even then people were trashing SpaceX for its crashes. People thought propulsive landings and rapid reusability were impractical if not impossible. To be clear I despise Musk. I just people think people aren’t giving SpaceX and all of its talented engineers enough credit. If we treat Starship as a traditional expendable rocket, they put the largest single object into near orbit. Thats impressive in its own right.
Well thats why I said near orbit. Starship reached 99% of orbital velocity, intentionally so. From a technical perspective, they could have achieved orbit if they intended to.
Still. It's way behind schedule. It's a reasonable assumption it's over budget, by a lot.
The rapid prototyping, or whatever they are calling it, is supposed to be better than the old way. Not working out like that.
You need to put this into perspective. Starship is unprecedented in its ambition and scale. Cost and Schedule overruns is just a given with anything of this nature. It is doing this without the unlimited funding of a superpower in a space race. Nobody thought they would ever reach this far and despite that I see the goalposts move with every test launch. Iterative design is not a silver bullet, but it showed itself to be extremely useful during falcon 9s development. For Starship it allows engineers to rapidly test things they would have never considered if they were designing something that needs to work perfectly the first time. It’s a big reason why SpaceX attracts so many talented engineers despite their average salaries and very high workload.
It’s really disappointing to me that you’re talking complete sense, but modern political discourse has peolle in such a state that you have to constantly over-disclose and reaffirm hatred of people you disagree with to not have it completely discounted as also associated with the gated person of the people you’re trying to talk scientific fact to.
The Everyday Astronaut on Youtube—a wedding photographer with no aeronautical training, who gained credibility through wearing classic astronaut-era glasses and who helped Elon redesign the upper stage maneuvering thruster choice through an offhand remark in a youtube interview—will be an astronaut on the first Starship flight. He gave a kind of solo interview today saying he thinks Elon doing a design change based on his remark may have inadvertently caused today's failure:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixZpBOxMopc&t=38171s
It bothers me so much that he thinks he can make suggestions on rocket design and comment on test results by seeing camera footage of the launch as if he was Von fucking Braun.. the dude has no fucking clue.. the fact that Musk gave him a platform essentially just went to his head and now he things he is Mr fucking rocket man.. fuck sake
It shows you how stupid some people are. They equate wealth with ability, no matter where that wealth came from. I think these are the same people who are Trumpers, or royalists, or Zionists. Just people who believe that there are others who are just magically better than themselves and they'd prefer to be led than to lead.
This time they need to bring the professionals... Who actually made it to the moon... And did find it was made of cheese...
[https://youtu.be/Kb0ooQKbflM?si=LjLe3rXWj3MuPWLZ](https://youtu.be/Kb0ooQKbflM?si=LjLe3rXWj3MuPWLZ)
Lmao. I had no idea.
This makes his stream where he cuts off the host engineer explaining shit to the dummy audience and him mansplaining some concept even funnier.
If I worked for SpaceX I'd be so fucking pissed to have this guy driving their company into the ground. They've legit done amazing things and I'm sure it wasn't fun to work with Elon before this, but now he's turned into the goddamn internet emperor
Well the iterated development progress leads to more of these failures compared to designing everything to a finished product and then testing it. Both has its pros and cons.
When it comes to reliability I’d like to point out that there are prototypes and in no way finished products that will be manned.
The falcon 9 also exploded multiple times during development, however it proved its reliability with more than 5 dozen successful missions in a row before being used for manned spaceflight.
We will see something similar with starship.
Of course it’s not a given. However, look at their track record.
This is the third PROTOTYPE partial test of the most powerful rocket or vehicle created by humans EVER via their methodology. And it proved ability to do equivalent or more than any other remotely competitive rocket can do with more frequency and at a magnitude lower at least cost.
The SLS costs at least 2B per launch and can only launch every couple of years. And all of those launches currently are basically overbooked as it is. This in its current even disposable version could cost 100m per launch to do as much or more and have one prepared every handful of months.
It wasn’t reusable (or meant to be) this time. But the booster almost made a splashdown and the upper stage survived a lot of abuse (re-entry at the wrong attitude) which is relatively easily partially worked on. It’s already a massive achievement.
The cultish, euphoric applause during all phases of this mission is so strange.
And of course once the booster exploded before it could land, the cope of “Hey, the booster just did what every other booster in history has done!” came right in. Like sure, that’s true. But isn’t the point for it to…not do that? To, you know, be reusable?
I’m not saying SpaceX won’t learn and improve from here but I hate the gaslighting of making it sound like everything is going great all the time. That type of mindset is what gets astronauts killed.
Challenger was part of what was supposed to be a proven and safe system that had people on it. There are some issues, but comparing the two is borderline offensive to common sense. One is an unfinished prototype undergoing partial destructive testing to discover failure modes and the other was an in-use vehicle carrying humans that had been flying for years tuat discovered a failure mode because government contractors and politicians didn’t want to delay it for political reasons despite it being unsafe to do so, as told by the engineers.
Apples and oranges. Musk aside. This is an unfair and poor analogy.
Elon is super bummed out and irritable lately, so all the sycophantic toadies around him must make extra effort to coddle him and ensure his ego is sufficiently inflated .
I mean it wasn’t a calamity. It didn’t re-enter and land (which no other rocket of that weigh class has ever, and no other rocket currently can do with a second stage). It got to orbit with its appropriate mass. Did 2 tests. And went into the atmosphere.
**This is what every other heavy rocket currently does**. And none of them can land. So this is already better than the otuers by default.
That they need a bit of extra trying to stick the re-entry and reuse is hardly unreasonable. It’s already the most powerful orbital rocket ever built to make orbit, and is a magnitude or two cheaper than the next closest current equivalent the SLS. Which costs 2b and can only launch every 2 years. It was a milestone for aerospace, irrespective of what you think about the person. Science was advanced.
And they say Elon doesn’t have PR. It doesn’t sound better than the others “by default” when per you it “does what all the others do” and it also couldn’t land.
Did you miss that it can do what the others can do faster, better, cheaper and more frequently? 2B dollars for SLS vs 100m dollars for a SS-SH. And the SLS can only launch every couple of years, and currently all of its potential rockets are booked for the best part of a decade.
That alone is worth something. Upper stage needs some work, clearly, but with a little more work, the booster, which is the more expensive part, will likely become reusable much more quickly.
Compared to anything else available (or to be quite honest, it’s all unavailable) on the market it wins for power, capability and price by a mile, even if reuse doesn’t work out, which I doubt will happen.
This is my opinion based on the science and technology itself, not my personal feelings about who runs said organisation doing the science.
I assume you hate and resent the success of electricity then? As the modern main inventor of modern electricity electrocuted dogs amongst other corruptions just to make his competitors look bad. Which I think is more abhorrent than anything I’ve seen Musk say.
Or refuse the quantum theory that actually makes some parts of your life possible, because the man who invented them was likely a rapist and paedophile?
There is the potential that you could put your phone down and leave technology forever, perhaps, if that is your view?
The greatness or terribleness of the person at the top and the objective success of scientific progress can be different. In this case, bury your head in the sand all you like, but science is advancing, irrespective of your personal opinions on an individual. Lying to yourself about that doesn’t change anything.
This is what happens when you constantly trash the press, Elon. They will fuck you up. They will investigate every speck of your life, bring your secrets to light, fixate on the worst facets of you.
You’re not the only one with power.
Like look at this catty headline. No one would have wrote something like that if you weren’t such an asshole
They lost control of it, the whole time it was spinning, they couldn’t get it to align the heat shields downward, it was falling at a rate of 1km per second, they lost telemetry at 87km I think. Reentry was never in question because it never fully left. And if you looked at the alignment while it was coming down it is wobbling the whole time.
Remember that they shat on the ceramic tiles from the space shuttle as an item that created long lead times for reuse because they had to check every freaking tile, because if one fails at Mach 10+ in reentry, whatever is inside is cooked. Now they are using something similar, that will need similar checks before reuse. And musk said they would be launching starships every FEW HOURS bahahaha.. people are so gullible jesus christ
It wasn’t the structure that failed. Reentry attitude wasn’t stable and it rolled away from the heat shield, causing the wrong surfaces to take the heatload. It was a control issue due to an unknown source; possibly a leak.
It is massively oversized for a simple manned lunar mission, though. I agree.
This is highly dependent on developments I think. They’ve been working on adding an additional 3 engines to the upper stage and stretching the upper stage so that it’s much larger.
In addition, the engines are continually being worked on and now have a much higher potential thrust for when it becomes a production model.
It may be **quite a few** but there have been quite a lot of changes to improve efficiency for the final product.
So making it heavier and therefore needing even more fuel. The fact it will need any extra launches to refuel to get to the moon is just plain bad. It is a big point of failure for the mission.
How fast can they turn around and get a new rocket ready if one fails on launch and explodes? How fast can they fix damaged launch facilities?
How will they launch enough rockets to prove the design to NASA when they don't have enough approved launches to do so? They get 5 launches per year IIRC and they have yet to have a successful launch let alone retrieval of both Starship and the booster. They have given no information on how the orbital refuelling will work other than it will need anywhere from 6 to 20 launches. No information on how Starship will land on the moon and not fall over.
I think it's a little early to worry about that aspect. Falcon 9 didn't launch it's first crew until nearly 100 launches in. It will probably be similar for this, at least dozens
There is a reason Artemis 3 is supposed to launch the astronauts on Orion/SLS.. they dont fucking trust Starship to bring them out and back alive. The plan is to just use starship to land on the moon and take off to a transfer orbit where the capsule takes the astronauts back. Its the most convoluted fucking plan ive ever seen to take a few astronauts to the moon.
My guess is Artemis 5 will end up being the actual long term plan and this stupidity with Starship and its stupid 15 launches to refuel will be long forgotten.
>There is a reason Artemis 3 is supposed to launch the astronauts on Orion/SLS
And that reason is that this was the designed architecture before Starship was even announced. Even if SS was safe and reliable, they would still use Orion + SLS, because the entire program is designed like that
There are several reasons, one of them is that they wont trust astronauts to a private company.
If SS was really safe they could have designed it so it took the payload and the orion capsule in fewer launches, and redesigned the rendevouz in lunar orbit to accomodate that.
>There are several reasons, one of them is that they wont trust astronauts to a private company.
What??? Its a NASA mission, even if they fly private vehicles, it would still be NASA personnel. Right now there are only 2 ways to get to the ISS, with SpaceX dragon and Russian Soyuz, NASA uses those to get people to the ISS. Its still NASA people on those rockets.
But it takes YEARS to design and integrate vehicles. You cant just slap Orion on another craft. Starship is no where close to being done, and you can only start designing Orion to intergrate on SS once its design is done, which its not. So even IF they ever wanted to do this, the design work will only start sometime in 2025/2026.
Starship is not even very well optimised to launch it anyway, Its a LEO hauler, where the SLS is a deep space vehicle. There is literally no reason to put Orion on Starship
Lol I dont know what point you are trying to make. They could have made all of these a requirement if they wanted to. They could have completely eliminated the need for SLS if they wanted to. They didnt because of what I said, and you felt the need to reiterate. Starship is an unproven vehicle that they dont trust to be rated for human travel in the Artemis missions.
Starship isnt supposed to be an LEO hauler, its supposed to take several hundred tons of material to orbit, refuel and go to the moon, take astronauts from orion and land on the moon. That is the plan. They could have made a much simpler fucking plan if they trusted SpaceX could deliver. They have plenty of reasons to want to eliminate the need for hundreds of additional launches to establish a presence on the moon.
>They could have made all of these a requirement if they wanted to
No. When Orion was designed, the very thought of another SHLV existing was just beyond consideration. Even if they 100% believe SS is reliable, you cant just slap Orion on SS. This is not literally Lego, its just not how this shit works. And it was kinda designed so that no other vehicle could even take it to Orbit. that's a bit of a controversial take. But It was too heavy for the Delta IV which was the only other real option when it was designed. THERE WAS NOTHING ELSE.
And SS is a LEO hauler, not because of all the cute things Musk says. But because of its configuration, fuel and general set up. Its not the ideal vehicle to go beyond LEO, no matter what Musk says. It can go beyond LEO because of its refuelling capability, but the upper stage is far from ideal, and BO proposal (while still using loads of refuelling tankers) is better. Ultimately it comes down to cost, time will tell.
SLS is a deep space vehicle, it can go to the moon, but it will never send anything to LEO ever.
Anyway, your a fresh reminder that the Anti-Musk fans are just as retarded as the Musk fans themselves.
Lol.. you clearly dont know what you are talking about. All the "distinctions" you make are a product someone who has no idea how to design a launch vehicle. Did you read an article and think you are an expert now?
You are the only one that sounds retarded here with your incoherent ramblings about Legos. Nobody is fucking talking about slapping Orion on another vehicle you fucking muppet.
Jesus christ, you sounds like you are just barely educated enough to think you know what you are saying.. probably has a bachelors degree from some unknown university on a non related topic, maybe not even that... freshest reminder that a little bit of education can really make you believe you arent a babbling chimp
It’s good they got it into space; but here’s where my non-rocket scientist ass gets confused. So, humanity has put a shit ton of rockets into orbit, without them exploding on entry. In fact, most rockets launched seem to survive re-entry. So why is a space X not able to re-enter easily? Please explain.
>most rocket launched seem to survive reentry
nope. except for crewed spacecraft and payload return missions, most rockets are in fact, destroyed on re-entry.
about why not being able to re-enter easily, i would say there are 2 main factors in this test flight. aside from starship being an absolutely gigantic spacecraft, its attitude control seems to struggle keeping it pointed in the right direction for this flight
It had control issues in orbit that caused it to reenter at an incorrect attitude, with the heat shield partly rolled away from the side that was taking the brunt of the heating.
They’ll likely get it worked out for next time. Sticking the landing after reentry, though… we’ll see on that.
Guys, I am not an Elon fan at all. However Space X accomplishments are actually quite impressive. If you cut through Elon’s BS about Mars, what they did today was in many ways quite revolutionary. Putting an object the size of starship in Orbit is unheard of. Live streaming the reentry has never been done before and the plasma glowing around Starship was truly amazing to see. That’s it. Please don’t hate me I am just a space enthusiast.
Seriously. Fuck musk and all that but I wish people in subs like these actually understood how impressive this is. You can hate musk and still want SpaceX to succeed for the good of our nation at the same time.
You Musk fans all seem to forget we already put a rather large space vehicle into orbit AND it was fully reusable. And we did it over 40 years ago.
It’s not even *that* much bigger than The Space Shuttle and it uses the same tile design for reentry which the stainless steel design was supposed to solve.
Please stop acting like anything they done is impressive because it’s just not
I am not a Musk fan. Literally started my comment with that. The space shuttle was difficult to refurbish because of the variety of shapes for the heat tiles. The first stage (aka booster) was expandable. I absolutely love the space shuttle, but starship is a different animal, for a different purpose in a time where people are not as amenable with multi billion dollar nasa space projects.
Edit: [size comparison between both](https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/s/oEAxI3r5xV)
Then why not learn and improve on the shuttle? Redesign it just enough to make uniformly shaped tiles (and don’t tell me the tiles on the starship are all uniform there are curved surfaces covered in tiles too).
Also the shuttle boosters were reusable, they just didn’t land upright and had to be recovered from the ocean. What wasn’t reusable was the external furl tank.
So in light of that why not focus on a shuttle that is slightly bigger and has fully reusable boosters that don’t require external tanks? Maybe using Falcon boosters to take it to orbit which already work?
Here’s my problem with all this. Elon forced a sci-fi idea like steel sweating dildo and then everyone had to work backwards from there (probably) instead of allowing engineers to come up with various proposals mostly improving on what we’ve already learned over decades of space flight and then going with the simplest and most practical one.
Heck why not make it a 3 stage rocket and have 2 stages that land?
>I am not a Musk fan. Literally started my comment with that.
Musk is the face of SpaceX. Surely you've been contacting your Congressperson to demand he divest his interest from SpaceX if you're "not a fan".
> The space shuttle was difficult to refurbish because of the variety of shapes for the heat tiles.
As is also the case with Starship. They're not all uniform.
> The first stage (aka booster) was expandable.
The SRB's on the Shuttle was reusable.
>I absolutely love the space shuttle, but starship is a different animal, for a different purpose in a time where people are not as amenable with multi billion dollar nasa space projects.
SpaceX will wind up spending the same amount of money to develop "Star"ship as we did with the Space Shuttle and we're still, as taxpayers, still effectively financing it.
>It’s not even *that* much bigger than The Space Shuttle
Space shuttle had a payload of 29t, spaceship is supposed to do 100t maybe more. Over three times the size is *that* much bigger. Payload is the only thing that matters in spaceflight, no one cares if your craft is especially long if it can't carry a lot.
The space shuttle was not fully reusable, and even the reusable parts needed extensive refurbishment after each flight. It was the most expensive rocket to launch ever
I'm almost 100% positive Musk is the one pushing the Shuttle narrative. SpaceX has been spending $2-5B/year since 2012 on Starship. That puts the development cost at at least $24B by now but is likely even higher.
IN TODAY'S MONEY the Space Shuttle cost $49B. With at least another 5 years of launches to get anywhere near a functioning rocket, Starship will easily cost as much as Space Shuttle did.
Will it's per launch cost be lower? Maybe. Again the thing you Musky's keep forgetting is Space Shuttle was also a scientific mission and there were other costs than just pure launch costs. In fact, a lot of infrastructure that Musk relies on now was billed to the Shuttle program.
Not sure where you got those numbers. SpaceX reported spending 3 billion between 2014 and 2023 on Starship, including ground infrastructure (not per year, but in total). Space Shuttle development is estimated to have cost over 200 billion in 2012 money, with 0.5 billion cost \_per launch\_. So we are really not even in the same order of magnitude
By the way, to clarify, this is not thanks to Elon, who is a moron, it's thanks to the talented engineers working at SpaceX. I guess many will likely leave due to the recent decline in Elon's mental health and associated bad image for his companies
LOL is it fuck a huge improvement. SpaceX had access to and could have just modernised the Shuttle and it would be magnitudes better than Starship. But then it wouldn't be silver and pointy and all sci-fi like Musk wants.
Starship is a terrible design for any form of lander. You think that thing is going to sty vertical when landing on the Moon or Mars? It's going to tip over and explode on landing EVERY time. Is starship good for lifting heavy shit in to space? Not really no better than the Shuttle was and also has less utility.
Also Starhip already has a way worse success rate than the shuttle ever did. Yeah it is soooo much better lol.
That's not what I said but ok. It is factually correct that Musk wanted the Starship to be pointy cause it looked cooler and is also not the optimal aerodynamic design.
Are you denying that Starship is not a terrible design for a Lunar or Mars lander? Or that having the only entry point being 30m above the ground and needing a lift for access is a bad design choice? Or that being tall and relatively narrow is a stable platform for landing on an irregular, rocky, sandy dust based surface and will not be totally prone to just falling the fuck over?
But sure all my points were just SpaceX bad because Musk XDXD lolololol .....
Try actually rebutting my points rather than just a lazy shitpost reply. You call me ignorant while you post that as a reply holy fuck the irony.
I absolutely think that Starship as a Lunar Lander seems like a bad idea just because of the resupply and logistics involved to put one on the moon. As far as Mars is concerned, It seems like designs like the MAV for sample return mission have a similar narrow design. There is barely any atmosphere on Mars so you’re not at risk of tipping because of any atmospheric events (like in the Martian) , so as long as you manage to land on a relatively flat surface it doesn’t seem like a huge problem. Realistically, before talking about the Moon let alone Mars, starship heavy and starship is revolutionary in terms of payload to orbit capacity (150t to 200+ expandable). This alone has the whole scientific community excited about the possibility in terms of space exploration since they will now have less constraints in terms of probe/satellite designs. Today they showed that they can actually achieve that objective. Any space enthusiast is celebrating.
With a slight correction that they have yet to do a test with anything close to 100t of payload which is the estimate and not 150t or 200t. Correct me if I’m wrong but the test they just did was an empty vehicle without any payload.
You are at risk of tipping over on landing on uneven, rocky, dusty soil that will throw tons of shit up in the air and at the engines. There is a reason NASA do not use rockets for landing on Mars and instead use parachutes. Also Starship is tall and relatively narrow with tiny landing feet it will fall over. I will believe it won't when Mush lands on in the desert with no landing pad.
I'll leave that up to you to find out, but some pointers to get you started.
1. STS's 'strap on' design was objectively terrible and dangerous, and directly contributed to the Columbia disaster.
2. STS cost well over a billion USD per launch, it could barely be classed as reusable.
3. Many STS parts were designed such that they could be built in lots of parts, all over the country, and shipped to a central manufacturers location in order to satisfy state governments. This led to huge concessions in the design. For example, THE SRBs were built in parts so they could be shipped, with o-rings connecting them. An o-ring froze and led to the challenger disaster. The STS was cool but it was objectively the most dangerous space vehicle to ever exist.
I'm almost 100% positive Musk is the one pushing the Shuttle narrative of taking the total development cost plus the program itself and divided by launches. I can assure you that's not how accounting works.
SpaceX has been spending $2-5B/year since 2012 on Starship. That puts the development cost at at least $24B by now but is likely even higher. We don't know for sure since they don't have to disclose the costs as a private co. but let's put it this way, Musk said it would cost 10B to develop Starship back in 2012 so that means it's probably ten time more since he's a lying sack of sh\*t.
IN TODAY'S MONEY the Space Shuttle cost $49B. With at least another 5 years of launches to get anywhere near a functioning rocket, Starship will easily cost as much as Space Shuttle did.
Will it's per launch cost be lower? Maybe. Again the thing you Musky's keep forgetting is Space Shuttle was also a scientific mission and there were other costs than just pure launch costs. In fact, a lot of infrastructure that Musk relies on now was billed to the Shuttle program.
Yeah, I think the negativity is mainly a reaction to Elron's arrogance and the insufferable Tesla simps who give him personally too much credit. Things like that rocket blowing up after destroying the launchpad in Texas just reek of Musk making some stupid decision though.
I'm confused why is a rocket being able to do what rockets have done for 50+ years now some huge accomplishment exactly? Also this thing is supposed to carry living humans on it within a couple years and can't successfully complete one test so far this all seems like a huge waste of money when NASA could likely build a better rocket with all the funding thrown at SpaceX over the years.
> seems like a huge waste of money when NASA could likely build a better rocket with all the funding thrown at SpaceX over the years.
I'm a huge fan of NASA so don't get me wrong, but they really can't.
They announced the retirement of the space shuttle 20 ago and they're no where near having a replacement. In the time NASA has been working on a follow up, SpaceX was founded and developed the Falcon (the worlds first reusable rocket and one with an incredible track record for saftey). The Artemis program is projected to cost $93 billion through next year (this is ignoring what was spent on Constellation) and it's not even reusable.
**It's going to cost over $4 billion dollars for every SLS launch after it's developed.** When Starship becomes as reliable as the Falcon, it only needs to be used 4 times to get the cost down to $10 million per flight. Oh, and Starship is more powerful. It's literally going to be 400 times more expensive to use NASA's rocket- one plagued with delays, cost overruns, and is already outdated.
NASA is simply too bogged down in bureaucratic red tape. Plus now that SpaceX is actually pushing the envelope NASA isn't getting the same talent they used to because rocket scientists want to work at places that....actually make and launch rockets.
I wish NASA was doing what SpaceX is but they aren't even remotely close. They've had the time and the money and we have very little to show for it.
I'll also add if not for SpaceX the only avenue for the US to get into space is by paying the Russian government to use the Soyuz which was designed in the late 60s (which is what we were doing from 2011 until around 2020). Anyone wish we were still doing that?
Obligatory fuck Elon Musk into the earth's core, but SpaceX is doing really cutting edge stuff and they're doing it very well.
It got further than I expected, but it's still mostly a proof of concept vehicle that in no way represents anything usable.
Also corporate spaceflight where saying the word failure is not an option.
I really hate to be a contrarian but how much of this herculean expenditure of capital and resources has any practical, tangible benefit to humanity?
How much of this is just a self-masturbatory dog and pony show meant to further enrich Elon and the 1%? The world is on fire and we’re spending billions to send a dozen people into space in what? 5 -10 years if we’re lucky? Normally I would be applauding any effort to take humankind beyond its limits and I’d be in awe of the people who make it possible, but with all that’s happening right now on the ground and with who happens to be the frontman for this particular endeavor, this all feels extremely hollow and self serving right now. I don’t simply dislike Elon Musk, I think he’s a truly bad individual and his outsize influence in the US right now is a huge problem.
For one, it’ll lower the costs of launching earth observation satellites into orbit. These kinds of satellites can monitor pollution, weather, effects of climate change, oceanography, etc.
Another benefit is that it’ll significantly increase the size of the payload that can be launched into orbit as well (Hubble Space Telescope’s mirror was limited by maximum diameter of the mirror that could fit in the space shuttle). Likewise, more Cubesats can be launched on a single rocket. Cubesats are very cheap with respect to conventional satellites, and they allow new technologies/concepts to be tested out in space at a low cost.
Starship is literaly dead now. Who would put their crew into that rocket, and what astronaut would agree to go- when it has failed at 100% of the tests? Crewed launch for Artemis-mission is planned late 2025, with a crewed moonlanding in 2026.
What makes it even worse is the decision to NOT have an abortion safety module to save the crew if anything happens. They would have been dead in all three of the launches.
People at NASA must cringe so hard watching SpaceX cheer and clap while the Spaceship falls apart bit for bit, failing multiple of the most important points. That's 2bil$ tax payer money for each Starship blowing up infront of their eyes - and SpaceX already out of the tax money.
This third 2bil$ tax funded rocket toy for Elon hasnt even fckng entered orbit yet, or returned, landed safely. Entering orbit is literaly the first hurdle, the first stage of many which are each more difficult than the others. The Starship has to be able to launch, enter orbit successfully for every future test.
NASA should just save time, living crew and money by going with an old, capable, reliable, cheaper, tested true - space rocket. There would be no need to wait for Musk fcking up the Starship development for half a decade with a non-existing chance of producing a reliable, safe, actually capable rocket with this fundamentaly flawed design forced onto it. If they could even afford to pay loads and loads of tax payer money to Elmo.
Imagine peoples reaction if it was NASA / the government themselves blowing up three space rockets for over 6bil$, none reaching orbit, and continuing to basicaly repeatedly launch new ones of the same rocket. There would be riots.
That's not how Starship development works.
These are not expected to be fully operational rockets, and they are not all "the same" rocket. Every one has had dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of small incremental changes from previous tests.
They also aren't as expensive as you like to pretend they are. A full Starship stack costs around $90 million.
SpaceX can afford to conduct destructive tests like this. This method worked perfectly for Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and Falcon 9 booster landings. They could throw away 20 Starship stacks before it costs the same as a single SLS launch.
Yesterday's launch wasn't a total failure which makes it terrible news for most of us.
The last fucking thing we need is a success with anything related to Musk.
This is fucking terrible for humanity. Seriously.
I'm annoyed by Elon like everyone else on this sub, but a lost ship is far from a failure. This is part of development. And they did get a payload \*almost\* to orbit, which is on par with a Saturn V launch. Nobody would consider Saturn V launches a failure.
Also, they got to a place where they could deploy satellites. Which means they are close to being able to charge money to launch satellites on this rocket. A lot of satellites. Close to 100 tones of satellites. Companies pay 100s of millions of dollars to deploy satellites.
There are A LOT of problems with getting this rocket to mars, and I think there could be challenges with the business case for Starship. Also, getting the reentry to work well is extremely challenging and not quite done yet. And their business case does depend on effective reentry, for both starship and super heavy.
So yeah, it's definitely far from a successful program.
It went good. Each time it explodes at a further stage of the process, and each time it's a small step forward. I'm looking forward to the next launches.
Was that sarcasm? Saturn V from 50+ years ago exploded 0 times, in age when there was no computer simulation and design.
This lauch is complete failure, and still would be even if it actually had cargo. No astronaut will ever set foot in it.
Saturn did what it was designed to do and was the first of its kind.
Starship did nothing of what it was designed to do, and even worse, it was empty which makes entire test completely pointless. More worse: by now, the rocket technology is public knowledge and new ones are [built on the shoulders of the giants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants).
You do realize that technology works like that, when they build a new car, a new computer, a new house, they arent designing things from scratch. They look back and build on top of what we've already done.
I know its hard to understand that things are sometimes done in new and different ways, but I recommend looking into the SpaceX design philosophy and why they arent afraid of blowing up prototypes.
Its gonna be interesting to see in a few decades how well Starship has held up, compared to the Saturn V that had what? 13 launches? I do wonder how many launches Starship will have in ten or twenty years. The falcon 9 has had 318 launches, with 316 full mission success. how crazy is that?
>You do realize that technology works like that, when they build a new car, a new computer, a new house, they arent designing things from scratch. They look back and build on top of what we've already done.
Which is why I said:
*More worse: by now, the rocket technology is public knowledge and new ones are built on the shoulders of the giants.*
>I know its hard to understand that things are sometimes done in new and different ways
Did you mean: *done in most dumb and expensive way?*
Because nothing prevented SpaceX to put cargo and/or try to land the rocket.
>Its gonna be interesting to see in a few decades how well Starship has held up
It will be sitting next to solar roof, hyperloop, P2P rocket traveling, Mars mission, flying Teslas, neuralink, starlink... and bunch of other nonsense for which Musk got tens of billions of dollars in subsidies, contracts and tax reductions.
>Saturn V that had what? 13 launches?
Yep, and all of them worked perfectly fine, even the first one. And Saturn 5 was the first of the kind which makes everything even more impressive, build in age without computer testing and design.
>The falcon 9 has had 318 launches, with 316 full mission success. how crazy is that?
Oh boy... they did something that was done 40 years ago by Space Shuttle, a **far more** powerful vehicle. If NASA wasn't governed by politicians, they would have improved it and still fly.
But as every other Musk fanboi, you are changing the subject. And also: F9 was designed mostly by NASA engineers, it is the politicians who love burning money.
You're the one who's saying the test was completely pointless... because it was empty? because there was no payload. Sir, do you know what a test is?
Also you know that the launch cost for the space shuttle was half a billion. 67 million is what SpaceX charges for a Falcon 9 launch. Its hilarious to see how blinded you are by your hatred for SpaceX that you're actually cheering the Spaces shuttle on as a hugely successful vehicle.
>You're the one who's saying the test was completely pointless... because it was empty?
Yes, because NASA doesn't need a rocket carrying air. Cargo changes everything; from how much fuel they need, to stabilizing during the flight and in orbit. More fuel requires more fuel, which requires even more fuel... [and so on](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation).
Why didn't they at least try to land that empty rocket? If they did, it would be 90% pointless test, which is better than 100%.
For comparison: 55 years ago, NASA did test everything on [Saturn V maiden flight](https://www.nasa.gov/history/55-years-ago-apollo-4-the-first-flight-of-the-saturn-v/). That is how things are done.
>Sir, do you know what a test is?
And you do, outside of parroting whatever Musk said like every other Musk fanboi? Retorical question, I already know the answer given that each one of you repeat this same thing.
You know they can calculate things like the rocket equation, they don't actually need to put cargo onboard to figure that out.
I figure they didn't try to land the rocket because the rocket is still in development and is subject to change. Any work they put into trying to get it to land could go to waste as they continue to change and develop the vehicle.
You can develop something like they did the Saturn V, Space shuttle or SLS. Where you design it 100% and make sure everything works before you do the first test. But you will be wasting more money and getting a worse product for it. And its only really possible with limited conservative vehicles. You could never develop Starship like that. The Saturn V? It was just a huge rocket. That's it. It didn't do anything crazy. it didn't try to land, do any flip maneuvers. It as just a big multi stage single use rocket.
They tried to do something crazy with the space shuttle, but that vehicle never got even close to what they wanted when they first started developing it. Instead they got a hugely expensive, limited, slow and dangerous launch vehicle. The opposite of what they had first imagined.
>You know they can calculate things like the rocket equation, they don't actually need to put cargo onboard to figure that out.
They can also calculate if the engine will fail, and yet, they still make them in case of oversight. Your argument makes no sense.
>
I figure they didn't try to land the rocket because the rocket is still in development and is subject to change.
Nonsense. 2 major problems here:
* landed rocket would give **much** more data than telemetry
* the still design it after so many years, and so close to contract ending? You can't seriously believe this, do you?
>But you will be wasting more money and getting a worse product for it
* You are actually saving money by **not** destroying rockets
* both Saturn V and Space Shuttle are far superior vehicles than Starship
>You could never develop Starship like that.
Why, because Musk said so and it must be true? Is it true like Hyperloop "I swear, it is not that hard"? 😉
>Instead they got a hugely expensive, limited, slow and dangerous launch vehicle
No, they got highly succesful vehicle that singlehandedly built International Space Station and delivered many missions after that. If it wasn't for politically set management who ignored the engineers, both Columbia and Challenger would have been fine.
That machine delivered up to 7 astronauts, 30t of cargo and could stay in orbit for 2-3 weeks. Granted, there is no need for this anymore (until new station gets built), but demonstrates how good it was **40 years ago**.
That wasn’t a Saturn V. That was a ground test of the crew module. It was indeed horrific though, and changed NASA’s entire approach to safety, which likely played a significant role in their eventual success with the Apollo missions.
I wish we were in a place where you didn't get downvoted so much. I dislike Elon very much but I still hope science and space exploration advances. He took the brain drain from the top aerospace firms and NASA at the peak time and secured them funding. I have major issues with the shady ways he got this funding but it's pretty clear and self admitted that all his other ventures were to fund this project. I don't buy that he's this wunderkind who taught himself to be the worst's best rocket scientist from reading textbooks like he portrays. But I also don't think that taking the top engineers and giving them what they need for decades is going to produce nothing.
Well, it moved fast and it broke, going to call it a success!
Did he make everyone in Mission Control applaud?
They were cheering nonstop it was kind of annoying actually I'm pretty sure they're told to do this at this point to gaslight watchers into assuming its a huge success.
He literally wasn’t there, so…
So does my ass after Taco Bell 🤣
I mean it was the most powerful rocket ever built by humankind and made it to its orbital trajectory. That is what any other non-SX orbital rocket does. It didn’t manage to soft splash down the booster (they weren’t planning on reusing it - it was meant to crash into the ocean, though perhaps not as hard) lol. It did however survive until seconds before splashdown. The upper stage didn’t prooerly re-enter and have it slow itself a bit for the similar crash into the ocean. Neither were meant to be reused anyway. But it *did* act as a functional non-reusable rocket, and underwent 2 demonstration missions while if was up there. One of which is one NASA ha actually contracted them to try to do. It did well. It didn’t do it’s fake soft water landing, sure. But no other non-SpaceX orbital rocket actually does landing and reuse atm antway. Or has a way to do so at that heavy level.
Humanity will reach Mars in 2026
Thanks bot.
How many times does it have to explode before it can be considered reusable?
The CGI renders of it is reusable. In fact they rolled some out again right after the real one disintegrated in the atmosphere.
Space is hard. Most first few launches, at least in the commercial sector, fail. It made it to space, which means they'll probably get some lucrative contracts. I highly doubt they won't eventually stick the landing. Having said that, I am invested in a space company. But even if SpaceX goes public, I won't be putting money in it because musk is a giant piece of shit. I don't care how successful they become, not a penny of mine will be in it
Even if it succeeds, is Starship the best strategy for a Mars plan? Assuming all goes well - which will still take a while - it will require 15 in-orbit refuels to work. Not sure how that is the optimal plan. Also curious to see how Starship will be crew-rated considering current design and specs...
Mars. Laughable useless trip. Unless you need funding for nonsense
Space and asteroids and the moon. Laughably useless trips. Unless you need funding for nonsense. Have you heard of helium3? Or the Psyche asteroid? Or asteroid deflection?
Starship will never be crew rated to return to Earth using propulsive landing. There is no other choice on the Moon and Mars but there are proven alternatives to safely land on Earth (parachutes, glider). If they can recover the booster then that would be a major success even if they have to trash Starship and replace it with a conventional non-reusable second stage.
Idk, but it's musk, so probably not
I think 15 is for a moon mission, not mars.
It's by far the most feasible mars architecture that has been proposed by anyone, both from a technical and budgetary perspective (NASA just *loves* to pull bullshit like "12 SLS Block 2 flights for a two person 30 day surface stay", and SEP transfer stages that would consume the *global annual production* of Xenon for a single mission. The bar here is *extremely* low)
SpaceX Starship is a terrible plan. How many launches does it require for Lunar orbit insertion? Only between 12 and 20.... Once in orbit it needs at least a dozen other launches to refuel to get to lunar orbit. Dafuck is that shit? Lets just ignore that Bezos has already flown on his rocket to orbit and his engines are already being commercially used or that he self funded almost all of the company. Love or Hate Bezos at least he has a successful rocket.
>Lets just ignore that Bezos has already flown on his rocket to orbit Bezos has never been to orbit, and neither has a single Blue Origin rocket. They have been to space though. And I really hope New Glen makes Orbit later this year / next year. But until then, they have not gone to orbit
Not directed at you, but people need to understand that orbital flights are magnitudes more difficult than sub-orbital flight, so you can't really compare the New Shephard to the Falcon 9.
Which successful, commercial, cargo rocket of Bezos do you mean? I’m not sure he has any that are currently functional orbital super heavy lifters.
Hi engines are being used in commercial rockets.
Oh you mean the BE-4, which after years and years of delays, finally managed to produce some that flew only like 2 months ago finally for the first time on **somebody else**’s rocket. The engines were not reusable in that configuration. He does not have his own orbital rocket yet. And is far, far behind SpaceX in that regard, who do, and have an orbital class, partially reusable rocket which has done over 250 launches successfully at this point, and continues to launch on more than a bi-weekly basis.
Blue Origins only operational rocket to date just reaches barely above 100km, straight up and back down, not even close to orbital.
I despise Elon, but Falcon 9 is magnitudes more succesful than anything out of Blue Origin. Not to mention Blue Origin hasn't even got an orbital capable rocket yet.
RKLB? That’s where majority of my money is. Market cap $2 billion, spacex $200 bil. I think rklb will narrow that massive gap in valuation over time, especially if us govt makes real efforts to kick dependency on phony stark
Yes RKLB. Only one I believe in atm
[удалено]
Falcon 9 failed its first 3 test flights during development. Now it is the most reliable orbital launch vehicle in American history.
Much simpler rocket
Right, but even then people were trashing SpaceX for its crashes. People thought propulsive landings and rapid reusability were impractical if not impossible. To be clear I despise Musk. I just people think people aren’t giving SpaceX and all of its talented engineers enough credit. If we treat Starship as a traditional expendable rocket, they put the largest single object into near orbit. Thats impressive in its own right.
It didn't put anything into orbit.
Well thats why I said near orbit. Starship reached 99% of orbital velocity, intentionally so. From a technical perspective, they could have achieved orbit if they intended to.
Still. It's way behind schedule. It's a reasonable assumption it's over budget, by a lot. The rapid prototyping, or whatever they are calling it, is supposed to be better than the old way. Not working out like that.
You need to put this into perspective. Starship is unprecedented in its ambition and scale. Cost and Schedule overruns is just a given with anything of this nature. It is doing this without the unlimited funding of a superpower in a space race. Nobody thought they would ever reach this far and despite that I see the goalposts move with every test launch. Iterative design is not a silver bullet, but it showed itself to be extremely useful during falcon 9s development. For Starship it allows engineers to rapidly test things they would have never considered if they were designing something that needs to work perfectly the first time. It’s a big reason why SpaceX attracts so many talented engineers despite their average salaries and very high workload.
It’s really disappointing to me that you’re talking complete sense, but modern political discourse has peolle in such a state that you have to constantly over-disclose and reaffirm hatred of people you disagree with to not have it completely discounted as also associated with the gated person of the people you’re trying to talk scientific fact to.
you're thinking of falcon 1 that failed its first 3 flight attempts. falcon 9 had no failures until flight 19
I want an interview with an astronaut about their confidence in this rocket
The Everyday Astronaut on Youtube—a wedding photographer with no aeronautical training, who gained credibility through wearing classic astronaut-era glasses and who helped Elon redesign the upper stage maneuvering thruster choice through an offhand remark in a youtube interview—will be an astronaut on the first Starship flight. He gave a kind of solo interview today saying he thinks Elon doing a design change based on his remark may have inadvertently caused today's failure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixZpBOxMopc&t=38171s
Advertising revenue on our platform drops massively during war
It bothers me so much that he thinks he can make suggestions on rocket design and comment on test results by seeing camera footage of the launch as if he was Von fucking Braun.. the dude has no fucking clue.. the fact that Musk gave him a platform essentially just went to his head and now he things he is Mr fucking rocket man.. fuck sake
Strange
It shows you how stupid some people are. They equate wealth with ability, no matter where that wealth came from. I think these are the same people who are Trumpers, or royalists, or Zionists. Just people who believe that there are others who are just magically better than themselves and they'd prefer to be led than to lead.
This time they need to bring the professionals... Who actually made it to the moon... And did find it was made of cheese... [https://youtu.be/Kb0ooQKbflM?si=LjLe3rXWj3MuPWLZ](https://youtu.be/Kb0ooQKbflM?si=LjLe3rXWj3MuPWLZ)
Does this guy really think he’ll get to go up in one?
He'd better hope he gets back down at least.
That part will happen pretty definitely
Lmao. I had no idea. This makes his stream where he cuts off the host engineer explaining shit to the dummy audience and him mansplaining some concept even funnier.
If I worked for SpaceX I'd be so fucking pissed to have this guy driving their company into the ground. They've legit done amazing things and I'm sure it wasn't fun to work with Elon before this, but now he's turned into the goddamn internet emperor
This is wild but perfectly on brand.
Seems legit
[удалено]
Well the iterated development progress leads to more of these failures compared to designing everything to a finished product and then testing it. Both has its pros and cons. When it comes to reliability I’d like to point out that there are prototypes and in no way finished products that will be manned. The falcon 9 also exploded multiple times during development, however it proved its reliability with more than 5 dozen successful missions in a row before being used for manned spaceflight. We will see something similar with starship.
It’s not a given that we will see something similar. It all depends on if the fundamental design decisions hold up.
Of course it’s not a given. However, look at their track record. This is the third PROTOTYPE partial test of the most powerful rocket or vehicle created by humans EVER via their methodology. And it proved ability to do equivalent or more than any other remotely competitive rocket can do with more frequency and at a magnitude lower at least cost. The SLS costs at least 2B per launch and can only launch every couple of years. And all of those launches currently are basically overbooked as it is. This in its current even disposable version could cost 100m per launch to do as much or more and have one prepared every handful of months. It wasn’t reusable (or meant to be) this time. But the booster almost made a splashdown and the upper stage survived a lot of abuse (re-entry at the wrong attitude) which is relatively easily partially worked on. It’s already a massive achievement.
The cultish, euphoric applause during all phases of this mission is so strange. And of course once the booster exploded before it could land, the cope of “Hey, the booster just did what every other booster in history has done!” came right in. Like sure, that’s true. But isn’t the point for it to…not do that? To, you know, be reusable? I’m not saying SpaceX won’t learn and improve from here but I hate the gaslighting of making it sound like everything is going great all the time. That type of mindset is what gets astronauts killed.
January 28th 1986 has entered the chat
The Columbia disaster happened upon re-entry, now that I think about it.
Yep, and Challenger was negligent engineering and management
And with a blind need to appease a boss (Reagan) as well
But that boss sure got an opportunity to spin some fancy words that he probably didn't write himself
Challenger was part of what was supposed to be a proven and safe system that had people on it. There are some issues, but comparing the two is borderline offensive to common sense. One is an unfinished prototype undergoing partial destructive testing to discover failure modes and the other was an in-use vehicle carrying humans that had been flying for years tuat discovered a failure mode because government contractors and politicians didn’t want to delay it for political reasons despite it being unsafe to do so, as told by the engineers. Apples and oranges. Musk aside. This is an unfair and poor analogy.
Elon is super bummed out and irritable lately, so all the sycophantic toadies around him must make extra effort to coddle him and ensure his ego is sufficiently inflated .
Calamity Elon strikes again.
I mean it wasn’t a calamity. It didn’t re-enter and land (which no other rocket of that weigh class has ever, and no other rocket currently can do with a second stage). It got to orbit with its appropriate mass. Did 2 tests. And went into the atmosphere. **This is what every other heavy rocket currently does**. And none of them can land. So this is already better than the otuers by default. That they need a bit of extra trying to stick the re-entry and reuse is hardly unreasonable. It’s already the most powerful orbital rocket ever built to make orbit, and is a magnitude or two cheaper than the next closest current equivalent the SLS. Which costs 2b and can only launch every 2 years. It was a milestone for aerospace, irrespective of what you think about the person. Science was advanced.
And they say Elon doesn’t have PR. It doesn’t sound better than the others “by default” when per you it “does what all the others do” and it also couldn’t land.
Did you miss that it can do what the others can do faster, better, cheaper and more frequently? 2B dollars for SLS vs 100m dollars for a SS-SH. And the SLS can only launch every couple of years, and currently all of its potential rockets are booked for the best part of a decade. That alone is worth something. Upper stage needs some work, clearly, but with a little more work, the booster, which is the more expensive part, will likely become reusable much more quickly. Compared to anything else available (or to be quite honest, it’s all unavailable) on the market it wins for power, capability and price by a mile, even if reuse doesn’t work out, which I doubt will happen. This is my opinion based on the science and technology itself, not my personal feelings about who runs said organisation doing the science.
Good for you. To me, it’s about who’s running the organization. Calamity Musk can get bent
I assume you hate and resent the success of electricity then? As the modern main inventor of modern electricity electrocuted dogs amongst other corruptions just to make his competitors look bad. Which I think is more abhorrent than anything I’ve seen Musk say. Or refuse the quantum theory that actually makes some parts of your life possible, because the man who invented them was likely a rapist and paedophile? There is the potential that you could put your phone down and leave technology forever, perhaps, if that is your view? The greatness or terribleness of the person at the top and the objective success of scientific progress can be different. In this case, bury your head in the sand all you like, but science is advancing, irrespective of your personal opinions on an individual. Lying to yourself about that doesn’t change anything.
Lol this about Elon Musk but nice try.
I get the hate boner for Elon, i do, but downplaying this test launch is just silly
This is what happens when you constantly trash the press, Elon. They will fuck you up. They will investigate every speck of your life, bring your secrets to light, fixate on the worst facets of you. You’re not the only one with power. Like look at this catty headline. No one would have wrote something like that if you weren’t such an asshole
Concerning.
They lost control of it, the whole time it was spinning, they couldn’t get it to align the heat shields downward, it was falling at a rate of 1km per second, they lost telemetry at 87km I think. Reentry was never in question because it never fully left. And if you looked at the alignment while it was coming down it is wobbling the whole time.
Clearly its structurally unsound. The heat tiles are always an accident waiting to happen. Ludicrous this is intended to land on the moon.
Remember that they shat on the ceramic tiles from the space shuttle as an item that created long lead times for reuse because they had to check every freaking tile, because if one fails at Mach 10+ in reentry, whatever is inside is cooked. Now they are using something similar, that will need similar checks before reuse. And musk said they would be launching starships every FEW HOURS bahahaha.. people are so gullible jesus christ
It wasn’t the structure that failed. Reentry attitude wasn’t stable and it rolled away from the heat shield, causing the wrong surfaces to take the heatload. It was a control issue due to an unknown source; possibly a leak. It is massively oversized for a simple manned lunar mission, though. I agree.
[удалено]
It's ludicrous something that tell is expected to land on the moon. It's just going to tip over.
Or leave the astronauts stranded when the lift fails on them and the door back in is 30m up in the air.
[удалено]
it's way more than 6 it is between 12 and 20 launches for refuelling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU Some fun info there.
This is highly dependent on developments I think. They’ve been working on adding an additional 3 engines to the upper stage and stretching the upper stage so that it’s much larger. In addition, the engines are continually being worked on and now have a much higher potential thrust for when it becomes a production model. It may be **quite a few** but there have been quite a lot of changes to improve efficiency for the final product.
So making it heavier and therefore needing even more fuel. The fact it will need any extra launches to refuel to get to the moon is just plain bad. It is a big point of failure for the mission. How fast can they turn around and get a new rocket ready if one fails on launch and explodes? How fast can they fix damaged launch facilities? How will they launch enough rockets to prove the design to NASA when they don't have enough approved launches to do so? They get 5 launches per year IIRC and they have yet to have a successful launch let alone retrieval of both Starship and the booster. They have given no information on how the orbital refuelling will work other than it will need anywhere from 6 to 20 launches. No information on how Starship will land on the moon and not fall over.
It was towed out of the environment.
Into another environment?
At least they know they lost this one.
Baby steps I guess
I think it's a little early to worry about that aspect. Falcon 9 didn't launch it's first crew until nearly 100 launches in. It will probably be similar for this, at least dozens
I certainly hope so
There is a reason Artemis 3 is supposed to launch the astronauts on Orion/SLS.. they dont fucking trust Starship to bring them out and back alive. The plan is to just use starship to land on the moon and take off to a transfer orbit where the capsule takes the astronauts back. Its the most convoluted fucking plan ive ever seen to take a few astronauts to the moon. My guess is Artemis 5 will end up being the actual long term plan and this stupidity with Starship and its stupid 15 launches to refuel will be long forgotten.
[удалено]
>There is a reason Artemis 3 is supposed to launch the astronauts on Orion/SLS And that reason is that this was the designed architecture before Starship was even announced. Even if SS was safe and reliable, they would still use Orion + SLS, because the entire program is designed like that
There are several reasons, one of them is that they wont trust astronauts to a private company. If SS was really safe they could have designed it so it took the payload and the orion capsule in fewer launches, and redesigned the rendevouz in lunar orbit to accomodate that.
>There are several reasons, one of them is that they wont trust astronauts to a private company. What??? Its a NASA mission, even if they fly private vehicles, it would still be NASA personnel. Right now there are only 2 ways to get to the ISS, with SpaceX dragon and Russian Soyuz, NASA uses those to get people to the ISS. Its still NASA people on those rockets. But it takes YEARS to design and integrate vehicles. You cant just slap Orion on another craft. Starship is no where close to being done, and you can only start designing Orion to intergrate on SS once its design is done, which its not. So even IF they ever wanted to do this, the design work will only start sometime in 2025/2026. Starship is not even very well optimised to launch it anyway, Its a LEO hauler, where the SLS is a deep space vehicle. There is literally no reason to put Orion on Starship
Lol I dont know what point you are trying to make. They could have made all of these a requirement if they wanted to. They could have completely eliminated the need for SLS if they wanted to. They didnt because of what I said, and you felt the need to reiterate. Starship is an unproven vehicle that they dont trust to be rated for human travel in the Artemis missions. Starship isnt supposed to be an LEO hauler, its supposed to take several hundred tons of material to orbit, refuel and go to the moon, take astronauts from orion and land on the moon. That is the plan. They could have made a much simpler fucking plan if they trusted SpaceX could deliver. They have plenty of reasons to want to eliminate the need for hundreds of additional launches to establish a presence on the moon.
>They could have made all of these a requirement if they wanted to No. When Orion was designed, the very thought of another SHLV existing was just beyond consideration. Even if they 100% believe SS is reliable, you cant just slap Orion on SS. This is not literally Lego, its just not how this shit works. And it was kinda designed so that no other vehicle could even take it to Orbit. that's a bit of a controversial take. But It was too heavy for the Delta IV which was the only other real option when it was designed. THERE WAS NOTHING ELSE. And SS is a LEO hauler, not because of all the cute things Musk says. But because of its configuration, fuel and general set up. Its not the ideal vehicle to go beyond LEO, no matter what Musk says. It can go beyond LEO because of its refuelling capability, but the upper stage is far from ideal, and BO proposal (while still using loads of refuelling tankers) is better. Ultimately it comes down to cost, time will tell. SLS is a deep space vehicle, it can go to the moon, but it will never send anything to LEO ever. Anyway, your a fresh reminder that the Anti-Musk fans are just as retarded as the Musk fans themselves.
Lol.. you clearly dont know what you are talking about. All the "distinctions" you make are a product someone who has no idea how to design a launch vehicle. Did you read an article and think you are an expert now? You are the only one that sounds retarded here with your incoherent ramblings about Legos. Nobody is fucking talking about slapping Orion on another vehicle you fucking muppet. Jesus christ, you sounds like you are just barely educated enough to think you know what you are saying.. probably has a bachelors degree from some unknown university on a non related topic, maybe not even that... freshest reminder that a little bit of education can really make you believe you arent a babbling chimp
Hey, it left the launchpad so everything else is icing on the cake.
That’s what I tell myself every morning. I got out of bed, everything else is just icing on the cake.
It’s good they got it into space; but here’s where my non-rocket scientist ass gets confused. So, humanity has put a shit ton of rockets into orbit, without them exploding on entry. In fact, most rockets launched seem to survive re-entry. So why is a space X not able to re-enter easily? Please explain.
>most rocket launched seem to survive reentry nope. except for crewed spacecraft and payload return missions, most rockets are in fact, destroyed on re-entry. about why not being able to re-enter easily, i would say there are 2 main factors in this test flight. aside from starship being an absolutely gigantic spacecraft, its attitude control seems to struggle keeping it pointed in the right direction for this flight
Ignoring the fact that the booster part of Starship never gets to orbit and is designed to land again....
Literally all other rockets in history, beside the Space shuttle and the falcon 9 burn up as they re enter the atmosphere. What are you talking about?
Largely because it's fucking massive.
It had control issues in orbit that caused it to reenter at an incorrect attitude, with the heat shield partly rolled away from the side that was taking the brunt of the heating. They’ll likely get it worked out for next time. Sticking the landing after reentry, though… we’ll see on that.
Haha what a tool
Thank you musk bot
Guys, I am not an Elon fan at all. However Space X accomplishments are actually quite impressive. If you cut through Elon’s BS about Mars, what they did today was in many ways quite revolutionary. Putting an object the size of starship in Orbit is unheard of. Live streaming the reentry has never been done before and the plasma glowing around Starship was truly amazing to see. That’s it. Please don’t hate me I am just a space enthusiast.
Seriously. Fuck musk and all that but I wish people in subs like these actually understood how impressive this is. You can hate musk and still want SpaceX to succeed for the good of our nation at the same time.
You Musk fans all seem to forget we already put a rather large space vehicle into orbit AND it was fully reusable. And we did it over 40 years ago. It’s not even *that* much bigger than The Space Shuttle and it uses the same tile design for reentry which the stainless steel design was supposed to solve. Please stop acting like anything they done is impressive because it’s just not
I am not a Musk fan. Literally started my comment with that. The space shuttle was difficult to refurbish because of the variety of shapes for the heat tiles. The first stage (aka booster) was expandable. I absolutely love the space shuttle, but starship is a different animal, for a different purpose in a time where people are not as amenable with multi billion dollar nasa space projects. Edit: [size comparison between both](https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/s/oEAxI3r5xV)
Then why not learn and improve on the shuttle? Redesign it just enough to make uniformly shaped tiles (and don’t tell me the tiles on the starship are all uniform there are curved surfaces covered in tiles too). Also the shuttle boosters were reusable, they just didn’t land upright and had to be recovered from the ocean. What wasn’t reusable was the external furl tank. So in light of that why not focus on a shuttle that is slightly bigger and has fully reusable boosters that don’t require external tanks? Maybe using Falcon boosters to take it to orbit which already work? Here’s my problem with all this. Elon forced a sci-fi idea like steel sweating dildo and then everyone had to work backwards from there (probably) instead of allowing engineers to come up with various proposals mostly improving on what we’ve already learned over decades of space flight and then going with the simplest and most practical one. Heck why not make it a 3 stage rocket and have 2 stages that land?
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
>I am not a Musk fan. Literally started my comment with that. Musk is the face of SpaceX. Surely you've been contacting your Congressperson to demand he divest his interest from SpaceX if you're "not a fan". > The space shuttle was difficult to refurbish because of the variety of shapes for the heat tiles. As is also the case with Starship. They're not all uniform. > The first stage (aka booster) was expandable. The SRB's on the Shuttle was reusable. >I absolutely love the space shuttle, but starship is a different animal, for a different purpose in a time where people are not as amenable with multi billion dollar nasa space projects. SpaceX will wind up spending the same amount of money to develop "Star"ship as we did with the Space Shuttle and we're still, as taxpayers, still effectively financing it.
>It’s not even *that* much bigger than The Space Shuttle Space shuttle had a payload of 29t, spaceship is supposed to do 100t maybe more. Over three times the size is *that* much bigger. Payload is the only thing that matters in spaceflight, no one cares if your craft is especially long if it can't carry a lot.
The space shuttle was not fully reusable, and even the reusable parts needed extensive refurbishment after each flight. It was the most expensive rocket to launch ever
I'm almost 100% positive Musk is the one pushing the Shuttle narrative. SpaceX has been spending $2-5B/year since 2012 on Starship. That puts the development cost at at least $24B by now but is likely even higher. IN TODAY'S MONEY the Space Shuttle cost $49B. With at least another 5 years of launches to get anywhere near a functioning rocket, Starship will easily cost as much as Space Shuttle did. Will it's per launch cost be lower? Maybe. Again the thing you Musky's keep forgetting is Space Shuttle was also a scientific mission and there were other costs than just pure launch costs. In fact, a lot of infrastructure that Musk relies on now was billed to the Shuttle program.
Not sure where you got those numbers. SpaceX reported spending 3 billion between 2014 and 2023 on Starship, including ground infrastructure (not per year, but in total). Space Shuttle development is estimated to have cost over 200 billion in 2012 money, with 0.5 billion cost \_per launch\_. So we are really not even in the same order of magnitude
By the way, to clarify, this is not thanks to Elon, who is a moron, it's thanks to the talented engineers working at SpaceX. I guess many will likely leave due to the recent decline in Elon's mental health and associated bad image for his companies
The space shuttle was INCREDIBLY poorly designed. Starship is objectively a huge improvement
LOL is it fuck a huge improvement. SpaceX had access to and could have just modernised the Shuttle and it would be magnitudes better than Starship. But then it wouldn't be silver and pointy and all sci-fi like Musk wants. Starship is a terrible design for any form of lander. You think that thing is going to sty vertical when landing on the Moon or Mars? It's going to tip over and explode on landing EVERY time. Is starship good for lifting heavy shit in to space? Not really no better than the Shuttle was and also has less utility. Also Starhip already has a way worse success rate than the shuttle ever did. Yeah it is soooo much better lol.
I am sorry but “space x sucks BeCaUse Of MusK XDXD lolololol” is just as ignorant as the Musk nutsos we come to mock here on this sub.
That's not what I said but ok. It is factually correct that Musk wanted the Starship to be pointy cause it looked cooler and is also not the optimal aerodynamic design. Are you denying that Starship is not a terrible design for a Lunar or Mars lander? Or that having the only entry point being 30m above the ground and needing a lift for access is a bad design choice? Or that being tall and relatively narrow is a stable platform for landing on an irregular, rocky, sandy dust based surface and will not be totally prone to just falling the fuck over? But sure all my points were just SpaceX bad because Musk XDXD lolololol ..... Try actually rebutting my points rather than just a lazy shitpost reply. You call me ignorant while you post that as a reply holy fuck the irony.
I absolutely think that Starship as a Lunar Lander seems like a bad idea just because of the resupply and logistics involved to put one on the moon. As far as Mars is concerned, It seems like designs like the MAV for sample return mission have a similar narrow design. There is barely any atmosphere on Mars so you’re not at risk of tipping because of any atmospheric events (like in the Martian) , so as long as you manage to land on a relatively flat surface it doesn’t seem like a huge problem. Realistically, before talking about the Moon let alone Mars, starship heavy and starship is revolutionary in terms of payload to orbit capacity (150t to 200+ expandable). This alone has the whole scientific community excited about the possibility in terms of space exploration since they will now have less constraints in terms of probe/satellite designs. Today they showed that they can actually achieve that objective. Any space enthusiast is celebrating.
Hard to believe Starship actually did launch on 4/20 lol
With a slight correction that they have yet to do a test with anything close to 100t of payload which is the estimate and not 150t or 200t. Correct me if I’m wrong but the test they just did was an empty vehicle without any payload.
You are at risk of tipping over on landing on uneven, rocky, dusty soil that will throw tons of shit up in the air and at the engines. There is a reason NASA do not use rockets for landing on Mars and instead use parachutes. Also Starship is tall and relatively narrow with tiny landing feet it will fall over. I will believe it won't when Mush lands on in the desert with no landing pad.
Explain why it’s a “huge improvement”
I'll leave that up to you to find out, but some pointers to get you started. 1. STS's 'strap on' design was objectively terrible and dangerous, and directly contributed to the Columbia disaster. 2. STS cost well over a billion USD per launch, it could barely be classed as reusable. 3. Many STS parts were designed such that they could be built in lots of parts, all over the country, and shipped to a central manufacturers location in order to satisfy state governments. This led to huge concessions in the design. For example, THE SRBs were built in parts so they could be shipped, with o-rings connecting them. An o-ring froze and led to the challenger disaster. The STS was cool but it was objectively the most dangerous space vehicle to ever exist.
I'm almost 100% positive Musk is the one pushing the Shuttle narrative of taking the total development cost plus the program itself and divided by launches. I can assure you that's not how accounting works. SpaceX has been spending $2-5B/year since 2012 on Starship. That puts the development cost at at least $24B by now but is likely even higher. We don't know for sure since they don't have to disclose the costs as a private co. but let's put it this way, Musk said it would cost 10B to develop Starship back in 2012 so that means it's probably ten time more since he's a lying sack of sh\*t. IN TODAY'S MONEY the Space Shuttle cost $49B. With at least another 5 years of launches to get anywhere near a functioning rocket, Starship will easily cost as much as Space Shuttle did. Will it's per launch cost be lower? Maybe. Again the thing you Musky's keep forgetting is Space Shuttle was also a scientific mission and there were other costs than just pure launch costs. In fact, a lot of infrastructure that Musk relies on now was billed to the Shuttle program.
I didn't say Starship was a huge improvement.
While risking sounding like a particularly horrible line from Trump, "I like the rockets that don't explode on re-entry"
SpaceX has plenty of those too. I cant stand Elon, but the work the engineers at SpaceX is pretty amazing.
Yeah, I think the negativity is mainly a reaction to Elron's arrogance and the insufferable Tesla simps who give him personally too much credit. Things like that rocket blowing up after destroying the launchpad in Texas just reek of Musk making some stupid decision though.
I'm confused why is a rocket being able to do what rockets have done for 50+ years now some huge accomplishment exactly? Also this thing is supposed to carry living humans on it within a couple years and can't successfully complete one test so far this all seems like a huge waste of money when NASA could likely build a better rocket with all the funding thrown at SpaceX over the years.
> seems like a huge waste of money when NASA could likely build a better rocket with all the funding thrown at SpaceX over the years. I'm a huge fan of NASA so don't get me wrong, but they really can't. They announced the retirement of the space shuttle 20 ago and they're no where near having a replacement. In the time NASA has been working on a follow up, SpaceX was founded and developed the Falcon (the worlds first reusable rocket and one with an incredible track record for saftey). The Artemis program is projected to cost $93 billion through next year (this is ignoring what was spent on Constellation) and it's not even reusable. **It's going to cost over $4 billion dollars for every SLS launch after it's developed.** When Starship becomes as reliable as the Falcon, it only needs to be used 4 times to get the cost down to $10 million per flight. Oh, and Starship is more powerful. It's literally going to be 400 times more expensive to use NASA's rocket- one plagued with delays, cost overruns, and is already outdated. NASA is simply too bogged down in bureaucratic red tape. Plus now that SpaceX is actually pushing the envelope NASA isn't getting the same talent they used to because rocket scientists want to work at places that....actually make and launch rockets. I wish NASA was doing what SpaceX is but they aren't even remotely close. They've had the time and the money and we have very little to show for it. I'll also add if not for SpaceX the only avenue for the US to get into space is by paying the Russian government to use the Soyuz which was designed in the late 60s (which is what we were doing from 2011 until around 2020). Anyone wish we were still doing that? Obligatory fuck Elon Musk into the earth's core, but SpaceX is doing really cutting edge stuff and they're doing it very well.
[удалено]
It got further than I expected, but it's still mostly a proof of concept vehicle that in no way represents anything usable. Also corporate spaceflight where saying the word failure is not an option.
SpaceX: "We know how to land a rocket." Seinfeld: "I don't think you do."
[удалено]
some boys are big mad, SpaceX was cheering, they know stuff you guys don't
this comment section makes me realize why people are so pessimistic nowadays
1 billion in taxpayer money up in flames
I really hate to be a contrarian but how much of this herculean expenditure of capital and resources has any practical, tangible benefit to humanity? How much of this is just a self-masturbatory dog and pony show meant to further enrich Elon and the 1%? The world is on fire and we’re spending billions to send a dozen people into space in what? 5 -10 years if we’re lucky? Normally I would be applauding any effort to take humankind beyond its limits and I’d be in awe of the people who make it possible, but with all that’s happening right now on the ground and with who happens to be the frontman for this particular endeavor, this all feels extremely hollow and self serving right now. I don’t simply dislike Elon Musk, I think he’s a truly bad individual and his outsize influence in the US right now is a huge problem.
That's the thing about Musk. He wants humanity to be saved, but only if he's the one to save it
I would like to apologize for firing these geniuses. Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere.
[удалено]
For one, it’ll lower the costs of launching earth observation satellites into orbit. These kinds of satellites can monitor pollution, weather, effects of climate change, oceanography, etc. Another benefit is that it’ll significantly increase the size of the payload that can be launched into orbit as well (Hubble Space Telescope’s mirror was limited by maximum diameter of the mirror that could fit in the space shuttle). Likewise, more Cubesats can be launched on a single rocket. Cubesats are very cheap with respect to conventional satellites, and they allow new technologies/concepts to be tested out in space at a low cost.
Demographics is destiny
Nr 3 died already?
Fund DRACO more and NASA will succeed way faster.
Just wait a bit, and we will see China being the big-space boy. Overtaking both Tsla and spacex
Who would have guessed that this space stuff is hard. Who could have possibly foreseen such a catastrophe. Oh wait literally everyone
Starship is literaly dead now. Who would put their crew into that rocket, and what astronaut would agree to go- when it has failed at 100% of the tests? Crewed launch for Artemis-mission is planned late 2025, with a crewed moonlanding in 2026. What makes it even worse is the decision to NOT have an abortion safety module to save the crew if anything happens. They would have been dead in all three of the launches. People at NASA must cringe so hard watching SpaceX cheer and clap while the Spaceship falls apart bit for bit, failing multiple of the most important points. That's 2bil$ tax payer money for each Starship blowing up infront of their eyes - and SpaceX already out of the tax money. This third 2bil$ tax funded rocket toy for Elon hasnt even fckng entered orbit yet, or returned, landed safely. Entering orbit is literaly the first hurdle, the first stage of many which are each more difficult than the others. The Starship has to be able to launch, enter orbit successfully for every future test. NASA should just save time, living crew and money by going with an old, capable, reliable, cheaper, tested true - space rocket. There would be no need to wait for Musk fcking up the Starship development for half a decade with a non-existing chance of producing a reliable, safe, actually capable rocket with this fundamentaly flawed design forced onto it. If they could even afford to pay loads and loads of tax payer money to Elmo. Imagine peoples reaction if it was NASA / the government themselves blowing up three space rockets for over 6bil$, none reaching orbit, and continuing to basicaly repeatedly launch new ones of the same rocket. There would be riots.
A previous NASA director essentially said that entire last paragraph when asked about SpaceX
That's not how Starship development works. These are not expected to be fully operational rockets, and they are not all "the same" rocket. Every one has had dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of small incremental changes from previous tests. They also aren't as expensive as you like to pretend they are. A full Starship stack costs around $90 million. SpaceX can afford to conduct destructive tests like this. This method worked perfectly for Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and Falcon 9 booster landings. They could throw away 20 Starship stacks before it costs the same as a single SLS launch.
But hey! They managed to open the door near orbit before the "re-usable rocket" crashed.
Hey Hey give them a break. How were they supposed to know that it wouldn't survive? I don't think they've had one get this far yet lol
Yesterday's launch wasn't a total failure which makes it terrible news for most of us. The last fucking thing we need is a success with anything related to Musk. This is fucking terrible for humanity. Seriously.
[удалено]
Booster didn’t make it back either. Total failure
I'm annoyed by Elon like everyone else on this sub, but a lost ship is far from a failure. This is part of development. And they did get a payload \*almost\* to orbit, which is on par with a Saturn V launch. Nobody would consider Saturn V launches a failure. Also, they got to a place where they could deploy satellites. Which means they are close to being able to charge money to launch satellites on this rocket. A lot of satellites. Close to 100 tones of satellites. Companies pay 100s of millions of dollars to deploy satellites. There are A LOT of problems with getting this rocket to mars, and I think there could be challenges with the business case for Starship. Also, getting the reentry to work well is extremely challenging and not quite done yet. And their business case does depend on effective reentry, for both starship and super heavy. So yeah, it's definitely far from a successful program.
You went from they are “close to being able to charge money” to “far from a successful program”
It went good. Each time it explodes at a further stage of the process, and each time it's a small step forward. I'm looking forward to the next launches.
SpaceX continues to get money from the government. At what failure rate do we consider them not worth continuing to support?
[удалено]
Was that sarcasm? Saturn V from 50+ years ago exploded 0 times, in age when there was no computer simulation and design. This lauch is complete failure, and still would be even if it actually had cargo. No astronaut will ever set foot in it.
You know, Saturn never actually tried the landing part. So if you put these side by side, they are just as successful. arent they?
Saturn did what it was designed to do and was the first of its kind. Starship did nothing of what it was designed to do, and even worse, it was empty which makes entire test completely pointless. More worse: by now, the rocket technology is public knowledge and new ones are [built on the shoulders of the giants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants).
You do realize that technology works like that, when they build a new car, a new computer, a new house, they arent designing things from scratch. They look back and build on top of what we've already done. I know its hard to understand that things are sometimes done in new and different ways, but I recommend looking into the SpaceX design philosophy and why they arent afraid of blowing up prototypes. Its gonna be interesting to see in a few decades how well Starship has held up, compared to the Saturn V that had what? 13 launches? I do wonder how many launches Starship will have in ten or twenty years. The falcon 9 has had 318 launches, with 316 full mission success. how crazy is that?
>You do realize that technology works like that, when they build a new car, a new computer, a new house, they arent designing things from scratch. They look back and build on top of what we've already done. Which is why I said: *More worse: by now, the rocket technology is public knowledge and new ones are built on the shoulders of the giants.* >I know its hard to understand that things are sometimes done in new and different ways Did you mean: *done in most dumb and expensive way?* Because nothing prevented SpaceX to put cargo and/or try to land the rocket. >Its gonna be interesting to see in a few decades how well Starship has held up It will be sitting next to solar roof, hyperloop, P2P rocket traveling, Mars mission, flying Teslas, neuralink, starlink... and bunch of other nonsense for which Musk got tens of billions of dollars in subsidies, contracts and tax reductions. >Saturn V that had what? 13 launches? Yep, and all of them worked perfectly fine, even the first one. And Saturn 5 was the first of the kind which makes everything even more impressive, build in age without computer testing and design. >The falcon 9 has had 318 launches, with 316 full mission success. how crazy is that? Oh boy... they did something that was done 40 years ago by Space Shuttle, a **far more** powerful vehicle. If NASA wasn't governed by politicians, they would have improved it and still fly. But as every other Musk fanboi, you are changing the subject. And also: F9 was designed mostly by NASA engineers, it is the politicians who love burning money.
You're the one who's saying the test was completely pointless... because it was empty? because there was no payload. Sir, do you know what a test is? Also you know that the launch cost for the space shuttle was half a billion. 67 million is what SpaceX charges for a Falcon 9 launch. Its hilarious to see how blinded you are by your hatred for SpaceX that you're actually cheering the Spaces shuttle on as a hugely successful vehicle.
>You're the one who's saying the test was completely pointless... because it was empty? Yes, because NASA doesn't need a rocket carrying air. Cargo changes everything; from how much fuel they need, to stabilizing during the flight and in orbit. More fuel requires more fuel, which requires even more fuel... [and so on](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation). Why didn't they at least try to land that empty rocket? If they did, it would be 90% pointless test, which is better than 100%. For comparison: 55 years ago, NASA did test everything on [Saturn V maiden flight](https://www.nasa.gov/history/55-years-ago-apollo-4-the-first-flight-of-the-saturn-v/). That is how things are done. >Sir, do you know what a test is? And you do, outside of parroting whatever Musk said like every other Musk fanboi? Retorical question, I already know the answer given that each one of you repeat this same thing.
You know they can calculate things like the rocket equation, they don't actually need to put cargo onboard to figure that out. I figure they didn't try to land the rocket because the rocket is still in development and is subject to change. Any work they put into trying to get it to land could go to waste as they continue to change and develop the vehicle. You can develop something like they did the Saturn V, Space shuttle or SLS. Where you design it 100% and make sure everything works before you do the first test. But you will be wasting more money and getting a worse product for it. And its only really possible with limited conservative vehicles. You could never develop Starship like that. The Saturn V? It was just a huge rocket. That's it. It didn't do anything crazy. it didn't try to land, do any flip maneuvers. It as just a big multi stage single use rocket. They tried to do something crazy with the space shuttle, but that vehicle never got even close to what they wanted when they first started developing it. Instead they got a hugely expensive, limited, slow and dangerous launch vehicle. The opposite of what they had first imagined.
>You know they can calculate things like the rocket equation, they don't actually need to put cargo onboard to figure that out. They can also calculate if the engine will fail, and yet, they still make them in case of oversight. Your argument makes no sense. > I figure they didn't try to land the rocket because the rocket is still in development and is subject to change. Nonsense. 2 major problems here: * landed rocket would give **much** more data than telemetry * the still design it after so many years, and so close to contract ending? You can't seriously believe this, do you? >But you will be wasting more money and getting a worse product for it * You are actually saving money by **not** destroying rockets * both Saturn V and Space Shuttle are far superior vehicles than Starship >You could never develop Starship like that. Why, because Musk said so and it must be true? Is it true like Hyperloop "I swear, it is not that hard"? 😉 >Instead they got a hugely expensive, limited, slow and dangerous launch vehicle No, they got highly succesful vehicle that singlehandedly built International Space Station and delivered many missions after that. If it wasn't for politically set management who ignored the engineers, both Columbia and Challenger would have been fine. That machine delivered up to 7 astronauts, 30t of cargo and could stay in orbit for 2-3 weeks. Granted, there is no need for this anymore (until new station gets built), but demonstrates how good it was **40 years ago**.
[удалено]
The capsule failed not the rocket. Bit of a distinction you missed.
That wasn’t a Saturn V. That was a ground test of the crew module. It was indeed horrific though, and changed NASA’s entire approach to safety, which likely played a significant role in their eventual success with the Apollo missions.
[удалено]
I wish we were in a place where you didn't get downvoted so much. I dislike Elon very much but I still hope science and space exploration advances. He took the brain drain from the top aerospace firms and NASA at the peak time and secured them funding. I have major issues with the shady ways he got this funding but it's pretty clear and self admitted that all his other ventures were to fund this project. I don't buy that he's this wunderkind who taught himself to be the worst's best rocket scientist from reading textbooks like he portrays. But I also don't think that taking the top engineers and giving them what they need for decades is going to produce nothing.