Edit: The launch was scrubbed for today. "Standing down from today's tenth flight of Starship to allow time to troubleshoot an issue with ground systems" https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1959755893324865963
The only official SpaceX stream will be here closer to launch: https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1yoKMPRjeYYxQ but the YouTube channels will be rebroadcasting it after their own cameras lose sight of the rocket.
There may or may not be an official SpaceX technical update presentation before or after the launch. There was supposed to be one last time too but it was silently canceled, so TBD.
I was able to see the (under construction) launch stand for Starship at KSC last week; it sounds like they built it and are rebuilding it constantly in response to pad learnings in Texas. It'd be amazing to get at least the first stage to a reliable state so the launch site could be complete in Florida without major concerns about the Falcon 9 launch tower situated close nearby!
The main thing I took away from visiting KSC the first time (alas missed out on any launches) was how incredibly huge all things orbital-launch-related are, even for smaller rockets. Also didn't realize how large the Blue Origin facilities are there. It's one thing to see glimpses in a spaceflight YouTube channel video, it's another to drive alongside them.
One of my favorite parts of living in Central Florida is watching the rockets take off every few days. Sadly a lot of the launches lately have been daytime or in the middle of the night, but seeing Falcon Heavy split off during the holidays one year remains a highlight.
Crumbs for anyone interested that parking at Chain of Lakes Park (in Titusville), then hiking out along E Jay Jay Rd, crossing the train tracks and walking south (hide from any train company trucks driving down), and watching across the lagoon is super chill.
Avoids all the tourists, insane parking, and/or Playalinda capacity uncertainty. Also skips the viewing platforms in the park that semi-professional photographers are huge dicks about.
Here's where I curmudgeonly insist that manned space exploration is a terrible idea, and the insistence on it has held back unmanned space exploration by decades. We would have livestreaming Jobian dirigible drones right now if we didn't insist on trying to get humans into the least permissive environment there is.
Maybe you don't realize how important humans in the loop are. Astronauts during the Apollo mission could do way more in a much shorter period of time than, say, Mars rovers, even 50 years after.
People can take initiatives on a completely unknown environment way better than our best computers can, including fixing things. That's a reason manned space stations are so useful, you can launch an experiment up there and know than there are smart people who will make things work even if you forgot some minor details. It is even more important the further you go, as latency increases.
In addition, manned space exploration tells us valuable information about ourselves. About our bodies, our mind. It may lead to valuable medical discoveries. And of course, at some point we will want to go there in person, from long term goals like space colonization to simple curiosity, and these are the things we need to know.
And I don't think manned space exploration held back anything. Manned exploration is inspiring, and Apollo was an important political move, it means lots of funding. Pictures of outer space clearly don't have the same impact. It is easy to see, for the decades where no one considered manned space exploration, not much happened compared to what happened in the 70s, including on the unmanned side, simply because of shrinking budgets due to the lack of interest. Yes, we did stuff, but Voyager, Venera, Hubble, Pioneer, etc... all in the 60s and 70s.
I’ll take the other side of that argument. Without human space flight inspiring the public by pushing the boundaries of what humans can achieve, you would never get the public on board to get the political buy-in to send unmanned craft to anywhere.
If you didn’t have human Spaceflight you’d get the budget for gps, military, and maybe weather satellites and not a whole lot else.
The irony of our physical existence in a nutshell, and fascinating. It's unfortunate that more people cannot decouple this idea from corporate technology and many of its current pioneers. But, I suppose if you're saying this you already know full well that manned space flight has been, and for some time will continue to be, necessary. If for nothing other than the biophysical reality of our species and it's development.
We're not adapted to intercontinental sailing either but we overcame that.
Being realistic is one thing but completely giving up on pushing out the frontier of our capabilities is shameful IMO. Literally mailing it in isn't a substitute for space travel.
"Giving up" seems like the wrong rubric here because you haven't even identified the goal that putting people into space would accomplish so I can't judge whether or not doing that would actually further anything. Whenever I press people on this it generally comes down to "because it's there", which was also a bad reason to climb Everest.
I can think of three worthwhile goals at a minimum:
1) Access the vast resources available elsewhere in the Solar System.
2) Move most polluting and destructive heavy industry off of Earth (this will take big advances in propulsion technology).
3) Provide good habitats for humans and ideally much of Earth's ecosphere elsewhere in the Solar System. Certainly the human population alone could rise to the hundreds of billions if desired/needed.
Surely it'll take a lot of progress to achieve those goals, but they're within reach of our current scientific knowledge. Interstellar travel, on the other hand, is much more of a stretch goal! ;-)
Yup. And if we end ourselves in this physical form, which I don't think any of us knows 100% for certain, a process which possibly could take place again.
> adapted to intercontinental sailing either but we overcame that.
We carried the seeds of our civilization to new continents which carry our gas mixture, food resources, temperature, gravity, and a million other parameters that the human body plan needs. The destinations were completely hospitable.
Good luck in space. It is beyond hostile and offers nothing for our survival. Also, there's really no economic reason to go there.
Yeah, I agree with the idea that planetary colonization is not the best idea.
I'm more of a massive spinning space station made from asteroid/lunar mined materials kind of guy myself.
But if harebrained ideas to colonize a body with substantially lower gravity that may no idea if the human body is even compatible with that lower gravity get us the infrastructure needed to get lots of stuff into space then so be it.
I think anyone expecting space to yield exploitable resources at a feasible cost isn't really thinking this through and/or isn't being real about how big and empty it is.
FWIW, it appears they're purposefully introducing multiple simulated failures into this test. It doesn't appear that they're trying to make this succeed at all costs. From the site:
> The primary test objectives for the booster will be focused on its landing burn and will use unique engine configurations. One of the three center engines used for the final phase of landing will be intentionally disabled to gather data on the ability for a backup engine from the middle ring to complete a landing burn. The booster will then transition to only two center engines for the end of the landing burn, entering a full hover while still above the ocean surface, followed by shutdown and drop into the Gulf of America.
...
> The flight test includes several experiments focused on enabling Starship’s upper stage to return to the launch site. A significant number of tiles have been removed from Starship to stress-test vulnerable areas across the vehicle during reentry. Multiple metallic tile options, including one with active cooling, will test alternative materials for protecting Starship during reentry. On the sides of the vehicle, functional catch fittings are installed and will test the fittings’ thermal and structural performance, along with a section of the tile line receiving a smoothed and tapered edge to address hot spots observed during reentry on Starship’s sixth flight test. Starship’s reentry profile is designed to intentionally stress the structural limits of the upper stage’s rear flaps while at the point of maximum entry dynamic pressure.
> FWIW, it appears they're purposefully introducing multiple simulated failures into this test.
Not only this test IIRC, Starship 9 had reentry trajectories that would stress-test the hardware to its limits too. In general I think their current strategy is testing the hardware limits in real conditions and improving rapidly on it to reduce the chance of any small failure to become catastrophic.
> followed by shutdown and drop into the Gulf of America.
It’s funny that the social engineering of the administration that allows them to launch is just as important as the mechanical engineering of the vehicle in terms
of achieving their macro goal.
I think this sort of “solve all of the problems, in every domain, that stand in our way” explains a lot about their activities and strategic planning.
It'll be a while before they're comfortable landing Starship itself onto the launch tower, so an ocean splashdown is the best outcome possible. And the booster is going to be testing another one of those extra aggressive reentry trajectories.
They broke the previous booster by overdoing it, so it remains to be seen whether they'll find the balance between "fuel efficient" and "doesn't cause catastrophic internal booster damage" this time around.
Funny, I'd say that for all of SpaceX's innovation and successes, Starship and its owner represent of some of the greatest expressions of humanity's flaws and challenges.
Yeah. I used to be excited about SpaceX stuff, I remember watching those early livestreamed landing attempts. But their recent close association with the American fascist movement basically killed my enthusiasm. I can't support the company anymore.
Elon Musk is one nepobaby with poor emotional regulation. SpaceX is an enormous number of very smart, very driven, very dedicated professionals who all work ridiculous hours in not great working conditions because they believe in the outrageous idea of humanity out among the stars.
It's ok to not like the guy at the top, but still marvel at the achievements of the people he pays.
I understand that perspective, but I can't agree with it. There are many important and meaningful jobs out there that those people could be doing, which don't involve giving financial & political power to one of the worst people alive today. Choosing to work for him after the many, many, many red lines Elon Musk has crossed taints all of the work those people are doing.
Entire human history has been like this. How many Bachs, Mozarts, Michelangelos, etc. got to do great things just because of a sympathetic ruler who held all the pursestrings?
The point is that over the course of human history all science is done at the whim of or in the service of bad people. Do you think Galileo didn't have wealthy patrons that descended from a long line of brutal warlords not afraid to crush some skulls to get ahead? This is how humans operate. You have to make progress where you can, how you can. We don't have the luxury of waiting for mister Rogers to start a rocket company.
There's a whoooole lot of breathing room between Elon Musk and Mr. Rogers. More ethical employment opportunities exist now, today; SpaceX employees are choosing not to take them.
I certainly hope the people at SpaceX don't do that because it's not cool to neglect your family and friends no matter how cool your job is.
I appreciate their work however and it's a shame that Musk has tainted their efforts. He could be a decent man if he tried but he's clearly chosen a different path.
You don't give him enough credit. No one else was lunatic enough to back spaceX and build it into a genuinely innovative and successful company like he has. Of course he had a leg up but i see in him a genuine drive to succeed. He thinks he can do things better then anyone else, and in some ways that's true and he gets frustrated when things don't go his way.
You see the same sort of thing in F1 drivers. Even in the most casual of driving competitions they are competetive to the point of pettiness. My theory is that's part of what makes them an F1 driver - the inability to lose. it can easily be turned to destructive purposes, see all the avoidable crashes but it gets harnessed and turned to useful purposes.
On a more loaded tangent, see Trump. His lifelong ambition was to be famous and become president and i thinkthat, more then his billions gave him the drive to run for office and get reelected (you can argue that it was to satisfy his overwhelming ego but that doesn't change my point). Even if you despise them and everything they stand for i think everyone can learn something from them in how to succeed in their goals. it's not being narcisstic and elbowing everyone out of the way, but it is about having goals, wanting them enough and a healthy dose of self belief.
Elon Musk's primary contributions to his companies are funding them and staying out of the way. When he gets involved in actually leading them bad things happen. See: Twitter.
I’m not sure how to respond to being called insane.
Anyway, I’ve been paying close attention to current politics and listening to alarm bells being rung from historians all around the world. Reality, as defined by the current administration, is not based on science or verifiable facts; That’s not the reality I want to subscribe to.
Elon Musk went head over heels to support this administration. Starlink contracts are being cancelled by large foreign governments for a reason. SpaceX only exists because of US government subsidies.
You're borderline saying "the present US administration, elected democratically, is equivalent to the Nazis".
That's insane. We used to have a rule on the Internet for people like you.
I'm no Trump fan, and people making alarmist statements like yours only help people like him get elected.
So, you know, stop. Especially if you think they're Nazis.
SpaceX exists because the US wants access to space and they are the cheapest way to space in history. They can continue to exist because starlink and their commercial launch services are massively profitable.
Still calling me insane and saying, “people like you.” Hmm.
You didn’t call out anything substantive in my previous comment so I’ll assume those points are not disputed.
As to the profitability of Starlink:
> Starlink is projected to generate between $11.8 billion and $12.3 billion in revenue in 2025, according to analyses from Quilty Space. This projected growth is driven by increasing subscriber demand and significant government contracts, particularly with the U.S. military.
You’ll likely find similar when looking up SpaceX profitability in 2025.
So, again, these things only exist because of the US government.
Do we agree on this yet or do we need to delve further somehow?
Let's review the easy to parse things that have been said
> I suppose you could say the same thing of Germany in the 1930s. The parallels aren’t even that hard to find as there are literal rockets being built in both cases.
You're obviously comparing both Elon and the current admin to Nazis. Which is insane, i.e. a view of things incompatible with reality, if you actually believe that.
> We used to have a rule for people like you on the Internet.
It's obviously Godwin's law. You aren't part of some oppressed class that I'm singling out, idiots have tons of power these days (look at the Whitehouse).
> You’ll likely find similar when looking up SpaceX profitability in 2025.
> So, again, these things only exist because of the US government.
> Do we agree on this yet or do we need to delve further somehow?
If you read carefully you'll see that I said that SpaceX would not have existed from its conception if not for the US government. But I asserted that it is no longer necessary and that is absolutely true. You pointing out that a basket of money includes dollars from the government (i.e. starlink revenue) doesn't even come close to disproving that. Google gets paid from government contracts too and their existence is not contingent on those contracts.
This conversation is over. I hope you will investigate facts and appreciate nuance more in the future.
That's easy to feel when you are passionate about an opposing viewpoint. What's hard is to see clearly enough to change your own viewpoint based on facts.
> You're obviously comparing both Elon and the current admin to Nazis
He did sieg heil twice on stage. He funds far-right parties internationally. His family heritage is literal nazis.
Directly from the article: Godwin's law can be applied mistakenly or abused as a distraction, a diversion, or even censorship, when miscasting an opponent's argument as hyperbole even when the comparison made by the argument is appropriate.
Starship is SpaceX’s greatest technological achievement already, even if it never reaches orbit reliably (with the potential exception of the inter-satellite Starlink laser links).
Did you not see the booster catch work on the first try? The partially successful re-entry even with half the control surface melting away?
The hundreds at SpaceX are doing Apollo-level breakthrough work, and it should not in any way be minimized due to tangential Elon-hate.
>The hundreds at SpaceX are doing Apollo-level breakthrough work, and it should not in any way be minimized due to tangential Elon-hate.
You're right. It shouldn't be. And yet here we are wasting our digital breaths talking about the man. And there's really only one person responsible for that.
You know what burns me about it? Like it or not, he did set the hard-driving culture of that and other companies he runs. And what's even worse, that kind of culture gets results. I think at the end of the day I just have to quietly respect it, and all the folks putting in the long hours, and be thankful that there exist companies out there that don't demand this where we can still earn a decent living.
If you're wasting your breath talking about someone, it's not on them, it's on you. We live in a world where everyone should have realized by now that attention is the most valuable currency you have ... and yet people continue to use that currency on things they claim to dislike ... I have a hard time feeling bad for them.
"Grass-fed body mass is the most valuable currency", said the rancher to the fenced-in herd of beef-cows.
Nah, that's what someone with power says in order to distract you from realizing you don't actually have nearly as much. Attention has never been a good substitute for power, or thousands of years of human civilization would be very very different.
There's a fine line between stoicism and self-defeating tactics.
How is that a greater achievement than Falcon 9 and reusable boosters, especially Falcon Heavy? Like sure if Starship lives up to its goals it will be a greater achievement. But how would an ambitious project that fails its most fundamental task (reaching orbit reliably) be a greater achievement than one that actually does meet its goals and was (and is) still incredibly revoluationary?
Because the engineering involved in what has already been achieved with the whole Starship program (the stage0/OLM quick disconnect/chopsticks, as well as the full flow
staged combustion Raptor: v1, and v2, and especially v3) is a far greater technological achievement than any part of the F9/FH stack.
Starship is a HARD project, and even the components that they have completed are insane levels of engineering, far beyond even the whole F9 program.
It’s not just a “does the rocket work” thing. Every working part of Starship so far has been a monumental breakthrough of unprecedented scale. The fact that they built the largest ever orbital launch system (it’s currently not yet reusable but it can indeed put a ~hundred tons into orbit in a single 15 minutes) is enough to classify it as an unqualified success. Their stated goal just happens to be significantly greater than even that.
It has already surpassed the (non-reusable) Saturn V in price/perf as well as payload capacity (and development program total cost).
While I agree with your larger point, I think it's a bit telling that you're using a 50 year old program that launched the only humans to ever visit another celestial body as the standard against which to judge the "greatest achievement." Humanity has sure done some amazing stuff!
It’s exceptional that people centrally organized a huge amount of effort and resources towards something imagined by countless humans since prehistory, was far from being a sure thing, had no possibility of revenue and only indirect value, planned and executed a full decade toward a single objective, and succeeded in a single moment shared by almost everyone with a television.
Arpanet, the transcontinental railroad, the pyramids…amazing still but lacked the 0 to 1 all at once factor. Starship is inspiring and also not a moonshot.
Hmm... Hadn't considered that. I suppose I was thinking of things in a "for it's time" lens. In general I suppose Starship is quite superior to the Apollo program. Apollo certainly feels more impressive to me, but I completely see how Starship is a greater achievement.
Mars is only “entirely awful” on the surface. It’s a fair sight better than the raw vacuum of space, and we already have permanent installations of people living there, both on Tiangong and ISS.
It’s only “entirely awful” if you want to do things like walk around outside and sit under trees. It has a lot of co2 and h2o around, and while the sunlight situation isn’t great, it isn’t dire either.
The longest time spent under water is what, maybe a month or two for those on nuclear submarines? Which is probably 25% the length of one leg of the mars trip? And subs can always just surface and call for help for 99% or problems they’d face?
Just fantastical thinking that we’ll make any headway on that trip in the next 50 years.
First orbit, then piss money away for 70-years with no discernible progress, then maybe Mars (for "reasons"), then we probably ruin the habitability of Earth long before "stars". I grant that's not as pithy as yours...
Part of the trouble is that an Earth with "ruined" habitability (let's throw together both severe climate change and also a nuclear exchange, why not?) is still far better & easier to live on than anywhere else we know about.
That's what I mean about space being just the worst. Like, it's so bad. Even Mars, which is relatively decent by space standards, is complete shit. Complete shit that's also insanely expensive to reach.
There is no sense in which we're destined for the stars.
We could have been destined for the stars fifty years ago, but it turns out we're a stupid species with no planetary intelligence.
So we spend far too much energy finding clever ways to blow things up - cities, rockets, economies - and far too little on boring shit like keeping the climate stable and the lights on.
And even less on the breakthrough physics, psychology, politics, and ecology needed to make interstellar travel even remotely likely.
> it sure does seem sad (and wrong) to claim our modern life is “out of balance”.
I think the global CO2 levels would disagree. Our oceans, and therefore most of the biosphere are quite literally out of (pH) balance due to rapid CO2 release.
> We are destined for the stars.
I doubt it. Don’t get me wrong I love the idea of it, but the reality is our physical form is so fragile and fleeting relative to the harsh vastness of the Universe.
We should protect this cradle of our genesis with everything we have. That we have not met other life should be taken as a warning of how difficult the road ahead.
On the other hand, I doubt half of what's going on would be possible or desirable without the learning and expertise gained from the past. Sometimes you have to know what you shouldn't do.
Then it really shouldn't have been written immediately after "Wait, that's price. SpaceX is profitable." The two statements have literally nothing to do with one another and it's easy to see why one would assume that the final sentence is talking about the sentence immediately before it.
Try again? The comment you’re replying to says “$2-3k” per kg. That’s $2000-$3000 per kg. If you multiply your numbers by 100, you get something comparable to the prices on SpaceX’s website.
> Seriously. NASA had a reusable orbital rocket 40 years ago. Space-X still only has reusable boosters.
Reusable but had to spend 2 months after use being repaired/having parts replaced, meanwhile Falcon 9 has turn around times in days and Starship is aiming for hours.
Whilst the the achievements and technological marvels by NASA should never be understated, Starship is aiming for a target significantly more difficult than the space shuttle.
The space shuttle was an awesome feat of engineering, but in practical terms, it cost a lot for every launch, so it really didn't deliver well on the most important piece of what reusability is supposed to get you.
The tiles themselves were apparently a big source of the problems on the shuttle too. If they can figure out reusable tiles with starship, with quick turnaround and low-cost for maintenance, that'd be a huge engineering accomplishment.
They've gotta consistently re-enter it first though.
The parts were reused but they rebuilt the whole thing from the ground up, everytime. Reusability means something like a plane: refuel + safety checks and you’re good to go again
Don't take my word for it. Richard Feynman served on the Challenger commission and very nicely summarizes the difference between Apollo and Space Shuttle.
Reusable first stage (which is the largest, most expensive part), expendable second stage (only one engine vs nine on the first stage), and reusable spacecraft. I'd be surprised if the Falcon second stage cost more than the Shuttle's external tank. (Though, to be fair, they are decades apart)
The only reason starship hasn't involved human sacrifice thus far is that they haven't put humans in it. It remains to be seen whether the engineers will manage to make something usable from musk's 'Cybertruck - space edition' fever dream.
I'm not sure why you would call Starship a "fever dream". The numbers work. It's in testing. I could see calling the Saudi "Line City" a fever dream, or California's HSR. But not Starship.
Because we haven’t seen a single re-use of a starship yet nor any significant payload brought to orbit, or the orbital refueling turn around and launch cadence necessary to even achieve 1/10th of what Musk suggests is “possible on paper”.
Super-heavy is being wasted on a potential dead end 2nd stage in my opinion.
Only because they haven't honestly tried (for reuse). We've seen Superheavy caught successfully with engines that could probably be reused, and we've seen Starships lightly splashdown with engines that could potentially be reused if they weren't filled with saltwater. I'd agree that they're way behind schedule and that recent launches have been disappointing but they've demonstrated their components. I believe reliability will come in time, the question is how much time.
By "numbers" I mean the rocket equation. There should be plenty of fuel to put Starship in orbit with a nontrivial payload and have it land again. Yes, the entire system doesn't work yet, but we're already into the refinement stage.
And isn't that decision to leave humans behind on the ground an inspired piece of mission planning. It's wonderful that computers and telemetry has progressed so far.
I love this quote. mankind having been to space already, the rockets are the sideshow to the way they designed and grew an org that delivered them along with a great business, starting from an amount of capital loads of nobodies have had but failed to do anything interesting with.
There were 135 space shuttle missions over 30 years, with 2 failures resulting in 14 lives lost, giving a success rate of 98.5%. The second failure happened when the program was mature, which means that either NASA didn't analyze certain failure modes or they didn't take steps to address them. The Space Shuttle's design is inherently less safe than a normal capsule on top. With the orbiter on the side of the stack, any debris from other components is more likely to damage it. The orbiter also had no launch escape system or ability for crew to eject. Also, the solid boosters could not be throttled or shut down early if they malfunctioned. In contrast, capsules like Dragon and Soyuz are above the booster stages, reducing the chance of damage from any malfunctions in the stages, and allowing a launch escape system to get the crew away in the event of an emergency.
Falcon 9 has had 531 launches over 15 years (394 of them have happened since January of 2022), with 3 failures (one on the pad before launch, two during launch), for a success rate of 99.4%. Had these failures occurred during manned missions, the Dragon capsule's launch escape system would have likely saved the crew.
The mature version of Falcon 9 (block 5) has had 466 successful landings out of 472 attempts, giving it a success rate of 98.7%. This likely means that riding on a Falcon 9 first stage with no additional safety devices (such as a parachute or a launch escape system) is safer than riding in the Shuttle.
Thanks for providing this to other users but my point was about other rocket programs beyond Falcon 9 and Space Shuttle such as Starship. Starship is behind where Falcon 9 was at this point. By the same timelines Apollo was sending people to the moon too.
It's not useful to compare timelines. Of course the Apollo program went fast. Adjusted for inflation, NASA's lunar program cost over $300 billion. It also killed three astronauts. And it didn't have the regulatory hurdles that exist today when trying to launch rockets.
Starship's budget is 2-3% of the Apollo program, and its goal is to become profitable long term. I would assume that given a sliver of the same budget, and a much harder problem (fully reusable super heavy lift vehicle), and more regulations than the 1960s, it would take significantly longer.
It's also not useful to compare failure rates yet, because Starship is currently a test program. SpaceX believes that it's cheaper to build, test, and revise rather than to try getting it right the first time. They know Starship is not reliable, which is why they don't have real payloads in their test flights. Contrast this to the Space Shuttle, which NASA thought was so safe that they put a schoolteacher on it and broadcast the launch to children across the country.
This is the 4th launch where they are effectively attempting the same thing they were going to do 8 months ago.
Musk himself has a deadline of December 2026 for Mars, ignoring Artemis. How many more launches do they need to work out orbital refueling to make that deadline if they don’t test actually sending a real payload into space?
I'm still going to be interested to see if Starship is ever an economic success.
These test launches are expensive and it's going to take a long time to recoup that R&D, in large part because of... the Falcon 9. You have to look at what problem Starship is solving. Typoical answers are:
1. Greater payload capacity. This is true but is there demand for that? This is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem but we can point to the Falcon Heavy as a useful data point. There have only been ~13 launches thus far. Some might say "you can launch multiple payloads in one launch" but you really can't unless they're on pretty much the exact same orbit. Starlink works fine for this because they are on basically the same orbit.
2. Maybe it's "reusable second stage". This is only a fraction of the total cost, like an order of magnitude less than the impact of the reusable first stage and Falcon 9 already has taht. And it's proven; or
3. Which brings us to "landing humans on the Moon or Mars" but it's not really a suitable vehicle for that. Think about it. How are you going to land? They're reduced launch weight with the chopstick catching mechanism for the first stage such that it can't land on its own (unlike Falcon 9) so we'd need the second stage to be able to land on its own and take off again. We're nowwhere near even testing that. And it's going to take a lot of testing for human-rating flight.
But OK, let's look past all that and say it lands on the Moon. Well, how do the astronauts get out and back in? They're 30-40 meters off the ground.
1. You raise some valid points, but it's pretty common that when you lower the price for something ($ per KG to LEO) you raise the demand. The planned price drop is so severe that it becomes practical to send full weight objects into space without spending money and time on reducing weight.
2. Still a huge reduction in price. A full StarShip launch is expected to be much cheaper than a full Falcon 9 launch (per launch) because the cost is just fuel (about $300k) and some maintenance.
3. Putting legs back on for the Mars landing vehicle (a small fraction of the # starships launched btw) is totally practical.
Testing-
Yes, there is a lot more testing to go. I personally prefer testing and data-driven approvals than the traditional Paperwork based approval methods.
1. I think starlink alone means there is demand for that. Starlink is an appreciable fraction of satellites in orbit... Apart from starlink, satellites spend a lot of money on being as light as possible, at the very least there's a tradeoff here where you get to make the same satellite cheaper by being less mass efficient.
2. I wouldn't dismiss the cost savings from a reusable second stage.
3. They already have experience with legs from Falcon 9, and they're already landing this rocket very precisely with their tower. I would expect the development timeline for legs to be short. Much shorter than the development timeline for human rating the rest of this, for instance...
3.5. Winches and ropes are light and cheap, lowering things to and raising things from the surface doesn't strike me as a particularly difficult problem... apart from maybe the human-rating aspects of the system.
I think Starship has a good theoretical basis for being an economic success. On the other hand I don't have much faith they will successfully execute at this point.
They're massively behind schedule and presumably above anticipated cost. They aren't showing signs of having successfully designed a safe, reliable, and cheaply built vehicle. They've been making what externally seem like stupid mistakes like having their rocket fail in basically the same way twice in a row. They are making political enemies left right and center whether it's by having a fascist CEO committing election related crimes, or littering the same down-range islands with rocket parts from failed launches. They are almost certainly driving away talent by virtue of the same CEOs political roles and crimes, and by virtue of doing things like taking SpaceX engineers and having them work on twitter.
Space enthusiasts seem quite immune to politics compared to the Tesla consumers, they still hang on his every word when it comes to Starship.
As an ignorant outsider who only watches these Starship launches and doesn't do Kerbal, seems to me like another Cybertruck, where he after super successful model goes all in for big and cool (to him) even if it doesn't work
When these rockets crash, is it because their digital simulations are inaccurate? Why do they need data from the actual test is the question instead of just relying on a bullet proof simulation?
There is no complete and "bullet proof" simulation of any system as complex as a whole rocket. Every simulation relies on simplifying assumptions, without exception.
Yeah. Most simulations are highly simplified toy models, and most of them need to be calibrated to real-life experimental results. The more complex the system, and the fewer experimental results you've got, the less reliable any simulation is going to be.
WRT Starship, I'm sure that certain aspects (like heat shield performance) can be simulated to acceptably high fidelity, but the entire system is beyond simulation. An accurate simulation would have to simulate the materials and mechanical behavior of every component, in an interconnected way, under a wide variety of stress states -- which is basically impossible with modern technology. Maybe in a few decades...
The SpaceX design philosophy is light on simulation. You quickly reach a point on simulation where taking your simulation to the next level costs as much as just building the thing.
The simulatable stuff is almost perfect. It's the stuff that can't be simulated that fails.
Take the last flight as an example. The booster experienced what was (probably) a structural failure in the propellant fuel lines. Simulating stress in the structure under static conditions is quite straightforward. Simulating the stress as the rocket ascends vertically and the tanks empty is hard, but doable.
Simulating the dynamic loading as the rocket flips? The fuel sloshes around, the sloshing fuel changes the kenimatics of the rocket, the kenimatics of the rocket change how the fuel sloshes, the engines try to correct adding a new force, the thrust from the engines creates increased force on the fuel increasing the pressure to the pumps, the performance of the engines changes because of the new fuel flow, that alters the acceleration further causing fuel to slosh, gass bubbles are intrained in the fuel from all the sloshing thus altering its flow/sloshing behavior, valves open and close creating pressure waves in the fuel that travel up and down the fuel lines (the water-hammer effect alone being enough to burst the pipes if valve closing is not well-timed), and the rocket itself flexes as all this happens, testing every exact detail of the manufacturing which you have to go out to the factory and physically measure. No simulation software ever imagined can handle all that coupling of systems.
The usual solution is to make some conservative estimates (the center-of-mass of the fuel will move by at most some amount, bubbles will last at most some time, the engines will have so much control authority, etc). But that requires experience. And this is aerospace, so safety margins are tiny.
A perfect theory of physics that exactly predicts the behavior of atoms doesn't really help you much when you're trying to predict the behavior of a spaceship containing approximately 10^33 atoms. Any such prediction is going to involve an enormous amount of heuristic approximation.
Just as one example, a spacecraft moving through a fluid atmosphere and with fluid fuel/oxidizer burning in its combustion chamber is going to involve incredibly complex turbulent fluid flows. And turbulence is something that we famously don't have good high-level theories (approximations) for.
We are - at least in terms of model fidelity. There's limitations to how much CFD/simulations you can do. That kind of data (+other sensors) is used to refine models - thermal, aerodynamics, structures.
Especially with starship, they are able to stream out live-video and data so that they get it even if the vehicle breaks up. Controlled hypersonic flight of such structures has been done very few times. There's stuff that can be learned from previous vehicles like the Space Shuttle but there are a lot of things that are very different - different control surfaces, flight profiles, thermal management etc.
Because there's a million and one things that could go wrong? Yes, we can make simulations. But the simulations are based on assumptions about the physical world. When the physical world doesn't obey those assumptions, things start to deviate from the simulation. Plus, simulations aren't perfect. We can't simulate every atom of the rocket and every atom of the atmosphere, so we have to approximate things. Errors creep in.
There is more to engineering than understanding the fundamental physics.
There isn't enough computing power in the world to simulate something like Starship at the atomic level, even if you assume you know all possible starting conditions and your software is absolutely correct.
I believe it's because the space of physics interacting with specific designs of specific components in the context of a large system with other specific components is very, very big and thus it is not feasible to just "simulate everything" ahead of time.
Also combustion itself is not properly understood all the way down, so there is literally a big physics gap involved here.
The physics is the easy part. Starship consists of thousands (millions?) parts that are all manufactured to varying precision. These tolerances can add up and cause unexpected failures.
Some aspects are just too complex to simulate. The fluid dynamics of nearly supersonic flows of cryogenic liquids that suddenly turn into white hot gas is… intractable.
The failures Starship had were often to do with simpler engineering bugs that they’ve been ironing out, such as: leaks in piping caused by violent shaking, explosive gases accumulating in closed spaces, filters getting clogged by ice forming in the cryogenic tanks, and burn-through of an experimental heat shield design at moving joints.
For the second time in two days we're having to remind you of the guidelines. HN isn't for engaging in ideological battle or posting snarky swipes about any nation's or region's superiority or inferiority. HN is for curious conversation about interesting topics. If that's what you're looking for, great, please make an effort to show it. If you keep up the snark, we'll have to ban the account.
If you look closer you'll see that this rockets are key to billions of people living on other planets, to cheaper internet, to better telescopes, to satellites controlling weather.
Ultimately this is an important step towards a future with healthcare providing thousands of years of life, and unlimited housing space.
Well, US spends 1.5 trillion on social security and only 20 billion on NASA, so "present" is kind of overrepresented. Redirecting that little bit so that a few more people can live without working, or can get expensive treatment to live a few more years is stupid, not inspiring.
We live in the present, so I'd expect it to be overrepresented. I expect most people don't give their kids more money than they spend on themselves, for instance.
Your second sentence showcases some wildly negative biases. I suspect we could probably save money by improving the efficiency of our social programs and end up with even more to spend on scientific advancement.
But what we can't have is affordable housing and healthcare without private actors effectively involved in value creation. As has been demonstrated over and over again.
This attitude that because one thing is bad we should ignore everything else is an incredibly small idea. Yes, we have a professional class of rent seeking middlemen that have captured the American healthcare industry. That sucks. We also have the industrial and technological power to do cool stuff. Let's do both things. Fix our problems and advance our technology.
To be fair, the same people benefiting from large government subsidies to develop private space travel are the same one(s) that actively gutted social programs and entire government agencies that provide value to the general population.
NASA is cool and undergoing massive defunding. Education is already under-funded and now under attack. Science is being actively squashed and replaced with religion yet somehow, you think space travel will become more likely?
There is a very strange, obvious, and bizarre reality gap between "We're going to Mars" and "...and we'll start by destroying decades of science funding and public education."
No one rational can possibly believe this is supposed to be a serious strategy, surely?
Hopefully now that Musk is no longer dabbling in politics (and alienating his electric car buyers, who are mostly Democrats), his rockets will stop exploding.
Edit so being distracted was a net benefit for Tesla and Spacex? Down voters have not addressed this assertion, must be true.
He has never stopped dabbling in politics. He just finally realized that doing it behind the scenes like his peers do is the best way to do it. It's insane that he thought doing it the other way would be good for him.
Surely anyone who has bought a Tesla since he did start meddling in politics is a Republican.
Before that, I'd assume it was mixed - I think people were buying because EVs were seen as futuristic, and there was non-partisan support for Musk when his main association was visionary rather than political/nutjob.
I suspect this is net good for the EV space at this point in history.
Tesla was a virtue signal brand from day one[1]. Their core insight came from Palo Alto et. al. You’d drive through the suburbs and many driveways had two vehicles: a [insert gas guzzling luxury vehicle] and a Prius. One vehicle to signal wealth/status - the other to signal environmental consciousness. But the eco vehicle was a compromise; compared to the jaguar it sat next to, it was a clunker.
Tesla’s GTM strategy was that you could buy a vehicle, without compromise, from them to signal to your social circles how much you cared about the environment. And it worked.
They broke the oil cartels with a direct to consumer sales strategy and kicked off the EV market.
But now that market’s needs are well met. The eco virtue signal crowd has multiple vendors selling decent products to meet their buying preferences.
There is a fairly large untapped market though that won’t convert off of oil. That demographic overlaps well with the 2025 MAGA coalition. And, with Elon’s involvement in that coalition, Tesla EVs are now a new virtue signal for a new demographic.
You have people buying EVs that were rolling coal as recently as 2 years ago.
[1] The brand being built around eco virtue signaling is well documented in early interviews with original founders - a quick search will turn up many direct quotes talking about them driving through California suburbs doing market research and discovering exactly that.
It seems to me it was the Roadster that kick-started Tesla by making electric sexy and desirable - high performance and expensive rather than something low performance bought for ideological/eco reasons. The Tesla model S which followed wasn't cheap either, and also emphasized high performance with the dual motor and plaid options. These seem more like wealth signalling than virtue signalling.
Also, the CEO of Ford or BMW or whoever makes $10M or $20M or whatever and that’s basically the end of the story. Musk owns such an enormous portion of Tesla still that boycotts materially impact his net worth and his future ability to buy as much political clout.
I would think the best way to keep SpaceX rockets from exploding is to get Musk as far away as possible from any engineering decisions. I firmly believe that SpaceX has only done as well as it has because the engineering is so far above Musk's knowledge that actual aeronautical engineers can do what they do and throw some technobabble at him to shut him up when he suggests dumb thing.
Multiple current, and more significantly former SpaceX engineers have confirmed Musk was the driving force behind the engineering decisions that lead to reusability for Falcon 9.
He’s also been very much in the driving seat on engineering for Starship, and we’ve yet to see how well that works out, but the success of F9 is there to see.
There are also stories from engineers at both SpaceX and Tesla that they do everything possible to keep him away from any engineering decisions because he doesn't know what he was talking about. His brainchild of the cybertruck was suppose to be a monolithic bent stainless steel shell that he spent years trying to accomplish and fired many engineers over who said it wouldn't work, and we see how that turned out with strips of low quality stainless glued onto aluminum parts that are suppose to be load bearing with a regular steel undercarriage that will still rust away.
The whole notion that "Musk doesn't know anything about technology or engineering" is incorrect. Probably stems from all the people trying to reconcile their hatred for Elon Musk with SpaceX's outstanding successes.
Quite a few major engineering decisions at SpaceX go all the way to Elon Musk himself. One of the best known is probably the decision to make Starship land onto the "chopsticks" of the launch tower, removing the need for dedicated landing legs.
Elon Musk made this suggestion back in 2020. Most of the engineers tried to talk him out of this crazy idea. So he took the few engineers who thought it was plausible and assigned it to them.
We even know for certain that this wasn't a success that got attributed to Musk after the fact - because this story was first printed in a biography in year 2023, when it wasn't clear whether this ambitious landing method would work in practice. The first "return to launch tower" attempt was only made in year 2024, and succeeded on the first try.
Musk has no engineering degrees, has never worked in any engineering capacity, has no patents under his belt, and has constantly run into engineering blunders directly attributed to his lack of understanding in SpaceX and all his other businesses. I think you are delusional if you think Musk has any more engineering knowledge than a highschooler with a B in science, nothing he has ever said or done has shown otherwise. On top of that I have seen numerous stories out of SpaceX itself that Elon has to be distracted away from anything important because he thinks he knows better than people with decades in aeronautical engineering.
SpaceX is a private company, but a significant part of the funding for the development of its Starship spacecraft, especially for lunar missions, comes from U.S. taxpayer money via NASA contracts.
The Starship rocket is the most powerful launch vehicle ever constructed. If controlled by a maniacal megalomaniac it could be turned into a powerful weapon. Hopefully that won't ever happen. But it raises the question: should a private citizen ever be in control of such powerful technology whose development was funded by taxpayers?
Do you think Musk is going to build a secret volcano lair and stockpile nuclear warheads? The entire US military arsenal is constructed by corporations, doing far more dangerous things than Musk has any access to.
"significant" is doing a lot of work here. spaceX appears to have spent ~$10B on development and infrastructure for Starship so far. NASA has been invoiced for ~50% of their $2.9B contract, so the taxpayer has paid ~15%.
Since it’s US tax payers money footing the bill, maybe whoever is in charge of spending US tax payers money at the moment? Or maybe whoever is building the vehicle? I’m not sure which is worse.
I'm not comfortable with the power Elon Musk has, given his behaviour and views. But I don't think weaponizing SpaceX rockets is a big concern.
The ability to manufacture rockets like this would of course be very valuable to anyone developing ballistic missiles for military purposes. But there are also big differences as those use mostly solid fuel. Selling this information to other countries could be a potential national security risk.
Musk's rockets are inside the US, he would probably be able to launch one rocket on a target before the US military would stop any further launches. So I don't think any direct threat here by Musk would be that worrisome.
He’d also need to persuade everybody involved in the launch guidance, and presumably also the payload development, transfer and integration to commit treason, and for none of them to break silence.
No one thought Musk would abuse his ownership of Starlink either, but in 2022 Musk personally ordered the shutdown of Starlink satellite coverage over key parts of Ukraine. Supposedly he was motivated by concerns that a successful Ukrainian advance might provoke a Russian nuclear response. He is not a head of state, but gets to make such decisions? (FWIW he later denied intentionally turning off Ukraine's Starlink terminals).
Right... so he could also, for example, decide that Starship will only take MAGA astronauts to the moon. And that's why taxpayer funds should not be used for developing Starship.
No he can't because the US is paying for that, it is the government's mission. And fwiw now the gray area of free starlink in Ukraine also taken care of, the US government is handling that contracting like they do with all weapons systems. Before starlink was made available for free in Ukraine for humanitarian purposes, but the military also obviously found good uses for it before the gray areas were resolved.
I have no idea what Musk might do, so I'm not excluding anything. But to do anything with a SpaceX rocket he would need co-conspirators, and in the end he would only get a single shot. So the result would be similar to a larger terrorist attack.
I would assume that the risk here is similar to that of many other companies or persons that use large amounts of explosives or other tools that could be weaponized. Musk has a delivery system that is superior to just driving a truck with explosives somewhere, but in many cases that doesn't matter much.
There are some scenarios I could imagine, but they're really more like movie scripts than reality. Musk doesn't have the power to prevent retaliation, and he also couldn't threaten or demand ransom as he couldn't defend his rockets against the US military.
What makes you say that? I don't like a lot of things that aren't neoliberalism, is there some trend where people are doing this?
I could make it clearer: Neoliberalism, specifically it's distinguishing trait of having governments foster markets via public money without getting public ownership, leads to concerning situations like the op was discussing.
Edit: Interestingly Trump's thing about getting the government getting a 10% stake in Intel is not neoliberalism! I don't like Trump, but that's still not neoliberalism
Raptor engine fuel lines. The most obvious candidate is diamond nano threads. If they plan on using for cabling for a Space elevator. Then they should be suitable as a flexible fuel line outer layer. Having looked into the future(pressurised fuel lines at present stainless steel), I am sure that Space Ex Starship should have a successful launch. As the previous launch should have been successful, checking every component, like a Halo Elite Spacecraft 'load master', checking individuals equipment before deploying into space on a space flight. Is the right way to go. So getting it right takes time, regardless of the media circus!
Edit: The launch was scrubbed for today. "Standing down from today's tenth flight of Starship to allow time to troubleshoot an issue with ground systems" https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1959755893324865963
Everyday Astronaut's live stream has started already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv97hecvwfI
NASASpaceflight also, with guest Scott Manley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7WmlTp7ue0
The only official SpaceX stream will be here closer to launch: https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1yoKMPRjeYYxQ but the YouTube channels will be rebroadcasting it after their own cameras lose sight of the rocket.
There may or may not be an official SpaceX technical update presentation before or after the launch. There was supposed to be one last time too but it was silently canceled, so TBD.
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I was able to see the (under construction) launch stand for Starship at KSC last week; it sounds like they built it and are rebuilding it constantly in response to pad learnings in Texas. It'd be amazing to get at least the first stage to a reliable state so the launch site could be complete in Florida without major concerns about the Falcon 9 launch tower situated close nearby!
The main thing I took away from visiting KSC the first time (alas missed out on any launches) was how incredibly huge all things orbital-launch-related are, even for smaller rockets. Also didn't realize how large the Blue Origin facilities are there. It's one thing to see glimpses in a spaceflight YouTube channel video, it's another to drive alongside them.
One of my favorite parts of living in Central Florida is watching the rockets take off every few days. Sadly a lot of the launches lately have been daytime or in the middle of the night, but seeing Falcon Heavy split off during the holidays one year remains a highlight.
Crumbs for anyone interested that parking at Chain of Lakes Park (in Titusville), then hiking out along E Jay Jay Rd, crossing the train tracks and walking south (hide from any train company trucks driving down), and watching across the lagoon is super chill.
Avoids all the tourists, insane parking, and/or Playalinda capacity uncertainty. Also skips the viewing platforms in the park that semi-professional photographers are huge dicks about.
If you want to pretend like you don’t care, don’t look up.
Here's where I curmudgeonly insist that manned space exploration is a terrible idea, and the insistence on it has held back unmanned space exploration by decades. We would have livestreaming Jobian dirigible drones right now if we didn't insist on trying to get humans into the least permissive environment there is.
Maybe you don't realize how important humans in the loop are. Astronauts during the Apollo mission could do way more in a much shorter period of time than, say, Mars rovers, even 50 years after.
People can take initiatives on a completely unknown environment way better than our best computers can, including fixing things. That's a reason manned space stations are so useful, you can launch an experiment up there and know than there are smart people who will make things work even if you forgot some minor details. It is even more important the further you go, as latency increases.
In addition, manned space exploration tells us valuable information about ourselves. About our bodies, our mind. It may lead to valuable medical discoveries. And of course, at some point we will want to go there in person, from long term goals like space colonization to simple curiosity, and these are the things we need to know.
And I don't think manned space exploration held back anything. Manned exploration is inspiring, and Apollo was an important political move, it means lots of funding. Pictures of outer space clearly don't have the same impact. It is easy to see, for the decades where no one considered manned space exploration, not much happened compared to what happened in the 70s, including on the unmanned side, simply because of shrinking budgets due to the lack of interest. Yes, we did stuff, but Voyager, Venera, Hubble, Pioneer, etc... all in the 60s and 70s.
I’ll take the other side of that argument. Without human space flight inspiring the public by pushing the boundaries of what humans can achieve, you would never get the public on board to get the political buy-in to send unmanned craft to anywhere.
If you didn’t have human Spaceflight you’d get the budget for gps, military, and maybe weather satellites and not a whole lot else.
We're not adapted to space, and our bodies are frail and die in 78 years.
We should focus on building digital bodies to house our children.
Our species in its current form dies with this gravity well. We're evolved to and fit it like a glove.
It's our minds that will see the universe.
The irony of our physical existence in a nutshell, and fascinating. It's unfortunate that more people cannot decouple this idea from corporate technology and many of its current pioneers. But, I suppose if you're saying this you already know full well that manned space flight has been, and for some time will continue to be, necessary. If for nothing other than the biophysical reality of our species and it's development.
We're not adapted to intercontinental sailing either but we overcame that.
Being realistic is one thing but completely giving up on pushing out the frontier of our capabilities is shameful IMO. Literally mailing it in isn't a substitute for space travel.
"Giving up" seems like the wrong rubric here because you haven't even identified the goal that putting people into space would accomplish so I can't judge whether or not doing that would actually further anything. Whenever I press people on this it generally comes down to "because it's there", which was also a bad reason to climb Everest.
I can think of three worthwhile goals at a minimum:
1) Access the vast resources available elsewhere in the Solar System.
2) Move most polluting and destructive heavy industry off of Earth (this will take big advances in propulsion technology).
3) Provide good habitats for humans and ideally much of Earth's ecosphere elsewhere in the Solar System. Certainly the human population alone could rise to the hundreds of billions if desired/needed.
Surely it'll take a lot of progress to achieve those goals, but they're within reach of our current scientific knowledge. Interstellar travel, on the other hand, is much more of a stretch goal! ;-)
The nice thing is that the continent at the end of the voyage, we were adapted to. This time, not so much.
If you have a closed off base where you end up it does not matter. Nobody expects astronauts to breathe air on Mars anytime soon.
What are they doing there that robots (remote operated if necessary) couldn't do at 1/1000th of the cost?
Going there is malinvestment when you consider what else we could be spending the money on.
Yup. And if we end ourselves in this physical form, which I don't think any of us knows 100% for certain, a process which possibly could take place again.
> adapted to intercontinental sailing either but we overcame that.
We carried the seeds of our civilization to new continents which carry our gas mixture, food resources, temperature, gravity, and a million other parameters that the human body plan needs. The destinations were completely hospitable.
Good luck in space. It is beyond hostile and offers nothing for our survival. Also, there's really no economic reason to go there.
Space belongs to the robots.
That and the Vietnam war both set us back. Why send humans to Mars with the advances we see daily in robotics?
Crewed. Or piloted in certain cases https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/12/astro...
This is NASA's language: https://www.nasa.gov/reference/jsc-crewed-spacecraft/
Thank you. Old habits.
Your comment is moot because the primary purpose of Starship is not exploration but colonization.
That's an even dumber idea though
Interplanetary colonization is a much dumber idea than manned spaceflight
Yeah, I agree with the idea that planetary colonization is not the best idea.
I'm more of a massive spinning space station made from asteroid/lunar mined materials kind of guy myself.
But if harebrained ideas to colonize a body with substantially lower gravity that may no idea if the human body is even compatible with that lower gravity get us the infrastructure needed to get lots of stuff into space then so be it.
I think anyone expecting space to yield exploitable resources at a feasible cost isn't really thinking this through and/or isn't being real about how big and empty it is.
Can you elaborate?
There is no substance that can be practically transported to earth from space at a cost that would justify the transport costs.
Are you talking about the current transport costs or theoretical optimal transport costs?
What do you think is the biggest part of the transport costs and why in your opinion can it not be reduced?
It's dumb because it's not practical yet?
Because it has no conceivable benefits and staggeringly huge risks and costs
This is a big one for SpaceX. They have had a couple of faillures on Starship on their previous launches.
FWIW, it appears they're purposefully introducing multiple simulated failures into this test. It doesn't appear that they're trying to make this succeed at all costs. From the site:
> The primary test objectives for the booster will be focused on its landing burn and will use unique engine configurations. One of the three center engines used for the final phase of landing will be intentionally disabled to gather data on the ability for a backup engine from the middle ring to complete a landing burn. The booster will then transition to only two center engines for the end of the landing burn, entering a full hover while still above the ocean surface, followed by shutdown and drop into the Gulf of America.
...
> The flight test includes several experiments focused on enabling Starship’s upper stage to return to the launch site. A significant number of tiles have been removed from Starship to stress-test vulnerable areas across the vehicle during reentry. Multiple metallic tile options, including one with active cooling, will test alternative materials for protecting Starship during reentry. On the sides of the vehicle, functional catch fittings are installed and will test the fittings’ thermal and structural performance, along with a section of the tile line receiving a smoothed and tapered edge to address hot spots observed during reentry on Starship’s sixth flight test. Starship’s reentry profile is designed to intentionally stress the structural limits of the upper stage’s rear flaps while at the point of maximum entry dynamic pressure.
> FWIW, it appears they're purposefully introducing multiple simulated failures into this test.
Not only this test IIRC, Starship 9 had reentry trajectories that would stress-test the hardware to its limits too. In general I think their current strategy is testing the hardware limits in real conditions and improving rapidly on it to reduce the chance of any small failure to become catastrophic.
> followed by shutdown and drop into the Gulf of America.
It’s funny that the social engineering of the administration that allows them to launch is just as important as the mechanical engineering of the vehicle in terms of achieving their macro goal.
I think this sort of “solve all of the problems, in every domain, that stand in our way” explains a lot about their activities and strategic planning.
They're still planning on landing both in the ocean, doesn't seem like they've gotten any more confident given that.
It'll be a while before they're comfortable landing Starship itself onto the launch tower, so an ocean splashdown is the best outcome possible. And the booster is going to be testing another one of those extra aggressive reentry trajectories.
They broke the previous booster by overdoing it, so it remains to be seen whether they'll find the balance between "fuel efficient" and "doesn't cause catastrophic internal booster damage" this time around.
They are new designs, not just some patches.
Given they've demonstrated all core steps (near successful re-entry, near-orbit insertion, booster catch) I'd say they are like 95% there.
Godspeed (or naturespeed for atheists)! Starship is my only hope for ever being able to go to space (assuming that they can bring the costs down).
One might say... lightspeed? :)
I'm not religious and still use 'godspeed', 'goddamnit', 'Jesus (opt. "fuckin' | "Herbert Walker") Christ'... just feels right, ya know
Pretty sure that's frowned upon if you do happen to be religious. Same though.
For all the humanity's challenges and flaws, Starship is its most inspiring expression, in steel and fire.
Funny, I'd say that for all of SpaceX's innovation and successes, Starship and its owner represent of some of the greatest expressions of humanity's flaws and challenges.
Yeah. I used to be excited about SpaceX stuff, I remember watching those early livestreamed landing attempts. But their recent close association with the American fascist movement basically killed my enthusiasm. I can't support the company anymore.
Elon Musk is one nepobaby with poor emotional regulation. SpaceX is an enormous number of very smart, very driven, very dedicated professionals who all work ridiculous hours in not great working conditions because they believe in the outrageous idea of humanity out among the stars.
It's ok to not like the guy at the top, but still marvel at the achievements of the people he pays.
I understand that perspective, but I can't agree with it. There are many important and meaningful jobs out there that those people could be doing, which don't involve giving financial & political power to one of the worst people alive today. Choosing to work for him after the many, many, many red lines Elon Musk has crossed taints all of the work those people are doing.
Entire human history has been like this. How many Bachs, Mozarts, Michelangelos, etc. got to do great things just because of a sympathetic ruler who held all the pursestrings?
I don't think you can rightly compare "rich people who spend money on art" and "rich people who employ people and become richer".
I agree that plenty of good has happened because of the profit motive but SpaceX is not patronizing the sciences, NASA is.
The point is that over the course of human history all science is done at the whim of or in the service of bad people. Do you think Galileo didn't have wealthy patrons that descended from a long line of brutal warlords not afraid to crush some skulls to get ahead? This is how humans operate. You have to make progress where you can, how you can. We don't have the luxury of waiting for mister Rogers to start a rocket company.
There's a whoooole lot of breathing room between Elon Musk and Mr. Rogers. More ethical employment opportunities exist now, today; SpaceX employees are choosing not to take them.
If you want to work on manned spaceflight specifically or Mars colonization even more specifically, where exactly could you better spend your time?
I certainly hope the people at SpaceX don't do that because it's not cool to neglect your family and friends no matter how cool your job is.
I appreciate their work however and it's a shame that Musk has tainted their efforts. He could be a decent man if he tried but he's clearly chosen a different path.
You don't give him enough credit. No one else was lunatic enough to back spaceX and build it into a genuinely innovative and successful company like he has. Of course he had a leg up but i see in him a genuine drive to succeed. He thinks he can do things better then anyone else, and in some ways that's true and he gets frustrated when things don't go his way.
You see the same sort of thing in F1 drivers. Even in the most casual of driving competitions they are competetive to the point of pettiness. My theory is that's part of what makes them an F1 driver - the inability to lose. it can easily be turned to destructive purposes, see all the avoidable crashes but it gets harnessed and turned to useful purposes.
On a more loaded tangent, see Trump. His lifelong ambition was to be famous and become president and i thinkthat, more then his billions gave him the drive to run for office and get reelected (you can argue that it was to satisfy his overwhelming ego but that doesn't change my point). Even if you despise them and everything they stand for i think everyone can learn something from them in how to succeed in their goals. it's not being narcisstic and elbowing everyone out of the way, but it is about having goals, wanting them enough and a healthy dose of self belief.
Elon Musk's primary contributions to his companies are funding them and staying out of the way. When he gets involved in actually leading them bad things happen. See: Twitter.
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That is an insane take. I think you need to go read some history to put reality in context
I’m not sure how to respond to being called insane.
Anyway, I’ve been paying close attention to current politics and listening to alarm bells being rung from historians all around the world. Reality, as defined by the current administration, is not based on science or verifiable facts; That’s not the reality I want to subscribe to.
Elon Musk went head over heels to support this administration. Starlink contracts are being cancelled by large foreign governments for a reason. SpaceX only exists because of US government subsidies.
What am I missing so far?
You're borderline saying "the present US administration, elected democratically, is equivalent to the Nazis".
That's insane. We used to have a rule on the Internet for people like you.
I'm no Trump fan, and people making alarmist statements like yours only help people like him get elected.
So, you know, stop. Especially if you think they're Nazis.
SpaceX exists because the US wants access to space and they are the cheapest way to space in history. They can continue to exist because starlink and their commercial launch services are massively profitable.
Still calling me insane and saying, “people like you.” Hmm.
You didn’t call out anything substantive in my previous comment so I’ll assume those points are not disputed.
As to the profitability of Starlink:
> Starlink is projected to generate between $11.8 billion and $12.3 billion in revenue in 2025, according to analyses from Quilty Space. This projected growth is driven by increasing subscriber demand and significant government contracts, particularly with the U.S. military.
You’ll likely find similar when looking up SpaceX profitability in 2025.
So, again, these things only exist because of the US government.
Do we agree on this yet or do we need to delve further somehow?
I feel like you're trying to misunderstand.
Let's review the easy to parse things that have been said
> I suppose you could say the same thing of Germany in the 1930s. The parallels aren’t even that hard to find as there are literal rockets being built in both cases.
You're obviously comparing both Elon and the current admin to Nazis. Which is insane, i.e. a view of things incompatible with reality, if you actually believe that.
> We used to have a rule for people like you on the Internet.
It's obviously Godwin's law. You aren't part of some oppressed class that I'm singling out, idiots have tons of power these days (look at the Whitehouse).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
> You’ll likely find similar when looking up SpaceX profitability in 2025.
> So, again, these things only exist because of the US government.
> Do we agree on this yet or do we need to delve further somehow?
If you read carefully you'll see that I said that SpaceX would not have existed from its conception if not for the US government. But I asserted that it is no longer necessary and that is absolutely true. You pointing out that a basket of money includes dollars from the government (i.e. starlink revenue) doesn't even come close to disproving that. Google gets paid from government contracts too and their existence is not contingent on those contracts.
This conversation is over. I hope you will investigate facts and appreciate nuance more in the future.
> I feel like you're trying to misunderstand
That's easy to feel when you are passionate about an opposing viewpoint. What's hard is to see clearly enough to change your own viewpoint based on facts.
> You're obviously comparing both Elon and the current admin to Nazis
He did sieg heil twice on stage. He funds far-right parties internationally. His family heritage is literal nazis.
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
Directly from the article: Godwin's law can be applied mistakenly or abused as a distraction, a diversion, or even censorship, when miscasting an opponent's argument as hyperbole even when the comparison made by the argument is appropriate.
> This conversation is over.
Agreed.
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Yin and yang, I can see both you and OP's comments as a bit of true.
Starship is SpaceX’s greatest technological achievement already, even if it never reaches orbit reliably (with the potential exception of the inter-satellite Starlink laser links).
Did you not see the booster catch work on the first try? The partially successful re-entry even with half the control surface melting away?
The hundreds at SpaceX are doing Apollo-level breakthrough work, and it should not in any way be minimized due to tangential Elon-hate.
>The hundreds at SpaceX are doing Apollo-level breakthrough work, and it should not in any way be minimized due to tangential Elon-hate.
You're right. It shouldn't be. And yet here we are wasting our digital breaths talking about the man. And there's really only one person responsible for that.
You know what burns me about it? Like it or not, he did set the hard-driving culture of that and other companies he runs. And what's even worse, that kind of culture gets results. I think at the end of the day I just have to quietly respect it, and all the folks putting in the long hours, and be thankful that there exist companies out there that don't demand this where we can still earn a decent living.
Sometimes it gets results. Usually it causes brain drain and the company fails.
Don’t succumb to survivorship bias.
yup - it's the users gooseus fault.
If you're wasting your breath talking about someone, it's not on them, it's on you. We live in a world where everyone should have realized by now that attention is the most valuable currency you have ... and yet people continue to use that currency on things they claim to dislike ... I have a hard time feeling bad for them.
> attention is the most valuable currency
"Grass-fed body mass is the most valuable currency", said the rancher to the fenced-in herd of beef-cows.
Nah, that's what someone with power says in order to distract you from realizing you don't actually have nearly as much. Attention has never been a good substitute for power, or thousands of years of human civilization would be very very different.
There's a fine line between stoicism and self-defeating tactics.
"Even if it never reaches orbit reliably"
How is that a greater achievement than Falcon 9 and reusable boosters, especially Falcon Heavy? Like sure if Starship lives up to its goals it will be a greater achievement. But how would an ambitious project that fails its most fundamental task (reaching orbit reliably) be a greater achievement than one that actually does meet its goals and was (and is) still incredibly revoluationary?
Because the engineering involved in what has already been achieved with the whole Starship program (the stage0/OLM quick disconnect/chopsticks, as well as the full flow staged combustion Raptor: v1, and v2, and especially v3) is a far greater technological achievement than any part of the F9/FH stack.
Starship is a HARD project, and even the components that they have completed are insane levels of engineering, far beyond even the whole F9 program.
It’s not just a “does the rocket work” thing. Every working part of Starship so far has been a monumental breakthrough of unprecedented scale. The fact that they built the largest ever orbital launch system (it’s currently not yet reusable but it can indeed put a ~hundred tons into orbit in a single 15 minutes) is enough to classify it as an unqualified success. Their stated goal just happens to be significantly greater than even that.
It has already surpassed the (non-reusable) Saturn V in price/perf as well as payload capacity (and development program total cost).
While I agree with your larger point, I think it's a bit telling that you're using a 50 year old program that launched the only humans to ever visit another celestial body as the standard against which to judge the "greatest achievement." Humanity has sure done some amazing stuff!
Is it odd or is it kinda central to the point?
It’s exceptional that people centrally organized a huge amount of effort and resources towards something imagined by countless humans since prehistory, was far from being a sure thing, had no possibility of revenue and only indirect value, planned and executed a full decade toward a single objective, and succeeded in a single moment shared by almost everyone with a television.
Arpanet, the transcontinental railroad, the pyramids…amazing still but lacked the 0 to 1 all at once factor. Starship is inspiring and also not a moonshot.
Hmm... Hadn't considered that. I suppose I was thinking of things in a "for it's time" lens. In general I suppose Starship is quite superior to the Apollo program. Apollo certainly feels more impressive to me, but I completely see how Starship is a greater achievement.
Koyaanisqatsi
https://youtu.be/OA7lzJSqeU4?si=gje1xvgAiidAAu3N
For a film with no narrative it sure does seem sad (and wrong) to claim our modern life is “out of balance”.
Still one of my favorite works of music and cinematography both; I just don’t agree at all with the implicit message. We are destined for the stars.
That end scene with the Atlas missile that you linked is def the best though (and Prophecies is the best song/track too).
> We are destined for the stars.
The stars suck, though. Even Mars is entirely awful.
Like, that's not very different from "we're destined for Hell". Not an inspiring sentiment, right? It's really bad.
How awful it is aside, it's also roughly as realistic as "we're destined for Tolkien's Middle Earth". Only marginally less fantastical.
Mars is only “entirely awful” on the surface. It’s a fair sight better than the raw vacuum of space, and we already have permanent installations of people living there, both on Tiangong and ISS.
It’s only “entirely awful” if you want to do things like walk around outside and sit under trees. It has a lot of co2 and h2o around, and while the sunlight situation isn’t great, it isn’t dire either.
The ocean also sucked(s) but we have pushed our dominance into there as well.
Dominating the environment is what we do. for better or worse... its the one true value we can measure ourselves against.
The longest time spent under water is what, maybe a month or two for those on nuclear submarines? Which is probably 25% the length of one leg of the mars trip? And subs can always just surface and call for help for 99% or problems they’d face?
Just fantastical thinking that we’ll make any headway on that trip in the next 50 years.
We are very far from dominating the oceans.
First orbit, then mars, then the stars.
First orbit, then piss money away for 70-years with no discernible progress, then maybe Mars (for "reasons"), then we probably ruin the habitability of Earth long before "stars". I grant that's not as pithy as yours...
Part of the trouble is that an Earth with "ruined" habitability (let's throw together both severe climate change and also a nuclear exchange, why not?) is still far better & easier to live on than anywhere else we know about.
That's what I mean about space being just the worst. Like, it's so bad. Even Mars, which is relatively decent by space standards, is complete shit. Complete shit that's also insanely expensive to reach.
For sure, don't know if I agree with the central "message" of that title / song. But I can see the complaints raised therein.
I'm just a bit of a contrarian, and couldn't resist the appeal of that reply :@)
There is no sense in which we're destined for the stars.
We could have been destined for the stars fifty years ago, but it turns out we're a stupid species with no planetary intelligence.
So we spend far too much energy finding clever ways to blow things up - cities, rockets, economies - and far too little on boring shit like keeping the climate stable and the lights on.
And even less on the breakthrough physics, psychology, politics, and ecology needed to make interstellar travel even remotely likely.
> it sure does seem sad (and wrong) to claim our modern life is “out of balance”.
I think the global CO2 levels would disagree. Our oceans, and therefore most of the biosphere are quite literally out of (pH) balance due to rapid CO2 release.
> We are destined for the stars.
I doubt it. Don’t get me wrong I love the idea of it, but the reality is our physical form is so fragile and fleeting relative to the harsh vastness of the Universe.
We should protect this cradle of our genesis with everything we have. That we have not met other life should be taken as a warning of how difficult the road ahead.
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Even among SpaceX's creations, I find the Falcon rockets more inspiring personally.
I'll always be more impressed by the Space Shuttle, to each their own I suppose.
But that never allowed for cheap and easy access to space, it was way too expensive even compared to expendible rockets.
On the other hand, I doubt half of what's going on would be possible or desirable without the learning and expertise gained from the past. Sometimes you have to know what you shouldn't do.
Cost to develop in today's dollars: $50bn (more if you consider it as a % of GDP). Cost per kg to launch something with it: roughly $70k.
Cost to launch on falcon per kg: $2-3k. Wait, that's price. SpaceX is profitable. It's roughly 100x cheaper.
> Cost to launch on falcon per kg: $2-3k. Wait, that's price. SpaceX is profitable. It's roughly 100x cheaper.
A fully loaded falcon costs less than $500k to launch?
Check your math. The capacity to LEO is around 17500 kg.
If the cost is 100 times cheaper than 2-3k per kilo that’s $20-30 per kilo, or 500k.
Maths checks out, whether the cost per launch is really that low is another thing.
You have misunderstood; SpaceX obviously doesn't have a profit margin of 99%. The 100x comparison was with the space shuttle.
Then it really shouldn't have been written immediately after "Wait, that's price. SpaceX is profitable." The two statements have literally nothing to do with one another and it's easy to see why one would assume that the final sentence is talking about the sentence immediately before it.
The implication to me and others was “it’s roughly 100x cheaper than the (3k/kg) price”
And that wouldn’t be a profit margin of 99%, it would be a profit margin around 10000%
17500 * $30 = around $500,000
$350,000 at the lower end where he said $20.
I don't think the expendable upper stage on its own is $350,000-$500,000. I think the fairing is probably more than that.
Try again? The comment you’re replying to says “$2-3k” per kg. That’s $2000-$3000 per kg. If you multiply your numbers by 100, you get something comparable to the prices on SpaceX’s website.
A fully loaded falcon can only carry 250kg?
Same. If for no other reason than it had never been done before then for the technology they had to accomplish the feat with at the time.
Why?
Starship is big rocket, but Space Shuttle is cool plane. Big fan of both!
Seriously. NASA had a reusable orbital rocket 40 years ago. Space-X still only has reusable boosters.
I was mostly impressed by the materials science of the space shuttle tiles, even though they’re expensive.
> Seriously. NASA had a reusable orbital rocket 40 years ago. Space-X still only has reusable boosters.
Reusable but had to spend 2 months after use being repaired/having parts replaced, meanwhile Falcon 9 has turn around times in days and Starship is aiming for hours.
Whilst the the achievements and technological marvels by NASA should never be understated, Starship is aiming for a target significantly more difficult than the space shuttle.
Great. Glad we agree that the Space shuttle was a stellar achievement in reusable rockets and every andvancement afterward is marginal.
The space shuttle was an awesome feat of engineering, but in practical terms, it cost a lot for every launch, so it really didn't deliver well on the most important piece of what reusability is supposed to get you.
The tiles themselves were apparently a big source of the problems on the shuttle too. If they can figure out reusable tiles with starship, with quick turnaround and low-cost for maintenance, that'd be a huge engineering accomplishment.
They've gotta consistently re-enter it first though.
The innovation is not making a reusable rocket, it's making a reusable rocket that is cheap and rapidly reusable.
The shuttle itself was reusable but the two solid rocket boosters and the external fuel tank were all disposable components.
False, in fact most of the Artemis I booster segments were previously flown on one or more shuttle missions
https://cdn.northropgrumman.com/-/media/wp-content/uploads/a...
The space shuttles boosters were reused. So, literally every engine in the shuttle was reused. Wild what NASA did 40 years ago…
The parts were reused but they rebuilt the whole thing from the ground up, everytime. Reusability means something like a plane: refuel + safety checks and you’re good to go again
Yes the boosters were fully reused. Thanks.
> Wild what NASA did 40 years ago…
You can do that when you have $1b/flight to spend on refurbishing.
And all designed in the 1970s.
It was reusable, but way over promised.
Don't take my word for it. Richard Feynman served on the Challenger commission and very nicely summarizes the difference between Apollo and Space Shuttle.
https://youtu.be/4kpDg7MjHps
SpaceX is doing stuff that's just beyond the scope of what's deemed conventionally realistic. That's achievable and pushes us forward.
Reusable first stage (which is the largest, most expensive part), expendable second stage (only one engine vs nine on the first stage), and reusable spacecraft. I'd be surprised if the Falcon second stage cost more than the Shuttle's external tank. (Though, to be fair, they are decades apart)
Sure, but it was burning congressional pork as fuel and cost only the occasional human sacrifice.
Don’t forget the investigation documentation as an unexpected byproduct.
The only reason starship hasn't involved human sacrifice thus far is that they haven't put humans in it. It remains to be seen whether the engineers will manage to make something usable from musk's 'Cybertruck - space edition' fever dream.
I'm not sure why you would call Starship a "fever dream". The numbers work. It's in testing. I could see calling the Saudi "Line City" a fever dream, or California's HSR. But not Starship.
What numbers work specifically?
Because we haven’t seen a single re-use of a starship yet nor any significant payload brought to orbit, or the orbital refueling turn around and launch cadence necessary to even achieve 1/10th of what Musk suggests is “possible on paper”.
Super-heavy is being wasted on a potential dead end 2nd stage in my opinion.
Only because they haven't honestly tried (for reuse). We've seen Superheavy caught successfully with engines that could probably be reused, and we've seen Starships lightly splashdown with engines that could potentially be reused if they weren't filled with saltwater. I'd agree that they're way behind schedule and that recent launches have been disappointing but they've demonstrated their components. I believe reliability will come in time, the question is how much time.
By "numbers" I mean the rocket equation. There should be plenty of fuel to put Starship in orbit with a nontrivial payload and have it land again. Yes, the entire system doesn't work yet, but we're already into the refinement stage.
And isn't that decision to leave humans behind on the ground an inspired piece of mission planning. It's wonderful that computers and telemetry has progressed so far.
True, but they're doing it on a far lower budget than the Space Shuttle.
A single RS-9 engine -- one of five used in the SLS -- costs more than an entire Falcon 9 launch with payload, taxes, and profit!
Starship is similarly frugal. Its construction is simpler, it is made of cheaper materials, it uses a cheaper fuel, etc, etc...
“Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.”
I love this quote. mankind having been to space already, the rockets are the sideshow to the way they designed and grew an org that delivered them along with a great business, starting from an amount of capital loads of nobodies have had but failed to do anything interesting with.
It was only reusable if you keep building new ones after they explode and kill everyone inside.
Did we all forget that the Space Shuttle is a failed program because it was unacceptably deadly due to a high failure rate?
It was only recently surpassed by Falcon 9 as the most reliable rocket program in human history with something like a 98% success rate.
All other rocket programs, including Starship are significantly worst in terms of failure rates than Shuttle.
There were 135 space shuttle missions over 30 years, with 2 failures resulting in 14 lives lost, giving a success rate of 98.5%. The second failure happened when the program was mature, which means that either NASA didn't analyze certain failure modes or they didn't take steps to address them. The Space Shuttle's design is inherently less safe than a normal capsule on top. With the orbiter on the side of the stack, any debris from other components is more likely to damage it. The orbiter also had no launch escape system or ability for crew to eject. Also, the solid boosters could not be throttled or shut down early if they malfunctioned. In contrast, capsules like Dragon and Soyuz are above the booster stages, reducing the chance of damage from any malfunctions in the stages, and allowing a launch escape system to get the crew away in the event of an emergency.
Falcon 9 has had 531 launches over 15 years (394 of them have happened since January of 2022), with 3 failures (one on the pad before launch, two during launch), for a success rate of 99.4%. Had these failures occurred during manned missions, the Dragon capsule's launch escape system would have likely saved the crew.
The mature version of Falcon 9 (block 5) has had 466 successful landings out of 472 attempts, giving it a success rate of 98.7%. This likely means that riding on a Falcon 9 first stage with no additional safety devices (such as a parachute or a launch escape system) is safer than riding in the Shuttle.
Thanks for providing this to other users but my point was about other rocket programs beyond Falcon 9 and Space Shuttle such as Starship. Starship is behind where Falcon 9 was at this point. By the same timelines Apollo was sending people to the moon too.
It's not useful to compare timelines. Of course the Apollo program went fast. Adjusted for inflation, NASA's lunar program cost over $300 billion. It also killed three astronauts. And it didn't have the regulatory hurdles that exist today when trying to launch rockets.
Starship's budget is 2-3% of the Apollo program, and its goal is to become profitable long term. I would assume that given a sliver of the same budget, and a much harder problem (fully reusable super heavy lift vehicle), and more regulations than the 1960s, it would take significantly longer.
It's also not useful to compare failure rates yet, because Starship is currently a test program. SpaceX believes that it's cheaper to build, test, and revise rather than to try getting it right the first time. They know Starship is not reliable, which is why they don't have real payloads in their test flights. Contrast this to the Space Shuttle, which NASA thought was so safe that they put a schoolteacher on it and broadcast the launch to children across the country.
This is the 4th launch where they are effectively attempting the same thing they were going to do 8 months ago.
Musk himself has a deadline of December 2026 for Mars, ignoring Artemis. How many more launches do they need to work out orbital refueling to make that deadline if they don’t test actually sending a real payload into space?
Hm...no thanks.
xoxo <3
Humanity
Science made it possible. Remember this when you see anti-scientific sentiment online.
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Meh, rocket science is just Newtonian physics mostly.
SpaceX is just the commercialization of stuff that was invented by our parents and grandparents in the 60s, 70s and 80s.
How to spot someone who has never designed a complex system in their life.
Be reasonable here. The complexity is within reach of high schoolers:
https://youtu.be/SH3lR2GLgT0
Let me know when Starship's complex systems, y'know, work.
Looks like it's cancelled
Odds on betting sites are all over the place for this one.
Got any good links?
Scrubbed
If it works, it works. But for now...
I'm still going to be interested to see if Starship is ever an economic success.
These test launches are expensive and it's going to take a long time to recoup that R&D, in large part because of... the Falcon 9. You have to look at what problem Starship is solving. Typoical answers are:
1. Greater payload capacity. This is true but is there demand for that? This is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem but we can point to the Falcon Heavy as a useful data point. There have only been ~13 launches thus far. Some might say "you can launch multiple payloads in one launch" but you really can't unless they're on pretty much the exact same orbit. Starlink works fine for this because they are on basically the same orbit.
2. Maybe it's "reusable second stage". This is only a fraction of the total cost, like an order of magnitude less than the impact of the reusable first stage and Falcon 9 already has taht. And it's proven; or
3. Which brings us to "landing humans on the Moon or Mars" but it's not really a suitable vehicle for that. Think about it. How are you going to land? They're reduced launch weight with the chopstick catching mechanism for the first stage such that it can't land on its own (unlike Falcon 9) so we'd need the second stage to be able to land on its own and take off again. We're nowwhere near even testing that. And it's going to take a lot of testing for human-rating flight.
But OK, let's look past all that and say it lands on the Moon. Well, how do the astronauts get out and back in? They're 30-40 meters off the ground.
I just don't know how this program succeeds.
1. You raise some valid points, but it's pretty common that when you lower the price for something ($ per KG to LEO) you raise the demand. The planned price drop is so severe that it becomes practical to send full weight objects into space without spending money and time on reducing weight.
2. Still a huge reduction in price. A full StarShip launch is expected to be much cheaper than a full Falcon 9 launch (per launch) because the cost is just fuel (about $300k) and some maintenance.
3. Putting legs back on for the Mars landing vehicle (a small fraction of the # starships launched btw) is totally practical.
Testing-
Yes, there is a lot more testing to go. I personally prefer testing and data-driven approvals than the traditional Paperwork based approval methods.
1. I think starlink alone means there is demand for that. Starlink is an appreciable fraction of satellites in orbit... Apart from starlink, satellites spend a lot of money on being as light as possible, at the very least there's a tradeoff here where you get to make the same satellite cheaper by being less mass efficient.
2. I wouldn't dismiss the cost savings from a reusable second stage.
3. They already have experience with legs from Falcon 9, and they're already landing this rocket very precisely with their tower. I would expect the development timeline for legs to be short. Much shorter than the development timeline for human rating the rest of this, for instance...
3.5. Winches and ropes are light and cheap, lowering things to and raising things from the surface doesn't strike me as a particularly difficult problem... apart from maybe the human-rating aspects of the system.
I think Starship has a good theoretical basis for being an economic success. On the other hand I don't have much faith they will successfully execute at this point.
They're massively behind schedule and presumably above anticipated cost. They aren't showing signs of having successfully designed a safe, reliable, and cheaply built vehicle. They've been making what externally seem like stupid mistakes like having their rocket fail in basically the same way twice in a row. They are making political enemies left right and center whether it's by having a fascist CEO committing election related crimes, or littering the same down-range islands with rocket parts from failed launches. They are almost certainly driving away talent by virtue of the same CEOs political roles and crimes, and by virtue of doing things like taking SpaceX engineers and having them work on twitter.
Space enthusiasts seem quite immune to politics compared to the Tesla consumers, they still hang on his every word when it comes to Starship.
As an ignorant outsider who only watches these Starship launches and doesn't do Kerbal, seems to me like another Cybertruck, where he after super successful model goes all in for big and cool (to him) even if it doesn't work
In addition you don't need to worry as much about people scratching the side of your satellite after parking using SpaceX rockets.
(Driving a Tesla is subject to public scrutiny from others both while driving and when parking)
And ... it's gone!
Scrubbed! ;(
When these rockets crash, is it because their digital simulations are inaccurate? Why do they need data from the actual test is the question instead of just relying on a bullet proof simulation?
There is no complete and "bullet proof" simulation of any system as complex as a whole rocket. Every simulation relies on simplifying assumptions, without exception.
Yeah. Most simulations are highly simplified toy models, and most of them need to be calibrated to real-life experimental results. The more complex the system, and the fewer experimental results you've got, the less reliable any simulation is going to be.
WRT Starship, I'm sure that certain aspects (like heat shield performance) can be simulated to acceptably high fidelity, but the entire system is beyond simulation. An accurate simulation would have to simulate the materials and mechanical behavior of every component, in an interconnected way, under a wide variety of stress states -- which is basically impossible with modern technology. Maybe in a few decades...
20 years from now:
Ok chatgpt 21.2
Build me a rocket simulation
The SpaceX design philosophy is light on simulation. You quickly reach a point on simulation where taking your simulation to the next level costs as much as just building the thing.
I think the idea of Computational Irreducibility fits here, prediction becomes either as hard or as costly as the process itself.
touch some steel, you’ve lived in the world of bits for too long
Computer models are built on assumptions and experience. You need experience to refine those assumptions. Sometimes that experience is an explosion.
But physics is physics. We’re not learning new physics are we? To reiterate, why wouldn’t these launches be perfect (seriously)?
The simulatable stuff is almost perfect. It's the stuff that can't be simulated that fails.
Take the last flight as an example. The booster experienced what was (probably) a structural failure in the propellant fuel lines. Simulating stress in the structure under static conditions is quite straightforward. Simulating the stress as the rocket ascends vertically and the tanks empty is hard, but doable.
Simulating the dynamic loading as the rocket flips? The fuel sloshes around, the sloshing fuel changes the kenimatics of the rocket, the kenimatics of the rocket change how the fuel sloshes, the engines try to correct adding a new force, the thrust from the engines creates increased force on the fuel increasing the pressure to the pumps, the performance of the engines changes because of the new fuel flow, that alters the acceleration further causing fuel to slosh, gass bubbles are intrained in the fuel from all the sloshing thus altering its flow/sloshing behavior, valves open and close creating pressure waves in the fuel that travel up and down the fuel lines (the water-hammer effect alone being enough to burst the pipes if valve closing is not well-timed), and the rocket itself flexes as all this happens, testing every exact detail of the manufacturing which you have to go out to the factory and physically measure. No simulation software ever imagined can handle all that coupling of systems.
The usual solution is to make some conservative estimates (the center-of-mass of the fuel will move by at most some amount, bubbles will last at most some time, the engines will have so much control authority, etc). But that requires experience. And this is aerospace, so safety margins are tiny.
A perfect theory of physics that exactly predicts the behavior of atoms doesn't really help you much when you're trying to predict the behavior of a spaceship containing approximately 10^33 atoms. Any such prediction is going to involve an enormous amount of heuristic approximation.
Just as one example, a spacecraft moving through a fluid atmosphere and with fluid fuel/oxidizer burning in its combustion chamber is going to involve incredibly complex turbulent fluid flows. And turbulence is something that we famously don't have good high-level theories (approximations) for.
> We’re not learning new physics are we
We are - at least in terms of model fidelity. There's limitations to how much CFD/simulations you can do. That kind of data (+other sensors) is used to refine models - thermal, aerodynamics, structures. Especially with starship, they are able to stream out live-video and data so that they get it even if the vehicle breaks up. Controlled hypersonic flight of such structures has been done very few times. There's stuff that can be learned from previous vehicles like the Space Shuttle but there are a lot of things that are very different - different control surfaces, flight profiles, thermal management etc.
Because there's a million and one things that could go wrong? Yes, we can make simulations. But the simulations are based on assumptions about the physical world. When the physical world doesn't obey those assumptions, things start to deviate from the simulation. Plus, simulations aren't perfect. We can't simulate every atom of the rocket and every atom of the atmosphere, so we have to approximate things. Errors creep in.
There is more to engineering than understanding the fundamental physics.
There isn't enough computing power in the world to simulate something like Starship at the atomic level, even if you assume you know all possible starting conditions and your software is absolutely correct.
I believe it's because the space of physics interacting with specific designs of specific components in the context of a large system with other specific components is very, very big and thus it is not feasible to just "simulate everything" ahead of time.
Also combustion itself is not properly understood all the way down, so there is literally a big physics gap involved here.
The physics is the easy part. Starship consists of thousands (millions?) parts that are all manufactured to varying precision. These tolerances can add up and cause unexpected failures.
If you can figure out how to make a bullet proof simulation of a complex hardware system like Starship you will be RICH, RICH, RICH.
Some aspects are just too complex to simulate. The fluid dynamics of nearly supersonic flows of cryogenic liquids that suddenly turn into white hot gas is… intractable.
The failures Starship had were often to do with simpler engineering bugs that they’ve been ironing out, such as: leaks in piping caused by violent shaking, explosive gases accumulating in closed spaces, filters getting clogged by ice forming in the cryogenic tanks, and burn-through of an experimental heat shield design at moving joints.
A credible YouTube link for the launch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7WmlTp7ue0
typo on the diagram - it's "Gulf of Mexico".
You don’t have to like the name or the current administration but to call it a typo is a bad faith effort on your part.
I took it as humorous.
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For the second time in two days we're having to remind you of the guidelines. HN isn't for engaging in ideological battle or posting snarky swipes about any nation's or region's superiority or inferiority. HN is for curious conversation about interesting topics. If that's what you're looking for, great, please make an effort to show it. If you keep up the snark, we'll have to ban the account.
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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45008078 and marked it off topic.
If you look closer you'll see that this rockets are key to billions of people living on other planets, to cheaper internet, to better telescopes, to satellites controlling weather.
Ultimately this is an important step towards a future with healthcare providing thousands of years of life, and unlimited housing space.
There are billions alive on this planet today. I think it's important to keep both the present and future in mind.
Well, US spends 1.5 trillion on social security and only 20 billion on NASA, so "present" is kind of overrepresented. Redirecting that little bit so that a few more people can live without working, or can get expensive treatment to live a few more years is stupid, not inspiring.
We live in the present, so I'd expect it to be overrepresented. I expect most people don't give their kids more money than they spend on themselves, for instance.
Your second sentence showcases some wildly negative biases. I suspect we could probably save money by improving the efficiency of our social programs and end up with even more to spend on scientific advancement.
But what we can't have is affordable housing and healthcare without private actors effectively involved in value creation. As has been demonstrated over and over again.
Starship isn't really a country.
This attitude that because one thing is bad we should ignore everything else is an incredibly small idea. Yes, we have a professional class of rent seeking middlemen that have captured the American healthcare industry. That sucks. We also have the industrial and technological power to do cool stuff. Let's do both things. Fix our problems and advance our technology.
To be fair, the same people benefiting from large government subsidies to develop private space travel are the same one(s) that actively gutted social programs and entire government agencies that provide value to the general population.
NASA is cool and undergoing massive defunding. Education is already under-funded and now under attack. Science is being actively squashed and replaced with religion yet somehow, you think space travel will become more likely?
There is a very strange, obvious, and bizarre reality gap between "We're going to Mars" and "...and we'll start by destroying decades of science funding and public education."
No one rational can possibly believe this is supposed to be a serious strategy, surely?
grass is always greener...
We could have both, easily. It’s a shame.
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This is not official. It's an account pretending to be SpaceX.
this is fake, probably will switch to a crypto scam in a few minutes
There is no official YouTube broadcast since the Twitter acquisition
Hopefully now that Musk is no longer dabbling in politics (and alienating his electric car buyers, who are mostly Democrats), his rockets will stop exploding.
Edit so being distracted was a net benefit for Tesla and Spacex? Down voters have not addressed this assertion, must be true.
He has never stopped dabbling in politics. He just finally realized that doing it behind the scenes like his peers do is the best way to do it. It's insane that he thought doing it the other way would be good for him.
Surely anyone who has bought a Tesla since he did start meddling in politics is a Republican.
Before that, I'd assume it was mixed - I think people were buying because EVs were seen as futuristic, and there was non-partisan support for Musk when his main association was visionary rather than political/nutjob.
I suspect this is net good for the EV space at this point in history.
Tesla was a virtue signal brand from day one[1]. Their core insight came from Palo Alto et. al. You’d drive through the suburbs and many driveways had two vehicles: a [insert gas guzzling luxury vehicle] and a Prius. One vehicle to signal wealth/status - the other to signal environmental consciousness. But the eco vehicle was a compromise; compared to the jaguar it sat next to, it was a clunker.
Tesla’s GTM strategy was that you could buy a vehicle, without compromise, from them to signal to your social circles how much you cared about the environment. And it worked.
They broke the oil cartels with a direct to consumer sales strategy and kicked off the EV market.
But now that market’s needs are well met. The eco virtue signal crowd has multiple vendors selling decent products to meet their buying preferences.
There is a fairly large untapped market though that won’t convert off of oil. That demographic overlaps well with the 2025 MAGA coalition. And, with Elon’s involvement in that coalition, Tesla EVs are now a new virtue signal for a new demographic.
You have people buying EVs that were rolling coal as recently as 2 years ago.
[1] The brand being built around eco virtue signaling is well documented in early interviews with original founders - a quick search will turn up many direct quotes talking about them driving through California suburbs doing market research and discovering exactly that.
It seems to me it was the Roadster that kick-started Tesla by making electric sexy and desirable - high performance and expensive rather than something low performance bought for ideological/eco reasons. The Tesla model S which followed wasn't cheap either, and also emphasized high performance with the dual motor and plaid options. These seem more like wealth signalling than virtue signalling.
The vast majority don't require the CEO of a companies politics to match theirs when buying a vehicle.
The vast majority of CEOs keep quiet about their politics so it doesn't become a problem.
Also, the CEO of Ford or BMW or whoever makes $10M or $20M or whatever and that’s basically the end of the story. Musk owns such an enormous portion of Tesla still that boycotts materially impact his net worth and his future ability to buy as much political clout.
~17% I believe?
Look how far VW has come
I would think the best way to keep SpaceX rockets from exploding is to get Musk as far away as possible from any engineering decisions. I firmly believe that SpaceX has only done as well as it has because the engineering is so far above Musk's knowledge that actual aeronautical engineers can do what they do and throw some technobabble at him to shut him up when he suggests dumb thing.
Multiple current, and more significantly former SpaceX engineers have confirmed Musk was the driving force behind the engineering decisions that lead to reusability for Falcon 9.
He’s also been very much in the driving seat on engineering for Starship, and we’ve yet to see how well that works out, but the success of F9 is there to see.
There are also stories from engineers at both SpaceX and Tesla that they do everything possible to keep him away from any engineering decisions because he doesn't know what he was talking about. His brainchild of the cybertruck was suppose to be a monolithic bent stainless steel shell that he spent years trying to accomplish and fired many engineers over who said it wouldn't work, and we see how that turned out with strips of low quality stainless glued onto aluminum parts that are suppose to be load bearing with a regular steel undercarriage that will still rust away.
The whole notion that "Musk doesn't know anything about technology or engineering" is incorrect. Probably stems from all the people trying to reconcile their hatred for Elon Musk with SpaceX's outstanding successes.
Quite a few major engineering decisions at SpaceX go all the way to Elon Musk himself. One of the best known is probably the decision to make Starship land onto the "chopsticks" of the launch tower, removing the need for dedicated landing legs.
Elon Musk made this suggestion back in 2020. Most of the engineers tried to talk him out of this crazy idea. So he took the few engineers who thought it was plausible and assigned it to them.
We even know for certain that this wasn't a success that got attributed to Musk after the fact - because this story was first printed in a biography in year 2023, when it wasn't clear whether this ambitious landing method would work in practice. The first "return to launch tower" attempt was only made in year 2024, and succeeded on the first try.
Musk has no engineering degrees, has never worked in any engineering capacity, has no patents under his belt, and has constantly run into engineering blunders directly attributed to his lack of understanding in SpaceX and all his other businesses. I think you are delusional if you think Musk has any more engineering knowledge than a highschooler with a B in science, nothing he has ever said or done has shown otherwise. On top of that I have seen numerous stories out of SpaceX itself that Elon has to be distracted away from anything important because he thinks he knows better than people with decades in aeronautical engineering.
Sure, but if there’s any correlation it’s probably better that he’s absent. SpaceX has competent leadership in Shotwell.
SpaceX is a private company, but a significant part of the funding for the development of its Starship spacecraft, especially for lunar missions, comes from U.S. taxpayer money via NASA contracts.
The Starship rocket is the most powerful launch vehicle ever constructed. If controlled by a maniacal megalomaniac it could be turned into a powerful weapon. Hopefully that won't ever happen. But it raises the question: should a private citizen ever be in control of such powerful technology whose development was funded by taxpayers?
Do you think Musk is going to build a secret volcano lair and stockpile nuclear warheads? The entire US military arsenal is constructed by corporations, doing far more dangerous things than Musk has any access to.
"significant" is doing a lot of work here. spaceX appears to have spent ~$10B on development and infrastructure for Starship so far. NASA has been invoiced for ~50% of their $2.9B contract, so the taxpayer has paid ~15%.
I don't know about the broader point the GP is making, but 15% funding is significant by most measures.
Which maniacal megalomaniac are you talking about?
Since it’s US tax payers money footing the bill, maybe whoever is in charge of spending US tax payers money at the moment? Or maybe whoever is building the vehicle? I’m not sure which is worse.
Uh, the richest one (ever), forgot his name. Almost bought a whole department in the government, nice calm guy.
In case you’ve noticed said rich person is out of favor with the chief megalomaniac.
I'm not comfortable with the power Elon Musk has, given his behaviour and views. But I don't think weaponizing SpaceX rockets is a big concern.
The ability to manufacture rockets like this would of course be very valuable to anyone developing ballistic missiles for military purposes. But there are also big differences as those use mostly solid fuel. Selling this information to other countries could be a potential national security risk.
Musk's rockets are inside the US, he would probably be able to launch one rocket on a target before the US military would stop any further launches. So I don't think any direct threat here by Musk would be that worrisome.
He’d also need to persuade everybody involved in the launch guidance, and presumably also the payload development, transfer and integration to commit treason, and for none of them to break silence.
No one thought Musk would abuse his ownership of Starlink either, but in 2022 Musk personally ordered the shutdown of Starlink satellite coverage over key parts of Ukraine. Supposedly he was motivated by concerns that a successful Ukrainian advance might provoke a Russian nuclear response. He is not a head of state, but gets to make such decisions? (FWIW he later denied intentionally turning off Ukraine's Starlink terminals).
> He is not a head of state, but gets to make such decisions?
Starlink is his property, he doesn't need to be head of state to suspend a free service and that's how it should be.
Right... so he could also, for example, decide that Starship will only take MAGA astronauts to the moon. And that's why taxpayer funds should not be used for developing Starship.
No he can't because the US is paying for that, it is the government's mission. And fwiw now the gray area of free starlink in Ukraine also taken care of, the US government is handling that contracting like they do with all weapons systems. Before starlink was made available for free in Ukraine for humanitarian purposes, but the military also obviously found good uses for it before the gray areas were resolved.
I have no idea what Musk might do, so I'm not excluding anything. But to do anything with a SpaceX rocket he would need co-conspirators, and in the end he would only get a single shot. So the result would be similar to a larger terrorist attack.
I would assume that the risk here is similar to that of many other companies or persons that use large amounts of explosives or other tools that could be weaponized. Musk has a delivery system that is superior to just driving a truck with explosives somewhere, but in many cases that doesn't matter much.
There are some scenarios I could imagine, but they're really more like movie scripts than reality. Musk doesn't have the power to prevent retaliation, and he also couldn't threaten or demand ransom as he couldn't defend his rockets against the US military.
No it should not, this is one of the primary moral hazards we get from neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism is anything I don't like!
What makes you say that? I don't like a lot of things that aren't neoliberalism, is there some trend where people are doing this?
I could make it clearer: Neoliberalism, specifically it's distinguishing trait of having governments foster markets via public money without getting public ownership, leads to concerning situations like the op was discussing.
Edit: Interestingly Trump's thing about getting the government getting a 10% stake in Intel is not neoliberalism! I don't like Trump, but that's still not neoliberalism
Raptor engine fuel lines. The most obvious candidate is diamond nano threads. If they plan on using for cabling for a Space elevator. Then they should be suitable as a flexible fuel line outer layer. Having looked into the future(pressurised fuel lines at present stainless steel), I am sure that Space Ex Starship should have a successful launch. As the previous launch should have been successful, checking every component, like a Halo Elite Spacecraft 'load master', checking individuals equipment before deploying into space on a space flight. Is the right way to go. So getting it right takes time, regardless of the media circus!