If the heat shield holds up then this changes everything. Next step is double catch and re-flying the same ships and catching again, then payloads to orbit become significantly cheaper opening a new era in space flight.
Yeah, I'm eagerly awaiting results from inspection of the heat shield (which hopefully they will disclose). Reflight without refurbishment is the last goal they need to hit before the system can be considered a success. After that, optimizing for increased payload and nailing reliability will be the things to work on. And of course orbital refueling for HLS.
They already recovered a ship from that one time they accidentally landed one in the ocean. SpaceX got to have a lot of heatshield endurance data by now.
Even if it doesn't meet their goals of rapid reuse, I think we've still joined the new era. Replacing tiles is going to be substantially cheaper than building new upper stages, likely less than the cost of fuel for a launch.
With price per kg to orbit dropping, you can afford much more off-the-shelf components for satellites and using more cheap and redundant parts, instead of high quality bespoke stuff.
Starlink is a big deal so I wouldn't discount it. It's significantly expanded the satellite networking market. It's also a key military asset.
Aside from that the F9 rideshare missions have made space accessible to a whole new class of space startup that wouldn't exist otherwise.
Prior to F9 there was no competition in the US market. The result was government customers paid ULA through the nose. Commercial customers largely used Ariane. F9 saved the government money directly but also forced other launchers to lower their prices.
And the even more tantalizing thing is what comes next. You're right that that's a big deal, that's near to two orders of magnitude cost reductions! But on the other hand we're still in a scenario where it costs $1200 to send a 16oz bottle of water to space. So that means the amount of infrastructure that can be deployed out there is limited and mostly restricted to governments or small satellites for private usage.
Now bring it down two more magnitudes, which is the aspirational goal of Starship, and you're talking about a world where regular companies can start to deploy mass infrastructure to space. Suddenly, space as a domain for expansion and development becomes completely viable. That would completely revolutionize space, Earth, and humanity. It would be the official start of the next era of humanity.
Low earth orbit can't sustain a Kessler syndrome for more than a few years. Atmospheric drag is too large. (And it gets proportionally larger for smaller fragments.)
Well how are we going to have big problems to solve if we don't create them!? Snark aside, Kessler syndrome is probably 100% inevitable. Even ignoring development, there's geopolitics. Modern warfare heavily depends on eyes in the sky, and so on day 1 of direct war between two great powers, stuff in space is going to start going pop.
Fortunately it's not as bad as most think. You'd still be 100% capable of launching stuff into space, and even orbital rotations would still be viable, even if it would require more active maneuvering. It's not like it creates a giant impassable shield over Earth that'd just blot out the sky, but more like the odds of a collision per year on a given orbit would tend to increase dramatically.
And the biggest risk would be in stuff quite close to Earth since that's where it'd be the most energetic/fastest, and also where there's the least amount of space meaning the odds of a collision are relatively greatest. Fortunately, that's also the domain where drag is the greatest and where particles would most rapidly end up falling into the atmosphere and burning up, so the worst of it would clean itself up naturally on reasonably short timeframes, like days to months.
You're speaking of advances well beyond the two magnitudes more we need. This is what I think most people don't get about the concept of full reuse. Those two orders of magnitude are theoretically viable with Starship!
Starship spends around $1 million fuel to send around 100 tons to orbit. That's a baseline cost of $10/kg. But if we get truly aspirational then fuel costs can be significantly reduced through greater vertical integration, and the later block models already are looking at bumping the payload up to 200 tons.
You obviously need some margin to account for maintenance after each flight, but the cost of the rocket itself rapidly amortizes to something near $0 with sufficient reuse. So something around $10/kg is a completely viable aspirational goal with current tech.
And if we get anywhere in the ballpark of that $10 then Starship is going to be at least a big of a revolution in space as LLMs were in the digital/cognitive world. Wild time to be alive!
I was reading in the comments that the rocket itself is made of steel. What if they manage to build it out of a lighter alloy that has the same or better properties when it comes to going and coming back from space?
What if, considering how SpaceX simplified rocket engine design figures out that, i don't know, adding a little bit of ammonia to the mix, makes the engines perform 10% better? Or 15%? Obviously not a rocket expert, but I don't think we (as a species) experimented with all the possible combinations of chemical compounds to get the best possible output to make a rocket get to space.
I us a lot of what IFs, because in the past few years we've made technological jumps that prior to that it would have taken us decades.
Starship built with new alloys and promises to deliver everything expected. I’m wondering what’s next for spacex beyond starship . It will take 5 years to squeeze all the possibilities from current design(s). What will be next 10x ?
Space stations , space manufacturing, different kind of payload eg telescopes that are 10x bigger , you name it , oh and yeah mars , moon , asteroids etc . It all depends on how cheaper and bigger payload . 10x or 100x. If 100x this is new era for humanity
Fuel transfer seems like a trivial problem next to the reusable heat shield. And even if for some weird reason it never works, the program could likely pay for itself just launching Starlink/Starshield with full reuse.
Or use SuperHeavy to launch non-reusable second stage and fueled Moon module of different design. After all SuperHeavy doesn’t have to be used exclusively for Starship.
Only for going to the Moon or Mars. As a launch system, Starship will still be a phenomenal success even if they struggle with fuel transfer, which is really an entirely different problem.
This depends on what you're considering to be the main goal of Starship. Both of you are correct that Starship's stated goals included what you're considering the goal.
If the simple industrial process of pumping liquid from one tank to another is too difficult, one wonders exactly what sort of society anyone could imagine building in space.
The main reason fuel depots and fuel transfer were disparaged was to protect the gravy train of SLS. But that's essentially over.
Nothing is simple in zero g. All our industrial processes have baked in assumption about gravity (and most also about the composition and pressure of surrounding air).
Huge congratulations to the engineering team on this one! It's been quite interesting to watch the evolution of Starship. Had they put another couple of tonnes of propellant and oxidizer on the Booster they might have caught both of them. It is still unclear to me what the final mass fraction to orbit will work out to be, but something that is 100% re-usable is better than something 60% reusable[1].
[1] Estimate of Falcon 9's booster + fairings being 60% (by cost, not by mass) of the launch package.
They called it off because it was running lower on fuel than they expected - the margins are crazy thin. You can see a green burst of flame near the end, which is what happens when you run oxygen rich/fuel poor (also called "engine-rich" - iirc the green flame is copper from the engine as the oxidizer-rich mix causes it to run hot).
I think it's a supposition that the reason they didn't catch the booster was that it couldn't get back to the chopsticks. I don't think SpaceX described the issues as that ... it would seem sort of strange if it was because the seemingly planned a catch for it so you'd think they would have a good handle on the fuel required. It's possible they didn't fully understand that requirement though.
I still remember watching Falcon 9 (Block V, iirc) successfully landing back on land (as opposed to droneships) after deploying Orbcomm OG2 satellites in December 2015 -- almost 11 years ago.
It blew my teen mind.
This day marks a fabulous advancement for the human species.
We went outside in our Orlando office to see the flair up in the sky, and then were looking for the re-entry, by the time we could figure out where it was our coworker said it was already standing upright.
I was at Canaveral for the double booster return (Heavy?), and it's unbelievable the velocity those things come back down at, with the powered deceleration.
A few seconds after the sonic boom, you're seeing them cancel out the last of their velocity and land on the pad.
One of those 'it can't possibly be that big because nothing that big could be moving that fast' optical lack of reference moments.
Yeah I think people that have never seen one of the beasts just can't imagine the scale. Fully 'assembled, the height is upwards of 120m - 70 on the booster, 50 on the upper stage. So it's something bigger than a football/handegg field going into space and something still in the same ballpark coming down at near freefall, then slowing itself, and landing on a spot with a margin of error of a few meters.
I'll be that guy: they still have to fly it again. That's the real question. Incredible achievement. We got used to landing and caught boosters real quick!
This was a huge milestone, but you're right that there are a long list of future milestones: catch both on the same flight, reuse of both on a given flight, fly without significant refurbishment, fly N times in T time for many values of each, orbital refueling, crew, etc.
Space Shuttle was a compromised design from the beginning. They originally wanted the Space Shuttle booster to also have wings and return to launch site (with a crew!). But they couldn't afford to develop two new vehicles, so they compromised by making the external tank as cheap as possible and adding solid rockets (which led to the Challenger disaster).
But their biggest mistake was having the engines on the orbiter (so they could be recovered) but not the fuel tank. That meant the orbiter had to hang on the side of the external tank, which made it vulnerable to foam strikes (leading to the Columbia disaster).
Landing with wings is aesthetically pleasing (compared to tower catches) but consider the waste: You have to boost the weight of the wings, landing gear, etc. all the way to orbit and then bring it all the way back. It's much more efficient to just bring fuel and use that for landing. And if your guidance is accurate enough, a pinpoint landing means you can land on the launch tower and not worry about landing legs.
For the shuttle there was also a lot of interference from the Airforce, which forced them to have a massive payload bay, so AF could launch and service their big Keyhole satellites (and possibly snatch Soviet ones in one orbit without warning).
Then there was pressure to make use of solid propellants to amortize their use with military uses, not to mention pushing for Shuttle carrying all payloads for the US.
This together created the dangerous and expensive design tHat was STS.
People give the USAF shit about influencing the shuttle specs, given the capability was never used...
... but a lot of those were set in 1968 - 73, when relationships between the US and Soviet Union were very different than the late 80s.
Given the development and operational timelines, it wasn't a bad bet to cover needing that military capability, had things turned out differently between the two superpowers.
Challenger blew because the joint was designed to always be in compression--but it went into tension during the twang. After the headlines they paid attention and fixed it.
The risky thing about solids is that you cannot abort them. Once they light, there is no turning them off.
Shuttle always started the main engines for a few seconds (wasting fuel) to make sure the engines worked before lighting the solids. But there were many engine-out scenarios after the solids were lit that would result in loss-of-crew.
Congress insisted on the boosters to be made in other districts distant from the launch sites, so they were forced to make them in segments instead of a single continuous tube welded together permanently.
I tend to think that for human rated flights it may be possible to give it a parachute just in case powered descent is not possible for any reason as a precaution for a belly flop water landing with parachute assist. The flaps are already there too so maybe just increase their size is possible for a glidable descent? We're entering a size class for the vehicle that makes some outside the box stuff possible without sacrificing too much in terms of payload capacity.
The space shuttle was aerodynamic for a very specific reason - they had to do a mission (that never happened) where they would launch, deploy a spy satellite into a specific polar orbit, and return back to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in a single orbit. The result was a requirement for a lot of cross range, which needed large wings that hurt its performance a spacecraft.
Starship doesn't have that - and so it can be much more optimized for it's purpose. It's basically tanks with a cargo bay and control surfaces, while the shuttle had to toss it's tanks away every flight.
IIRC this could also snatch a satellite using the same profile, with no warning.
Also some in the Soviet leadership were very scared the shuttle could carry nukes clandestinely, then during an ostensibly routine mission change inclination using its wings and decapitate Moscow with no prior warning.
There's many objections to this, but a major one is that the entire vision for Starship is Mars and other terrestrial bodies. If you create something optimized for Earth, you have to start over from scratch for another planet. And vice versa if you create something specialized for another planet.
An adaptable retropulsive landing system, by contrast, is fit for duty just about anywhere. In the long run you'd just need the atmospheric/planetary specs, a flat hard surface somewhere, and it'd be able to come down on it safely.
Do you think Space Shuttle landing is equivalent because you like all the extra weight and complexity of a landing gear, or because you like having to build a giant runway?
There weren't too many runways available to use as backups given size requirements, so I assume if/when they start doing human starship launches they will have multiple chopstick towers and therefore have near-equivalent emergency backup capability.
There hasn’t been anything like this in humanity for a very long time. It’s so emotional to watch and see what we are capable of and the bright future ahead of us. Thank you for everyone who made this happen.
Starship is, essentially, Space Shuttle done right: fully reusable booster without solid boosters (avoids Challenger disaster) and orbiter stacked on top instead of on the side (avoid Columbia disaster).
The original designs for the Space Shuttle had the booster (with wings!) return to the launch site, but the cost for two new crewed vehicles was too large, so they scaled it back to the compromised version.
Even more revolutionary, compared to Shuttle, Starship is built on an assembly line. They can build a booster ever 4 weeks and a ship every 2 weeks.
The future we were promised in the 1970s is about to become real.
But the Shuttle became what it became for reasons that Starship doesn’t have to deal with. Shuttle had multiple masters (NASA and DoD) driving a bastardized design. The non-assembly line of NASA is a feature, not a bug: by spreading work across many congressional districts it mitigates political defunding risk. Im not defending those, but they are important context for those who pretend the differences are a signal of government incompetence.
It’s evidence that they are solving different problems. Does the fact that Musk spends hundreds of millions on election cycles mean he’s incompetent, or he’s trying to mitigate a political risk you and I don’t have to deal with?
I'm not super convinced that the commercial aerospace industry really needed NASA once super high value satellite services came about in the 90s.
The ideal of a good government industry program, is to create a domestic industry, and A: maintain it at a minimum level for whatever goal is in focus (defence, technology familiarity, investment certainty). And B to help it grow to be independent of the government, so the profits and funding can go elsewhere.
To me, most of what NASA did after Skylab are a bit questionable. With most of the high profile stuff being of limited value compare to the RF and solid state electronics projects.
I mean, Musk himself stated SpaceX needed NASA. New entrants especially benefit from a self insured customer because private industry won’t accept that level of risk.
I agree with a lot of your point, but would probably caveat a lot of the JPL work.
I mean, considering nothing like it had been done before (or since) kinda proves the inefficient approach worked. I'm not defending gov inefficiency but often it still leads to good results somehow (and also major disasters, sigh)
What does worked mean in this context? A barely reusable craft that risked human lives to launch mundane satellites and was so unreliable DOD stopped using and was so expensive NASA couldn’t afford to keep it running?
No, he's trying to bully his way into forcing the government to do what he wants, and he can because he is extremely wealthy. It just happens that in this case, it yields something useful. That is a poor model, the rich should not arbitrarily get their own way.
Can see your point, that spreading the constructions sites across different states was necessary in order to get it built, but in terms of pure engineering, this is probably a negative.
Guess the point is that generally speaking, large scale engineering is typically not done at efficient and creative-levels when directed by the government. Governments have too many stakeholders that have needs that have little do with with engineering that need to be satisfied
...And of course, there are exceptions -guessing the Gemini and Apollo programs would be a good examples.
... oh, and am not trying to call you out, just trying to think through this for myself as well.
What makes you think Gemini and Apollo are counterexamples? They were successful, but were also heavily dependent on contractors and occurred when NASA funding was many multiples of today’s budget when measured by percentage of GDP.
Well, they seemed like highly effective government programs as they were able to get people to the moon under a very tight deadline (and also knew they were extremely expensive programs. Kind of crazy the amounts relatively to gdp they were spending).
And, if they weren't, backs up that the government is not typically a good overseer when it comes engineering programs
(although, still seems like when there is a very strong need, governments can be very good partners).
There is nothing inherently wrong with 'government' providing the source of funding for these programs, and there's nothing wrong with spreading parts of the program across different regions. In fact, in a way it can be cheaper. With the Apollo testing facilities in Mississippi, the Apollo program being built out of Huntsville, and the other 7 locations across the US--you can adequately tap higher end talent while moving some components to cheaper locations to work on.
Agree actually. The government basically funded Spacex for Falcon 9 through the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, and probably some of Starship's development too. Yeah, the funding wasn't the question, it's whether the government is a good overseer of programs like this.
Regarding spreading the parts of the development/manufacturing across different regions, am sure there are good benefits to doing this, and cost efficiency is definitely one of them (Boeing's manufacturing is a great example, as well as most auto companies). So yeah, you're right there. But when the government does it, it often is for political reasons, so you wonder if they really do gain cost efficiencies? Hmm...
Personally, my take is the earlier in the development process you are of a product (or vehicle), the better it is to keep everything tight knit (yeah, am a believer in the major concepts of agile development - small, integrated teams working close together, able to iterate fast). And feels like this is also true for design teams in general, no matter what the size of the company. It pays to keep them together as much as possible.
But the more mature a product gets, like a car company that's been building cars for decades, it seems like spreading out manufacturing could be a cost savings.
publicly funded means funded by the people. its not really unreasonable that people demand the economic benefits of investing their money to be spread around a bit.
its not ideal from logistics POV, but it is not what I would take as the prime example of incompetence. its just the government way of doing thinngs.
If the economic benefit summarized as employment, then the goal is wrong. And indeed space conquest oftem just makes our child brains dream, instead of being something useful per itself. So we tout employment and side-effects as a prime benefit of space. Why not create a broken-window factory, it will create more jobs.
It's more like the cost of the political system we run. Yes, it's not the most streamlined, but it's stable. Quite a number of people yearn for the efficiency of a system under one will of an enlightened monarch. We have a bunch of examples, from Lycurgus and Cyrus back in the day to Mr Putin today; there is a cost to such a system, too.
It’s always entertaining to hear engineers ridicule inefficient government programs while simultaneously setting up a load balancer, backups, or a high-availability db cluster. Completely unable to generalize the lesson that redundancy and overhead aren’t necessarily bad, and that efficiency is in tension with other desirable attributes in every system, political, biological, computational, whatever.
There’s a common theme in HN discussions where people mistake understanding a system for evangelizing it. Really nothing could be further from the truth.
this is well and truly common all over the internet -- you explain how some system, something fairly non-technical even, say, a common social failing, some institutional bias or what-have-you, works, and you have a bunch of people go on the offensive as though you've just endorsed the thing. so you have to hedge practically anything with a token virtue-signal, even in communities where it's pretty strongly implied that you're on the same page about considering the thing bad.
if you'll indulge a tangent, i can only chalk up the increase in this phenomenon over the time i've been online to the consolidation of online discussion to a handful of sites that have become ever more adept and efficient at creating filter bubbles. and it's always the sites where that hasn't taken root, where everyone's seeing the same thing, that then catch a reputation for being hellholes full of terrible people, because naturally, the majority of people engage with those sites not directly, but through screenshots shared on the major socials, and those major socials are incentivised to push you content that you engage with. then, as we all know, angry people click more. so of course as a user of one of those major socials, a majority of those screenshots the site pushes you end up being those that depict speech your own filter bubble cohort finds abhorrent. hn is actually subject to this dynamic a little bit.
I understand what you’re saying, but in a larger sense the fact that distributing labor and increasing costs is necessary as risk-prevention against our own politicians is a sign of a broken system of incentives and representation
Consider this: had they not, NASA may not exist. Considering Musk himself said SpaceX would not exist had NASA not bailed them out, it also means SpaceX likely wouldn’t exist. In other words, SpaceX also needed those distributed wastes, they just were externalities to the company. A broader context of the system is important when diagnosing systemic issues.
NASA paid SpaceX for a service, and SpaceX delivered that service on time and vastly cheaper than their competitors who were also paid by NASA (ISS resupply).
In the case of transporting humans to the ISS, SpaceX did it vastly cheaper than the competitor who was also paid by NASA. That competitor has never done what they were paid to do.
If there is anyone or anything to be angry at, it seems mighty strange to be angry at the company who actually did what they were paid to do when another company took much more money and didn’t deliver.
Fair, “bailout” is not a good term for an era where taxpayers give loans to floundering companies.
What Musk admitted to was NASA “saved” SpaceX with a last minute contract to prevent their bankruptcy. I would make the argument that SpaceX would not exist without all those early government contracts. It’s a shrewd business move: use a self-insured entity (the govt) when risk is the highest because it pushes the financial risk to the taxpayer, and gradually move to more privatized customers when risk is lower and insurance costs can make such launches economically viable.
I do agree Boeing CST was not run well and I’ve thrown plenty of ire there way. But that is an entirely different argument and a bit of whataboutism.
Taxpayers did not give a loan to SpaceX anymore than they gave one to any contractor they pay for a service.
The government paid SpaceX for a service, which was delivered as promised. This happens hundreds of thousands of times a year with tons of companies being paid to do things for the government.
I was clear that it was a contract that saved them from bankruptcy. A contract they could leverage for loans, but I clearly said contract. I wish HN would limit accounts that are very new and seem to misrepresent other posts.
I usually agree that the hybrid approach gives the best outcomes. The govt is necessary when the risk is too great for private industry to bear and the private side tends to move faster on innovation.
not to mention shuttle as we knew it was never supposed to be its final form. the Block 1 Shuttles were more or less intended to be a MVP and they would follow along with Block II orbiters. But of course Block Two never happened, and we just got incremental updates of the block 1s.
> The original designs for the Space Shuttle had the booster (with wings!) return to the launch site, but the cost for two new crewed vehicles was too large, so they scaled it back to the compromised version.
Can you cite a source for this claim? My understanding is that the control algorithms for landing a rocket did not exist at the time of the space shuttle. The algorithms were invented in 2010s[1] and space shuttle operated from 1981-2011[2]
Recovery never paid dividends for Shuttle, due to satellites' degradation in orbit, and SPCX seems to have driven the industry even further from 'exquisite systems'. I love the idea of in-orbit servicing, but I am not sure it will ever work for unmanned objects.
The economics and use cases have and are evolving.
I don't see this as "space shuttle done right" as a vehicle or "program" without the ability to carry out maintenance and recovery missions. As expensive as it was, for various reasons, it was actually used for those missions.
For example I don't think "space data centers" are going to work if the upgrade path for the hardware is vaporize it all and replace it vs recover and recycle/resell.
Once you get mass into orbit it's more economical to keep it there so rather than recovery to Earth it would be better to build the facilities in orbit to perform maintenance, refurbishment and refuelling. Starship should make that feasible.
The more cost effective approach is now repair-in-place. Startups in early orbital testing include Starfish Space (autonomous satellite life extension, orbital repositioning/inclination changes, and active debris disposal) and Katalyst (Multi-arm robotic capture, hardware upgrades, and orbital repositioning).
The question on my mind is; does repair-in-place make economical sense for commercial satellites?
Old-space satellites are expensive, so on-orbit repair theoretically makes sense here. The largest obstacle to cost-effective repair in that domain is the one-off nature of these vehicles. This means each repair mission requires R&D, manufacturing, and testing before launch. So for this method to be effective, the repair mission needs time before any faults become lethal. I'm not super confident about resuscitation either; off-nominal thermal/power can cook electronics beyond repair. Plus, any RPO mission risks accidental damage.
And on the other hand, new-age satellites like Starlink are build cheap(er) and designed for replacement. Why bother with repair when you can just build and launch another?
It seems like you're also a satellite repair nerd, so I'd love to hear any thoughts you might have :D
the satellites are life limited whether they have noticeable faults or not (mostly by the remaining propellant, but also by TID radiation and payload obsolescence), and any sensible repair-in-place mission aims to proactively repair satellites near the end of their practical life rather than reactively responding to issues. The robotics (and fluid transfer for refuelling) are basically there, you just need satellites with an architecture that enables repair/replacement/refuelling to move beyond demonstrators. And most satellites are not built in that way.
As for whether it's worth it, it depends a lot on the satellite and the orbit. Starlink: probably not worth upgrading. Geostationary satellites: there's a reason why what goes up there commands oldspace prices (long way up, intensive radiation environment) and that reason also justifies serviceability. Hypothetical LEO datacentre with most of the mass being solar panels and radiators that last a lot longer than the chips are commercially relevant: yeah, probably makes sense to have the chip payload swappable and the thrusters refuellable.
A mission for one satellite to repair a lot of others is complex (it's basically an extra-hard version of the travelling salesman problem) but when the alternative is inserting many entirely new satellites into n orbits, sending a tiny fraction of the mass to n orbits via a reusable servicer starts to make a lot of sense...
Exactly, the scale and scope of payloads is increasing as launch costs are decreasing.
If starship launches ever get anywhere near the 2m-10m claim.. Suddenly fixing or retrieving that 500m-2bn satellite. Or rotating the compute modules on that 150bn space datacenter constellation..
Honestly I could envision regulation requiring it at some point.
It could conceivably capture near-dead satellites and bring them back, deorbit them, or send up a payload of multiple repair ships.
The cost to launch may get to the point that it is cheaper to replace than repair, and we can build 10 of a satellite instead of 1 bespoke unit per program.
Sure, and the starship is just a scaled up falcon with more raptors..
But here we are 12-15 years later and it's still not operational.
This would require it being safe for and having facilities for crew. Tool and machinery for service and recovery. The vessel would need to handle re-entry stress with return payloads on board. The heat tiles would need to support the extra mass. The vehicle capture system. Etc. Etc.
Could it all be built on the starship "platform"? Maybe.. One day. But that day is not this day.
Private industry tends to be far more efficient at making “stuff that works” than a non-profit governmental organization.
Even for all the genuinely good and smart people that worked for NASA over the decades, the bureaucratic machinery that makes it run eventually becomes so convoluted, corrupt and bloated for its own good.
I should know; I worked there for over a quarter of a century. Nothing beats the private industry for “making shit that works.”
The government was the customer, so it was up to them to decide what to do in house and what to hire out. They chose to manage the project in house, creating specific design requirements and contracting out work to meet those requirements, not to create the designs.
Private industry did do most of the work, but they had no leeway to influence the design. Even when they tried to make choices, e.g. Morton Thiokol's Engineers' no-go decision on the Challenger launch due to low temperatures, NASA administrators effectively overrode that decision, by directly calling unqualified employees at Morton Thiokol, until they found one they could pressure into giving a go.
I really think it depends. For long running projects with high ongoing costs like a launch vehicle, I agree. The issue with government projects of this type is that they eventually turn into jobs projects, and that can compromise the main goals of the projects.
But NASA has had some phenomenal successes in their science expeditions - the Webb Space Telescope (and its Hubble precursor, despite its need for "glasses"), the Mars rovers, Voyagers, etc. Those projects would have largely been impossible in the private sector because there is no monetary return.
This is an overly simplistic take. In many cases, the private industry moves and innovates faster. In many others, it injects its own forms of waste (regulatory capture, profiteering over mission, etc)
> Private industry tends to be far more efficient at making “stuff that works” than a non-profit governmental organization.
If that were true, then why doesn't the US have a single high speed train?
NASA projects are well-known to be expensive because they, similar to military procurement in the US, are handled like inofficial job creation projects involving as many states as possible.
The US rail network was created by private industry, including both freight and passenger. This included many of the fastest passenger trainsets at the time, like the Zephyr. In 1971 the US nationalized passenger rail into Amtrak, and Amtrak stopped using off-the-shelf trainsets and managed the development of their own, similar to NASA developing the Space Launch System (the space shuttle) for their use. At that point, the US started falling behind on rail speed records.
In short, the US had stuff that works, including the fastest trains, when run by private industry, but after nationalizing the industry into a non-profit governmental organization, they stopped producing stuff that works.
> If that were true, then why doesn't the US have a single high speed train?
Planes are faster, cheaper, safer, require much less infrastructure, go anywhere to anywhere, scale elastically with demand, and have less emissions per passenger mile than high-speed trains.
> and have less emissions per passenger mile than high-speed trains
The optimal high speed train is about two orders of magnitude more efficient than the equivalent flight on a passenger mile basis. Might look a little different for crossing oceans or thin routes where it's really not worth building a thousand miles of rail to replace a flight a day, but lack of demand between nearby cities or is not why the US doesn't have any high speed rail network...
> If that were true, then why doesn't the US have a single high speed train?
Because building/modifying rails crossing many states and cities means having to deal with a unending shitload of bureaucrats at single every level of power.
While sending something up straight in the air and then into space means all those little bureaucrats from all those cities/communities/states do not get a say in the matter.
I think you forget that in Apollo time all people ever wanted was to get out of earth and see what's actually out there, with human presence. All the other stuff, would be done later, like this.
The Space Shuttle took 2 people into orbit on its first launch and returned them safely to earth. On the first attempt. On the first test of any of the hardware into space. In 1981.
Starship did not and has not done that and until it does I will continue to hold reservations.
I do not see this Starship and its mission profile ever being a human-rated system in this incarnation, ever.
A really cheap way to launch mass into LEO? Sure, I'll give it that.
The shuttle had a 2/135 death rate. If Starship becomes the core infrastructure for Starlink, it'll be able to afford hundreds of launches before putting humans on it. You won't have to trust some theoretical calculations, you'll just be able to see in practice what the risk of a Starship launch is.
Sure but it doesn't launch or land humans on Earth, which is the hardest part. And that's fine for now. Once it's launched and landed a few hundred times we can think about launching people on it.
Liquid fueled rockets are intrinsically safer than solid fuel rockets. There is a floor on just how low you can get the risk level with solid fuel, you can't test the rockets you fly, and the failure mode is catastrophic blow-up à la Challenger.
It's like saying flying is safer than driving per passenger-mile. It is. By orders of magnitude. I don't care how safe your new Volvo or electric vehicle is, flying in a helicopter is still safer, and a passenger jet vastly more so.
"But Starship blew up 5 times!" Yes, and flying a test plane is dangerous too. Apples to oranges. Starship and SLS have vastly different design certification strategies. SLS spends 100x as much to deliver something that works as reliably as it ever will by the second or third launch. SpaceX gets Starship flying quickly and discovers bugs in prod. So you see more failures. But even now, Starship is probably safer than SLS ever will be. If not now, then very, very soon.
I like the rocket less, imho solids have no place in human spaceflight, but the Orion has a LES, which elevates it to being more safe than any spacecraft without one.
dumb question, but at what point does the cost of fuel start to become an issue with such frequent launches? today I imagine launch cost is dominated by the price of the nonrecoverable parts, but fuel will become the floor no?
All back of envelope here just to get a rough order of magnitude:
Starship needs 10kg (0.5mcf) of methane and 36kg of oxygen per kg to orbit. The oxygen takes 22kWh to liquefy or about (0.16mcf to generate that onsite). So 0.66mcf/kg to orbit and 66,000mcf from to fully fuel.
That is the daily gas usage of a midisze city, say 200k population, per launch.
Starship is more efficient than F9 but in terms of multiple launches per day, the supply chain is indeed a factor. An hourly launch cadence is going to consume roughly as much natural gas as Houston.
For liquid oxygen, Spacex is building an air separation plant at its facility in Texas to grab it from the air.
For methane, didn't know this but looked it up, methane is one of the cheapest propellants, but rocket grade methane needs to be purer (starship is estimated to cost $300k to $1 million to refuel)
Not only that, but Starship is a robust system from an architectural point of view (not saying they don't have some bugs to work out of it). As we saw in the previous launch, they can go to orbit with an engine missing. An engine down on the shuttle would have been a catastrophic situation.
The Shuttle did have limited engine out capability. The only in-flight engine-out (as opposed to a pad abort after SSME ignition and before SRB ignition, which happened five times) was STS-51-F with a successful abort to orbit. The various other engine-out contingency modes were never used, but they did exist.
Initially only single engine out was broadly survivable; after the Challenger disaster new abort procedures were developed that made two engines out survivable during all of flight and even all three engines out at some points.
The big caveat here is that most of these modes were never tested, and the risk of failure during the more demanding aborts was substantial. RTLS abort was famously not tested on STS-1 because it was considered riskier than going all the way to orbit on the Shuttle's first crewed flight.
Design flaws that you don't know about yet are still design flaws.
I'm sure there are plenty of "accepted design flaws" in SpaceX vehicles. Hopefully SpaceX engineers are better at calculating the probabilities than NASA was, but I would not volunteer for early missions.
With the Challenger disaster, the contractor's engineering team that developed the booster gave a no-go for launch and NASA administrators showed off their engineering skills by using social engineering to trick an unqualified and unapproved employee of the contractor into signing the form to go for launch. That's far worse than being bad at calculating the safety risks; the specifically overruled the decision by the people that were good at calculating the safety risk.
Source: Truth, Lies, and O-Rings by Allan J. McDonald, James R. Hansen, and Jonathan Yen
The two programs don’t manage risk the same way. You’re picturing a younger NASA trying to do the same process as led to the first space shuttle launch.
To put it in perspective, the Falcon 9 has had 702 launches and has only lost one payload during launch. A couple didn't make it into the right orbit, but there's contingencies to deal with that in manned missions.
Since 2022, there have been 601 booster landings, with two losses. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-stage_b...) That means that if you could have snuck onto one of the last 600 Falcon 9 boosters, with appropriate life support gear, your chances of survival would have been over four times higher than if you had snuck into the cargo bay for an SLS (space shuttle) launch, and that's with the SLS being designed to be manned, unlike the Falcon 9 booster.
The Space Shuttle program started in 1969, the first test fight happened in 1981, 12 years in. The first outline of Starship appeared in 2016, first kinda flight in 2022 (6 years), and a full-scale orbital flight, in 2026 (10 years). As a bonus point, it's nearly 100% reusable.
It's not human-rated yet, but I bet that in 1981, at the height of the Cold War and with Star Wars unfolding, it would be.
If you asked me if I wanted to return to earth on something that glides like a plane and lands on a runway with no propulsion... or a pressure vessel that needs it's engines to work perfectly to get you back to a single spot at the pad, within a few meters, to be 'caught', and if that doesn't happen, you hit the ground vertically and explode...
I know which one I'm taking. Yes I know the shuttle had no 'go-around' as a glider. But wings and wheels and a big runway in the desert.... versus the insane acrobatics of Starship...
We haven't seen how Starship would deal with crosswinds in the atmosphere being predicted wrong. What happens when it knows it is off course on the way down and can't make it back to the pad? If there were people onboard? I assume there would be a contingency where it just vents fuel and hits the ground and hopes to act as a crush-can at terminal velocity but I don't know how people survive that. By comparison, ditching the shuttle like a plane with an engine-out failure seems easy by comparison.
I am not demeaning the amazing achievement of the Starship and its booster and this ability to catch it and reuse it. I think that is indeed an amazing achievement that should be celebrated. But I don't see this as being a thing to put people on that can somehow be intrinsically safer than the Shuttle, just yet. These are just my basic opinions, I think they are opinions with some merit, and I don't feel that deserves downvotes.
> We haven't seen how Starship would deal with crosswinds in the atmosphere being predicted wrong.
Winds are not a significant factor in the trajectory of the ship. Reason is that it spends almost all of it's time very high, above all weather, and only descends to the less stable areas of the atmosphere at the very end, when it's in a vertical belly-flop, going very rapidly through all the different weather layers. You can see this clearly in the return video, at 2 minutes before landing it was still 15km up. And when it's high, it has much more ability to steer by adjusting drag than any winds can move it up there.
What could actually be a problem is sudden high winds or other problems at the landing site. The ship commits to a landing when it does the deorbit burn ~60m before landing. at L-20m, it has about 1000km of cross-range capability, at L-10m only 200km, and after that it goes down quickly, with only 50km at L-5m.
If it's coming back with something valuable, you'd better have plenty of divert options.
Hmm, interesting question.
Just brainstorming there, but it seems like there are going to be specialized versions of starship:
- a tanker (for in space refueling)
- a moon lander
Could see one that is specialized for taking humans into space and then returning them to Earth. It could have a dedicated abort vehicle that takes over the top half of the ship (similar to the abort vehicles they have now on most human-rated rockets).
And maybe it uses landing legs instead, because they're more fault tolerant than a catch tower.
All this might take up a ton of weight, but starship can carry so much tonnage to space, they'd probably still have a lot of tonnage left for humans and cargo.
Yeah, it could be pretty amazing, able to to take hundreds into orbit instead of just a handful.
I mean, I could see an option being a detachable landing pod for human missions. Or, more crazily, and I'm not sure of the dimensions but some space-plane like the Dream Chaser or whatever that could fit in the cargo bay then deorbit separately after it's done it's mission? There's a lot of ideas. And we're going to learn so much about how to do reusability now that we just didn't know before. But I would not be surprised if some cockamamie version of this wasn't human rated eventually.
Obviously, we're a really long way away from that from a reliability standpoint? But you know, if they launch 10,000 of these over the next decade... we're going to know a lot more about the safety of this design. I'm sure they'll clobber one in to mechazilla eventually? But what if they don't?
Two of the 135 total SLS (space shuttle) launches were destroyed. Two of the last 600 Falcon 9 boosters were destroyed on landing.
If I had to ride along in one of them, I'd choose the Falcon 9 booster over the space shuttle.
Also, the Columbia failure occurred because it was a glider. The Starship doesn't have any leading-edge tiles for debris to fall onto. Arguably, the Challenger failure also occurred because it was a glider, which required the odd fuel tank and booster mounting that failed.
The system architecture seems to be more fragile than simple capsules with parachutes or even the shuttle (which was already pretty dangerous). There’s no parachute, if you don’t hit the tower during landing you’re in a lot of trouble (unless they can soft-land the ship without the tower and without the bottom exploding?).
The problem isn’t “it’s more complicated” but more “if something goes wrong there’s not a lot you can do”. There’s basically no redundancy and a lot of single points of failure. Having two sets of Parachutes is a lot harder to screw up than a powered landing.
With a normal capsule, you have multiple fuel tanks and redundant RCS thrusters so you’ll practically always be able to deorbit and land (since you also have redundant parachutes). If starship has a fuel leak, how are you going to land, even if you’re able to deorbit?
An airliner has layers upon layers of safety redundancies.
There are multiple flight computers. Practically every essential sensor has copies. Oxygen generation, ram air turbine, life jackets, inflated boats. Onboard radar. TCAS. The airplane itself glides. Then there are thousands of procedural rules and regulations for safe operation.
A system like starship that relies on precise active propulsion has no such room for error.
You've clearly padded your list to look more negative because your last sentence only applies to the glide part... Starship obviously has the same redundant flight computers and sensors and radar and TCAS and will have thousands of procedures for safe operation.
Starship’s been in development for over two decades and the design keeps being changed and failing.
Soyuz has a very impressive record, Starship has been horrifically mismanaged by comparison. The falcon heavy flew 14 times and SpaceX is all in on a heavy launch vehicle because what? Even if they hit every target perfectly from now on it was a wasteful project.
The design changing and the development _failing to meet its stated deadlines_ is not a good argument for the system never working. Especially given we know the deadlines were unrealistic to begin with, yet significant milestones have been achieved in (deadline-ignoring) impressive time frame - like landing a second stage rocket from orbit within 8 years of development (by a private company, not a national effort).
> Starship’s been in development for over two decades
What? The first version of something that looks anything like Starship was the ITS announced back in 2016, later "BFR" in 2017 and the stainless steel version (which is now flying) in December 2018.
Eight years is very reasonable for a fully reusable heavy lift system - something no one has built before.
The Space Shuttle took roughly 12.5 years from formal concept studies to its first flight (and 9 years from official program approval)
Space Shuttle was an even harder project. Amendments to the Starship project were all directed towards making it fly better. Modifications which various departments demanded from the Shuttle project made it a worse and worse spaceship. They even had to let go of the emergency recovery capability, which eventually led to death of 10 astronauts.
You're saying a development rocket that is pushed past the expected limit fails? Amazing...
Even taking you seriously, it has made it to effective orbit more than it has exploded. Nearly all 'landings' have exploded, because that's what happens when you intentionally land a 30 story building full of fuel in the open ocean
I was just talking to my son about how absolutely incrediblw it was that apollo 11 1anded on the moon, and here we are we with by comparison unlimited compute and its launch 15 to do the first orbit. I absolutely get its a very different beast, and catching is amazing, but still, serious respect to the apollo program.
And because the government said the shuttle was “safe”, six astronauts and a schoolteacher got blown up in front of millions of schoolchildren five years later. The Shuttle never should have been a human-rated system.
The Challenger disaster could perfectly well have been avoided if they had been willing to look. There was a clear indication of substantial deviation from design and the joint could have been engineered to stay in compression during the twang.
But Columbia was fundamental. There was an awful lot of insulation aerodynamically before the heat shield. Once again, multiple warnings, but keeping the insulation from being torn off while keeping the weight down was problematic. Columbia was the beginning of the end as they realized they couldn't sweep it under the rug anymore and they couldn't truly fix it.
> The Challenger disaster could perfectly well have been avoided if they had been willing to look.
The tragedy of Challenger is that Morton Thiokol engineers did look enough to know that the O-ring design was likely to fail under cold weather conditions. This was already a known issue and the engineers specifically recommended that Challenger postpone launch because of the temperature at the pad the night before the launch.
They got overruled... almost certainly for what amounts to political reasons as the big bosses didn't want to throw off the timing of the media-hyped "first class taught from space".
Still remember watching the Challenger launch on a CRT TV propped up on an AV cart in an 8th grade classroom and it being a big deal that a teacher was going up in space.
The decision to ignore the Morton Thiokol recommendation not to launch wasn't made at NASA HQ. There was a late night teleconference between Morton Thiokol, Marshall Space Flight Center (where the SRB program was managed) and personnel from Marshall and Morton Thiokol on the ground in Florida. The Marshall leadership put a lot of pressure on Morton Thiokol execs to withdraw their recommendation, and Morton Thiokol caved. My recollection is that it's unclear how much if anything was communicated to NASA HQ. These were the people who had taken over after von Braun's retirement, so very much from an engineering rather than a political background.
I don't think that the "teacher in space" part was much of a factor in Marshall's decision-making. There was clearly plan-continuation bias, and there was a clear directive that Marshall should not be responsible for delaying a launch. The management style they had inherited from von Braun also meant that disagreement was highly discouraged. The data was ambiguous enough that they could convince themselves that everything was fine and Morton Thiokol was coming up with a new launch requirement at the last minute.
The person at Morton Thiokol who caved was neither qualified nor authorized to make the decision. The Morton Thiokol engineers said no, and their executives backed them up, but NASA administrators kept asking Morton Thiokol employees that were out of the loop, until they could pressure on into saying yes.
There's a really well written and researched book on the topic, that I highly recommend, called Truth, Lies, and O-Rings by Allan J. McDonald, James R. Hansen, and Jonathan Yen
My comment was in reply to the parent comment saying "Starship is, essentially, Space Shuttle done right"
, and my claim is that this is not the case, that comparing Starship to the Space Shuttle is a category error, in that I don't see Starship actually being replacement for the Shuttle as a human-transport vehicle, and thus it cannot be considered 'Space Shuttle done right'.
> that comparing Starship to the Space Shuttle is a category error
Both are second stages that return from orbit to Earth. Seems a pretty valid comparison on these fundamentals to me.
(Yes, I know you're extending the comparison to human-transport but that is not fundamental to their ability to take payload to orbit and return, as the Starship can fly without on-board pilots.)
> I do not see this Starship and its mission profile ever being a human-rated system in this incarnation, ever.
Any sentence with such a superlative is bound to be wrong at some point. As they say in finance: "On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
Did you feel similar before the crewed SpaceX Dragon 2 flew successfully?
isn't the whole "we put a human into space" symbolic anyway? There's no air up there. If we had a full supply chain of robots that brought us back regolith from the moon wouldn't that be more useful than being able to send a person up there?
nah humans going is the point. the science is interesting but not of that tremendous value. we don't view archaeology as the highest human endeavor do we?
It can be both, right? Like, we can put humans there and expand the resources available to humanity immensely by sending teams of robots out to manufacture the future habitats, etc.?
Personally, I'm looking forward to joining the Elench. Humans are allowed to join the Elench aren't they?
What exactly is “the point” of humans going there, other than science? Telling a hero story that ignores the contributions of hundreds of thousands that made this possible? Gratifying a few mammoth-sized egos?
What is the point of humans here on Earth exactly? Some consider that humans can be replaced by AI today/in near future. Should we just give up and live space to a more advanced civilization?
You have to start with a justification for "the point" of human life at all which is a struggle with some people who only see utility in whatever their equivalent of a quarterly balance sheet is (this includes publishing papers in academic journals).
I don’t understand why justifying human spaceflight supposedly requires grand philosophical ramblings about the meaning of life. Justifying brushing your teeth doesn’t require that either, does it?
Huh? Space shuttle killed 14 astronauts. It was a flawed design from the beginning and never delivered on its original promise.
Starship has its own design trade-offs, as any engineered object does, but it has the benefit of 50 years of technological development since Shuttle.
I'm not as certain as you about whether or not Starship will ever be human rated. But if successful, it will be launching a couple of hundred times per year. Talk to me in five years and we'll see where we are then.
I don't think it makes sense to make starship human rated. They'd likely give up too much. Probably better to have a different cheaper rocket for the people.
Like you don't build a barge to ferry standards, it would defeat the point of the barge.
Starship is a lot cheaper than it looks, because they're mass manufacturing the engines. They're targeting $250k per Raptor 3. The RS-25 used on NASA's SLS/Space Shuttle costs about $100M to make currently, comparable thrust.
Maybe you're right--I don't know. But large freight airplanes are the same as large passenger airplanes, except for the seats, etc. I think the same might be true for Starship.
The most damning thing I've seen on starship was a video that described how little space there is inside for the humans Elon said it would hold. Something like urban transit personal space.
That is practically all spaceflight. The Apollo LEM - which landed on the moon - had ~2.3 m^3 per person. The command module had ~2 m^3 per person. There is nothing unusual there and depending on how you configure the interior it could be relatively spacious.
Reusability is all about cost savings. The real question now is how much does it cost to turn Starship around for reuse - how much heat shield replacement, how do the vaccuum raptor engines survive the thermal cycling, what is the lifetime of parts involved in the catch mechanism, etc.
Cost savings are one of the drivers for reuse, but not the only one. Maximum practical flight rate is another. F9's peak flight rate over the past couple years would not have been attainable without first stage reuse, simply because of the manufacturing bottlenecks on stages. And fairing reuse was openly driven by a limited capacity to manufacture fairings fast enough - it's not even clear that SpaceX is overall saving money there, but they are saving time, and their business model is based around putting as much mass in orbit as they can as fast as they can.
I thought the same, the catch was nice and impressive but I’d say it would be a fair bit of stress on the structure too. I’m guessing one day we will actually see these things have landing gears and not need a tower but until then…
I get similar vibes to watching this spectacle to that of the “Tesla flying car” demonstration. Amazing stunt , but is that the primary goal ?
Landing gear is really really heavy. To compare it to a building, the upper stage is 17 stories tall and 700sqft crosssection (9m⌀). The rocket is top-heavy, so you have to have wide legs. Wide legs need big triangular structures that articulate outwards, which dramatically increase the load (torque = force*distance) needed to hold up the 17 story building without breaking when it hits the ground, and are complex and get in the way of all the engines.
In comparison, adding more steel to the tower is effectively free. Additionally the hardpoints on the rocket are at the top (no top-heavy problem to deal with) and very close to the rocket, so the torque is minimal. And the hardpoints already exist, in the form of the attachments to the wings, which already need to be strong.
It is crazy but... it makes some amount of sense? I mean we'll see landing gear when/if it gets to the moon, but there's a lot less gravity there.
I thought the same, the catch was nice and impressive but I’d say it would be a fair bit of stress on the structure too. I’m guessing one day we will actually see these things have landing gears and not need a tower but until then…
Which guidelines are they violating? Just because their commentary is unpopular with the usual shills doesn't mean they're violating guidelines at all. I'm certainly not seeing much at all that's violating any guideline.
I don't think you intended to dis the space shuttle (much) but it's important to recognize that half a century has passed since the start of the shuttle design process. Comparing the two is like comparing the 747 to the Ford Tri-motor.
No, it’s not like that at all because airplanes improved significantly between the 1920’s and 1960’s whereas spacecraft improved marginally in some respects and regressed significantly in other respects between the 1970’s and 2000’s.
Normalization of deviance happened because there was so much deviance!
The number of Criticality 1 issues on STS was incredible--literally thousands. Booster seal--yup, they knew about that; foam strikes? check; also turbine blade cracks, reaction control short-circuits, and hundreds of other problems.
They couldn't fix them because (a) the design was locked--they weren't building more orbiters, and (b) Congress controlled the budget and the Shuttle was not a priority.
The point of Starship is to build enough ships and fly enough missions that problems get fixed. And since losing a ship costs the company money, they have a strong incentive to fix the problems. That's exactly what they've done with Falcon 9, and the result speaks for itself.
It's more egregious than just knowing there were flaws. After Morton Thiokol engineers, the manufacturer of the boosters that failed in the Challenger disaster gave a no-go for the flight, because the temperature was too low, NASA administrators cold called a bunch of Morton Thiokol employees that weren't qualified to give go/no-go decisions, and most of them declined, until they found one that gave into pressure and gave a 'go' for launch.
They actively forced deviance.
For more details, check out Truth, Lies, and O-Rings by Allan J. McDonald, James R. Hansen, and Jonathan Yen
The same Elon who keeps promising things his companies cannot deliver and obviously exerts incredible pressure on his underlings? You think that doesn't create incentives to claim things are better than they are?
> The same Elon who keeps promising things his companies cannot deliver and obviously exerts incredible pressure on his underlings?
Failing to deliver a ReactJS + web services project, and failing to catch a steel cylinder weighing thousands of tonnes, full of combustible liquids, hurtling down from space with two metal arms mounted on a pole are two different things.
If you're a billionaire and not failing enough times doing absolutely crazy things, that's a net loss for humanity. I want billionaires to fail 80% of the time. Heck even 100x millionaires should be failing a lot.
I'd rather billionaires not exist at all, personally. Before you say something absurd like "SpaceX wouldn't exist without billionaires" I suggest you check the timeline. Falcon 9 was operational before Elon Musk officially joined the 10 digits club.
Innovation will always happen and Elon didn't personally inject billions into SpaceX either.
Let's cap wealth at 999M and anything over the gets redistributed to poor entrepreneurs.
> If you're a billionaire and not failing enough times doing absolutely crazy things, that's a net loss for humanity. I want billionaires to fail 80% of the time. Heck even 100x millionaires should be failing a lot.
Ah, yes. Others should do more for society so I can benefit!
You should just get straight to the point: you want higher taxes on those wealthier than you.
It's funny how people can look at the exact same program and draw wildly different conclusions. From where I'm sitting, Starship is a deeply flawed and highly risky program with an uncertain future. There are two keys problems:
1. It's not clear what the product-market fit for Starship really is, specifically there is limited demand for these super-heavy payloads. What's my evidence? Falcon Heavy. It averages about 1 launch a year, typically by the military, compared to >100 for Falcon 9.
There are five standard counterarguments to this:
a) "You can carry multiple payloads." Most of the time this simply isn't true. The payloads have to be on almost identical orbits for this to work. Different inclination? No shot. Different altitude? Almost no shot. This brings us to the second;
b) "But Starlink." Yes, Starlink can take advantage of this although to justify its massive expansion, Starlink really has to launch a satellite-based handheld mobile phone network and it has to be pretty much global. It's unclear if this can be from a legal and regulatory standpoint or if it will be able to effectively compete with traditional terrestrial 5G networks. It's unclear what customer density can be supported;
c) "It will induce demand for bigger payloads." Falcon Heavy is relatively cheap, particularly compared to the alternatives from Ariane and ULA yet launch cadence is still particularly slow. Satellites, which are the bread and butter of commercial rocketry, just don't need to be that big;
d) "Starship will replace Falcon 9 launches." Yes, but other companies will fill the Falcon 9 gap if SpaceX abandons it. If you're only carrying one payload to LEO (or even geostationary orbit) and you can do that with a smaller launch system that you can reuse, it's simply going to be better eventually; and
e) "Space based AI data centers." This is never going to happen. it doesn't make any sense. You can't get enough power or distribute the heat. You're subject to cosmic rays and solar radiation, which the atmosphere otherwise mostly protects you from, and you have no way to economically service the inevitable failures.
2. The whole Mars thing is BS, basically, kinda like space-based data centers. It's not happening. There's absolutely no reason to go;
3. Starship isn't suited for lunar missions, which is one reason (IMHO) why Elon tried to scuttle NASA's lunar program [1]. Basically, a 40 meter high vessel that has to land horizontally is hard to land, hard to get in and out of (with your astronauts 40 meters off the surface) and much harder to get off the Moon and back to Earth.
4. Between (2) and (3) a whole lot of new capabilities have to be developed anyway, none of which have even begun yet (eg in-orbit refueling).
Now the one really useful thing from the Starship program (IMHO) is the Raptor engine. For context, the Falcon 9's Merlin engine used oxygen and RP-1 (kerosene, basically). Only the oxygen had to be kept really cold. But it has coking issues (ie solid carbon build up from the RP-1 being consumed). Raptor replaces RP-1 with LNG. No coking but now you have two cryogenic fuels instead of one.
They don't need super heavy payloads, it seems pretty clear that they'll be able to launch even just a Falcon 9 payload in this for less than Falcon 9, because they're not throwing away the expensive upper stage.
Also, my understanding is that Starlink v3 just doesn't fit inside F9. The larger phased arrays that that enables lets them make much better use of spectrum than the v2 minis. There are lots of potential uses for larger payload volumes.
The space DC thing has been beaten to death online, with tons of very confident commentators claiming it will never happen for the reasons you've mentioned. Some counterpoints, Google just launched their first ML infra to space with their Project Suncatcher launch, and if you actually run the numbers, the radiators are smaller than the solar arrays, so obviously it's feasible to launch the radiator if it's feasible to launch the solar array to power it. Who knows if it'll make economic sense, but it seems pretty clear that it's getting harder to build DCs on the ground in the US, there's a lot of backlash against it, we just saw what it did to Abbott. Many areas don't have the spare power, and doing it in space makes solar into reliable baseload power rather than 1/8th nameplate and intermittent.
Anyway, I don't work in that industry, I've just been following along with them because I've been an investor since before Starlink was a thing, but I really think people should keep an open mind about whether SpaceX can pull off things that sound a bit nutty.
I'm having trouble going from the facts I know to your conclusion ("Starship is deeply flawed"). I supposed "deeply flawed" is subjective, so I doubt I'll change your mind, but I can't help myself when "someone is wrong on the internet."
You say, "It's not clear what product-market fit for Starship really is" but then you list a pretty good market fit: Starlink. Starship is the only vehicle that can launch Starlink v3 satellites, and one single Starship launch can put up as much bandwidth as 10 Falcon 9 launches.
The internal launch cost of a Falcon 9 launch is ~$20 million, so effectively, one Starship launch is replacing $200 million worth of Falcon 9 launches. Current speculation is that it costs $100 million to build a Starship stack, so even if they never recover either booster or ship, they would still be saving $100 million per launch.
That's pretty good product-market fit, if you ask me.
Next you talk about Mars. I assume the argument is basically: Starship was designed to go to Mars, but there's no reason to go to Mars, ergo Starship has no purpose. But that sounds like a self-refuting argument. If Starship was designed to go to Mars, that implies that Musk wants to go to Mars (which I actually think is true), which means Starship has a purpose: to go to Mars.
Alternatively, let's say Musk is just conning and he doesn't really care about Mars. He's really just building Starship for Starlink or Starmind or whatever. In that scenario (which I don't believe but can't disprove) then Starship still has a purpose: Starlink and Starmind.
Your next argument is that Starship isn't suited for lunar mission. I actually agree with this--Starship was designed for Mars, which is why it runs on methane (for in-situ propellant generation), and relies on a aerobraking to enter Mars orbit. But the same architecture that can take Starship to Mars will be able to land 50 tons on the lunar surface--something that no other lander can do.
[Your arguments about landing difficulties and astronauts descending 40 meters are not very strong. Starship is bottom-heavy because of the engines, so very hard to tip over, and elevators are a 100-year-old technology.]
Lastly, you bring up "a whole lot of new capabilities" to be developed, but you only mention in-orbit refueling. That's true: in-orbit refueling is yet to be demonstrated. But that's a new capability that (a) no other vehicle has performed, and (b) would open up the solar system to exploration. That's a case of Starship being more ambitious than any previous space vehicle--almost the opposite of "deeply flawed". And even if in-orbit refueling never works (which I doubt), Starship would still be revolutionary for being reusable.
We both have wildly different conclusions on Starship. Maybe one way to see who's right is to make predictions. I think Starship will continue to launch Starlink satellites and that SpaceX will continue to make a profit from Starlink. My guess is between 10-20 Starship launches in 2027 and 50-70 launches in 2028. I also predict that Starship will land on the moon, with astronauts, before the end of 2030.
If my predictions come true, I think that would make Starship a very successful program.
I'll float a use case, which I admit though borders on science fiction. Still, it could be done without breaking the laws of physics.
"Construction of a multi-generational ship, in orbit, designed to travel for hundreds of years between stars".
Discussing this in-depth would take a book, but by necessity this ship would be very (very) large and would require an extraordinary amount of mass to be ferried into orbit.
Of course this unlikely to happen during starship's lifetime, but hey, it's at least a legitimate use case.
>> Even more revolutionary, compared to Shuttle, Starship is built on an assembly line. They can build a booster ever 4 weeks and a ship every 2 weeks.
Note that they are also scaling up production in a big way, because they want to launch weekly soon, and then daily. Not sure if we will get to the latter anytime soon but I'm also not going to bet against Elon.
When Falcon 9 was making its early landing attempts, I'm sure people would have struggled to believe that they'd soon be doing over 120 launches+landings per year with very few mishaps.
The US government realized this in the late 90s-early 2000s and started pushing NASA to go outside to utilize private industry in more a competitive way (instead of giving contracts to the same tiny group of gov contractors). This started initially under GWB and later Obama expanded it, which helped open the door to companies like SpaceX and X PRIZE type competitions.
> The first three launches of the rocket, between 2006 and 2008, all resulted in failures, which almost ended the company. Financing for Tesla Motors had failed, as well, and consequently Tesla, SolarCity, and Musk personally were all nearly bankrupt at the same time.
> The financial situation started to turn around with the first successful launch achieved on the fourth attempt on September 28, 2008. Musk split his remaining $30 million between SpaceX and Tesla, and NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract in December, thus financially saving the company.
Yeah, bad gov't (NASA). Get out of the way for private industry. Or, wait, help us when we are desperate and nearly bankrupt. Which one? The correct answer is "both, in harmony".
I feel like I’m not reading the same passage of text. NASA didn’t give SpaceX anything. They were a customer, paying the best company for the best service. That’s how free markets work.
So you're leaving out SA-1 through 5, AS-101 through 105, AS-201 through 203, QTV, Pad Abort Test 1 and 2, A-001 through 004, and the Mercury and Gemini programs before them to be intentionally deceptive? Or... just disrespectful?
> Which is the more successful ?
Who thinks like this? Who sees what I just saw and has this thought? A wasted opportunity for some wonder and joy.
That's like saying a 2026 F150 is safe because a 2023 trim passed a crash test, despite a full overhaul of all the crash structures taking place in between
hmm, think it's more like saying a newly redesigned f150 will eventually pass the crash test, because it's basically 80% the same design as the previous generation. It might be in 2027, but if not then and the engineers keep at it, then in 2028 or 2029.
My understanding is that the real fly in the ointment has been that Starship isn't anywhere near its target payload capacity, and it may be difficult to get it there. I don't know if that's changed with this flight or not.
This launch put 50T in orbit, which is half the stated goal. If it never improved past this, it'd continue to be the largest and least expensive heavy lift rocket into the foreseeable future.
That's because when launching from Texas, they have to do a dogleg maneuver to avoid populated islands such as Cuba. If they launch from Florida, they claim they'll get 100 tons.[1]
> Flying Starship from Florida, he said, will further improve capacity compared to Texas launches. Launching from Florida offers more favorable trajectories to certain orbits, potentially allowing Starship to carry more satellites without expending propellant on dogleg maneuvers. Dontchev said a single Florida Starship launch will be able to carry up to 20 times the bandwidth of a single Falcon 9.
SpaceX currently claims that each launch is 10x the bandwidth of a Falcon 9 launch, and is 50ish tons of payload, so launching from Florida would be around 100 tons of payload.
This was the third heaviest payload ever put in orbit. None of the others had a reusable first stage, second stage or fairings, so they cost vastly more (throw away the entire stack each launch)
Even if they never increase it from here, this is an enormous achievement and success.
Due to the nature of spaceflight, payload tends to be around 1-3% of total mass. You don't tend to max payload during testing for stuff you expect to have a reasonable chance of going boom.
Given how Americans tend to self-sort into political castes, I suspect that the majority of SpaceX employees are now ideologically aligned with their CEO. Working there would be too risky for them otherwise.
You got me figured out completely. I hate Elon so much I have watched every launch stream since 2010, own stock in his companies, buy his car with $10k beta software, and voted as a shareholder to give him the biggest pay package in human history.
I hate him so much I'll even agree with his quote from this year saying that “Starship Version 3, I think this design can be fully reusable.”
Don't sweat it. Lots of Starship fans (myself included) are overly sensitive because there is so much bad-faith criticism out there.
Still, I think you're discounting the accomplishment here. Boosters have reflown after a catch, so re-usable engines is already demonstrated. And heat shield reuse is going to be iterative: the first few will require lots of work, but they will keep improving until the tiles last for many missions.
But you can't iterate if you don't get the ship back in one piece. That's what makes this accomplishment important.
I am trying to understand what's the big deal about this, other that massive weight and the money involved. The way I see it is software controls the fuel output and motion control. The only other challenge I have been hearing about is the heat shield. Other that this what's really special about the spaceship. The number of modules and the complexity seems not that huge. Any error or miscalculation in here is very costly and that is the only thing seems to be the bottleneck here.
Yes, though not an engineering one. At SpaceX she handles business development, strategy, and ops, though she was trained as an engineer and did it previously in her career. I think this is almost the more impressive feat here, not to diminish the engineering leap.
Definitely a name that won’t be forgotten anytime soon.
Just watched the catch stream live on the dome of a local planetarium - really feeling history is being made.
It was all so symbolic, they just had a talk about the Voyager probe reaching one light day from Earth accompanied by screening of the Startrek movie (which includes V'ger/Voyager) and ad hoc decided to stream the catch just after the movie ended.
Was a really surreal experience, first watching the tiny Enterprise zooming around the vast V'ger spacecraft only to see Starship zooming through the clouds and getting caught, all on the same planetarium dome projection! :-)
Interestingly, there's a similar large "block" recovery rig in the South China Sea. They use two sets of steel cables running in the X and Y directions — visually it's a lot like the Japanese cat's cradle string game. From a quick search, it appears to have shown up after SpaceX's chopsticks catch. Different engineering approach, but the same idea of catching the returning stage in a grid rather than with arms.
I was nine. I remember our black and white TV, the crackling from the picture tube's high voltage wiring adding a tang of ozone. We stayed up late that night.
Yeah - I was 8, and remember the whole family glued to our 20" B/W TV watching the moon landing. Remember the poor quality of the video/audio ("one small step for man") from the moon - hopefully will be 4K next time!
Er, no. Nothing like it. Grabbed from your bed in the middle of the night, bundled downstairs to watch (grainy) and hear (crackly) weird things on a black-and-white TV, while adults, including strangers, whooped and shouted drunkenly. I understood the Apollo 11 thing only in the days after, through news reports. The live event was as impenetrable to me as a dream. Then again, I was half-asleep and five years old.
I was seven, and I happen to have had a profoundly different experience than you. There was a massive rocket mania and all the kids I knew wanted to see the landing.
Russ Olsen does a great keynote about the life-changing experience for those of us so affected. I happened to be in the audience for this edition and it was something special to be old enough to remember it much as he remembered it.
That's a super cool recount. I did know that it was at night US time (which obviously is different from what happened today) but I didn't know a lot more than that.
What I meant in my first comment was just the absolute amazement of how far technology has gotten, to the point where this thing is just hurtling towards the ground and then suddenly just floats onto a tower. That gave me chills to watch.
My grandma was one of the only person with a TV where she lived, half of the town was in her living room, nothing comparable. I bet most people watched this on their toilet seat before scrolling to the next cool thing as if it was nothing
> I bet most people watched this on their toilet seat before scrolling to the next cool thing as if it was nothing
I think GP tries to compare _their_ experience (not the experience of "most people") with what people felt 55 years ago.
idk about them, but I watched it in a live stream starting about an hour early, because I wanted to see the reentry (that plasma is something special) and I didn't want to miss things. Still I don't think it is the same. Not after Falcon 9 landings, double Falcon 9 boosters landings and catching of the Starship first stage. I expected it to be caught today. Got some doubts after the booster missed the tower, but still pretty sure that 2nd stage would make it.
If he doesn't write his own tweets then he hires someone with the same personality to write them. They are not notably restrained or anti-inflammatory.
Slight underperformance in the engines resulted in the the booster not reaching where it was supposed to be and the GNC systems automatically aborted to the gulf for safety.
Apparently the booster signaled it didn't have enough fuel to risk it. Either because it consumed more then expected on the way up, or a measurement error potentially.
At the last moment the exhaust turned green. That's consistent with the fuel running out, the engines running oxygen rich, and subsequently "engine rich". So I would put my money on actually running out vs a measurement error.
That's basically what Musk said, yes: that they need to work on both engine performance and performance consistency. He said they'd be cutting off the main engines one second sooner to provide more margin for boost-back.
Amazing that a one-second difference can matter, but those things go through tons of fuel every one of those seconds!
landing footage shows exactly why they didn't attempt the tower catch - the final braking burn was engine rich (green tint), it didn't blow up, but there was a respectable chance of it just crashing into the tower running on less than fumes
I'm not sure thats the case. the booster hovered for what seemed a lot longer than prior booster landing attempts. Almost like they were purposely running out the fuel.
The goal, as I understand it, is to return the booster with as little fuel as possible at time of catch -- and not run short.
The booster footage indicated to me that its engines turned off, and then the body of the booster imploded, before it touched the ground and then became the expected fireball.
I'm definitely not a rocket scientist, but this series of events leads me to believe that the fuel was absolutely exhausted.
Their risk tolerance would probably be greater if both towers were fully operational. But any damage to the only functional tower during booster catch = an automatic abort to the ship catch one day later, and the ship catch is what was really interesting at this point of development.
The previz imagery of their plans for the Louisiana coast showed pairs of towers dotting the coast. At first I thought they were for alternating the cadence of launches, but now I wonder if one is to catch the booster and the other to catch ship.
The existing towers can only handle empty ships & boosters. The tower stacks them, then they’re fueled. A catch-only tower would avoid some cladding and the propellant loading lines, but it would still need a deluge system and a QD arm to replace any remaining propellant with inert gas. At that point you might as well pay a little more and get a fully capable tower.
Lol. I'm not sure if you're making an ironic joke, but they actually had to prove this when the previous administration was trying to bury them in bureaucracy. So they had to carry out a scientific study to demonstrate that (1) the ocean is quite large and (2) the odds of anything being at any specific point are quite low.
I'm sure you can dig it up somewhere if you too need a study to confirm such.
Is it weird that a private for-profit company wanting to explode something in public space needs to prove it does what it can to minimize the potential damages? Should everyone be allowed to throw bombs into the ocean? Or just Elon?
Hmm is this why Elon wants to deregulate his pursuits? Should we just turn a blind eye to this sort of pollution in the same way the Spacex camera cut the shot of the explosion as it occurred?
Let's hope our government will more proactively monitor these launches starting in January 2027 when a new Texas and federal government comes to power.
Honestly if this thread had the actual number of points it deserved based on the kind of milestone this represents for humanity's future and access to space, it would be in the millions.
If you don't follow rocketry you can't possibly understand what this means.
This was the Trinity test.
And even if you hate Elon and all his businesses, this knowledge will proliferate. Either by talent movement / osmosis, by espionage or just being inspired ("if they can do it, maybe we have a chance as well").
Within a decade the average cost to LEO will drop 20x-50x and if you're not recovering both of your stages, you don't exist.
> And even if you hate Elon and all his businesses, this knowledge will proliferate. Either by talent movement / osmosis, by espionage or just being inspired ("if they can do it, maybe we have a chance as well").
It doesn't need to proliferate. It has existed in us for a very long time, albeit working the kinks out would take time.
The major factor on the trajectory space goes is a financial question, not a technological one. And it always has been this way.
Elon is a terrible person that's done a lot of bad for humanity (but also some good). But he's damn good at convincing people to fund his shit and so we get cool rockets until he goes out of favour.. probably that happens when we hit critical mass on the space pollution he puts up into our sky.
What amazes me is how many Raptor 2 and 3s are sitting on the bottom the gulf and the Indian Ocean. Dissecting a Raptor 3 in particular would be a real cheat code for anyone wanting to know how to build something similar! Metallurgy alone would be huge!
I know engineering is about expediency, and price, but I’m still bummed that we aren’t getting ships with landing gear in this or likely the next generation of rockets either.
Seems that the heavier the rocket the more ground clearance to need to self-land, and so you can’t scale up the dragon’s landing system. I don’t think there’s anywhere near enough weight to shave off of the next rocket or enough specific impulse to add to bring the size back down.
It’s probably better to think of it on the spectrum of “atmosphere-rated” vessels. Ships landing in zero-g don’t need feet, they need clamping surfaces. Atmosphere rated might need both, depending on usage. The is just an almost atmosphere rated craft. If the moon and mars weren’t covered with horrible dust we could have it land on feet. But it is instead some of the worst dust in the solar system so we would have to catch it even there wasn’t a big weight pensly for carrying it around.
Absolutely, wings only work in Earth's atmosphere. Rocket propulsion can work anywhere. Leaving the landing gear on Earth is also a no brainer since it's only ever used there so why bring it all the way to orbit with you? Thankfully all the other rocks we'd want to land on have much lower gravity so landing on them can be done with lightweight legs. Hell, maybe there's a way to send the landing structure ahead of time like some variation on that Chinese cable catcher they used for their copycat.
It was extremely cool 45+ years ago. But the space race ended, and while government-funded space programs did some fantastic work beyond that (space telescopes and Mars landers), it took capitalism to develop the resuable rocket, then scale it up to Starship proportions.
A more accurate analogy would be giving contracts to Exxon back before they had ever found or drilled a single oil well, as their primary source of revenue to subsidize their R&D and learning curve, in the hope that they would eventually be able to supply the government with needed oil, and ultimately succeeded to become a key supplier.
I had to read the comment below (from u/modeless) before I realized by landing gear you meant the upright ones. I thought you wanted it to land sideways like a plane. (Arguably doable, though the control systems might add a lot more weight)
The problem with space planes is they are terrible planes, terrible rockets, and feed the egos of pilots.
To be fair to NASA and the astronauts, NASA needed humans who behave like military test pilots. In physiology, in reaction time, in crisis management, in following chain of command. And the armed forces were willing to give them access to known quantities.
We didn’t know how control systems would evolve over the next three decades, but the pilots wanted to pilot, and did not trust the control systems. And the irony of it all is that the Space Race was a proxy war for nuclear armament, so control systems needed to be made autonomous anyway.
Better control systems, wider telemetry, and not worrying about incinerating employees let current generation rocketry iterate faster, and do more fucking around and finding out. We found out twice with the shuttle and it killed the program.
It’s curious how much the upper stage now resembles a space shuttle on a ballistic trajectory instead of a glide angle. Very different landing strategies for those two modes of descent…
Yeah the Starship program isn't about landing on Mars or even going there.
It's about pumping mass into low Earth orbit, partly for commericial, but mostly military purposes such as Golden Dome. Been in the works for decades and finally here. The people who know are very excited.
Starlink is pretty amazing tech which can be used for both good and evil - from enabling reliable communication in disaster zones to letting civilians browse social media from remote locations to communicating with weapons of war.
Every product has the same adoption curve. Early customers pay a premium which pays for building the factories, not just the product. By the time everyone is using them the prices have gotten low enough that the price is informed by supply rather than demand.
SpaceX being their own customer, and a lower priority one, lets them levellize their revenue, which also helps retain staff. And if anyone commoditizes launch systems, they have a hedge against that. However if demand for starlink ever does exceed capacity, the launch side could find their schedules being much more variable.
In software, you see this with priority queues all the time if you know where to look. Someone makes a “low priority” system that soaks up spare capacity. Internal customers become dependent on these systems and then become delay-averse. Meanwhile, other teams also start soaking up that spare capacity, by improved design or feature creep or both. That low priority system becomes starved of resources, and the internal customers start saber rattling. That system gets its own dedicated resources, and now stranded resources climb back to the original levels, if not worse.
Starlink will eventually become the same thing. And I wonder if they will spin it off when that situation arises.
The Internet was built to be literally bomb-proof rather than figuratively. The utility of that has been self evident and “five nines” thinking continues this tradition. AWS AZs are meant to partially survive floods and wildfires. A super volcano would take out an entire region but people would have other problems at that point (the exception being if emergency services were on those machines, but disaster teams have been learning to bring emergency infrastructure with them ever since New Orleans).
As a UIUC student used to be fond of reminding me, part of the University of Illinois’ contribution to the old Internet was in a building that, if it were to collapse, would fall outward and not crush the basement. Officially that building was designed so every office has natural light, like a collapsible water cup, but it’s a very interesting coincidence that it (the basement) is bomb proof.
I unfortunately agree. Years ago I realized the Mars talk was just talk when I noticed that Musk and SpaceX were not funding any of the other stuff you’d need to fund if you wanted to “make life multiplanetary.”
Continuing to iterate on self contained biospheres and long term closed cycle life support? (Not a solved problem!) Working on construction techniques for the Moon or Mars? Studies on the dose response curve for gravity, like sponsoring a spin lab for the ISS to at least see if mice can reproduce in 0.3g? Self contained industrial infrastructure leaning heavily on 3D printers? Psychological research on the best way to build interiors and run social units?
Musk could personally fund all of that with little impact on his net worth.
It’s also decades of work. Some of what I listed is harder than the rockets. Better get started if you want to have a settlement on Mars this century.
Nope. Nothing. Just rockets, the a satellite network that is clearly “dual use.” Then Trump 2.0 and lots of “golden dome” (Star Wars 2.0) talk.
It’s not to go to Mars.
I love space and I hugely admire the engineering achievement, but it’s disappointing to learn for this and many other reasons that the people behind it were not the visionaries they pretended to be. They’re just more territorial apes obsessed with ape tribal stuff like race and nationalism and fighting over dirt at the bottom of a gravity well. Small minds with big toys.
I don’t think is right at all. It’s just Musk focusing on the fundamentals of ‘what is stopping us making significantly (100x or 1000x) more progress on space exploration. And the answer to that is that it’s just too expensive to launch mass off the earth.
If you make it much cheaper, then everything else flows from that. You no longer have to spend years engineering everything at the cutting edge of your mass budget. You can use off the shelf parts, you can have redundancy.
The gains will come when these flights become commonplace.
Biosphere stuff is more fundamental than just mass. We had several closed ecosystem projects built on the ground out of concrete, with no mass limits, and all of them failed.
A habitat on Mars would certainly not be closed ecosystem, especially not in the beginning. The biggest issue at biosphere IIRC was CO2 poisoning. You can crack the air in a mars habitat with power and in the worst case find Martian resources that will do some advantageous chemistries
Bad engineering, too many uncontrolled variables and roundabout solutions. Just solve the problems directly. Make the air, scrub the CO2, grow only food. The solution looks like a (light weight) nuclear submarine not a greenhouse.
Biosphere 2 was hippie gobbledygook.
"The Biosphere 2 project was launched in 1984 by businessman and billionaire Ed Bass and systems ecologist John P. Allen, with Bass providing US$150 million in funding until 1991.[15] Bass and Allen had met in the 1970s at the Synergia Ranch, a counterculture community led by Allen, who advocated Buckminster Fuller's "Spaceship Earth" concept and explored the idea of biospheres as a refuge from disasters such as nuclear war.[15] Several other former members of Synergia Ranch also joined the Biosphere 2 project"[0]
"Synergia Ranch is an ecovillage founded in 1969 by John P. Allen"[1]
Ed Bass inherited $2.8 million when he was a teenager from his great uncle who made his money in oil production, he's currently chairman of an investment and venture-capital management firm. In between he hung out with a bunch of hippies.[2] Just your typical nepo-boomer arc.
More likely than growing food will be bringing a couple of years of food with you, and having growth be only for proof of concept experiments (well and some freshness if it works out).
> a spin lab for the ISS to at least see if mice can reproduce in 0.3g?
That was done and the results were published a few months ago, but the study did not have any relationship with SpaceX.
The results were rather pessimistic for the long-term missions on Moon or Mars.
In my opinion, even if it is possible that humans might support a somewhat lower gravity than mice, the conclusion is that for interplanetary travel humans must use only spaceships that create artificial gravity by rotation.
The results of the study were that mice require a gravity of at least 2/3 of that of Earth to stay in perfect health and of at least 1/3 of that of Earth to avoid extremely severe health damage.
This means that even on Mars the gravity is not sufficient for long-term human life. In an underground Mars base, one could make a part with increased gravity by rotation, where the crew should spend most of the time, but that would increase a lot the complexity of building and maintaining such a base.
If the results hold then it’s another thing that counts toward settling space, not another planet.
It’s where I’ve been leaning for a while. If we want to go beyond Earth build huge rotating stations or spacecraft. Don’t just go down another gravity well.
Build your own spin stations and dial in the exact gravity and everything else you want. Mine asteroids, which are super easy to access. You can launch mass off an asteroid by throwing it really hard.
Or by constant thrust at 1/3g, or a mix of thrust and rotation that achieves sufficient acceleration, though spinning + thrust means precession which I’m glad isn’t my job to zero out.
Unless someone invents the Epstein drive we aren’t going to have astronauts experiencing acceleration for months rather than minutes of the trip. And the more constant the acceleration the shorter the trip anyway.
Really interesting. I remember scratching my head a little about stainless steel. It’s durable but heavy, cuts into payload fraction, and probably not what you would pick if the goal was to shoot interplanetary. At least not for the upper stage. Maybe for the big chunky reusable booster, but there aluminum probably makes more sense. Falcon is aluminum so it’s already the devil they know anyway.
I recall talk about transpiration cooling. My guess is it died due to complexity or that it would use fuel as coolant which further eats mass. There was a bunch of original work on composites which would make way more sense if you want to hit high energy orbits.
You could still, AFAIK, use Starship to put a bunch of components into LEO and assemble something to go interplanetary. Or at least its booster.
I have wondered if we won’t see interplanetary on a big scale (beyond Apollo scale) until we have fusion or beamed power. You could put up a beamed power constellation with this architecture I guess.
But it makes a lot more sense as is for LEO military applications. I can see that.
The weird Musk-Russia links, if that is real, are odd given this thesis. If we are building Golden Dome or whatever it’s called now then who is the adversary? If not Russia than who?
China isn’t expansionist beyond Taiwan and it’d be way cheaper to build our own domestic TSMC than to fight that proxy war.
North Korea and maybe Iran are the only other credible threats with an interest in attacking the US, and they are kind of a joke compared to Russia and China when it comes to long range capacity.
Without discounting the possibility of him being fully russia-psyopped, always keep in mind that elon MUST put forward some nonzero pro-Russia face because he is a diplomatic point of contact in an increasingly tenuous diplomatic situation between the US and Russia on account of his company lifts Russian cosmonauts to the ISS on the regular
First off, I think this is all conspiratorial nonsense. But as for Golden Dome - it's more about offense than defense. The reason MAD works is because if you destroy another country then they also destroy you. But if you can negate the latter part, then you're simply left with 'you can destroy another country.' In other words if you can negate an enemy's ability to retaliate, then you can nuke or invade whoever you want, without concern about retaliation.
The geographic location of the US would make this basically a godmode type 'weapon' because a conventional invasion of the US is practically impossible since you'd need to bring mass number of forces across an ocean and those ships would simply get popped. Even coming through South America wouldn't really work because the Isthmus of Panama could just be hyper-fortified. And even then you still have to get to South America! But the US' chosen enemies are somehow half-way around the world, and we have plenty of proxy armies we can throw against them. And when our victims retaliate against our proxies then we'll support them with a powerful army of flags, emojis, and slogans on social media.
All that said, this still doesn't work. Nuclear fallout would affect the globe, with a Russia-US conflict estimated at driving some 5 billion deaths from climatic effects alone. [1] Missile defense will likely always lag behind offense simply because offense is akin to shooting a bullet at a giant stationary target, whereas defense is akin to shooting a bullet at a bullet. It requires a massive technology disparity to be effective. And there are also other forms of nuclear strikes than missiles - such as nuclear created radioactive (and super sized) tsunamis. And if a country really wants the flashing red button, then a salted nuke could likely kill off most of all of humanity (and everything else on Earth), let alone any given country.
Oh I doubt very much he has given up on that. He's smart enough to know that the delivery time is going to be extremely variable, and that most of the other problems involve figuring out how to make the place palatable to humans, which is just too far in the future right now. Don't bite off more than you can chew.
How much time is needed to do the required research? Like, how long it would take to learn how to create an artificial biosphere on a small scale, so you can have a farm on the Moon or Mars? 10 years? 20 years? Maybe 50 years? Isn't now is the good time to start the research?
No because they aren't a government funded research team, they are actually trying to make money along the way. So the appropriate time to do that kind of work is sometime closer to actually needing it.
The silver lining is that if Elon had continued pushing for Mars, to not let it happen organically, Mars would become a company town, with all the bad connotations that ever had, with paying for air added on top of it.
While I'm a little more optimistic that the development of Starship will lead to manned missions to the Moon, Mars, and other bodies in the solar system I drew a similar conclusion as you did a few years ago as well.
What I find frustrating about this is that a lot of the biological research needed to make a sustainable colony is stuff that would have direct benefits on Earth for people today.
R&D on bioreactors, genetically engineering organisms, making food production more efficient, techniques to make people more resistant to the cancer causing effects of radiation etc... all of these could have impacts on how we live today.
Nice catch (NPI)! Unfortunately I think it's a bit more mundane, it'll be a piece of ice breaking off the lower section of the body. If you scrub through the footage, particularly earlier in the flight (e.g. 1:43:37 on the SpaceX stream, T+54:05) you'll see other pieces of ice flying off that look very similar.
I have no idea about Starship, but in one of the Environmental Assessment reports there was specific data on the fuel remaining in Falcon-9 after landing. It was <1270 kg of RP-1, which is equal to 14 seconds of firing at full thrust for one engine -- if one could use all of the fuel up, which is typically not possible. That was the upper bound.
That ship has sailed since the first rockets were used to launch bombs and incendiaries somewhere in China, a long time ago. Hammers can be used to build and to kill. Knives cut wood as well as flesh. Humans are belligerent primates whether we want it or not, changing that isn't something even all humanities faculties in the world can manage nor any ideologue intent on creating the New Soviet Man or Übermensch or transhumanist. Fortunately there tend to be more people intent on doing 'good' things with technology than 'bad', where 'good' can also include defending against those doing 'bad' things even though that is a thin line to walk.
I am not a cynic, but a realist. It is easy to do things when you put a ton of money towards the effort so I find this nothing special. Maybe when I was a child these things would fascinate me, but they are just engineering.
So, what would amaze me? Ending homelessness in the United States. Because that takes more than money. I would like to swap the "passion" or engineering for the "compassion" of ending suffering. Very easy to shape and change material things, very hard to change the heart.
The people you want to share your excitement might be suffering under the same separation of wealth that made this landing possible. (Yet there is little talk that they failed to catch the booster and it exploded).
Me and four other engineering graduates just sat and watched this around a big TV in my mates apartment in Sydney, and what we saw was an amazing team, delivering amazing engineering results. Just take a win for humanity for once.
You don't need private people/companies or more taxes for that. US has enough resources to do it already. Maybe you should go ask your politicians, better yet, ask your friends/neighbors/yourself if you are ready to take the drastic steps necessary to solve that.
Of course, you should not need to ask, in a better world.
If govt really cared about it, more than that, if (most) PEOPLE really cared about it, it should be top 3 priority of any govt in any country.
- Govt should build massive cheap hotel-type housing spaces (full free) equipped with bare minimum necessities like roof, heating, food, basic healthcare (not million $ free cancer treatment).
- Mandatory drug rehabilitation (if applicable)
- Mandatory job search/placement/training
- Jail with forced-labor for people who put no effort and/or causes disturbance
If your govt has $6M to fund tourism in Egypt, money to fund opera/ in columbia, comic book in peru, then they have money to help homeless people IN the country. No money should go to non-citizens (let alone non-citizens in another country) while citizens of a country go homeless.
I am typing this from the security of my home, without worrying about 0c temp, or food. So it is easy for me to say this but still, I am sorry that you are going through this, and I sincerely wish you the best; that your life turns around, even if just a little, enough to have a roof over your head.
Homelessness is largely driven by personal choice and by our desire to not compel the "unhoused" into mental institutions where they'd probably be better served.
There are ample government and private support mechanisms, including housing and food, but most choose not to take advantage.
> Homelessness is largely driven by personal choice
Ha! Really? I am homeless. Disabled with a serious mental illness. I just cannot afford housing anymore. Living out of my minivan.
Not my choice. I do not even have a psychiatrist or therapist anymore.
> There are ample government and private support mechanisms, including housing and food, but most choose not to take advantage.
This is the biggest myth neoliberals tell themselves to feel better. I agev up. Seven years on a section 8 housing list then they just dumped me with no explanation.
I would think that private space exploration frees up all sorts of NASA funding which can be spent on your social improvements of choice, no? Hard for me to see the either-or you're positing. We can have both.
I share your unhappiness with the grifts, including SpaceX's. Then I think of the thousands of lesser, more damaging-in-aggregate ones that I likely have no view into, and it bums me out.
So yeah, what I have left is my child-like "heck yeah rockets!" :) And this one was great.
ofc a comment like that would get downvoted by investors and technologists, but yes i agree, if you have enough imagination and money, almost anything in engineering is eventually possible. that same imagination and money is rarely spent on making the experience of living beings who are suffering nicer. but we dont live in a 1D world and all people need a win, engineering nerds included.
Space is unique in consistently attracting comments like GP's. Literally no other endeavor, no matter how boring or silly, attracts these. Has been so since before the Internet, even.
Even pointing out that this is just private company doing private stuff - so no government money to accuse of being misallocated, which was the only thing that gave those evergreen comments some legitimacy - won't help. I guess it's just inertia now.
At least this is talking about homelessness and not feeding people; the latter was getting too easy to push back on by pointing out just how much space contributed to farming and food security.
i was posting in support of all parties, the nerds and the homeless. i guess space attracts these sorts of comments because of the extreme contrast. on the one hand, going to space takes enormous energy, manpower and money, and its easy to claim misallocation of resources when the extremes are so glaring. its a good opportunity to point these things out when theyre so obvious.
The two big causes of homelessness are substance addiction and craziness. Semaglutide is the first medical intervention that can help to some extent with the desire part of addiction.
Electric brain stimulation is likely able to help with mood disorders. Maybe even OCD and schizophrenia. If nothing else, proper measurements (lots of good data) of both healthy brains and mentally ill brains should help. We've had almost none of that, with EEGs being rather pathetic.
Nobody is going to "solve" homelessness tomorrow or next year. Not the people who think they can just spend more money -- someone's money, not their own, not the people who think charity is the way forward, and not the people who think what is needed is cures.
We can do some almost immediately if we are willing to institutionalize more people but it's not a good or complete solution and we aren't willing to, anyway.
The real improvements are likely to eventually come from things like semaglutide (and more likely more research into the instincts that drive addiction, now that we finally have a molecule that can affect them) and things that both provide data (that we sorely need) and can provide interventions directly in the brain.
Still waiting on the promised $25,000 EV though. If Neuralink is anything like American EVs, psychiatric patients might as well move to China for treatment.
Thank you for for making this comment. It helped me realize in myself what's changed over the last few years.
I grew up reading Zubrin's The Case for Mars, The Martian, and October Sky. I went to space camp at NASA, and as a 14 year old I sent an angry email to NASA when I learned of the early ISS decommission date(they later extended the lifespan several times, and I like to think I was the reason ;) ).
I followed Bigelow Aerospace in the 2000s doing the only interesting commercial work in space, and afterwards became amongst the first online SpaceX fanboys, long before they ever landed a merlin engine.
I studied hard in school with a passion of going to Embry-Riddle to learn to build rockets - though I ultimately chose a software path in life instead, I stayed an enormous space fanboy over the 2010s, frequenting the SpaceX subreddit and catching every launch and landing stream I could live.
I've cried watching so many rocket landings. The spirit of human endeavor is god damn BEAUTIFUL to me.
I want to point my finger and say that everything else changed. The Internet became what it is. Elon Musk showed his true colors. Software Engineering became middle management.
But the truth is that I've changed.
I care about the people wealth disparity hurts more than I do about us getting our perfect vision of the future now now NOW.
The faster we pump this machine, the louder the Earth is SCREAMING.
The world is on fire, and we're covering it in data centers with the goal of building artificial machines for strip-mining humanity of the very competency in engineering that has given us so much joy.
We're caught up in a race to the bottom and without diverting our path I have to wonder if this starship landing will be one of the last great human-driven engineering achievements before we lose the ability to do so ourselves.
I don't think the answer is to swap the passion for engineering with compassion, as I think they can both live happily together, but I hear where that desire is coming from.
It's coming from a place of love.
And when the last tree has fallen, we may find that we cannot eat money.
In orbit refueling is likely next year. The goal is to have two shots at a moon landing in 2028.
And a nuclear ion rocket scheduled for 2028 as well.
The current NASA administrator is doing a good job getting rid of all the things keeping NASA from doing things. (And at least after Artemis II, both parties in congress seemed to be on his side.)
I believe it was Trump and Elon Musk falling out over the "Big Beautiful Bill". A lot of people then campaigned for to get the job anyway, and he did.
After Artemis II, there was a moderately hilarious congressional hearing in which the Republicans insisted on giving NASA more money, the Democrats insisted on giving even more money than that, and Isaacman trying to say "we're good".
Only recently I read how the dust on Mars surface is toxic, contains those unhealthy ultrafine particles (PM2.5 and PM0.10) and sticks to almost all surfaces. It will be difficult to keep from getting inside a habitat.
And how the Apollo astronauts got "lunar hay fever", allergy-like symptoms from
the lunar dust that stuck outside their space suits and so got carried inside their lunar module.
- longer in orbit missions for Starship of weeks or months. There are some non trivial issues with that probably; and you'd need that to not make refueling pointless.
- having two active launch sites. Nor strictly required but probably handy if you are going to have two Starships in orbit at the same time.
They might not get to all that in that order. But the important step today is that they get to inspect a "flight proven" Starship without water damage. I bet they are going to learn a lot of details of where exactly they need to iterate and improve. This took them some time with Falcon 9 as well. We've gotten used to this thing basically launching and landing without many issues. But that wasn't always the case. 2027 is probably going to see an increase launch rate.
Moon landings are going to be an interesting one because it depends on NASA as well and the decision making around that is very political. On the other hand, there's going to be increasing peer pressure from the Chinese. They have their own plans and it doesn't involve waiting for NASA to get there first. They are targeting 2030 for a manned mission. I expect the politics might get a bit more opinionated on that topic as that gets closer. The long term game here is not just landing and planting another flag but actually establishing a permanent presence on the moon. That involves flying useful payloads back and forth. Starship seems designed for that.
What happens after that is going to be an interesting one. IMHO, Starship is optimal for earth landings but not necessarily for the moon and Mars. What's currently flying is probably over engineered for a place with no atmosphere and one 6th of the gravity (the moon) or a very thin atmosphere and one third of the gravity (Mars). Would those flaps even work in the Mars atmosphere? However, it's a great launch vehicle to get components in space to build something more optimal. Also the booster might be used to launch other things than Starship. Like something that will never come down and can instead be fueled for deep space missions and Mars/Moon landings.
All I want are bigger and more cleverly located space telescopes, a couple of more probes and orbiters around other planets and asteroids, and I want those Mars samples that Percy has been pooping over the Mars surface returned to Earth and studied in a lab. And maybe a probe to Alpha Centauri or exo-planet viewers that use the Sun’s gravitational lensing in the next 5 or 6 decades.
I think the concept for the Alpha Centauri probes uses solar sails and externally fired lasers[1]. The exo-planet viewer concept also proposes solar sails.
I mean, you need to get money from somewhere to fund your dreams.
If it's datacenters in space then let be it. They are pretty cool as well. It seems a lot of people don't like them on Earth.
That remains to be determined. The math with blackbody radiation cooling borderline works. So they may be cool, but whether it is enough ...
But I don't think we will see success before the craziness down here has settled down and they don't face the political headwinds they currently do. And I don't think that they can compete with ground based per unit cost no matter what kind of black magic they do.
What actually is the point of all this? I'm not trying to be a snarky contrarian, I've never had any interest whatsoever in space, star trek, "what's out there?", so I genuinely don't get it.
I'm not trashing people's interests, obviously I am the odd man out in not giving a damn, I just don't see what we're trying to achieve when there are so many issues we can't even figure out on earth.
> damn, I just don't see what we're trying to achieve when there are so many issues we can't even figure out on earth
Earth issues are mostly coordination problems. Space issues are technological problems. Elon Musk has been very successful at solving technological problems: electric vehicles, space flight, mind-machine interfaces.
It makes sense that people like him who can solve technological problems point their attention and substantial agency to the things that their unique skills place them in a position to solve.
The Elon Musk of coordination does not currently exist. One must imagine that the kind of person or school of people who instituted NATO and the US-Japan MDA and turned our one-time enemies into our staunchest allies were people of such caliber but there’s no one I know today who qualifies for that.
Musk definitely has mastered firm-level coordination but clearly national coordination (let alone international coordination) is a problem beyond even him. His teams nearly religiously point the same way, and they have achieved wonders. It is truly remarkable what these people have done. Good for them, and I’m glad to see them at it!
Thank you for the well thought out reply. I will try to do better to understand the larger technological breakthroughs of space flight as a key development in how things modernize on earth itself
Elon Musk is not the person building any of it. Not EVs, Space Flight or mind-machine interfaces.
He is reckless and ignorant and yes it works for some of his stuff and it doesn't work for others.
His ignorance alone in DOGE probably killed children and humans. Don't get me wrong, US of America doesn't has to pay for aid around the planet even if they contribute massivly to climate change and consumes a lot of resources importet around the planet, but his abrupt cancelation and involvment in USAID killed chilrden and humans.
Do we also ignore everything else if you list up things which are only positive? Like Boring company? Solar city? Buying Twitter and manipulating democracy around the planet? Doing an Ad tour in front of the White House and disrespecting anyone else who can't buy themselves next to Trump?
If you don’t get it, nothing anyone says is going to convince you otherwise.
The people who “had an interest” in pursuing the unknown built the entire modern world that you exist in, since so many things have some connection back to the space program, including ironically the very device you’re using to express your opinion. So it’s probably worth paying them a little respect.
> since so many things have some connection back to the space program, including ironically the very device you’re using to express your opinion.
Well there you go. I did not know that. And yet, instead of saying, "The space program is useful because of X and Y, it's pretty cool actually, I recommend book Z about it.", I get replies that I am a lost cause who doesn't respect scientists.
Unreal. I could have a more balanced conversation with a Muslim imam about religious beliefs.
And? We can't live in space, we can't travel because distances are too large, it's still polluting our orbit and a huge waste of resources, for what? Just build more satellites? Is there even the demand for more satellite internet?
I'm all for doing R&D for research's sake, like medicine research in zero G, but this exagerated "everything related with space is magical and life-changing" view is ridiculous. This whole HN thread is ridiculous, this is the crowd that would fall hook line & sinker for datacenters in space.
This is the most powerful rocket ever constructed. It has the largest possible payload. The James Webb is tiny compared to what is possible. No other rocket can do that. End of. Please stop. You are embarrassing yourself.
Just to be clear: James Webb was build and designed with nanometer aligned optical system, has to be cooled down while being at L2, can't be serviced and repaired and it was only enough money there to build it once and took 5 years of building and 25 years of planning.
It is an achievement, i'm not disagreeing with it.
I'm disagreeing with the level of it.
I'm also disappointed that we celebrate this and ignore that the richest man on the planet is also involved in reducing usability of starlink in a real war were real humans are dying. And his involvment in USAID, DOGE and co.
So take your complaint to govt. Also, nobody is stopping you from using starlink-alternatives.com . In fact, since you hate him, that's what you should do.
Ukraine is defending itself and just before Trump, US of America put a lot of pressure on my country germany and the europeian union to stop doing business with Russia.
Now Elon Musk, the richecst person on the planet and part of US of America is interfering with his system, which gives him A LOT more power than a single human and non gov should have in a WAR which is not his probably due to some indirect garbage between him and the current US of America Gov.
While the EU is paying for it.
And i do not use anything Musk.
Musk has only direct negative impact on my life, no posive one. He used his money to buy twitter because he couldn't shut up and then leveraged it to manipulate and allow manipulation in our elections in germany (search for Elon Musk and AfD).
He is potentially poisening our atmosphwere with his rocket launches.
And in general, I do care about fellow human beings and i'm pissed in their names for all the people he is responsible for being killed (after all he is also responsible apparently for all the invention of the companies he invested in eh?).
Where is Germany's industry? Why is Germany axing its own legs and then crying about it? Why did Germany laugh when Trump complained about over reliance on Russian gas? Why is Germany predicted to not have enough gas this January? Why is Germany fucking up the middle class with more and more taxes? All that tax, yet almost nothing to show for. Keine geld!! Economy going to shit. People taking sick days like candy. More people dying to heat than gun violence in USA. Hours of notary to open a company. Effing europoors and you come to complain...
PS: Statistically, when I walk on the streets, every 4 German I meet, there's one nazi (as per your definition I would strongly assume). Look inside first.
If a private person from another country is the only one controlling space, it becomes a geo politicial and military issue.
So either we should advocate for destroying it, or we are allowed to leverage.
And for all the other things you ar ementioning: Non of them have anything to do to what i said. Its just strawman left and right.
Are you also joking about the Gas and winter? Because Donald Trump, the President of the US of America used his power to start a war with Iran.
More people in USA die from gun and heat than germans die from gun and heat.
And just because there are nazis around the world, i'm not and this is part of my argumentation. If you are a nazi and it doesnt matter to you, of course you don't understand it.
You argue with your Salesman, but don't care of anything negative about Elon Musk? As long as he catches a Rocket eh? Get a spine?
A private person is building things, he "controls" the space because he built things. Nobody stopped Europe from building those things. Again, Starlink is not for military purposes. You have an issue, go complain to US Govt who controls Starsheild.
No, it is because Germany decided to eff up the economy in the name of bogus crap by removing nuclear before enough solar came online.
> heat
Europe*
You, as a German, have zero right to complain when 1/4 (soon 1/3) of your country men are Nazi. As I said, look INSIDE (and stop blaming everyone else).
Perhaps you don't have any clue that earth and it's inhabitants are very, very likely to be the only one, - - or, of the very few planets in our known universe, with such a sequence of events over millions if not billions of years that allow us to be living beings, evolving - - while out in space is a vacuum, intense radiation, no oxygen, no food or water for many hundreds if not thousands of light years distance away. Incredibly few of our species grasps this fact and actually appreciates it ...
Well considering we gave SpaceX a contract to get us to the moon and for that to happen it needs to do something ridiculous like 20+ in orbit refueling yeah it's a pretty important thing to criticize.
Would be nice if the good news got some room on the front page, no wonder people are so hopeless when the things that would give them hope and optimism are buried under a pile of doom
I forgot to mention Space X has again limited Ukraines star link again so people are dying from their inability to intercept Russian ballistics…personally I find that more important front page news…you reap what you sew ?
I don’t disagree with you but this exciting for “tech people” who are into engineering. That’s about all.
What good news though? These days it's a tie at best between humanity reaching new levels of space access and trillionaireity reaching new levels of stranglehold on humanity.
Sorry, as much as I'd like to separate the two, I can't.
Congrats to SpaceX engineers! But for those who are not fans of the guy at the top here's a video of Blue Origin landing their rocket. Competition is good!
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XjSmNf3y37U
Fuel costs practically nothing, a tiny percentage of the total launch cost. At some point an additional 1000 tons of liquid oxygen only sets you back $250k. Kerosene or LNG is cheap too. At the very least your booster and first stage fuel cost is more or less irrelevant, make them as simple and big as possible. Just gotta avoid hydrogen and specialty gases.
He's actively holding the program back at this point. Top engineers in this industry are increasingly reluctant to join a company with a such a toxic culture and public reputation tainted by musk.
Pre-trump 1 SpaceX was a tough place with a slightly off vibe but otherwise strong industry reputation.
Post-trump 1 SpaceX became a place you put in a couple years so that you could get a more stable job wherever you wanted
Post DOGE SpaceX is a place you really have to hold your nose to work at and coming out of that company increasingly labels you as a possible culture problem. I've seen a lot of SpaceX people getting turned down during interviews because they're either toxic or present a risk of toxicity.
The amount of stress that these vehicles go through as they ascend to orbit and then descend back through the atmosphere to the surface is mind-boggling. To create a rapidly usable vehicle that can do this pushes the limits of material science.
Previously they successfully caught the booster returning to the launch site from ~100 km about ~10 minutes from launch.
Here they caught the upper stage ,called starhip, which went to ~260 km orbit, deployed 50 tons of satellites and after 22 hours shed its orbital velocity and manuevered to be caught with centimeter precision. :)
Oh nice, it's great to see each milestone along the way.
I suppose the challenges with this step are that after starship did its job, we expect it to be worse-for-wear, and so maybe less able to stably land? (But it did it!)
It's more a difference of speed. A less known fact is that rockets and orbital mechanics is more about going fast than it is going high.
The booster has a max speed of mach 5 before it returns to the tower. The upper stage which landed had a max speed of mach 25 which has to be shed off somehow without breaking the ship!
It is very impressive that they can control the return trajectory accurately enough for a tower catch, and to coordinate the arms on the tower (which are very slow and heavy), to grab the rocket without damaging it.
But this was already convincingly demonstrated by catching the booster three times.
It is very hard to return the second stage from the orbit due to its vastly greater kinetic energy. Protecting the rocket from the heating during the reentry is something that has never been done until SpaceX started to practice with the Starship.
But they have already demonstrated this feat before, with pinpoint landings into the ocean.
The significance of today's event is mostly in demonstrating that they have such a high confidence in this system that they were able to satisfy the safety requirements for obtaining a licence to fly the Starship return trajectory over the populated landmass, crossing Mexican territory on the way to the tower. This is the cherry on the cake. Now all the pieces are in place, and once the remaining wrinkles in the system are ironed out, we can expect the flights to become routine, and eventually, the reuse of Starship to become routine as well.
The other, somewhat more modest, but still important milestone was that they kept the Starship in orbit for a whole day, and after that they still had the fuel for a deorbit and the landing burns. It did not all boil off.
Edit: Here is an interview with Lars Blackmore, the guy in charge of Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) for Starship, where he talks about flying the descent over land for the first time: https://youtu.be/POrMxoZbXVI?t=390
Kind of crazy to reduce the hardware on ship so much and move so much complexity to the ground. This can really only happen in a situation where anybody can throw out any dumb idea, because if you suggested this 20 years ago people would think you are an idiot.
That's...the point. You can hire commercial welders to work on the ground side and build everything out once, cheaply.
The issue with the shuttle era was that they needed huge teams of specialized technicians to refurbish the insanely complex orbiter after every mission.
If we ever get sufficiently improved materials science for heat shields and engines there's still always a possibility of returning to the SSTO space plane concept. That would allow a more austere launch and recovery environment, but given current limitations this is the local maxima.
The actual problem with the shuttle was the same as the same as the actual problem with all space technologies -- there just isn't that much value in launching stuff into space. It's nonzero, but it's a rounding error when compared to terrestrial applications.
>This can really only happen in a situation where anybody can throw out any dumb idea, because if you suggested this 20 years ago people would think you are an idiot.
Indeed.
Musk's biographer tweeted the pages from his book <https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942> discussing how in late 2020 Musk suggested, then insisted against considerable opposition from his engineers, that Superheavy be caught with chopsticks instead of landing on legs like Falcon 9.
Also according to the book, Musk is the person who suggested and, against considerable opposition from his engineers, insisted on Starship switching to stainless steel instead of carbon fiber <https://x.com/richardprice100/status/1728106606616015097>.
(Hint to others: Musk was right and his engineers were wrong. Both times.)
Elon Musk is a real life version of D.D. Harriman, the protagonist of Heinlein's The Man Who Sold the Moon. An excerpt taken from Wikipedia:
""I", he says, "would cheat, lie, steal, beg, bribe—do anything to accomplish what we have accomplished". Children donate money for a promise of all contributors' names engraved on a plaque left on the Moon. The names, however, will be microscopic in size. Harriman sells land and naming rights to craters, and plans to sell postal covers canceled on the Moon to collectors. He starts rumors that diamonds exist in moondust, intending to secretly place gems in the rocket to convince people that the rumors are true."
And anyone who's read Machiavelli knows what kind of man it takes to succeed at this level in non-fiction.
Given the fact that men of his abilities and motivations have existed throughout history, and will continue to exist as long as we have men, for all his perceived flaws I'm quite pragmatically relieved he is ensconced with a Western power rather than any other in the world.
Nice! I wonder how the engineering involved here compares to the engineering behind manufacturing TSMC chips (including ASML machines, Zeiss optics etc.). Which is harder?
As it seems building rockets has historically been a capital intensive business with low profits and limited demand, so there just wasn't much competition in the space industry.
I would say that they're orthogonal except for the requirement for exacting results and standards. Doing anything once is hard. Doing anything repeatably is hard^2.
We don't have to look past it. Musk said it failed because engine underperformance caused too little fuel margin. He added that they have upgrades due on future flights.
If they ran out of fuel with 50 tons of payload it certainly begs the question of whether they will get to the goal of 100 tons of payload even with upgrades.
They also had engine fail on boostback. Reliability has been a persistent problem, they'll have to fix it for refueling and manned operations.
"The booster’s primary objective on Flight 15 will be executing a successful launch, ascent, stage separation, boostback burn, and return to the launch site for catch. This will be the first return and catch attempt for a Super Heavy V3 booster." [1]
Reusable stages is very neat, but seems a little crazy to pay the tyranny of the rocket equation twice. I heard one person say that carrying fuel to land over the whole flight means it takes 23x more launches to get an equivalent payload to orbit.
Using modern technology, couldn't disposable first stages be produced much more cheaply than during the space race?
How much of modern manufacturing disposable booster's cost would be fuel vs metal?
OP, this is probably the source of the confusion. Some people are claiming that SpaceX will need 20+ refueling launches for human lunar landings. However, that's a very different claim than reusable rockets requiring 23x more launches just to carry the same amount of payload to Earth orbit.
It's not paying it twice. The rocket equation is about the ratio of the wet and dry mass, so for an expendable rocket you're always limited by the fact that there's an upper stage (and for the second stage the payload etc).
This is why SpaceX cares more about TWR for their engines than traditional rockets did. It goes from making a negligible difference to a huge component of how much fuel they need to keep for landing.
The 23x more launches figure comes from HLS (Nasa sponsored mission to the moon). They may well change the configuration of that anyway, but if you want to refuel in orbit, that's what it costs. It's hard to get fuel to orbit (or any sort of payload). Previous Moon missions haven't refueled anything, but they couldn't return anything heavy from the moon's surface, the vehicle got smaller and smaller as it went and many parts were left behind, so it's not comparable. You can be sure if it's cheaper to somehow do this mission with expendable boosters, they'll think about doing that.
On a normal mission just to earth orbit, there is one booster and one starship, and reusing the booster is more a question of why not save some money for a little more propellant use? The reususable booster doesn't contribute much extra weight, it uses little propellant for boostback and landing.
The booster also doesn't go all the way and you need a booster if you're going to reach orbit (due to that equation), so it doesn't take much to make it reusable. So all in all, why not make it reusable if you can? What would you save from using expendable ones?
It costs less, but it is not free. The stages need to be designed to come back and that adds weight. Additionally you need some fuel, it is not all air breaking.
And every bit of weight is really bad, because of the rocket equation.
Without internal figures no one can say what is ultimately financially better. Especially now that the development is a sunken cost.
Yes, they should just parachute people out of planes, why reuse them thousands of times, carrying that extra fuel to land, they could go another few hundred miles.
The point is the ship and rockets are expensive vs fuel. Fly a Starship 100 times the cost is amortised over the flights and fuel+bit of refurb maintenance is tiny.
If the fuel (+ oxidizer) ends up costing as much as 1% of the cost of launching a conventional single-use rocket then the people behind it will be very happy. That means that their rocket (+ cost of ground facilities + all the people prepping the rocket and monitoring the launch) is very cheap.
The fuel (+ oxidizer) is basically free compared to all the other costs.
It doesn't take the same amount of fuel to land as it does to lift.
Speaking as a Kerbal Space program playing, internet commentor, It's probably <1% of the fuel to briefly counteract terminal velocity as it is to lift off and reach space.
That 23x number is trivially refuted simply by looking at the fact that this flight delivered 52 tons of cargo to orbit. Could a similarly sized expendable rocket like the Saturn V deliver 1196 tons?
How is it twice? Braking on the way down doesn't take nearly as much fuel as lift off so the "tyranny of the rocket equation" should be paid only once.
"I heard one person say that carrying fuel to land over the whole flight means it takes 23x more launches to get an equivalent payload to orbit."
I don't think that this is the case when using the atmosphere to shed most of your velocity, which is what we do when landing on Earth. Propulsive braking would be another story, but you can avoid that on bodies that do have some atmosphere. In our proximity, only the Moon and Mercury would need propulsive braking, but Moon's gravity is low and Mercury is hard to visit anyway.
That said, once you use the atmosphere to cushion what is basically a fall, the weight of the necessary heat shield comes to the equation too.
Congrats to the everyone involved (more than just engineers!).
Here's hoping Musk gets kicked before he sinks this project too, as he's already severely burdened it with his short-sighted fascistic endeavors. As a formerly very enthusiastic follower of SpaceX's activities the specter of Musk's evil beliefs really ruins the messaging of making progress for all of humanity.
It's difficult to underline how huge this is. This marks the first time in the history of rocketry that the upper stage of a rocket has returned home from orbit to a safe, upright landing.
(And to preempt the obvious objection: yes, maybe you can call the Space Shuttle an "upper stage of a rocket" if you squint hard enough, but it didn't do upright landings, its external tank was not reusable and even the Shuttle itself was effectively rebuilt from scratch at exorbitant cost each time.)
It's sad to see a lot of media missing the point, eg as I type this BBC is reporting this as "SpaceX successfully catches part of Starship rocket on its return to Earth".
Edit: corrected to note that the SRBs were reusable, but the ET was not.
Notably, they were reusable! Sure, they had to refurbish them, same with the shuttle’s main engines. The only thing they threw away was the external tank which didn’t have any engines.
Yeah this guy is smoking something. I actually think the shuttle landings were more impressive than this one. Not taking anything away from what they're doing here, but they're still only up to the mid-1970s technology-wise.
> yes, maybe you can call the Space Shuttle an "upper stage of a rocket" if you squint hard enough
Why wouldn't it count? It is not the first time in the history of rocketry that the part that is not the boosters returns home intact.
Sure, you can say "it's the first time in the history of rocketry that it lands upright", but you could also say "it's the first time in the history of rocketry that it is not white".
If you want to say how huge this is, tell me how different it is from landing the boosters. Because from the outside it sure as hell looks very similar.
The Space Shuttle has four parts, namely the Orbiter, the External Tank, and the two SRBs. Only the Orbiter is reusable and actually lands, the rest are jettisoned in flight. (SRBs are recovered, the ET is not.) However, the Orbiter is completely incapable of flight without the other three, so it's not a rocket stage on its own, just part of one.
As for why it's harder to catch Starship than Super Heavy, where do I begin:
* Super Heavy is suborbital, its maximum velocity is far, far less than Starship.
* Super Heavy returns upright. The Starship does the famous but aerodynamically very complex "belly flop" to reduce speed.
* Super Heavy only has two static fins to guide it. Starship has four actively controlled fins that need to survive the extreme forces of launch and re-entry.
> The Space Shuttle has four parts, namely the Orbiter, the External Tank, and the two SRBs. Only the Orbiter is reusable and actually lands, the rest are jettisoned in flight and burn up in the atmosphere.
Thanks, the insights about Super Heavy vs Starship are interesting.
About how "huge" it is, I understand that it is economically huge: Musk will get even richer.
I would be interested in knowing how "huge" it is in terms of engineering. Like, my understanding is that they needed to invent new maths to go to the moon in the 60s. Does SpaceX compare with that, or is it "just" what you can do with a lot of money and powerful computers?
Genuinely interested, even though rocket fans will hate me for not knowing the answer and daring asking. Bring the downvotes!
Whatever you call it, the Shuttle Orbiter wasn’t a complete stage in any case. It needed the external tank, which was never recovered.
SpaceX has now demonstrated all the pieces of a fully reusable launcher. Next comes putting them all together in the same flight, and hopefully demonstrating that the flights can become frequent and cheap. There’s no guarantee of that, but it’s looking good.
Do you want more cool stuff like James Webb in orbit? Fully reusable huge rockets like Starship is how you get them there.
Also, remember how JWST had to do that incredibly complex and fiddly in-orbit expansion and alignment to fit together the mirror after launch? If Starship had been available at the time, this would have been far easier, since Starship has twice the diameter (four times the area) of the Ariane rocket they used to launch it.
Yes without a shadow of doubt it could deploy two JWST on a single launch. Add in the refuling they successfully demonstrated and the sky is no longer the limit.
Besides that I really really wished it wouldn't be Elon Musk, i'm looking forward to cheaper stuff so its easier to send science stuff up. Don't get me wrong at all.
But it feels like hyperbole.
Pure technically speaking, if you can fly a rocket up and control it properly, whats the crazy thing flying a rocket back down and controlling it?
Or do you see it more like a milestone seeing?
And for me, it still feels like if Elon Musk tries his Dataenter 'idea' and really sneds up everyday a Starship, we will lose a lot of control as normal humans whats going on in space and what will happen to our atmosphere.
I think the main challenge is really the heat shielding. That is the part that is so different from the takeoff. And it actually remains to be seen if that is good enough for repeated rapid reuse.
To pick just one achievement among many, the Raptor engines on the Starship are literally revolutionary. First ever full-flow staged combustion engine, designed for both extreme reliability and cheap mass production, even the fuel they use (methalox) had never been tried at this scale.
Did you watch the landing video? That great big plume of fire nudging the Starship into the chopsticks with millimeter precision comes from Raptor engines!
> Pure technically speaking, if you can fly a rocket up and control it properly, whats the crazy thing flying a rocket back down and controlling it?
You are absolutely right. Same thing about just putting a battery and some motors to make a car like RC car! Same about 48v/replacing canbus. Same thing about putting some satellites on orbit for internet! Same for mobile service! Same about if humans can use eyes to drive, computers should be able to using cameras! All _simple_ things, obvious in retrospect.
Yet one man is marching forward, poking his nose in industries he does not belong, and still almost always coming on top.
Makes you wonder why existing incumbents can't do these "simple" things.
This thread is about an achievement made by the thousands of people working at one of his companies. Elon is only a small part of the equation.
Also, I don't understand what you're even trying to say by "ignorant enough to disrupt markets". There are plenty of rich people flinging money around, few have achieved anything near what Musk did. Look at Blue Origin, which is still playing catch-up despite SpaceX already proving everything and Bezos throwing basically infinite money at it.
You don't understand the precision required to catch a 70m tall behemoth when you have Earths atmosphere. It's not even close to bringing a capsule to an approximate area, a small ship somewhere with almost no atmosphere, or even landing a rocket on a pad (which we've only had since Falcon 9)
“The James Webb telescope is just a three mirror korsch telescope in space. We’ve known how to build those since the 30s and we’ve been putting telescopes in space since the 60s. Doesn’t seem that impressive”
von Braun just wanted to build rockets. He was a Nazi, yes, and he did Nazi things, but he would have been (and was) just as loyal to any other country that let him build rockets.
My understanding is that von Braun was fine with using slave labor to build the wartime rockets. He wasn't just some nerd totally detached from Nazi atrocities.
I don't know what Musk's real politics are, but at the moment at least there is no evidence that he is as bad as von Braun.
Launch itself isn't super profitable and doesn't have a very big TAM, especially if you carefully treat the TAM as a present value and discount future cash flows. Also, at least by my personal guesswork, Starlink alone shouldn't get close to a $1 trillion valuation. It seems like the current valuation is based on people's guesses about the likelihood that space data centers pan out in a big way.
> It seems like the current valuation is based on people's guesses about the likelihood that space data centers pan out in a big way
The Starship program is one of - if not the - biggest risks here. Making starship work could bring the launch cost down far enough to derisk that whole program, and today just made it a lot less risky
Starlink is going to be using a lot of launches for satellite replacement. Target constellation size is 40K satellites, which with a 5 year satellite lifetime means they need to replace 8000/year (160 launches of 50 satellites each => 3 launches per week).
We've seen the booster landing/catch before, but seeing the ship do it with the belly flop definitely looked cooler to me. I still remember the awe of watching two boosters land at the same time after a heavy launch. Watching the transition from bellyflop to landing gave me the same awe and being impressed.
> Why is Space-X undervalued because they can catch a rocketship?
The market values SpaceX over multiple areas of the business and their future plans and it isn't just this event which they have proven to accomplish.
> You do understand that a company needs to have a business case equivilient to its valuation right?
Nope. That is not how this works nor how investors see it. It is about their total addressable market (TAM) which SpaceX can capture over everyone else. So here are some more further questions:
1) Who is paying SpaceX for the compute that they have?
2) How quick is SpaceX building their data centers to support their customers?
3) How many people use Starlink as their primary internet provider?
You understand that almost all of where SpaceX businesses can expand into those areas and grow into that valuation and higher?
> Our whole planet sends 1000-2000t of payload into space, most of it is now starlink.
Your point is?
So who else can catch and reuse a rocketship to frequently deploy satellites into space in a very short period of time? (Don't say Blue Origin.)
1) Anthropic because Elon Musk bought too much Compute and doesn't need it for his own AI proudct. In parallel Neoclouds are building up the same compute and its more like a negative sign that they got lucky
2) ? I don't understand what you mean. Are we now talking about Datacenters for others or the space thing?
3) probably below 8 million. 10 Million customer overall, plenty as an alternative or for camping etc.
Amazon Leo is an alternative. But for sure Space-X started a race to the bottom (china, blue origin and co) so they have to start moving and use their first mover advantage.
My point is, that Space-X is already responsible for the most amount of payload which gets send into space. We as a whole planet don't have that much payload and Space-X made it alot cheaper to send payload up.
So were is the 1 Trillion evaluation? Btw. its currently at 1.89T
> 1) Anthropic because Elon Musk bought too much Compute and doesn't need it for his own AI proudct.
The Grok models and products also use the compute in SpaceX's data centers. It only makes sense to provide that excess compute to others such as Anthropic that don't own any, and that is worth tens of billions a quarter.
> In parallel Neoclouds are building up the same compute and its more like a negative sign that they got lucky
It is not the same. You can ask any chatbot, how many GPUs do the neoclouds have over SpaceX in their data centers?
Then:
> 2) ? I don't understand what you mean. Are we now talking about Datacenters for others or the space thing?
Both. The point being that they (SpaceX) are already quickly building new ones on land codenamed "Gun Range" and "Spam" and are the only ones that can launch and connect all of them via Starlink (if they eventually launch new ones into space) and serve both themselves and new customers.
> Amazon Leo is an alternative. But for sure Space-X started a race to the bottom (china, blue origin and co) so they have to start moving and use their first mover advantage.
Amazon Leo is not even generally available. So that doesn't even count.
> My point is, that Space-X is already responsible for the most amount of payload which gets send into space. We as a whole planet don't have that much payload and Space-X made it alot cheaper to send payload up.
So what happens when the neoclouds are not able to build data centers on land anymore due to legislation that prohibits more of them getting built [0] and ultimately they get paused? Most of the neoclouds are already sold out and cannot build more of them and have deadlines on these loans with interest on them.
Maybe the compute has to be deployed somewhere else in the long term....
> So were is the 1 Trillion evaluation? Btw. its currently at 1.89T
Exactly. It if goes lower than 1T it is cheap. This is not even pricing in the building of their own semiconductor fabricator (Terafab).
If you start building Datacenters up in space, you need to send A LOT of Starships up there for MONTH to get ONE normal avg size GPU based DC in Space.
This DC can then poisen our atmopshwere btw. and burns up limited resources on our own planet.
They don't need the compute because their product Grok is not competitive. They don't use the compute to make Grok better because?!
Amazon Leo will be though. Space-X has a first mover advantage, what did Tesla do with it?
> If you start building Datacenters up in space, you need to send A LOT of Starships up there for MONTH to get ONE normal avg size GPU based DC in Space.
This isn't a massive problem for SpaceX as you want to believe it to be.
> This DC can then poisen our atmopshwere btw. and burns up limited resources on our own planet
So are you going to tell them to pause everything? (You won't) What solution do you have to them to solve this? (You don't have any solution.)
> They don't need the compute because their product Grok is not competitive.
That is false. Otherwise they would have given up on scaling Grok already.
> They don't use the compute to make Grok better because?!
So Cursor does not have any customers that use Grok on a regular basis beyond Twitter / X? Nor does Grok Bot need the compute either? (They most certainly do.)
Efficiency gains in their inference engines allow them to use less GPUs for themselves, and also sell that excess compute to others who are otherwise sold out. Both scenarios can be true and it doesn't mean they "don't need it" either.
> Amazon Leo will be though. Space-X has a first mover advantage
With what launch pad? SpaceX has plenty of their own and are building even more.
> What did Tesla do with it?
They built self-driving cars with "FSD" and autopilot with that advantage, and your point is?
space colonization is a fantasy from the era of rapidly growing population. now that the population is shrinking at near-extinction speed, what's the point of it? the Earth is not and will never be as inhospitable to us as dystopian sci-fi depicts. even Antarctica is a better target for colonization that Mars, where the gravity is wrong, the air is poison, and the soil is poison.
If you want the Vulcans to take notice, you gotta get to warp speed. Building the transporter of the parts/pieces of that kind of ship is just the first step.
You could go to LinkedIn and look at people in the:
* structures
* propulsion
* avionics
* flight software
departments, because they all work together to make this happen, along with support from IT/SRE. The person most responsible for ensuring that it happens is Lars Blackmore[1], who was also the Responsible Engineer in charge of making sure Falcon 9 landed successfully
If the heat shield holds up then this changes everything. Next step is double catch and re-flying the same ships and catching again, then payloads to orbit become significantly cheaper opening a new era in space flight.
Yeah, I'm eagerly awaiting results from inspection of the heat shield (which hopefully they will disclose). Reflight without refurbishment is the last goal they need to hit before the system can be considered a success. After that, optimizing for increased payload and nailing reliability will be the things to work on. And of course orbital refueling for HLS.
They already recovered a ship from that one time they accidentally landed one in the ocean. SpaceX got to have a lot of heatshield endurance data by now.
And they attached one of those used tiles to the ship that just landed. Second flight tile data is going to be huge.
Even if it doesn't meet their goals of rapid reuse, I think we've still joined the new era. Replacing tiles is going to be substantially cheaper than building new upper stages, likely less than the cost of fuel for a launch.
Falcon9 already made it a lot cheaper but i don't see much market opening up? other then launching their starlink's
Starship will make it even cheaper, if it works.
With price per kg to orbit dropping, you can afford much more off-the-shelf components for satellites and using more cheap and redundant parts, instead of high quality bespoke stuff.
Starlink is a big deal so I wouldn't discount it. It's significantly expanded the satellite networking market. It's also a key military asset.
Aside from that the F9 rideshare missions have made space accessible to a whole new class of space startup that wouldn't exist otherwise.
Prior to F9 there was no competition in the US market. The result was government customers paid ULA through the nose. Commercial customers largely used Ariane. F9 saved the government money directly but also forced other launchers to lower their prices.
> Commercial customers largely used Ariane.
That and the Russians. But SpaceX is cheaper than both of them.
There was already a big shortage of rockets to get things to orbit before SpaceX announced that they wouldn't sell Falcon 9 launches commercially anymore. https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/analysts-find-looming-...
When I was a kid it was like $50k/lb to send something up? Now it's like $1200? That's a big deal.
And the even more tantalizing thing is what comes next. You're right that that's a big deal, that's near to two orders of magnitude cost reductions! But on the other hand we're still in a scenario where it costs $1200 to send a 16oz bottle of water to space. So that means the amount of infrastructure that can be deployed out there is limited and mostly restricted to governments or small satellites for private usage.
Now bring it down two more magnitudes, which is the aspirational goal of Starship, and you're talking about a world where regular companies can start to deploy mass infrastructure to space. Suddenly, space as a domain for expansion and development becomes completely viable. That would completely revolutionize space, Earth, and humanity. It would be the official start of the next era of humanity.
I would be more excited if the plan to deploy to space didn't involve destroying critically important wetlands on earth.
> a world where regular companies can start to deploy mass infrastructure to space
If we don't start becoming much more careful, I expect we'll live to see the Kessler syndrome, perhaps sooner than we expect.
Low earth orbit can't sustain a Kessler syndrome for more than a few years. Atmospheric drag is too large. (And it gets proportionally larger for smaller fragments.)
So just half a decade of LEO's being economically infeasible then?
I guess that gives the rebels time to organise for the next wave of fragmentation and shrapnel launches.
Well how are we going to have big problems to solve if we don't create them!? Snark aside, Kessler syndrome is probably 100% inevitable. Even ignoring development, there's geopolitics. Modern warfare heavily depends on eyes in the sky, and so on day 1 of direct war between two great powers, stuff in space is going to start going pop.
Fortunately it's not as bad as most think. You'd still be 100% capable of launching stuff into space, and even orbital rotations would still be viable, even if it would require more active maneuvering. It's not like it creates a giant impassable shield over Earth that'd just blot out the sky, but more like the odds of a collision per year on a given orbit would tend to increase dramatically.
And the biggest risk would be in stuff quite close to Earth since that's where it'd be the most energetic/fastest, and also where there's the least amount of space meaning the odds of a collision are relatively greatest. Fortunately, that's also the domain where drag is the greatest and where particles would most rapidly end up falling into the atmosphere and burning up, so the worst of it would clean itself up naturally on reasonably short timeframes, like days to months.
Give it time. Maybe in the meantime new chemicals are discovered that make space flight cheaper. And new alloys to make the rocket lighter.
And who knows, maybe we discover The Expanse like reaction engines in a few decades.
You're speaking of advances well beyond the two magnitudes more we need. This is what I think most people don't get about the concept of full reuse. Those two orders of magnitude are theoretically viable with Starship!
Starship spends around $1 million fuel to send around 100 tons to orbit. That's a baseline cost of $10/kg. But if we get truly aspirational then fuel costs can be significantly reduced through greater vertical integration, and the later block models already are looking at bumping the payload up to 200 tons.
You obviously need some margin to account for maintenance after each flight, but the cost of the rocket itself rapidly amortizes to something near $0 with sufficient reuse. So something around $10/kg is a completely viable aspirational goal with current tech.
And if we get anywhere in the ballpark of that $10 then Starship is going to be at least a big of a revolution in space as LLMs were in the digital/cognitive world. Wild time to be alive!
I was reading in the comments that the rocket itself is made of steel. What if they manage to build it out of a lighter alloy that has the same or better properties when it comes to going and coming back from space?
What if, considering how SpaceX simplified rocket engine design figures out that, i don't know, adding a little bit of ammonia to the mix, makes the engines perform 10% better? Or 15%? Obviously not a rocket expert, but I don't think we (as a species) experimented with all the possible combinations of chemical compounds to get the best possible output to make a rocket get to space.
I us a lot of what IFs, because in the past few years we've made technological jumps that prior to that it would have taken us decades.
Indeed, wild time to be alive.
Starship built with new alloys and promises to deliver everything expected. I’m wondering what’s next for spacex beyond starship . It will take 5 years to squeeze all the possibilities from current design(s). What will be next 10x ?
Space stations , space manufacturing, different kind of payload eg telescopes that are 10x bigger , you name it , oh and yeah mars , moon , asteroids etc . It all depends on how cheaper and bigger payload . 10x or 100x. If 100x this is new era for humanity
This changes nothing, in space fuel transfer between ships is the make it or break it.
Fuel transfer seems like a trivial problem next to the reusable heat shield. And even if for some weird reason it never works, the program could likely pay for itself just launching Starlink/Starshield with full reuse.
Or use SuperHeavy to launch non-reusable second stage and fueled Moon module of different design. After all SuperHeavy doesn’t have to be used exclusively for Starship.
I don't know -- that fuel transfer scene in Armageddon was pretty sketchy!
Only for going to the Moon or Mars. As a launch system, Starship will still be a phenomenal success even if they struggle with fuel transfer, which is really an entirely different problem.
Fuel transfer isn't needed to launch to LEO at much lower cost.
It’s needed to go to the Moon based on the current Artemis design
Which is of secondary concern. SpaceX makes money on Starlink, not launches.
This depends on what you're considering to be the main goal of Starship. Both of you are correct that Starship's stated goals included what you're considering the goal.
If the simple industrial process of pumping liquid from one tank to another is too difficult, one wonders exactly what sort of society anyone could imagine building in space.
The main reason fuel depots and fuel transfer were disparaged was to protect the gravy train of SLS. But that's essentially over.
Nothing is simple in zero g. All our industrial processes have baked in assumption about gravity (and most also about the composition and pressure of surrounding air).
Even without enabling missions requiring refuelling this is still a huge step change in orbital capabilities.
Orbital refueling seems like a small problem compared to a reusable starship.
plenty of use cases were fuel transfer is not needed.
No really it can now launch 20x the Starlinks per flight and StarMind is possible now economically.
It changes cost to put up satellites, which is very significant.
It might not change much for mars
How many payloads are we going to put in the orbit before we end up with a new set of problem?
Huge congratulations to the engineering team on this one! It's been quite interesting to watch the evolution of Starship. Had they put another couple of tonnes of propellant and oxidizer on the Booster they might have caught both of them. It is still unclear to me what the final mass fraction to orbit will work out to be, but something that is 100% re-usable is better than something 60% reusable[1].
[1] Estimate of Falcon 9's booster + fairings being 60% (by cost, not by mass) of the launch package.
It looks like they delivered 50 tons today. Even if it stays this way, it will still reduce price to orbit significantly.
They called it off because it was running lower on fuel than they expected - the margins are crazy thin. You can see a green burst of flame near the end, which is what happens when you run oxygen rich/fuel poor (also called "engine-rich" - iirc the green flame is copper from the engine as the oxidizer-rich mix causes it to run hot).
I think it's a supposition that the reason they didn't catch the booster was that it couldn't get back to the chopsticks. I don't think SpaceX described the issues as that ... it would seem sort of strange if it was because the seemingly planned a catch for it so you'd think they would have a good handle on the fuel required. It's possible they didn't fully understand that requirement though.
Insane achievement! It is the dawn of a new era! One that has been 10+ years in the making.
I still remember watching Falcon 9 (Block V, iirc) successfully landing back on land (as opposed to droneships) after deploying Orbcomm OG2 satellites in December 2015 -- almost 11 years ago.
It blew my teen mind.
This day marks a fabulous advancement for the human species.
We went outside in our Orlando office to see the flair up in the sky, and then were looking for the re-entry, by the time we could figure out where it was our coworker said it was already standing upright.
I was at Canaveral for the double booster return (Heavy?), and it's unbelievable the velocity those things come back down at, with the powered deceleration.
A few seconds after the sonic boom, you're seeing them cancel out the last of their velocity and land on the pad.
One of those 'it can't possibly be that big because nothing that big could be moving that fast' optical lack of reference moments.
Yeah I think people that have never seen one of the beasts just can't imagine the scale. Fully 'assembled, the height is upwards of 120m - 70 on the booster, 50 on the upper stage. So it's something bigger than a football/handegg field going into space and something still in the same ballpark coming down at near freefall, then slowing itself, and landing on a spot with a margin of error of a few meters.
To put it into perspective, it's taller than the Statue of Liberty including the base.
I'll be that guy: they still have to fly it again. That's the real question. Incredible achievement. We got used to landing and caught boosters real quick!
This was a huge milestone, but you're right that there are a long list of future milestones: catch both on the same flight, reuse of both on a given flight, fly without significant refurbishment, fly N times in T time for many values of each, orbital refueling, crew, etc.
Definitely! But for thr record, they did reuse the first stage previously.
I'm still not really convinced this is better than a space-shuttle style landing.
Seems like the same design principles that goes into Starship could create a version with more aerodynamic surface.
Is the idea that Starhship will be considered safe enough for human crews?
Was Space Shuttle safe enough for human crews?
Space Shuttle was a compromised design from the beginning. They originally wanted the Space Shuttle booster to also have wings and return to launch site (with a crew!). But they couldn't afford to develop two new vehicles, so they compromised by making the external tank as cheap as possible and adding solid rockets (which led to the Challenger disaster).
But their biggest mistake was having the engines on the orbiter (so they could be recovered) but not the fuel tank. That meant the orbiter had to hang on the side of the external tank, which made it vulnerable to foam strikes (leading to the Columbia disaster).
Landing with wings is aesthetically pleasing (compared to tower catches) but consider the waste: You have to boost the weight of the wings, landing gear, etc. all the way to orbit and then bring it all the way back. It's much more efficient to just bring fuel and use that for landing. And if your guidance is accurate enough, a pinpoint landing means you can land on the launch tower and not worry about landing legs.
For the shuttle there was also a lot of interference from the Airforce, which forced them to have a massive payload bay, so AF could launch and service their big Keyhole satellites (and possibly snatch Soviet ones in one orbit without warning).
Then there was pressure to make use of solid propellants to amortize their use with military uses, not to mention pushing for Shuttle carrying all payloads for the US.
This together created the dangerous and expensive design tHat was STS.
People give the USAF shit about influencing the shuttle specs, given the capability was never used...
... but a lot of those were set in 1968 - 73, when relationships between the US and Soviet Union were very different than the late 80s.
Given the development and operational timelines, it wasn't a bad bet to cover needing that military capability, had things turned out differently between the two superpowers.
The solids were not a fundamental problem.
Challenger blew because the joint was designed to always be in compression--but it went into tension during the twang. After the headlines they paid attention and fixed it.
The risky thing about solids is that you cannot abort them. Once they light, there is no turning them off.
Shuttle always started the main engines for a few seconds (wasting fuel) to make sure the engines worked before lighting the solids. But there were many engine-out scenarios after the solids were lit that would result in loss-of-crew.
Congress insisted on the boosters to be made in other districts distant from the launch sites, so they were forced to make them in segments instead of a single continuous tube welded together permanently.
I tend to think that for human rated flights it may be possible to give it a parachute just in case powered descent is not possible for any reason as a precaution for a belly flop water landing with parachute assist. The flaps are already there too so maybe just increase their size is possible for a glidable descent? We're entering a size class for the vehicle that makes some outside the box stuff possible without sacrificing too much in terms of payload capacity.
The space shuttle was aerodynamic for a very specific reason - they had to do a mission (that never happened) where they would launch, deploy a spy satellite into a specific polar orbit, and return back to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in a single orbit. The result was a requirement for a lot of cross range, which needed large wings that hurt its performance a spacecraft.
Starship doesn't have that - and so it can be much more optimized for it's purpose. It's basically tanks with a cargo bay and control surfaces, while the shuttle had to toss it's tanks away every flight.
IIRC this could also snatch a satellite using the same profile, with no warning.
Also some in the Soviet leadership were very scared the shuttle could carry nukes clandestinely, then during an ostensibly routine mission change inclination using its wings and decapitate Moscow with no prior warning.
Well, that was essentially the later-stage X-20 Dyna Soar mission, as well as its follow-ons for a fews years after.
Until each side accumulated enough ICBM nukes that it was clear mutually-assured destruction would dominate.
There's many objections to this, but a major one is that the entire vision for Starship is Mars and other terrestrial bodies. If you create something optimized for Earth, you have to start over from scratch for another planet. And vice versa if you create something specialized for another planet.
An adaptable retropulsive landing system, by contrast, is fit for duty just about anywhere. In the long run you'd just need the atmospheric/planetary specs, a flat hard surface somewhere, and it'd be able to come down on it safely.
You don’t want it more aerodynamic
Do you think Space Shuttle landing is equivalent because you like all the extra weight and complexity of a landing gear, or because you like having to build a giant runway?
Unnecessarily snarky but 100% correct!
Of course, being able to land on runways gave the Space Shuttle more choices for emergency landings than needing a chopsticks catcher.
That said, the Space Shuttle holds records for the most humans killed in spaceflight, and the most expensive cost per kilogram to LEO.
There weren't too many runways available to use as backups given size requirements, so I assume if/when they start doing human starship launches they will have multiple chopstick towers and therefore have near-equivalent emergency backup capability.
To everyone who works at SpaceX and read this. You are all amazing.
I hope other great minds at SpaceX are well remembered into the far future.
Agreed its a great time to be alive!
Except the boss
What's wrong with Shotwell?
There hasn’t been anything like this in humanity for a very long time. It’s so emotional to watch and see what we are capable of and the bright future ahead of us. Thank you for everyone who made this happen.
Starship is, essentially, Space Shuttle done right: fully reusable booster without solid boosters (avoids Challenger disaster) and orbiter stacked on top instead of on the side (avoid Columbia disaster).
The original designs for the Space Shuttle had the booster (with wings!) return to the launch site, but the cost for two new crewed vehicles was too large, so they scaled it back to the compromised version.
Even more revolutionary, compared to Shuttle, Starship is built on an assembly line. They can build a booster ever 4 weeks and a ship every 2 weeks.
The future we were promised in the 1970s is about to become real.
I agree this is a good approach.
But the Shuttle became what it became for reasons that Starship doesn’t have to deal with. Shuttle had multiple masters (NASA and DoD) driving a bastardized design. The non-assembly line of NASA is a feature, not a bug: by spreading work across many congressional districts it mitigates political defunding risk. Im not defending those, but they are important context for those who pretend the differences are a signal of government incompetence.
Isn't the fact that spreading work across many congressional districts is necessary rather evidence of government incompetence?
That's not a mitigating factor!
"Before you walk away thinking the government is incompetent, please remember that the government makes bad decisions on purpose" ??
It’s evidence that they are solving different problems. Does the fact that Musk spends hundreds of millions on election cycles mean he’s incompetent, or he’s trying to mitigate a political risk you and I don’t have to deal with?
Sure every system has its unique problems but when you cut to the results, one is clearly way more efficient.
It really depends to what degree you're willing to ignore the externalities.
One system is way better at doing the thing that it was designed for.
The other system is way better at doing the thing that it was designed for.
And since both of the design goals are important, having both systems is a good thing.
As said elsewhere, that simplistic take falls apart when you realize there would not be a SpaceX if there wasn’t a NASA.
I'm not super convinced that the commercial aerospace industry really needed NASA once super high value satellite services came about in the 90s.
The ideal of a good government industry program, is to create a domestic industry, and A: maintain it at a minimum level for whatever goal is in focus (defence, technology familiarity, investment certainty). And B to help it grow to be independent of the government, so the profits and funding can go elsewhere.
To me, most of what NASA did after Skylab are a bit questionable. With most of the high profile stuff being of limited value compare to the RF and solid state electronics projects.
I mean, Musk himself stated SpaceX needed NASA. New entrants especially benefit from a self insured customer because private industry won’t accept that level of risk.
I agree with a lot of your point, but would probably caveat a lot of the JPL work.
I mean, considering nothing like it had been done before (or since) kinda proves the inefficient approach worked. I'm not defending gov inefficiency but often it still leads to good results somehow (and also major disasters, sigh)
What does worked mean in this context? A barely reusable craft that risked human lives to launch mundane satellites and was so unreliable DOD stopped using and was so expensive NASA couldn’t afford to keep it running?
No, he's trying to bully his way into forcing the government to do what he wants, and he can because he is extremely wealthy. It just happens that in this case, it yields something useful. That is a poor model, the rich should not arbitrarily get their own way.
Can see your point, that spreading the constructions sites across different states was necessary in order to get it built, but in terms of pure engineering, this is probably a negative.
Guess the point is that generally speaking, large scale engineering is typically not done at efficient and creative-levels when directed by the government. Governments have too many stakeholders that have needs that have little do with with engineering that need to be satisfied
...And of course, there are exceptions -guessing the Gemini and Apollo programs would be a good examples.
... oh, and am not trying to call you out, just trying to think through this for myself as well.
What makes you think Gemini and Apollo are counterexamples? They were successful, but were also heavily dependent on contractors and occurred when NASA funding was many multiples of today’s budget when measured by percentage of GDP.
Well, they seemed like highly effective government programs as they were able to get people to the moon under a very tight deadline (and also knew they were extremely expensive programs. Kind of crazy the amounts relatively to gdp they were spending).
And, if they weren't, backs up that the government is not typically a good overseer when it comes engineering programs
(although, still seems like when there is a very strong need, governments can be very good partners).
There is nothing inherently wrong with 'government' providing the source of funding for these programs, and there's nothing wrong with spreading parts of the program across different regions. In fact, in a way it can be cheaper. With the Apollo testing facilities in Mississippi, the Apollo program being built out of Huntsville, and the other 7 locations across the US--you can adequately tap higher end talent while moving some components to cheaper locations to work on.
Agree actually. The government basically funded Spacex for Falcon 9 through the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, and probably some of Starship's development too. Yeah, the funding wasn't the question, it's whether the government is a good overseer of programs like this.
Regarding spreading the parts of the development/manufacturing across different regions, am sure there are good benefits to doing this, and cost efficiency is definitely one of them (Boeing's manufacturing is a great example, as well as most auto companies). So yeah, you're right there. But when the government does it, it often is for political reasons, so you wonder if they really do gain cost efficiencies? Hmm...
Personally, my take is the earlier in the development process you are of a product (or vehicle), the better it is to keep everything tight knit (yeah, am a believer in the major concepts of agile development - small, integrated teams working close together, able to iterate fast). And feels like this is also true for design teams in general, no matter what the size of the company. It pays to keep them together as much as possible.
But the more mature a product gets, like a car company that's been building cars for decades, it seems like spreading out manufacturing could be a cost savings.
I wouldn't call it incompetence. It's more a sign of government misalignment.
I see misalignment as a form of incompetence.
> Isn't the fact that spreading work across many congressional districts is necessary rather evidence of government incompetence?
Government issue? Or, let's be more honest, the issue here is with the people expecting government programs to become job programs?
publicly funded means funded by the people. its not really unreasonable that people demand the economic benefits of investing their money to be spread around a bit.
its not ideal from logistics POV, but it is not what I would take as the prime example of incompetence. its just the government way of doing thinngs.
If the economic benefit summarized as employment, then the goal is wrong. And indeed space conquest oftem just makes our child brains dream, instead of being something useful per itself. So we tout employment and side-effects as a prime benefit of space. Why not create a broken-window factory, it will create more jobs.
It's more like the cost of the political system we run. Yes, it's not the most streamlined, but it's stable. Quite a number of people yearn for the efficiency of a system under one will of an enlightened monarch. We have a bunch of examples, from Lycurgus and Cyrus back in the day to Mr Putin today; there is a cost to such a system, too.
It’s always entertaining to hear engineers ridicule inefficient government programs while simultaneously setting up a load balancer, backups, or a high-availability db cluster. Completely unable to generalize the lesson that redundancy and overhead aren’t necessarily bad, and that efficiency is in tension with other desirable attributes in every system, political, biological, computational, whatever.
The "government" doesn't make those decisions, it's the political class that chooses to do those choices of putting money in each district.
It's evidence Congress is/was little more than a bunch of clowns.
The government engineers and scientists that worked on the space shuttle were not.
Also it's trivial to be an armchair expert decades removed from actual events.
There’s a common theme in HN discussions where people mistake understanding a system for evangelizing it. Really nothing could be further from the truth.
this is well and truly common all over the internet -- you explain how some system, something fairly non-technical even, say, a common social failing, some institutional bias or what-have-you, works, and you have a bunch of people go on the offensive as though you've just endorsed the thing. so you have to hedge practically anything with a token virtue-signal, even in communities where it's pretty strongly implied that you're on the same page about considering the thing bad.
if you'll indulge a tangent, i can only chalk up the increase in this phenomenon over the time i've been online to the consolidation of online discussion to a handful of sites that have become ever more adept and efficient at creating filter bubbles. and it's always the sites where that hasn't taken root, where everyone's seeing the same thing, that then catch a reputation for being hellholes full of terrible people, because naturally, the majority of people engage with those sites not directly, but through screenshots shared on the major socials, and those major socials are incentivised to push you content that you engage with. then, as we all know, angry people click more. so of course as a user of one of those major socials, a majority of those screenshots the site pushes you end up being those that depict speech your own filter bubble cohort finds abhorrent. hn is actually subject to this dynamic a little bit.
I understand what you’re saying, but in a larger sense the fact that distributing labor and increasing costs is necessary as risk-prevention against our own politicians is a sign of a broken system of incentives and representation
Consider this: had they not, NASA may not exist. Considering Musk himself said SpaceX would not exist had NASA not bailed them out, it also means SpaceX likely wouldn’t exist. In other words, SpaceX also needed those distributed wastes, they just were externalities to the company. A broader context of the system is important when diagnosing systemic issues.
NASA did not bail out SpaceX.
NASA paid SpaceX for a service, and SpaceX delivered that service on time and vastly cheaper than their competitors who were also paid by NASA (ISS resupply).
In the case of transporting humans to the ISS, SpaceX did it vastly cheaper than the competitor who was also paid by NASA. That competitor has never done what they were paid to do.
If there is anyone or anything to be angry at, it seems mighty strange to be angry at the company who actually did what they were paid to do when another company took much more money and didn’t deliver.
What anger are you talking about?
Fair, “bailout” is not a good term for an era where taxpayers give loans to floundering companies.
What Musk admitted to was NASA “saved” SpaceX with a last minute contract to prevent their bankruptcy. I would make the argument that SpaceX would not exist without all those early government contracts. It’s a shrewd business move: use a self-insured entity (the govt) when risk is the highest because it pushes the financial risk to the taxpayer, and gradually move to more privatized customers when risk is lower and insurance costs can make such launches economically viable.
I do agree Boeing CST was not run well and I’ve thrown plenty of ire there way. But that is an entirely different argument and a bit of whataboutism.
Taxpayers did not give a loan to SpaceX anymore than they gave one to any contractor they pay for a service.
The government paid SpaceX for a service, which was delivered as promised. This happens hundreds of thousands of times a year with tons of companies being paid to do things for the government.
I was clear that it was a contract that saved them from bankruptcy. A contract they could leverage for loans, but I clearly said contract. I wish HN would limit accounts that are very new and seem to misrepresent other posts.
For me the takeaway of all of this is that you need both government and private sector involvement to produce a thriving space industry.
I usually agree that the hybrid approach gives the best outcomes. The govt is necessary when the risk is too great for private industry to bear and the private side tends to move faster on innovation.
You use the descriptor “broken system” to mean “the world is more complex than my fantasy of how it should be”
not to mention shuttle as we knew it was never supposed to be its final form. the Block 1 Shuttles were more or less intended to be a MVP and they would follow along with Block II orbiters. But of course Block Two never happened, and we just got incremental updates of the block 1s.
Politicians don’t understand project development. “What do you mean we need to develop a new shuttle? We just spent billions on this one!”
Everything you said sounds like arguments for government incompetence to me.
They didn’t avoid them, they just passed them on to someone else
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50503535
> The original designs for the Space Shuttle had the booster (with wings!) return to the launch site, but the cost for two new crewed vehicles was too large, so they scaled it back to the compromised version.
Can you cite a source for this claim? My understanding is that the control algorithms for landing a rocket did not exist at the time of the space shuttle. The algorithms were invented in 2010s[1] and space shuttle operated from 1981-2011[2]
[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6428631
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle
Space shuttle was a reliable recovery vehicle too.
I see a need for maintenance crews and large payload recovery in the future.
Starship doesn't seem like the tool for that, and no tool is in development for it TMK?
Recovery never paid dividends for Shuttle, due to satellites' degradation in orbit, and SPCX seems to have driven the industry even further from 'exquisite systems'. I love the idea of in-orbit servicing, but I am not sure it will ever work for unmanned objects.
The economics and use cases have and are evolving.
I don't see this as "space shuttle done right" as a vehicle or "program" without the ability to carry out maintenance and recovery missions. As expensive as it was, for various reasons, it was actually used for those missions.
For example I don't think "space data centers" are going to work if the upgrade path for the hardware is vaporize it all and replace it vs recover and recycle/resell.
I don’t believe economics works for upgrading of space data centers. Sunlight is free, you can still use it with prev generation gpus just fine.
Recycling costs money and reselling isn’t worth it so ground data centers won’t be different.
Once you get mass into orbit it's more economical to keep it there so rather than recovery to Earth it would be better to build the facilities in orbit to perform maintenance, refurbishment and refuelling. Starship should make that feasible.
That is predicated on it being expensive to get mass to orbit.
I don’t see the need, but why isn’t Starship a fit for that?
Because it can't do it?
I see no reason it can’t?
Other than it can't? Where is evidence? It's not there yet.
It can fly up, back, and has payload capacity in both directions.
> and no tool is in development for it
The more cost effective approach is now repair-in-place. Startups in early orbital testing include Starfish Space (autonomous satellite life extension, orbital repositioning/inclination changes, and active debris disposal) and Katalyst (Multi-arm robotic capture, hardware upgrades, and orbital repositioning).
The question on my mind is; does repair-in-place make economical sense for commercial satellites?
Old-space satellites are expensive, so on-orbit repair theoretically makes sense here. The largest obstacle to cost-effective repair in that domain is the one-off nature of these vehicles. This means each repair mission requires R&D, manufacturing, and testing before launch. So for this method to be effective, the repair mission needs time before any faults become lethal. I'm not super confident about resuscitation either; off-nominal thermal/power can cook electronics beyond repair. Plus, any RPO mission risks accidental damage.
And on the other hand, new-age satellites like Starlink are build cheap(er) and designed for replacement. Why bother with repair when you can just build and launch another?
It seems like you're also a satellite repair nerd, so I'd love to hear any thoughts you might have :D
the satellites are life limited whether they have noticeable faults or not (mostly by the remaining propellant, but also by TID radiation and payload obsolescence), and any sensible repair-in-place mission aims to proactively repair satellites near the end of their practical life rather than reactively responding to issues. The robotics (and fluid transfer for refuelling) are basically there, you just need satellites with an architecture that enables repair/replacement/refuelling to move beyond demonstrators. And most satellites are not built in that way.
As for whether it's worth it, it depends a lot on the satellite and the orbit. Starlink: probably not worth upgrading. Geostationary satellites: there's a reason why what goes up there commands oldspace prices (long way up, intensive radiation environment) and that reason also justifies serviceability. Hypothetical LEO datacentre with most of the mass being solar panels and radiators that last a lot longer than the chips are commercially relevant: yeah, probably makes sense to have the chip payload swappable and the thrusters refuellable.
A mission for one satellite to repair a lot of others is complex (it's basically an extra-hard version of the travelling salesman problem) but when the alternative is inserting many entirely new satellites into n orbits, sending a tiny fraction of the mass to n orbits via a reusable servicer starts to make a lot of sense...
Exactly, the scale and scope of payloads is increasing as launch costs are decreasing.
If starship launches ever get anywhere near the 2m-10m claim.. Suddenly fixing or retrieving that 500m-2bn satellite. Or rotating the compute modules on that 150bn space datacenter constellation..
Honestly I could envision regulation requiring it at some point.
It could conceivably capture near-dead satellites and bring them back, deorbit them, or send up a payload of multiple repair ships.
The cost to launch may get to the point that it is cheaper to replace than repair, and we can build 10 of a satellite instead of 1 bespoke unit per program.
What about recovery as a means of espionage? One of the Shuttle use cases floated was to recover Soviet satellites and other tech like film imagery.
That’s what the X-37 is presumably for.
X-37 can and has launched in a Falcon Heavy.
no reason you couldn't make a starship with a cargo bay for recovery, it would just cost a considerable amount of payload mass
Sure, and the starship is just a scaled up falcon with more raptors..
But here we are 12-15 years later and it's still not operational.
This would require it being safe for and having facilities for crew. Tool and machinery for service and recovery. The vessel would need to handle re-entry stress with return payloads on board. The heat tiles would need to support the extra mass. The vehicle capture system. Etc. Etc.
Could it all be built on the starship "platform"? Maybe.. One day. But that day is not this day.
Private industry tends to be far more efficient at making “stuff that works” than a non-profit governmental organization.
Even for all the genuinely good and smart people that worked for NASA over the decades, the bureaucratic machinery that makes it run eventually becomes so convoluted, corrupt and bloated for its own good.
I should know; I worked there for over a quarter of a century. Nothing beats the private industry for “making shit that works.”
Then why didn’t private industry beat NASA to all the space milestones?
The government was the customer, so it was up to them to decide what to do in house and what to hire out. They chose to manage the project in house, creating specific design requirements and contracting out work to meet those requirements, not to create the designs.
Private industry did do most of the work, but they had no leeway to influence the design. Even when they tried to make choices, e.g. Morton Thiokol's Engineers' no-go decision on the Challenger launch due to low temperatures, NASA administrators effectively overrode that decision, by directly calling unqualified employees at Morton Thiokol, until they found one they could pressure into giving a go.
Who do you think designed and built all those NASA ships that made the space milestones? Mostly Boeing, Rockwell, and Lockheed
No profit in going to the moon or putting people in space.
I really think it depends. For long running projects with high ongoing costs like a launch vehicle, I agree. The issue with government projects of this type is that they eventually turn into jobs projects, and that can compromise the main goals of the projects.
But NASA has had some phenomenal successes in their science expeditions - the Webb Space Telescope (and its Hubble precursor, despite its need for "glasses"), the Mars rovers, Voyagers, etc. Those projects would have largely been impossible in the private sector because there is no monetary return.
This is an overly simplistic take. In many cases, the private industry moves and innovates faster. In many others, it injects its own forms of waste (regulatory capture, profiteering over mission, etc)
> Private industry tends to be far more efficient at making “stuff that works” than a non-profit governmental organization.
If that were true, then why doesn't the US have a single high speed train?
NASA projects are well-known to be expensive because they, similar to military procurement in the US, are handled like inofficial job creation projects involving as many states as possible.
The US rail network was created by private industry, including both freight and passenger. This included many of the fastest passenger trainsets at the time, like the Zephyr. In 1971 the US nationalized passenger rail into Amtrak, and Amtrak stopped using off-the-shelf trainsets and managed the development of their own, similar to NASA developing the Space Launch System (the space shuttle) for their use. At that point, the US started falling behind on rail speed records.
In short, the US had stuff that works, including the fastest trains, when run by private industry, but after nationalizing the industry into a non-profit governmental organization, they stopped producing stuff that works.
> If that were true, then why doesn't the US have a single high speed train?
Planes are faster, cheaper, safer, require much less infrastructure, go anywhere to anywhere, scale elastically with demand, and have less emissions per passenger mile than high-speed trains.
> and have less emissions per passenger mile than high-speed trains
The optimal high speed train is about two orders of magnitude more efficient than the equivalent flight on a passenger mile basis. Might look a little different for crossing oceans or thin routes where it's really not worth building a thousand miles of rail to replace a flight a day, but lack of demand between nearby cities or is not why the US doesn't have any high speed rail network...
Efficient in what terms? Dollars per mile? In the usa?
> Planes [...] have less emissions per passenger mile than high-speed trains.
This claim is not even in the right ballpark.
> If that were true, then why doesn't the US have a single high speed train?
Because building/modifying rails crossing many states and cities means having to deal with a unending shitload of bureaucrats at single every level of power.
While sending something up straight in the air and then into space means all those little bureaucrats from all those cities/communities/states do not get a say in the matter.
A big reason for the lack of new US trains is that it's very hard to buy all the needed land under the US system.
In most of the world the landowners have far less rights.
The decade(s) long environmental reviews of every piece of land used for the project is also a huge force agains any such projects.
If the legalities were handled, I expect US train builders would excel at building high speed trains. In reality, we'll never know.
Apparently it's also a problem for people building ICBM silos.
I think you forget that in Apollo time all people ever wanted was to get out of earth and see what's actually out there, with human presence. All the other stuff, would be done later, like this.
The Space Shuttle took 2 people into orbit on its first launch and returned them safely to earth. On the first attempt. On the first test of any of the hardware into space. In 1981.
Starship did not and has not done that and until it does I will continue to hold reservations.
I do not see this Starship and its mission profile ever being a human-rated system in this incarnation, ever.
A really cheap way to launch mass into LEO? Sure, I'll give it that.
The shuttle had a 2/135 death rate. If Starship becomes the core infrastructure for Starlink, it'll be able to afford hundreds of launches before putting humans on it. You won't have to trust some theoretical calculations, you'll just be able to see in practice what the risk of a Starship launch is.
Isn’t starship supposed to be integral to the Artemis project in say… a year.
Sure but it doesn't launch or land humans on Earth, which is the hardest part. And that's fine for now. Once it's launched and landed a few hundred times we can think about launching people on it.
For political reasons. SLS is far less safe a vehicle than Starship, but it is injected into Artemis for political reasons.
I'm a big Starship fan but I'm not convinced it's safer than SLS yet.
Liquid fueled rockets are intrinsically safer than solid fuel rockets. There is a floor on just how low you can get the risk level with solid fuel, you can't test the rockets you fly, and the failure mode is catastrophic blow-up à la Challenger.
It's like saying flying is safer than driving per passenger-mile. It is. By orders of magnitude. I don't care how safe your new Volvo or electric vehicle is, flying in a helicopter is still safer, and a passenger jet vastly more so.
"But Starship blew up 5 times!" Yes, and flying a test plane is dangerous too. Apples to oranges. Starship and SLS have vastly different design certification strategies. SLS spends 100x as much to deliver something that works as reliably as it ever will by the second or third launch. SpaceX gets Starship flying quickly and discovers bugs in prod. So you see more failures. But even now, Starship is probably safer than SLS ever will be. If not now, then very, very soon.
Eh.
I like the rocket less, imho solids have no place in human spaceflight, but the Orion has a LES, which elevates it to being more safe than any spacecraft without one.
dumb question, but at what point does the cost of fuel start to become an issue with such frequent launches? today I imagine launch cost is dominated by the price of the nonrecoverable parts, but fuel will become the floor no?
All back of envelope here just to get a rough order of magnitude:
Starship needs 10kg (0.5mcf) of methane and 36kg of oxygen per kg to orbit. The oxygen takes 22kWh to liquefy or about (0.16mcf to generate that onsite). So 0.66mcf/kg to orbit and 66,000mcf from to fully fuel.
That is the daily gas usage of a midisze city, say 200k population, per launch.
Yes, but it's an order of magnitude difference. Today a Falcon 9 launch cost ~$20 million, mostly because they throw away the second stage.
Propellant for a Falcon 9 launch is ~$500K.
Starship is more efficient than F9 but in terms of multiple launches per day, the supply chain is indeed a factor. An hourly launch cadence is going to consume roughly as much natural gas as Houston.
For liquid oxygen, Spacex is building an air separation plant at its facility in Texas to grab it from the air.
For methane, didn't know this but looked it up, methane is one of the cheapest propellants, but rocket grade methane needs to be purer (starship is estimated to cost $300k to $1 million to refuel)
Not only that, but Starship is a robust system from an architectural point of view (not saying they don't have some bugs to work out of it). As we saw in the previous launch, they can go to orbit with an engine missing. An engine down on the shuttle would have been a catastrophic situation.
The Shuttle did have limited engine out capability. The only in-flight engine-out (as opposed to a pad abort after SSME ignition and before SRB ignition, which happened five times) was STS-51-F with a successful abort to orbit. The various other engine-out contingency modes were never used, but they did exist.
Initially only single engine out was broadly survivable; after the Challenger disaster new abort procedures were developed that made two engines out survivable during all of flight and even all three engines out at some points.
The big caveat here is that most of these modes were never tested, and the risk of failure during the more demanding aborts was substantial. RTLS abort was famously not tested on STS-1 because it was considered riskier than going all the way to orbit on the Shuttle's first crewed flight.
More importantly, those deaths were both caused by substantial design flaws, not by freak accidents.
Bad things happen, and spaceflight is a hard problem. But that’s not what killed two Shuttle crews.
Design flaws that you don't know about yet are still design flaws.
I'm sure there are plenty of "accepted design flaws" in SpaceX vehicles. Hopefully SpaceX engineers are better at calculating the probabilities than NASA was, but I would not volunteer for early missions.
With the Challenger disaster, the contractor's engineering team that developed the booster gave a no-go for launch and NASA administrators showed off their engineering skills by using social engineering to trick an unqualified and unapproved employee of the contractor into signing the form to go for launch. That's far worse than being bad at calculating the safety risks; the specifically overruled the decision by the people that were good at calculating the safety risk.
Source: Truth, Lies, and O-Rings by Allan J. McDonald, James R. Hansen, and Jonathan Yen
The two programs don’t manage risk the same way. You’re picturing a younger NASA trying to do the same process as led to the first space shuttle launch.
To put it in perspective, the Falcon 9 has had 702 launches and has only lost one payload during launch. A couple didn't make it into the right orbit, but there's contingencies to deal with that in manned missions.
Since 2022, there have been 601 booster landings, with two losses. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-stage_b...) That means that if you could have snuck onto one of the last 600 Falcon 9 boosters, with appropriate life support gear, your chances of survival would have been over four times higher than if you had snuck into the cargo bay for an SLS (space shuttle) launch, and that's with the SLS being designed to be manned, unlike the Falcon 9 booster.
The Space Shuttle program started in 1969, the first test fight happened in 1981, 12 years in. The first outline of Starship appeared in 2016, first kinda flight in 2022 (6 years), and a full-scale orbital flight, in 2026 (10 years). As a bonus point, it's nearly 100% reusable.
It's not human-rated yet, but I bet that in 1981, at the height of the Cold War and with Star Wars unfolding, it would be.
> I do not see this Starship and its mission profile ever being a human-rated system in this incarnation, ever.
May I know why ? And if the feat was done by NASA or China, would you change your conclusion?
It would not change my conclusion at all.
If you asked me if I wanted to return to earth on something that glides like a plane and lands on a runway with no propulsion... or a pressure vessel that needs it's engines to work perfectly to get you back to a single spot at the pad, within a few meters, to be 'caught', and if that doesn't happen, you hit the ground vertically and explode...
I know which one I'm taking. Yes I know the shuttle had no 'go-around' as a glider. But wings and wheels and a big runway in the desert.... versus the insane acrobatics of Starship...
We haven't seen how Starship would deal with crosswinds in the atmosphere being predicted wrong. What happens when it knows it is off course on the way down and can't make it back to the pad? If there were people onboard? I assume there would be a contingency where it just vents fuel and hits the ground and hopes to act as a crush-can at terminal velocity but I don't know how people survive that. By comparison, ditching the shuttle like a plane with an engine-out failure seems easy by comparison.
I am not demeaning the amazing achievement of the Starship and its booster and this ability to catch it and reuse it. I think that is indeed an amazing achievement that should be celebrated. But I don't see this as being a thing to put people on that can somehow be intrinsically safer than the Shuttle, just yet. These are just my basic opinions, I think they are opinions with some merit, and I don't feel that deserves downvotes.
> We haven't seen how Starship would deal with crosswinds in the atmosphere being predicted wrong.
Winds are not a significant factor in the trajectory of the ship. Reason is that it spends almost all of it's time very high, above all weather, and only descends to the less stable areas of the atmosphere at the very end, when it's in a vertical belly-flop, going very rapidly through all the different weather layers. You can see this clearly in the return video, at 2 minutes before landing it was still 15km up. And when it's high, it has much more ability to steer by adjusting drag than any winds can move it up there.
What could actually be a problem is sudden high winds or other problems at the landing site. The ship commits to a landing when it does the deorbit burn ~60m before landing. at L-20m, it has about 1000km of cross-range capability, at L-10m only 200km, and after that it goes down quickly, with only 50km at L-5m.
If it's coming back with something valuable, you'd better have plenty of divert options.
Hmm, interesting question. Just brainstorming there, but it seems like there are going to be specialized versions of starship: - a tanker (for in space refueling) - a moon lander
Could see one that is specialized for taking humans into space and then returning them to Earth. It could have a dedicated abort vehicle that takes over the top half of the ship (similar to the abort vehicles they have now on most human-rated rockets). And maybe it uses landing legs instead, because they're more fault tolerant than a catch tower. All this might take up a ton of weight, but starship can carry so much tonnage to space, they'd probably still have a lot of tonnage left for humans and cargo.
Yeah, it could be pretty amazing, able to to take hundreds into orbit instead of just a handful.
I mean, I could see an option being a detachable landing pod for human missions. Or, more crazily, and I'm not sure of the dimensions but some space-plane like the Dream Chaser or whatever that could fit in the cargo bay then deorbit separately after it's done it's mission? There's a lot of ideas. And we're going to learn so much about how to do reusability now that we just didn't know before. But I would not be surprised if some cockamamie version of this wasn't human rated eventually.
Obviously, we're a really long way away from that from a reliability standpoint? But you know, if they launch 10,000 of these over the next decade... we're going to know a lot more about the safety of this design. I'm sure they'll clobber one in to mechazilla eventually? But what if they don't?
Agree with this:)
that's not going to happen, Artemis is using Orion with parachutes to land in the ocean
Two of the 135 total SLS (space shuttle) launches were destroyed. Two of the last 600 Falcon 9 boosters were destroyed on landing.
If I had to ride along in one of them, I'd choose the Falcon 9 booster over the space shuttle.
Also, the Columbia failure occurred because it was a glider. The Starship doesn't have any leading-edge tiles for debris to fall onto. Arguably, the Challenger failure also occurred because it was a glider, which required the odd fuel tank and booster mounting that failed.
The system architecture seems to be more fragile than simple capsules with parachutes or even the shuttle (which was already pretty dangerous). There’s no parachute, if you don’t hit the tower during landing you’re in a lot of trouble (unless they can soft-land the ship without the tower and without the bottom exploding?).
“the system is more complicated” is not a good argument for it never working.
A passenger airliner is vastly more complicated than a parachute, yet both work.
(You’re also in a lot of trouble if you don’t hit the runway in an airliner)
The problem isn’t “it’s more complicated” but more “if something goes wrong there’s not a lot you can do”. There’s basically no redundancy and a lot of single points of failure. Having two sets of Parachutes is a lot harder to screw up than a powered landing.
With a normal capsule, you have multiple fuel tanks and redundant RCS thrusters so you’ll practically always be able to deorbit and land (since you also have redundant parachutes). If starship has a fuel leak, how are you going to land, even if you’re able to deorbit?
If they reach the launch cadence they're aiming for, the fix for a lot of things is going to become "just send another Ship".
That's not an answer to the "is this safe for humans?" question.
Problems detected during orbit? Sure.
But during landing? You can't send another ship to rescue the crew that is aboard another Starship that just failed being caught.
Gliding into a large body of water, or maybe just a flat stretch of land? Planes do that sometimes.
An airliner has layers upon layers of safety redundancies.
There are multiple flight computers. Practically every essential sensor has copies. Oxygen generation, ram air turbine, life jackets, inflated boats. Onboard radar. TCAS. The airplane itself glides. Then there are thousands of procedural rules and regulations for safe operation.
A system like starship that relies on precise active propulsion has no such room for error.
You've clearly padded your list to look more negative because your last sentence only applies to the glide part... Starship obviously has the same redundant flight computers and sensors and radar and TCAS and will have thousands of procedures for safe operation.
Starship’s been in development for over two decades and the design keeps being changed and failing.
Soyuz has a very impressive record, Starship has been horrifically mismanaged by comparison. The falcon heavy flew 14 times and SpaceX is all in on a heavy launch vehicle because what? Even if they hit every target perfectly from now on it was a wasteful project.
The design changing and the development _failing to meet its stated deadlines_ is not a good argument for the system never working. Especially given we know the deadlines were unrealistic to begin with, yet significant milestones have been achieved in (deadline-ignoring) impressive time frame - like landing a second stage rocket from orbit within 8 years of development (by a private company, not a national effort).
> Starship’s been in development for over two decades
What? The first version of something that looks anything like Starship was the ITS announced back in 2016, later "BFR" in 2017 and the stainless steel version (which is now flying) in December 2018.
Eight years is very reasonable for a fully reusable heavy lift system - something no one has built before.
The Space Shuttle took roughly 12.5 years from formal concept studies to its first flight (and 9 years from official program approval)
Space Shuttle was an even harder project. Amendments to the Starship project were all directed towards making it fly better. Modifications which various departments demanded from the Shuttle project made it a worse and worse spaceship. They even had to let go of the emergency recovery capability, which eventually led to death of 10 astronauts.
Falcon 9 had numerous landing failures early on.
They're averaging over 2 successful launches+landings per week now, and it's so routine that nobody cares.
An addendum to this is that Falcon's 85th launch was Demo-2 (30 May 2020)... 10 years after Dragon Spacecraft Qualification Unit.
Because it blows up more than gets into orbit.
You're saying a development rocket that is pushed past the expected limit fails? Amazing...
Even taking you seriously, it has made it to effective orbit more than it has exploded. Nearly all 'landings' have exploded, because that's what happens when you intentionally land a 30 story building full of fuel in the open ocean
> You're saying a development rocket that is pushed past the expected limit fails? Amazing...
Where did i deny it was not a work in progress ?
So why pretend it is a success until it is ready ?
> Nearly all 'landings' have exploded, because that's what happens when you intentionally land a 30 story building full of fuel in the open ocean
Thanks for agreeing with me.
I was just talking to my son about how absolutely incrediblw it was that apollo 11 1anded on the moon, and here we are we with by comparison unlimited compute and its launch 15 to do the first orbit. I absolutely get its a very different beast, and catching is amazing, but still, serious respect to the apollo program.
One cost, what, 30% of all government spending over several years?
The other's total was less than just the Senate Launch System.
One was 60+ years ago, the other is built with knowledge learned from building the first.
> 30% of all government spending
In your fucking dreams. NASA’s entire budget has never been more than 4 or 5% gov spending a year.
I appreciate your point and correction to who you are responding to, but that's not a very HN way of expressing it. You can do better.
And because the government said the shuttle was “safe”, six astronauts and a schoolteacher got blown up in front of millions of schoolchildren five years later. The Shuttle never should have been a human-rated system.
Safely??
The Challenger disaster could perfectly well have been avoided if they had been willing to look. There was a clear indication of substantial deviation from design and the joint could have been engineered to stay in compression during the twang.
But Columbia was fundamental. There was an awful lot of insulation aerodynamically before the heat shield. Once again, multiple warnings, but keeping the insulation from being torn off while keeping the weight down was problematic. Columbia was the beginning of the end as they realized they couldn't sweep it under the rug anymore and they couldn't truly fix it.
Challenger could also have been avoided simply by not launching in conditions that were known to be out of spec.
> The Challenger disaster could perfectly well have been avoided if they had been willing to look.
The tragedy of Challenger is that Morton Thiokol engineers did look enough to know that the O-ring design was likely to fail under cold weather conditions. This was already a known issue and the engineers specifically recommended that Challenger postpone launch because of the temperature at the pad the night before the launch.
They got overruled... almost certainly for what amounts to political reasons as the big bosses didn't want to throw off the timing of the media-hyped "first class taught from space".
Still remember watching the Challenger launch on a CRT TV propped up on an AV cart in an 8th grade classroom and it being a big deal that a teacher was going up in space.
The decision to ignore the Morton Thiokol recommendation not to launch wasn't made at NASA HQ. There was a late night teleconference between Morton Thiokol, Marshall Space Flight Center (where the SRB program was managed) and personnel from Marshall and Morton Thiokol on the ground in Florida. The Marshall leadership put a lot of pressure on Morton Thiokol execs to withdraw their recommendation, and Morton Thiokol caved. My recollection is that it's unclear how much if anything was communicated to NASA HQ. These were the people who had taken over after von Braun's retirement, so very much from an engineering rather than a political background.
I don't think that the "teacher in space" part was much of a factor in Marshall's decision-making. There was clearly plan-continuation bias, and there was a clear directive that Marshall should not be responsible for delaying a launch. The management style they had inherited from von Braun also meant that disagreement was highly discouraged. The data was ambiguous enough that they could convince themselves that everything was fine and Morton Thiokol was coming up with a new launch requirement at the last minute.
The person at Morton Thiokol who caved was neither qualified nor authorized to make the decision. The Morton Thiokol engineers said no, and their executives backed them up, but NASA administrators kept asking Morton Thiokol employees that were out of the loop, until they could pressure on into saying yes.
There's a really well written and researched book on the topic, that I highly recommend, called Truth, Lies, and O-Rings by Allan J. McDonald, James R. Hansen, and Jonathan Yen
How is incremental development and testing related to human-rated flight?
As is, your comment has a bold claim backed by seemingly unrelated fact.
My comment was in reply to the parent comment saying "Starship is, essentially, Space Shuttle done right" , and my claim is that this is not the case, that comparing Starship to the Space Shuttle is a category error, in that I don't see Starship actually being replacement for the Shuttle as a human-transport vehicle, and thus it cannot be considered 'Space Shuttle done right'.
> that comparing Starship to the Space Shuttle is a category error
Both are second stages that return from orbit to Earth. Seems a pretty valid comparison on these fundamentals to me.
(Yes, I know you're extending the comparison to human-transport but that is not fundamental to their ability to take payload to orbit and return, as the Starship can fly without on-board pilots.)
Did you feel similar before the crewed SpaceX Dragon 2 flew successfully?
isn't the whole "we put a human into space" symbolic anyway? There's no air up there. If we had a full supply chain of robots that brought us back regolith from the moon wouldn't that be more useful than being able to send a person up there?
nah humans going is the point. the science is interesting but not of that tremendous value. we don't view archaeology as the highest human endeavor do we?
It can be both, right? Like, we can put humans there and expand the resources available to humanity immensely by sending teams of robots out to manufacture the future habitats, etc.?
Personally, I'm looking forward to joining the Elench. Humans are allowed to join the Elench aren't they?
What exactly is “the point” of humans going there, other than science? Telling a hero story that ignores the contributions of hundreds of thousands that made this possible? Gratifying a few mammoth-sized egos?
What is the point of humans here on Earth exactly? Some consider that humans can be replaced by AI today/in near future. Should we just give up and live space to a more advanced civilization?
You have to start with a justification for "the point" of human life at all which is a struggle with some people who only see utility in whatever their equivalent of a quarterly balance sheet is (this includes publishing papers in academic journals).
I don’t understand why justifying human spaceflight supposedly requires grand philosophical ramblings about the meaning of life. Justifying brushing your teeth doesn’t require that either, does it?
Huh? Space shuttle killed 14 astronauts. It was a flawed design from the beginning and never delivered on its original promise.
Starship has its own design trade-offs, as any engineered object does, but it has the benefit of 50 years of technological development since Shuttle.
I'm not as certain as you about whether or not Starship will ever be human rated. But if successful, it will be launching a couple of hundred times per year. Talk to me in five years and we'll see where we are then.
I don't think it makes sense to make starship human rated. They'd likely give up too much. Probably better to have a different cheaper rocket for the people.
Like you don't build a barge to ferry standards, it would defeat the point of the barge.
Starship is a lot cheaper than it looks, because they're mass manufacturing the engines. They're targeting $250k per Raptor 3. The RS-25 used on NASA's SLS/Space Shuttle costs about $100M to make currently, comparable thrust.
Maybe you're right--I don't know. But large freight airplanes are the same as large passenger airplanes, except for the seats, etc. I think the same might be true for Starship.
Freight airplanes have additional reinforcement to increase max takeoff weight and manage uneven floor loading.
I'd rather have something that's well-tested before I put people in it.
The most damning thing I've seen on starship was a video that described how little space there is inside for the humans Elon said it would hold. Something like urban transit personal space.
That is practically all spaceflight. The Apollo LEM - which landed on the moon - had ~2.3 m^3 per person. The command module had ~2 m^3 per person. There is nothing unusual there and depending on how you configure the interior it could be relatively spacious.
I believe the question was lack of space for food and water to go to Mars.
Reeeally scraping the bottom of the grievance barrel there.
This is a weirdly pedantic hill to die on.
How many people died in the nasa space program vs the Starship one?
I concur. Everyone is acting like Starship is fully developed and finished and flying humans as we speak.
I don't think anyone is saying that?
Reusability is all about cost savings. The real question now is how much does it cost to turn Starship around for reuse - how much heat shield replacement, how do the vaccuum raptor engines survive the thermal cycling, what is the lifetime of parts involved in the catch mechanism, etc.
In any case, a cool spectacle.
Cost savings are one of the drivers for reuse, but not the only one. Maximum practical flight rate is another. F9's peak flight rate over the past couple years would not have been attainable without first stage reuse, simply because of the manufacturing bottlenecks on stages. And fairing reuse was openly driven by a limited capacity to manufacture fairings fast enough - it's not even clear that SpaceX is overall saving money there, but they are saving time, and their business model is based around putting as much mass in orbit as they can as fast as they can.
I thought the same, the catch was nice and impressive but I’d say it would be a fair bit of stress on the structure too. I’m guessing one day we will actually see these things have landing gears and not need a tower but until then…
I get similar vibes to watching this spectacle to that of the “Tesla flying car” demonstration. Amazing stunt , but is that the primary goal ?
Landing gear is really really heavy. To compare it to a building, the upper stage is 17 stories tall and 700sqft crosssection (9m⌀). The rocket is top-heavy, so you have to have wide legs. Wide legs need big triangular structures that articulate outwards, which dramatically increase the load (torque = force*distance) needed to hold up the 17 story building without breaking when it hits the ground, and are complex and get in the way of all the engines.
In comparison, adding more steel to the tower is effectively free. Additionally the hardpoints on the rocket are at the top (no top-heavy problem to deal with) and very close to the rocket, so the torque is minimal. And the hardpoints already exist, in the form of the attachments to the wings, which already need to be strong.
It is crazy but... it makes some amount of sense? I mean we'll see landing gear when/if it gets to the moon, but there's a lot less gravity there.
I thought the same, the catch was nice and impressive but I’d say it would be a fair bit of stress on the structure too. I’m guessing one day we will actually see these things have landing gears and not need a tower but until then…
So losing up 100 starships to reuse one that gets to the moon, is saving money ?
Perhaps they will lose 150, but eventually they will make 1000 that work.
In order to get passing tests, they have to fail first.
That not how science works.
Hope is not physical reality.
Something is only successful when success is delivered.
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Which guidelines are they violating? Just because their commentary is unpopular with the usual shills doesn't mean they're violating guidelines at all. I'm certainly not seeing much at all that's violating any guideline.
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What’s the alternative to building on an assembly line? Is there a “theory” of the assembly line building relative to more ad-hoc approaches?
I don't think you intended to dis the space shuttle (much) but it's important to recognize that half a century has passed since the start of the shuttle design process. Comparing the two is like comparing the 747 to the Ford Tri-motor.
The 747 is more then a decade older than the Shuttle. You would have to compare the 747 to the 787.
No, it’s not like that at all because airplanes improved significantly between the 1920’s and 1960’s whereas spacecraft improved marginally in some respects and regressed significantly in other respects between the 1970’s and 2000’s.
Incredible, had no idea they were assembled so quickly.
> Starship is, essentially, Space Shuttle done right
There's lots to praise here, but they haven't flown a single manned mission yet
(Also hindsight is 20:20)
> without solid boosters (avoids Challenger disaster) and orbiter stacked on top instead of on the side (avoid Columbia disaster)
We know of the failure modes of the Shuttle, we don't know about the failures of Starship
Or better, the two obvious ones: it will fail to be caught or it will fail to bellyflop
And of course Starship benefits immensely from computers getting thousands of times better and lighter (and cheaper)
> Even more revolutionary, compared to Shuttle, Starship is built on an assembly line
Yes this is a big win
Challenger and Columbia were caused by Normalization of Deviance and groupthink. How did they solve those problems?
Normalization of deviance happened because there was so much deviance!
The number of Criticality 1 issues on STS was incredible--literally thousands. Booster seal--yup, they knew about that; foam strikes? check; also turbine blade cracks, reaction control short-circuits, and hundreds of other problems.
They couldn't fix them because (a) the design was locked--they weren't building more orbiters, and (b) Congress controlled the budget and the Shuttle was not a priority.
The point of Starship is to build enough ships and fly enough missions that problems get fixed. And since losing a ship costs the company money, they have a strong incentive to fix the problems. That's exactly what they've done with Falcon 9, and the result speaks for itself.
It's more egregious than just knowing there were flaws. After Morton Thiokol engineers, the manufacturer of the boosters that failed in the Challenger disaster gave a no-go for the flight, because the temperature was too low, NASA administrators cold called a bunch of Morton Thiokol employees that weren't qualified to give go/no-go decisions, and most of them declined, until they found one that gave into pressure and gave a 'go' for launch.
They actively forced deviance.
For more details, check out Truth, Lies, and O-Rings by Allan J. McDonald, James R. Hansen, and Jonathan Yen
Elon. Government is groupthink and normalization of silos and tolerance of incompetence. Elon forbids either.
The same Elon who keeps promising things his companies cannot deliver and obviously exerts incredible pressure on his underlings? You think that doesn't create incentives to claim things are better than they are?
> The same Elon who keeps promising things his companies cannot deliver and obviously exerts incredible pressure on his underlings?
Failing to deliver a ReactJS + web services project, and failing to catch a steel cylinder weighing thousands of tonnes, full of combustible liquids, hurtling down from space with two metal arms mounted on a pole are two different things.
If you're a billionaire and not failing enough times doing absolutely crazy things, that's a net loss for humanity. I want billionaires to fail 80% of the time. Heck even 100x millionaires should be failing a lot.
I'd rather billionaires not exist at all, personally. Before you say something absurd like "SpaceX wouldn't exist without billionaires" I suggest you check the timeline. Falcon 9 was operational before Elon Musk officially joined the 10 digits club.
Innovation will always happen and Elon didn't personally inject billions into SpaceX either.
Let's cap wealth at 999M and anything over the gets redistributed to poor entrepreneurs.
> If you're a billionaire and not failing enough times doing absolutely crazy things, that's a net loss for humanity. I want billionaires to fail 80% of the time. Heck even 100x millionaires should be failing a lot.
Ah, yes. Others should do more for society so I can benefit!
You should just get straight to the point: you want higher taxes on those wealthier than you.
Quite the opposite, I was actually defending people who make super risky bets.
Elon lies about being a good path of exile player, like a 10 year old might. What else do you think he's lying about?
I can't reply to your question "what else is he lying about." Jensen's a good person and apparently likes sex with people other than his wife.
Your ad hominem attack doesn't take away from my point.
Starship is effectively another falling car that doesn't crash.
It's taken 100 years for humans to build a rocket that lands itself.
Gonna take even longer to establish a humans on Mars.
Ya need supply lines, radiation shielding, water... all in the next 2-3 decades if you want any shot at seeing it.
There's no guarantee future generations can justify the effort, resource use.
Yall gonna stay around 2-3 more generations to make sure they do?
It's funny how people can look at the exact same program and draw wildly different conclusions. From where I'm sitting, Starship is a deeply flawed and highly risky program with an uncertain future. There are two keys problems:
1. It's not clear what the product-market fit for Starship really is, specifically there is limited demand for these super-heavy payloads. What's my evidence? Falcon Heavy. It averages about 1 launch a year, typically by the military, compared to >100 for Falcon 9.
There are five standard counterarguments to this:
a) "You can carry multiple payloads." Most of the time this simply isn't true. The payloads have to be on almost identical orbits for this to work. Different inclination? No shot. Different altitude? Almost no shot. This brings us to the second;
b) "But Starlink." Yes, Starlink can take advantage of this although to justify its massive expansion, Starlink really has to launch a satellite-based handheld mobile phone network and it has to be pretty much global. It's unclear if this can be from a legal and regulatory standpoint or if it will be able to effectively compete with traditional terrestrial 5G networks. It's unclear what customer density can be supported;
c) "It will induce demand for bigger payloads." Falcon Heavy is relatively cheap, particularly compared to the alternatives from Ariane and ULA yet launch cadence is still particularly slow. Satellites, which are the bread and butter of commercial rocketry, just don't need to be that big;
d) "Starship will replace Falcon 9 launches." Yes, but other companies will fill the Falcon 9 gap if SpaceX abandons it. If you're only carrying one payload to LEO (or even geostationary orbit) and you can do that with a smaller launch system that you can reuse, it's simply going to be better eventually; and
e) "Space based AI data centers." This is never going to happen. it doesn't make any sense. You can't get enough power or distribute the heat. You're subject to cosmic rays and solar radiation, which the atmosphere otherwise mostly protects you from, and you have no way to economically service the inevitable failures.
2. The whole Mars thing is BS, basically, kinda like space-based data centers. It's not happening. There's absolutely no reason to go;
3. Starship isn't suited for lunar missions, which is one reason (IMHO) why Elon tried to scuttle NASA's lunar program [1]. Basically, a 40 meter high vessel that has to land horizontally is hard to land, hard to get in and out of (with your astronauts 40 meters off the surface) and much harder to get off the Moon and back to Earth.
4. Between (2) and (3) a whole lot of new capabilities have to be developed anyway, none of which have even begun yet (eg in-orbit refueling).
Now the one really useful thing from the Starship program (IMHO) is the Raptor engine. For context, the Falcon 9's Merlin engine used oxygen and RP-1 (kerosene, basically). Only the oxygen had to be kept really cold. But it has coking issues (ie solid carbon build up from the RP-1 being consumed). Raptor replaces RP-1 with LNG. No coking but now you have two cryogenic fuels instead of one.
[1]: https://futurism.com/elon-musk-scrap-nasa-moon-program
They don't need super heavy payloads, it seems pretty clear that they'll be able to launch even just a Falcon 9 payload in this for less than Falcon 9, because they're not throwing away the expensive upper stage.
Also, my understanding is that Starlink v3 just doesn't fit inside F9. The larger phased arrays that that enables lets them make much better use of spectrum than the v2 minis. There are lots of potential uses for larger payload volumes.
The space DC thing has been beaten to death online, with tons of very confident commentators claiming it will never happen for the reasons you've mentioned. Some counterpoints, Google just launched their first ML infra to space with their Project Suncatcher launch, and if you actually run the numbers, the radiators are smaller than the solar arrays, so obviously it's feasible to launch the radiator if it's feasible to launch the solar array to power it. Who knows if it'll make economic sense, but it seems pretty clear that it's getting harder to build DCs on the ground in the US, there's a lot of backlash against it, we just saw what it did to Abbott. Many areas don't have the spare power, and doing it in space makes solar into reliable baseload power rather than 1/8th nameplate and intermittent.
Anyway, I don't work in that industry, I've just been following along with them because I've been an investor since before Starlink was a thing, but I really think people should keep an open mind about whether SpaceX can pull off things that sound a bit nutty.
I'm having trouble going from the facts I know to your conclusion ("Starship is deeply flawed"). I supposed "deeply flawed" is subjective, so I doubt I'll change your mind, but I can't help myself when "someone is wrong on the internet."
You say, "It's not clear what product-market fit for Starship really is" but then you list a pretty good market fit: Starlink. Starship is the only vehicle that can launch Starlink v3 satellites, and one single Starship launch can put up as much bandwidth as 10 Falcon 9 launches.
The internal launch cost of a Falcon 9 launch is ~$20 million, so effectively, one Starship launch is replacing $200 million worth of Falcon 9 launches. Current speculation is that it costs $100 million to build a Starship stack, so even if they never recover either booster or ship, they would still be saving $100 million per launch.
That's pretty good product-market fit, if you ask me.
Next you talk about Mars. I assume the argument is basically: Starship was designed to go to Mars, but there's no reason to go to Mars, ergo Starship has no purpose. But that sounds like a self-refuting argument. If Starship was designed to go to Mars, that implies that Musk wants to go to Mars (which I actually think is true), which means Starship has a purpose: to go to Mars.
Alternatively, let's say Musk is just conning and he doesn't really care about Mars. He's really just building Starship for Starlink or Starmind or whatever. In that scenario (which I don't believe but can't disprove) then Starship still has a purpose: Starlink and Starmind.
Your next argument is that Starship isn't suited for lunar mission. I actually agree with this--Starship was designed for Mars, which is why it runs on methane (for in-situ propellant generation), and relies on a aerobraking to enter Mars orbit. But the same architecture that can take Starship to Mars will be able to land 50 tons on the lunar surface--something that no other lander can do.
[Your arguments about landing difficulties and astronauts descending 40 meters are not very strong. Starship is bottom-heavy because of the engines, so very hard to tip over, and elevators are a 100-year-old technology.]
Lastly, you bring up "a whole lot of new capabilities" to be developed, but you only mention in-orbit refueling. That's true: in-orbit refueling is yet to be demonstrated. But that's a new capability that (a) no other vehicle has performed, and (b) would open up the solar system to exploration. That's a case of Starship being more ambitious than any previous space vehicle--almost the opposite of "deeply flawed". And even if in-orbit refueling never works (which I doubt), Starship would still be revolutionary for being reusable.
We both have wildly different conclusions on Starship. Maybe one way to see who's right is to make predictions. I think Starship will continue to launch Starlink satellites and that SpaceX will continue to make a profit from Starlink. My guess is between 10-20 Starship launches in 2027 and 50-70 launches in 2028. I also predict that Starship will land on the moon, with astronauts, before the end of 2030.
If my predictions come true, I think that would make Starship a very successful program.
I'll float a use case, which I admit though borders on science fiction. Still, it could be done without breaking the laws of physics.
"Construction of a multi-generational ship, in orbit, designed to travel for hundreds of years between stars".
Discussing this in-depth would take a book, but by necessity this ship would be very (very) large and would require an extraordinary amount of mass to be ferried into orbit.
Of course this unlikely to happen during starship's lifetime, but hey, it's at least a legitimate use case.
The space shuttle is infinitely sexier sorry
Yep, this thing is the beat up Toyota Hilux to the Space Shuttle's hand built Ferrari. Still reminds me of the first flying grain silos.
But a fleet of Hiluxes is a whole lot more useful for actually getting shit done than a couple Ferraris.
>> Even more revolutionary, compared to Shuttle, Starship is built on an assembly line. They can build a booster ever 4 weeks and a ship every 2 weeks.
Note that they are also scaling up production in a big way, because they want to launch weekly soon, and then daily. Not sure if we will get to the latter anytime soon but I'm also not going to bet against Elon.
When Falcon 9 was making its early landing attempts, I'm sure people would have struggled to believe that they'd soon be doing over 120 launches+landings per year with very few mishaps.
The reusable Starship will carry 100+ tons of weight or 1100 cubic meters of volume per launch.
Government had to get out of the way. A visionary from Private Sector like Elon Musk was needed
The US government realized this in the late 90s-early 2000s and started pushing NASA to go outside to utilize private industry in more a competitive way (instead of giving contracts to the same tiny group of gov contractors). This started initially under GWB and later Obama expanded it, which helped open the door to companies like SpaceX and X PRIZE type competitions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Orbital_Transportat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Challenges
The defense industry could use this sort of thing, which we saw with the costs/shortages of missiles in the Iran war.
From SpaceX Wiki page[1]:
Yeah, bad gov't (NASA). Get out of the way for private industry. Or, wait, help us when we are desperate and nearly bankrupt. Which one? The correct answer is "both, in harmony".[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX
I feel like I’m not reading the same passage of text. NASA didn’t give SpaceX anything. They were a customer, paying the best company for the best service. That’s how free markets work.
Let me know when Starship makes it to the moon. Apollo got there after 2 launches. and only had 1x problem and everyone got home.
Launches are irrelevant. Much more useful metric is "total $ spent on the program before it makes it to the moon", not launches.
That's funny, I count about 20 Apollo program launches before anyone went to the moon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apollo_missions
And of course Apollo 1 incinerated it's entire crew.
Seems like you're only aware of the highly publicized successes and not the difficult development history.
What else might you be unaware of?
Peace to the men and families of Apollo 1.
Sorry Apollo 1, 4, 5 and 6 were unmanned, 7 got men to LEO, 8 orbitted the moon and 9 landed Neil and Buzz.
Starship is up to 15 and is not man rated nor has it achieved a moon orbit or moon landing.
Which is the more successful ?
So you're leaving out SA-1 through 5, AS-101 through 105, AS-201 through 203, QTV, Pad Abort Test 1 and 2, A-001 through 004, and the Mercury and Gemini programs before them to be intentionally deceptive? Or... just disrespectful?
> Which is the more successful ?
Who thinks like this? Who sees what I just saw and has this thought? A wasted opportunity for some wonder and joy.
The Apollo 1 crew begs to differ.
Also, Apollo had Gemini before it and Mercury before that. It was an iterative process.
It's wild that Dunning–Kruger extends to rocket science and astronautics.
"fully reusable" is highly aspirational.
They have barely reflown a handful of tiles, and have not reflown any engines.
Essentially, the two things you'd expect to break will probably still break.
They did fly reused engines a year ago
Only booster engines though. What remains to be seen is how the vaccuum raptors hold up for reuse - pretty brutal temperature cycling.
Yes. But not the engines they are flying now.
Kind of a strange response. Yeah, most people would think spacex will eventually be able to reuse v3 of the raptors too.
That's like saying a 2026 F150 is safe because a 2023 trim passed a crash test, despite a full overhaul of all the crash structures taking place in between
hmm, think it's more like saying a newly redesigned f150 will eventually pass the crash test, because it's basically 80% the same design as the previous generation. It might be in 2027, but if not then and the engineers keep at it, then in 2028 or 2029.
Landing the damn thing (and almost landing the booster) seems to point in the general direction of full reusability.
My understanding is that the real fly in the ointment has been that Starship isn't anywhere near its target payload capacity, and it may be difficult to get it there. I don't know if that's changed with this flight or not.
This launch put 50T in orbit, which is half the stated goal. If it never improved past this, it'd continue to be the largest and least expensive heavy lift rocket into the foreseeable future.
That's because when launching from Texas, they have to do a dogleg maneuver to avoid populated islands such as Cuba. If they launch from Florida, they claim they'll get 100 tons.[1]
> Flying Starship from Florida, he said, will further improve capacity compared to Texas launches. Launching from Florida offers more favorable trajectories to certain orbits, potentially allowing Starship to carry more satellites without expending propellant on dogleg maneuvers. Dontchev said a single Florida Starship launch will be able to carry up to 20 times the bandwidth of a single Falcon 9.
SpaceX currently claims that each launch is 10x the bandwidth of a Falcon 9 launch, and is 50ish tons of payload, so launching from Florida would be around 100 tons of payload.
1. https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/11/spacex-now-fundamental...
This was the third heaviest payload ever put in orbit. None of the others had a reusable first stage, second stage or fairings, so they cost vastly more (throw away the entire stack each launch)
Even if they never increase it from here, this is an enormous achievement and success.
Due to the nature of spaceflight, payload tends to be around 1-3% of total mass. You don't tend to max payload during testing for stuff you expect to have a reasonable chance of going boom.
It's like how F1 cars can make it through the full track, but will need a new engine pretty regularly.
Something something Ship of Theseus.
You're allowed to compliment technical achievements, even if its done by a republican.
It's done by thousands of people, who are employed by a republican.
Reducing their work to the (self-serving) political alignments of the CEO is a big part of the optics issue.
Given how Americans tend to self-sort into political castes, I suspect that the majority of SpaceX employees are now ideologically aligned with their CEO. Working there would be too risky for them otherwise.
That may well be true, but it doesn't really change my point.
You got me figured out completely. I hate Elon so much I have watched every launch stream since 2010, own stock in his companies, buy his car with $10k beta software, and voted as a shareholder to give him the biggest pay package in human history.
I hate him so much I'll even agree with his quote from this year saying that “Starship Version 3, I think this design can be fully reusable.”
Don't sweat it. Lots of Starship fans (myself included) are overly sensitive because there is so much bad-faith criticism out there.
Still, I think you're discounting the accomplishment here. Boosters have reflown after a catch, so re-usable engines is already demonstrated. And heat shield reuse is going to be iterative: the first few will require lots of work, but they will keep improving until the tiles last for many missions.
But you can't iterate if you don't get the ship back in one piece. That's what makes this accomplishment important.
It'll become real whether we want it or even benefits us or not. Nothing we can do but trust the billionaires.
I like that they wrote "dont panic" on the fuselage above the s42 badge
Did it carry a towel?
Probably.
And were Vogons banned from the mission?
If this makes even me want to go study engineering I know it will inspire millions of youngsters into making the future we all want. Bravo!
I am trying to understand what's the big deal about this, other that massive weight and the money involved. The way I see it is software controls the fuel output and motion control. The only other challenge I have been hearing about is the heat shield. Other that this what's really special about the spaceship. The number of modules and the complexity seems not that huge. Any error or miscalculation in here is very costly and that is the only thing seems to be the bottleneck here.
If its that trivial, why did nobody came up with this on their own so far?
The real question is if others maybe thought it's not worthwhile because the R&D cost isn't justified. Like "a solution without a problem".
The engineering of this is just mind boggling awesome. The culmination of so many fields, so many factors, to this. Congrats!!!
It is. It's a great achievement for Gwynne Shotwell.
Yes, though not an engineering one. At SpaceX she handles business development, strategy, and ops, though she was trained as an engineer and did it previously in her career. I think this is almost the more impressive feat here, not to diminish the engineering leap.
Definitely a name that won’t be forgotten anytime soon.
And the CEO, Musk. Shotwell is president.
Nothing new. Flight controls and automatic navigation of a high speed ballistic missle is much more impressive and had existed for decades.
I hope those sour patch kids taste good…
This kind of stuff hasn’t been done before. So by definition, new.
> bind boggling
mind bottling
Watched it with my 5 year old daughter (3 year old son was sadly uninterested), and we were both cheering and high fiving. Very exciting.
Just watched the catch stream live on the dome of a local planetarium - really feeling history is being made.
It was all so symbolic, they just had a talk about the Voyager probe reaching one light day from Earth accompanied by screening of the Startrek movie (which includes V'ger/Voyager) and ad hoc decided to stream the catch just after the movie ended.
Was a really surreal experience, first watching the tiny Enterprise zooming around the vast V'ger spacecraft only to see Starship zooming through the clouds and getting caught, all on the same planetarium dome projection! :-)
Which planetarium showed this, if you don't mind answering? If it's near me I'd love to attend!
So precise it was almost boring - incredible work. Kudos.
Booster didn't make it back though this time, becasue of one engine not relighting out of 33. Space Shuttles became boring before Challenger too.
Interestingly, there's a similar large "block" recovery rig in the South China Sea. They use two sets of steel cables running in the X and Y directions — visually it's a lot like the Japanese cat's cradle string game. From a quick search, it appears to have shown up after SpaceX's chopsticks catch. Different engineering approach, but the same idea of catching the returning stage in a grid rather than with arms.
Yeah, it makes the chopsticks look unnecessarily unforgiving.
The chopsticks are so stylish though.
Congratulations to the steely eyed missile men and women of SpaceX.
I wonder if John Aaron was watching. Or Gene Kranz. Both are still alive.
They surely would have been watching. Unless that wasn't an option :-)
Failure to watch wasn't an option...
I imagine this is what it was like to witness Apollo 11 55 years ago.
I was nine. I remember our black and white TV, the crackling from the picture tube's high voltage wiring adding a tang of ozone. We stayed up late that night.
Yeah - I was 8, and remember the whole family glued to our 20" B/W TV watching the moon landing. Remember the poor quality of the video/audio ("one small step for man") from the moon - hopefully will be 4K next time!
8K or 16K from Mars. This is what I am hoping for.
This isn't even remotely close to that.
Er, no. Nothing like it. Grabbed from your bed in the middle of the night, bundled downstairs to watch (grainy) and hear (crackly) weird things on a black-and-white TV, while adults, including strangers, whooped and shouted drunkenly. I understood the Apollo 11 thing only in the days after, through news reports. The live event was as impenetrable to me as a dream. Then again, I was half-asleep and five years old.
I was seven, and I happen to have had a profoundly different experience than you. There was a massive rocket mania and all the kids I knew wanted to see the landing.
Russ Olsen does a great keynote about the life-changing experience for those of us so affected. I happened to be in the audience for this edition and it was something special to be old enough to remember it much as he remembered it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMZBA7KHnHQ
That's a super cool recount. I did know that it was at night US time (which obviously is different from what happened today) but I didn't know a lot more than that.
What I meant in my first comment was just the absolute amazement of how far technology has gotten, to the point where this thing is just hurtling towards the ground and then suddenly just floats onto a tower. That gave me chills to watch.
My grandma was one of the only person with a TV where she lived, half of the town was in her living room, nothing comparable. I bet most people watched this on their toilet seat before scrolling to the next cool thing as if it was nothing
> I bet most people watched this on their toilet seat before scrolling to the next cool thing as if it was nothing
I think GP tries to compare _their_ experience (not the experience of "most people") with what people felt 55 years ago.
idk about them, but I watched it in a live stream starting about an hour early, because I wanted to see the reentry (that plasma is something special) and I didn't want to miss things. Still I don't think it is the same. Not after Falcon 9 landings, double Falcon 9 boosters landings and catching of the Starship first stage. I expected it to be caught today. Got some doubts after the booster missed the tower, but still pretty sure that 2nd stage would make it.
I dont think this remotely compares to watching dudes walk on the moon.
Eh trust me. When someone lands on mars it’ll be as this guy described, one reel and a dozen comments saying it’s ai.
When they land on Mars, it will be amazing balls. This rocket pad thing is 'pretty neat' but not that special
The "Baby Come Back" soundtrack really brought this home for me. What an incredible achievement. Very moving.
Anyone else have trouble watching this 8 hours after? I tried on SpaceX page, X, only YT seems to work fine.
I connect from EU.
Do we know why they didn't try to catch the booster?
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2121648438144024943
booster was low on fuel, plus no mood of risking tower with boom, boosters are cheaper than towers.
There was also one engine out on the booster during the boostback burn - I wonder if that was a concern?
Cool. And people thought he wrote this himself!
If he doesn't write his own tweets then he hires someone with the same personality to write them. They are not notably restrained or anti-inflammatory.
In this case I wonder if perhaps he fed what was told to him to grok and that's what he got out?
He is also CTO of SpaceX. This isn’t an unusual level of technical detail if you follow his X. He always writes his own posts.
Slight underperformance in the engines resulted in the the booster not reaching where it was supposed to be and the GNC systems automatically aborted to the gulf for safety.
Two reasons floating around. 1.)They lost communication with tower 2.)They ran out of fuel for safe land.
source: Scott Manley https://youtube.com/shorts/m2oGDCvDmdE?si=0AlX8sgHDihXCED6
Apparently the booster signaled it didn't have enough fuel to risk it. Either because it consumed more then expected on the way up, or a measurement error potentially.
At the last moment the exhaust turned green. That's consistent with the fuel running out, the engines running oxygen rich, and subsequently "engine rich". So I would put my money on actually running out vs a measurement error.
And even if they had caught it it wouldn't have been worth much as the expensive part is the engines and they wouldn't have been reusable.
I heard somewhere the engine efficiency is still somewhat variable so they burned more fuel than anticipated.
That's basically what Musk said, yes: that they need to work on both engine performance and performance consistency. He said they'd be cutting off the main engines one second sooner to provide more margin for boost-back.
Amazing that a one-second difference can matter, but those things go through tons of fuel every one of those seconds!
"Slightly low on fuel."
If I understand correctly, the margin was tight enough not to take the risk of damaging the tower.
And if the landing footage is any indication, it sure looks like they would have made the catch anyway if they'd gone for it.
landing footage shows exactly why they didn't attempt the tower catch - the final braking burn was engine rich (green tint), it didn't blow up, but there was a respectable chance of it just crashing into the tower running on less than fumes
I'm not sure thats the case. the booster hovered for what seemed a lot longer than prior booster landing attempts. Almost like they were purposely running out the fuel.
The goal, as I understand it, is to return the booster with as little fuel as possible at time of catch -- and not run short.
The booster footage indicated to me that its engines turned off, and then the body of the booster imploded, before it touched the ground and then became the expected fireball.
I'm definitely not a rocket scientist, but this series of events leads me to believe that the fuel was absolutely exhausted.
> and then the body of the booster imploded
This was the Flight Termination System (FTS)
It terminates via implosion? That sounds backwards.
Sounds like the final boom was intentional from control
Perhaps it was, and if so: It occurred subsequent to the implosion.
(In case that distinction is missed, I do mean "implode" as the antonym of "explode".)
Their risk tolerance would probably be greater if both towers were fully operational. But any damage to the only functional tower during booster catch = an automatic abort to the ship catch one day later, and the ship catch is what was really interesting at this point of development.
The previz imagery of their plans for the Louisiana coast showed pairs of towers dotting the coast. At first I thought they were for alternating the cadence of launches, but now I wonder if one is to catch the booster and the other to catch ship.
They need another cheaper tower just for catching. Much less mass when landing.
The existing towers can only handle empty ships & boosters. The tower stacks them, then they’re fueled. A catch-only tower would avoid some cladding and the propellant loading lines, but it would still need a deluge system and a QD arm to replace any remaining propellant with inert gas. At that point you might as well pay a little more and get a fully capable tower.
Do we know what sea life just died as the booster exploded? What are the impacts to the Texas Gulf when a booster detonates into the ocean?
Probably next to nothing compared to what we fish out of the ocean constantly.
> What are the impacts to the Texas Gulf when a booster detonates into the ocean?
Trivial compared to what we already did with Deepwater Horizion.
Lol. I'm not sure if you're making an ironic joke, but they actually had to prove this when the previous administration was trying to bury them in bureaucracy. So they had to carry out a scientific study to demonstrate that (1) the ocean is quite large and (2) the odds of anything being at any specific point are quite low.
I'm sure you can dig it up somewhere if you too need a study to confirm such.
Is it weird that a private for-profit company wanting to explode something in public space needs to prove it does what it can to minimize the potential damages? Should everyone be allowed to throw bombs into the ocean? Or just Elon?
idk, i'll take a look after i finish eating my steak dinner
Hmm is this why Elon wants to deregulate his pursuits? Should we just turn a blind eye to this sort of pollution in the same way the Spacex camera cut the shot of the explosion as it occurred?
Let's hope our government will more proactively monitor these launches starting in January 2027 when a new Texas and federal government comes to power.
Holy ship, it was picture perfect capture!
That was incredible to watch!
Huge congratulations to the team.
We witnessed history today
This is absolutely incredible!! I can’t wrap my head around this.
Honestly if this thread had the actual number of points it deserved based on the kind of milestone this represents for humanity's future and access to space, it would be in the millions.
If you don't follow rocketry you can't possibly understand what this means.
This was the Trinity test.
And even if you hate Elon and all his businesses, this knowledge will proliferate. Either by talent movement / osmosis, by espionage or just being inspired ("if they can do it, maybe we have a chance as well").
Within a decade the average cost to LEO will drop 20x-50x and if you're not recovering both of your stages, you don't exist.
> And even if you hate Elon and all his businesses, this knowledge will proliferate. Either by talent movement / osmosis, by espionage or just being inspired ("if they can do it, maybe we have a chance as well").
It doesn't need to proliferate. It has existed in us for a very long time, albeit working the kinks out would take time.
The major factor on the trajectory space goes is a financial question, not a technological one. And it always has been this way.
Elon is a terrible person that's done a lot of bad for humanity (but also some good). But he's damn good at convincing people to fund his shit and so we get cool rockets until he goes out of favour.. probably that happens when we hit critical mass on the space pollution he puts up into our sky.
What amazes me is how many Raptor 2 and 3s are sitting on the bottom the gulf and the Indian Ocean. Dissecting a Raptor 3 in particular would be a real cheat code for anyone wanting to know how to build something similar! Metallurgy alone would be huge!
They blow them up.
Lol no they don’t. Keys to the kingdom sitting on the ocean floor.
does debris like that do anything bad for the oceans?
Ah man I just missed it. The live feed is just stock footage. Any links to the catch?
https://youtu.be/jHlpfNSpBmw?t=3233
We'll put that link in the top text as well. Thanks!
Last few minutes here:
https://x.com/spacex/status/2121316300702056595
different angle of view with Elon commenting https://www.youtube.com/shorts/M-krN98_Vy4
That’d be the booster catch from some time back.
I know engineering is about expediency, and price, but I’m still bummed that we aren’t getting ships with landing gear in this or likely the next generation of rockets either.
Seems that the heavier the rocket the more ground clearance to need to self-land, and so you can’t scale up the dragon’s landing system. I don’t think there’s anywhere near enough weight to shave off of the next rocket or enough specific impulse to add to bring the size back down.
Starship HLS has landing gear. For Earth landings everything is so marginal that the weight penalty of landing gear is too high.
Also, landing it on the chopsticks makes rapid turnaround easier.
It’s probably better to think of it on the spectrum of “atmosphere-rated” vessels. Ships landing in zero-g don’t need feet, they need clamping surfaces. Atmosphere rated might need both, depending on usage. The is just an almost atmosphere rated craft. If the moon and mars weren’t covered with horrible dust we could have it land on feet. But it is instead some of the worst dust in the solar system so we would have to catch it even there wasn’t a big weight pensly for carrying it around.
Yeah, the chopstics mechanism is just so elegant in the end!
It can catch both stages & be used to stack the thing as well, simple and genius!
The space shuttle orbiter definitely had a lot more cool factor.
I think I’m convinced that VTOL is a better engineering trade off for space ships rather than making space planes.
Absolutely, wings only work in Earth's atmosphere. Rocket propulsion can work anywhere. Leaving the landing gear on Earth is also a no brainer since it's only ever used there so why bring it all the way to orbit with you? Thankfully all the other rocks we'd want to land on have much lower gravity so landing on them can be done with lightweight legs. Hell, maybe there's a way to send the landing structure ahead of time like some variation on that Chinese cable catcher they used for their copycat.
It was extremely cool 45+ years ago. But the space race ended, and while government-funded space programs did some fantastic work beyond that (space telescopes and Mars landers), it took capitalism to develop the resuable rocket, then scale it up to Starship proportions.
Like 50% of SpaceXs initial development came from tax payer money.
A good investment by Uncle Sam, it's saved them quite a bit since.
The government was a customer. That’s very different from the government giving a research grant.
That’s like saying 25% of Exxon’s development came from tax payer money because the government uses a shitload of oil.
A more accurate analogy would be giving contracts to Exxon back before they had ever found or drilled a single oil well, as their primary source of revenue to subsidize their R&D and learning curve, in the hope that they would eventually be able to supply the government with needed oil, and ultimately succeeded to become a key supplier.
They only gave the contract once Falcon had already gotten into orbit.
It also had a large stupid factor. Like one of von Braun's Germans was reported to have said: "they reinvented the wheel -- and made it square."
Could you share a bit more about where that quote came from exactly? Any primary sources?
I had to read the comment below (from u/modeless) before I realized by landing gear you meant the upright ones. I thought you wanted it to land sideways like a plane. (Arguably doable, though the control systems might add a lot more weight)
The problem with space planes is they are terrible planes, terrible rockets, and feed the egos of pilots.
To be fair to NASA and the astronauts, NASA needed humans who behave like military test pilots. In physiology, in reaction time, in crisis management, in following chain of command. And the armed forces were willing to give them access to known quantities.
We didn’t know how control systems would evolve over the next three decades, but the pilots wanted to pilot, and did not trust the control systems. And the irony of it all is that the Space Race was a proxy war for nuclear armament, so control systems needed to be made autonomous anyway.
Better control systems, wider telemetry, and not worrying about incinerating employees let current generation rocketry iterate faster, and do more fucking around and finding out. We found out twice with the shuttle and it killed the program.
It’s curious how much the upper stage now resembles a space shuttle on a ballistic trajectory instead of a glide angle. Very different landing strategies for those two modes of descent…
Yeah the Starship program isn't about landing on Mars or even going there.
It's about pumping mass into low Earth orbit, partly for commericial, but mostly military purposes such as Golden Dome. Been in the works for decades and finally here. The people who know are very excited.
Starlink is pretty amazing tech which can be used for both good and evil - from enabling reliable communication in disaster zones to letting civilians browse social media from remote locations to communicating with weapons of war.
Every product has the same adoption curve. Early customers pay a premium which pays for building the factories, not just the product. By the time everyone is using them the prices have gotten low enough that the price is informed by supply rather than demand.
SpaceX being their own customer, and a lower priority one, lets them levellize their revenue, which also helps retain staff. And if anyone commoditizes launch systems, they have a hedge against that. However if demand for starlink ever does exceed capacity, the launch side could find their schedules being much more variable.
In software, you see this with priority queues all the time if you know where to look. Someone makes a “low priority” system that soaks up spare capacity. Internal customers become dependent on these systems and then become delay-averse. Meanwhile, other teams also start soaking up that spare capacity, by improved design or feature creep or both. That low priority system becomes starved of resources, and the internal customers start saber rattling. That system gets its own dedicated resources, and now stranded resources climb back to the original levels, if not worse.
Starlink will eventually become the same thing. And I wonder if they will spin it off when that situation arises.
> to communicating with weapons of war
You could say the same thing for terrestrial internet. Not trying to be contradictory, I just find this a very interesting ethical topic.
The Internet was built to be literally bomb-proof rather than figuratively. The utility of that has been self evident and “five nines” thinking continues this tradition. AWS AZs are meant to partially survive floods and wildfires. A super volcano would take out an entire region but people would have other problems at that point (the exception being if emergency services were on those machines, but disaster teams have been learning to bring emergency infrastructure with them ever since New Orleans).
As a UIUC student used to be fond of reminding me, part of the University of Illinois’ contribution to the old Internet was in a building that, if it were to collapse, would fall outward and not crush the basement. Officially that building was designed so every office has natural light, like a collapsible water cup, but it’s a very interesting coincidence that it (the basement) is bomb proof.
Yeah but Starlink also intends to put weapons ONBOARD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
Defensive weapons.
It would be a pretty inefficient way to deploy offensive weapons.
No it's explicitly OFFENSIVE weapons (left-of-launch strike)
Castelion is building the hypersonic glider weapons. A more public predecessor is,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Falcon_Project
Striking any point on Earth within 90 seconds notice is interesting to some people.
It would end a lot of disputes rather quickly.
I unfortunately agree. Years ago I realized the Mars talk was just talk when I noticed that Musk and SpaceX were not funding any of the other stuff you’d need to fund if you wanted to “make life multiplanetary.”
Continuing to iterate on self contained biospheres and long term closed cycle life support? (Not a solved problem!) Working on construction techniques for the Moon or Mars? Studies on the dose response curve for gravity, like sponsoring a spin lab for the ISS to at least see if mice can reproduce in 0.3g? Self contained industrial infrastructure leaning heavily on 3D printers? Psychological research on the best way to build interiors and run social units?
Musk could personally fund all of that with little impact on his net worth.
It’s also decades of work. Some of what I listed is harder than the rockets. Better get started if you want to have a settlement on Mars this century.
Nope. Nothing. Just rockets, the a satellite network that is clearly “dual use.” Then Trump 2.0 and lots of “golden dome” (Star Wars 2.0) talk.
It’s not to go to Mars.
I love space and I hugely admire the engineering achievement, but it’s disappointing to learn for this and many other reasons that the people behind it were not the visionaries they pretended to be. They’re just more territorial apes obsessed with ape tribal stuff like race and nationalism and fighting over dirt at the bottom of a gravity well. Small minds with big toys.
I don’t think is right at all. It’s just Musk focusing on the fundamentals of ‘what is stopping us making significantly (100x or 1000x) more progress on space exploration. And the answer to that is that it’s just too expensive to launch mass off the earth.
If you make it much cheaper, then everything else flows from that. You no longer have to spend years engineering everything at the cutting edge of your mass budget. You can use off the shelf parts, you can have redundancy.
The gains will come when these flights become commonplace.
Biosphere stuff is more fundamental than just mass. We had several closed ecosystem projects built on the ground out of concrete, with no mass limits, and all of them failed.
A habitat on Mars would certainly not be closed ecosystem, especially not in the beginning. The biggest issue at biosphere IIRC was CO2 poisoning. You can crack the air in a mars habitat with power and in the worst case find Martian resources that will do some advantageous chemistries
This is pure speculation until it's demonstrated. Is SpaceX funding such demonstrations?
Do you think they just crack open the windows on the ISS?
Bad engineering, too many uncontrolled variables and roundabout solutions. Just solve the problems directly. Make the air, scrub the CO2, grow only food. The solution looks like a (light weight) nuclear submarine not a greenhouse.
Biosphere 2 was hippie gobbledygook.
"The Biosphere 2 project was launched in 1984 by businessman and billionaire Ed Bass and systems ecologist John P. Allen, with Bass providing US$150 million in funding until 1991.[15] Bass and Allen had met in the 1970s at the Synergia Ranch, a counterculture community led by Allen, who advocated Buckminster Fuller's "Spaceship Earth" concept and explored the idea of biospheres as a refuge from disasters such as nuclear war.[15] Several other former members of Synergia Ranch also joined the Biosphere 2 project"[0]
"Synergia Ranch is an ecovillage founded in 1969 by John P. Allen"[1]
Ed Bass inherited $2.8 million when he was a teenager from his great uncle who made his money in oil production, he's currently chairman of an investment and venture-capital management firm. In between he hung out with a bunch of hippies.[2] Just your typical nepo-boomer arc.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synergia_Ranch
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Bass
More likely than growing food will be bringing a couple of years of food with you, and having growth be only for proof of concept experiments (well and some freshness if it works out).
> a spin lab for the ISS to at least see if mice can reproduce in 0.3g?
That was done and the results were published a few months ago, but the study did not have any relationship with SpaceX.
The results were rather pessimistic for the long-term missions on Moon or Mars.
In my opinion, even if it is possible that humans might support a somewhat lower gravity than mice, the conclusion is that for interplanetary travel humans must use only spaceships that create artificial gravity by rotation.
The results of the study were that mice require a gravity of at least 2/3 of that of Earth to stay in perfect health and of at least 1/3 of that of Earth to avoid extremely severe health damage.
This means that even on Mars the gravity is not sufficient for long-term human life. In an underground Mars base, one could make a part with increased gravity by rotation, where the crew should spend most of the time, but that would increase a lot the complexity of building and maintaining such a base.
I didn’t know this had been done.
If the results hold then it’s another thing that counts toward settling space, not another planet.
It’s where I’ve been leaning for a while. If we want to go beyond Earth build huge rotating stations or spacecraft. Don’t just go down another gravity well.
Build your own spin stations and dial in the exact gravity and everything else you want. Mine asteroids, which are super easy to access. You can launch mass off an asteroid by throwing it really hard.
yeah. i much rather humans build space stations than inhabit planets unless those planets are precisely suitable for us.
we can use planets for their resources or industry.
Or by constant thrust at 1/3g, or a mix of thrust and rotation that achieves sufficient acceleration, though spinning + thrust means precession which I’m glad isn’t my job to zero out.
Unless someone invents the Epstein drive we aren’t going to have astronauts experiencing acceleration for months rather than minutes of the trip. And the more constant the acceleration the shorter the trip anyway.
The Mars smokescreen was strong so a lot of people bought into it, even employees who didn't have the security clearances.
The origin of SpaceX with Michael D. Griffin and Pete Worden really make it clear though.
https://ioc.exchange/@muskfiles/116333241408716236
Curious to know what the smoke would be screening?
Sounds like they're saying it's actually for military applications.
Really interesting. I remember scratching my head a little about stainless steel. It’s durable but heavy, cuts into payload fraction, and probably not what you would pick if the goal was to shoot interplanetary. At least not for the upper stage. Maybe for the big chunky reusable booster, but there aluminum probably makes more sense. Falcon is aluminum so it’s already the devil they know anyway.
I recall talk about transpiration cooling. My guess is it died due to complexity or that it would use fuel as coolant which further eats mass. There was a bunch of original work on composites which would make way more sense if you want to hit high energy orbits.
You could still, AFAIK, use Starship to put a bunch of components into LEO and assemble something to go interplanetary. Or at least its booster.
I have wondered if we won’t see interplanetary on a big scale (beyond Apollo scale) until we have fusion or beamed power. You could put up a beamed power constellation with this architecture I guess.
But it makes a lot more sense as is for LEO military applications. I can see that.
The weird Musk-Russia links, if that is real, are odd given this thesis. If we are building Golden Dome or whatever it’s called now then who is the adversary? If not Russia than who?
China isn’t expansionist beyond Taiwan and it’d be way cheaper to build our own domestic TSMC than to fight that proxy war.
North Korea and maybe Iran are the only other credible threats with an interest in attacking the US, and they are kind of a joke compared to Russia and China when it comes to long range capacity.
> The weird Musk-Russia links
Without discounting the possibility of him being fully russia-psyopped, always keep in mind that elon MUST put forward some nonzero pro-Russia face because he is a diplomatic point of contact in an increasingly tenuous diplomatic situation between the US and Russia on account of his company lifts Russian cosmonauts to the ISS on the regular
Why do you think there is a country interested in attacking the US? I don't think there is a single country interested in doing so.
> If not Russia than who?
then*
First off, I think this is all conspiratorial nonsense. But as for Golden Dome - it's more about offense than defense. The reason MAD works is because if you destroy another country then they also destroy you. But if you can negate the latter part, then you're simply left with 'you can destroy another country.' In other words if you can negate an enemy's ability to retaliate, then you can nuke or invade whoever you want, without concern about retaliation.
The geographic location of the US would make this basically a godmode type 'weapon' because a conventional invasion of the US is practically impossible since you'd need to bring mass number of forces across an ocean and those ships would simply get popped. Even coming through South America wouldn't really work because the Isthmus of Panama could just be hyper-fortified. And even then you still have to get to South America! But the US' chosen enemies are somehow half-way around the world, and we have plenty of proxy armies we can throw against them. And when our victims retaliate against our proxies then we'll support them with a powerful army of flags, emojis, and slogans on social media.
All that said, this still doesn't work. Nuclear fallout would affect the globe, with a Russia-US conflict estimated at driving some 5 billion deaths from climatic effects alone. [1] Missile defense will likely always lag behind offense simply because offense is akin to shooting a bullet at a giant stationary target, whereas defense is akin to shooting a bullet at a bullet. It requires a massive technology disparity to be effective. And there are also other forms of nuclear strikes than missiles - such as nuclear created radioactive (and super sized) tsunamis. And if a country really wants the flashing red button, then a salted nuke could likely kill off most of all of humanity (and everything else on Earth), let alone any given country.
[1] - https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00573-0
Oh I doubt very much he has given up on that. He's smart enough to know that the delivery time is going to be extremely variable, and that most of the other problems involve figuring out how to make the place palatable to humans, which is just too far in the future right now. Don't bite off more than you can chew.
> which is just too far in the future right now.
How much time is needed to do the required research? Like, how long it would take to learn how to create an artificial biosphere on a small scale, so you can have a farm on the Moon or Mars? 10 years? 20 years? Maybe 50 years? Isn't now is the good time to start the research?
No because they aren't a government funded research team, they are actually trying to make money along the way. So the appropriate time to do that kind of work is sometime closer to actually needing it.
The silver lining is that if Elon had continued pushing for Mars, to not let it happen organically, Mars would become a company town, with all the bad connotations that ever had, with paying for air added on top of it.
Until they toss Musk out an airlock and found the Mars Colonial Republic. :)
While I'm a little more optimistic that the development of Starship will lead to manned missions to the Moon, Mars, and other bodies in the solar system I drew a similar conclusion as you did a few years ago as well.
What I find frustrating about this is that a lot of the biological research needed to make a sustainable colony is stuff that would have direct benefits on Earth for people today.
R&D on bioreactors, genetically engineering organisms, making food production more efficient, techniques to make people more resistant to the cancer causing effects of radiation etc... all of these could have impacts on how we live today.
Damned impressive.
That was incredible impressive, what a feat of engineering!
The Chinese one was more impressive
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GJ-wZLLuh9M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zt1V9UWhuKk
Curious what will be next 10x design? Nuclear propulsion? Same rocket made by robots ?
Space elevator?
The most amazing thing i've seen in a while.
The heat shield looks very good. Excited to see how much work it will take to fly this again. I'm in awe. I like the future sometimes.
Seemed to me two tiles were missing, including one right in the center of the ship's belly, but no hull damage.
Easy fix
If you ignore the scale it doesn’t seem all the impressive. But the scale is bonkers.
Best thing ever built and it works!!!
Amazing, kudos SpaceXAI. You folks just don't give up!
You can see a plane passing underneath it at video timestamp 22:44:43!
Nice catch (NPI)! Unfortunately I think it's a bit more mundane, it'll be a piece of ice breaking off the lower section of the body. If you scrub through the footage, particularly earlier in the flight (e.g. 1:43:37 on the SpaceX stream, T+54:05) you'll see other pieces of ice flying off that look very similar.
Nice, great
i wonder how much fuel was left over after landing? What is their safety margin in seconds of burn remaining?
I have no idea about Starship, but in one of the Environmental Assessment reports there was specific data on the fuel remaining in Falcon-9 after landing. It was <1270 kg of RP-1, which is equal to 14 seconds of firing at full thrust for one engine -- if one could use all of the fuel up, which is typically not possible. That was the upper bound.
Probably 2 to 3 seconds max? You pay a massive penalty for carrying any extra fuel.
How many years until the next milestones?
- in orbit refueling
- moon landing
- Mars rendez-vous
- Mars landing
- humans on Mars
Nah, the game is to put data centers in space. Plus the Space Force dreams.
It's important to be able to set aside cynicism, even if for a single hour, to enjoy technological achievements like this.
It is important to recognize what technology will be used for and demand it won‘t be used for evil.
The implied claim being "datacenters are evil"?!
s/evil/a scam/
That ship has sailed since the V2 rocket.
Since the rock and the stick.
That ship has sailed since the first rockets were used to launch bombs and incendiaries somewhere in China, a long time ago. Hammers can be used to build and to kill. Knives cut wood as well as flesh. Humans are belligerent primates whether we want it or not, changing that isn't something even all humanities faculties in the world can manage nor any ideologue intent on creating the New Soviet Man or Übermensch or transhumanist. Fortunately there tend to be more people intent on doing 'good' things with technology than 'bad', where 'good' can also include defending against those doing 'bad' things even though that is a thin line to walk.
I am not a cynic, but a realist. It is easy to do things when you put a ton of money towards the effort so I find this nothing special. Maybe when I was a child these things would fascinate me, but they are just engineering.
So, what would amaze me? Ending homelessness in the United States. Because that takes more than money. I would like to swap the "passion" or engineering for the "compassion" of ending suffering. Very easy to shape and change material things, very hard to change the heart.
The people you want to share your excitement might be suffering under the same separation of wealth that made this landing possible. (Yet there is little talk that they failed to catch the booster and it exploded).
Me and four other engineering graduates just sat and watched this around a big TV in my mates apartment in Sydney, and what we saw was an amazing team, delivering amazing engineering results. Just take a win for humanity for once.
> Ending homelessness in the United States
You don't need private people/companies or more taxes for that. US has enough resources to do it already. Maybe you should go ask your politicians, better yet, ask your friends/neighbors/yourself if you are ready to take the drastic steps necessary to solve that.
Well to start off, I am homeless, so I can’t really ask myself for help with that.
But imagine engineering hearts so that we did not have to ask?
Of course, you should not need to ask, in a better world.
If govt really cared about it, more than that, if (most) PEOPLE really cared about it, it should be top 3 priority of any govt in any country.
- Govt should build massive cheap hotel-type housing spaces (full free) equipped with bare minimum necessities like roof, heating, food, basic healthcare (not million $ free cancer treatment).
- Mandatory drug rehabilitation (if applicable)
- Mandatory job search/placement/training
- Jail with forced-labor for people who put no effort and/or causes disturbance
If your govt has $6M to fund tourism in Egypt, money to fund opera/ in columbia, comic book in peru, then they have money to help homeless people IN the country. No money should go to non-citizens (let alone non-citizens in another country) while citizens of a country go homeless.
I am typing this from the security of my home, without worrying about 0c temp, or food. So it is easy for me to say this but still, I am sorry that you are going through this, and I sincerely wish you the best; that your life turns around, even if just a little, enough to have a roof over your head.
Homelessness is largely driven by personal choice and by our desire to not compel the "unhoused" into mental institutions where they'd probably be better served.
There are ample government and private support mechanisms, including housing and food, but most choose not to take advantage.
> Homelessness is largely driven by personal choice
Ha! Really? I am homeless. Disabled with a serious mental illness. I just cannot afford housing anymore. Living out of my minivan.
Not my choice. I do not even have a psychiatrist or therapist anymore.
> There are ample government and private support mechanisms, including housing and food, but most choose not to take advantage.
This is the biggest myth neoliberals tell themselves to feel better. I agev up. Seven years on a section 8 housing list then they just dumped me with no explanation.
I would think that private space exploration frees up all sorts of NASA funding which can be spent on your social improvements of choice, no? Hard for me to see the either-or you're positing. We can have both.
I share your unhappiness with the grifts, including SpaceX's. Then I think of the thousands of lesser, more damaging-in-aggregate ones that I likely have no view into, and it bums me out.
So yeah, what I have left is my child-like "heck yeah rockets!" :) And this one was great.
ofc a comment like that would get downvoted by investors and technologists, but yes i agree, if you have enough imagination and money, almost anything in engineering is eventually possible. that same imagination and money is rarely spent on making the experience of living beings who are suffering nicer. but we dont live in a 1D world and all people need a win, engineering nerds included.
Space is unique in consistently attracting comments like GP's. Literally no other endeavor, no matter how boring or silly, attracts these. Has been so since before the Internet, even.
Even pointing out that this is just private company doing private stuff - so no government money to accuse of being misallocated, which was the only thing that gave those evergreen comments some legitimacy - won't help. I guess it's just inertia now.
At least this is talking about homelessness and not feeding people; the latter was getting too easy to push back on by pointing out just how much space contributed to farming and food security.
i was posting in support of all parties, the nerds and the homeless. i guess space attracts these sorts of comments because of the extreme contrast. on the one hand, going to space takes enormous energy, manpower and money, and its easy to claim misallocation of resources when the extremes are so glaring. its a good opportunity to point these things out when theyre so obvious.
> so no government money to accuse of being misallocated
They have at least $3.6 billion from the US to misallocate. Closer to $10 billion.
https://www.usaspending.gov/recipient/8a3a5525-3218-a488-db0...
https://lew.am/comparing-subsidies-received-by-spacex-boeing...
Semaglutide will likely help on the homelessness front, both directly and by helping us understand deep drives better in general.
Musk's Neuralink is ironically likely to help on the psychiatric disorder side.
Just Send More Money™ is not likely to help (as you recognize). Neither is "compassion".
And a $25,000 EV will alleviate the auto crisis in Americ- wait a minute...!
The two big causes of homelessness are substance addiction and craziness. Semaglutide is the first medical intervention that can help to some extent with the desire part of addiction.
Electric brain stimulation is likely able to help with mood disorders. Maybe even OCD and schizophrenia. If nothing else, proper measurements (lots of good data) of both healthy brains and mentally ill brains should help. We've had almost none of that, with EEGs being rather pathetic.
Nobody is going to "solve" homelessness tomorrow or next year. Not the people who think they can just spend more money -- someone's money, not their own, not the people who think charity is the way forward, and not the people who think what is needed is cures.
We can do some almost immediately if we are willing to institutionalize more people but it's not a good or complete solution and we aren't willing to, anyway.
The real improvements are likely to eventually come from things like semaglutide (and more likely more research into the instincts that drive addiction, now that we finally have a molecule that can affect them) and things that both provide data (that we sorely need) and can provide interventions directly in the brain.
Still waiting on the promised $25,000 EV though. If Neuralink is anything like American EVs, psychiatric patients might as well move to China for treatment.
Thank you for for making this comment. It helped me realize in myself what's changed over the last few years.
I grew up reading Zubrin's The Case for Mars, The Martian, and October Sky. I went to space camp at NASA, and as a 14 year old I sent an angry email to NASA when I learned of the early ISS decommission date(they later extended the lifespan several times, and I like to think I was the reason ;) ).
I followed Bigelow Aerospace in the 2000s doing the only interesting commercial work in space, and afterwards became amongst the first online SpaceX fanboys, long before they ever landed a merlin engine.
I studied hard in school with a passion of going to Embry-Riddle to learn to build rockets - though I ultimately chose a software path in life instead, I stayed an enormous space fanboy over the 2010s, frequenting the SpaceX subreddit and catching every launch and landing stream I could live.
I've cried watching so many rocket landings. The spirit of human endeavor is god damn BEAUTIFUL to me.
I want to point my finger and say that everything else changed. The Internet became what it is. Elon Musk showed his true colors. Software Engineering became middle management.
But the truth is that I've changed.
I care about the people wealth disparity hurts more than I do about us getting our perfect vision of the future now now NOW.
The faster we pump this machine, the louder the Earth is SCREAMING.
The world is on fire, and we're covering it in data centers with the goal of building artificial machines for strip-mining humanity of the very competency in engineering that has given us so much joy.
We're caught up in a race to the bottom and without diverting our path I have to wonder if this starship landing will be one of the last great human-driven engineering achievements before we lose the ability to do so ourselves.
I don't think the answer is to swap the passion for engineering with compassion, as I think they can both live happily together, but I hear where that desire is coming from.
It's coming from a place of love.
And when the last tree has fallen, we may find that we cannot eat money.
May love fill this place.
Thank you for having the courage to post this
Fcking makes me sad that they were so downvoted. What is wrong with people?
Is it? I mean, I’m loving this historic event but if someone wants to remember the stupid parts, what’s wrong with that?
In orbit refueling is likely next year. The goal is to have two shots at a moon landing in 2028.
And a nuclear ion rocket scheduled for 2028 as well.
The current NASA administrator is doing a good job getting rid of all the things keeping NASA from doing things. (And at least after Artemis II, both parties in congress seemed to be on his side.)
What was the issue that delayed Issacman's nomination/confirmation? Why was his nomination withdrawn and then renominated?
I believe it was Trump and Elon Musk falling out over the "Big Beautiful Bill". A lot of people then campaigned for to get the job anyway, and he did.
After Artemis II, there was a moderately hilarious congressional hearing in which the Republicans insisted on giving NASA more money, the Democrats insisted on giving even more money than that, and Isaacman trying to say "we're good".
(I believe NASA got the more money.)
> humans on Mars
Only recently I read how the dust on Mars surface is toxic, contains those unhealthy ultrafine particles (PM2.5 and PM0.10) and sticks to almost all surfaces. It will be difficult to keep from getting inside a habitat.
https://www.space.com/astronomy/mars/mars-dust-is-toxic-how-...
And how the Apollo astronauts got "lunar hay fever", allergy-like symptoms from the lunar dust that stuck outside their space suits and so got carried inside their lunar module.
https://www.esa.int/articles/about-us/directorates/human-and...
Couple of milestones before that:
- flying reused booster + Starship
- longer in orbit missions for Starship of weeks or months. There are some non trivial issues with that probably; and you'd need that to not make refueling pointless.
- having two active launch sites. Nor strictly required but probably handy if you are going to have two Starships in orbit at the same time.
They might not get to all that in that order. But the important step today is that they get to inspect a "flight proven" Starship without water damage. I bet they are going to learn a lot of details of where exactly they need to iterate and improve. This took them some time with Falcon 9 as well. We've gotten used to this thing basically launching and landing without many issues. But that wasn't always the case. 2027 is probably going to see an increase launch rate.
Moon landings are going to be an interesting one because it depends on NASA as well and the decision making around that is very political. On the other hand, there's going to be increasing peer pressure from the Chinese. They have their own plans and it doesn't involve waiting for NASA to get there first. They are targeting 2030 for a manned mission. I expect the politics might get a bit more opinionated on that topic as that gets closer. The long term game here is not just landing and planting another flag but actually establishing a permanent presence on the moon. That involves flying useful payloads back and forth. Starship seems designed for that.
What happens after that is going to be an interesting one. IMHO, Starship is optimal for earth landings but not necessarily for the moon and Mars. What's currently flying is probably over engineered for a place with no atmosphere and one 6th of the gravity (the moon) or a very thin atmosphere and one third of the gravity (Mars). Would those flaps even work in the Mars atmosphere? However, it's a great launch vehicle to get components in space to build something more optimal. Also the booster might be used to launch other things than Starship. Like something that will never come down and can instead be fueled for deep space missions and Mars/Moon landings.
They did refly one of the boosters already.
Launches, Starlink, military provide cash. SpaceX needs to be profitable at least to some extent.
All I want are bigger and more cleverly located space telescopes, a couple of more probes and orbiters around other planets and asteroids, and I want those Mars samples that Percy has been pooping over the Mars surface returned to Earth and studied in a lab. And maybe a probe to Alpha Centauri or exo-planet viewers that use the Sun’s gravitational lensing in the next 5 or 6 decades.
Launch is a small part of the cost of a space telescope. Certainly having a bigger fairing opens up design and capability options.
We will need nuclear propulsion for a lot of that, but the good news is that it has already been built and demonstrated back in the 70s.
edit: Rate limited so adding link to interview the reply mentions here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujfF_SnxvZQ
And NASA is working on it again! Isaacman talked about it in a recent interview with Everyday Astronaut.
I think the concept for the Alpha Centauri probes uses solar sails and externally fired lasers[1]. The exo-planet viewer concept also proposes solar sails.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2069_Alpha_Centauri_mission
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens
I don't know how long it will take, but I'll be here watching you seethe as they hit each one and you post another list.
yes exactly
“Full flow engines can’t be made!”
“Okay, they can, but the engines are too complex and expensive!”
“Okay, they can be made much simpler and cheaper, but they’re not powerful enough!”
“Okay, they’re powerful enough but the heat shield won’t work!”
“Okay, it works, but catching a rocket is impractical!”
“Okay, catching a rocket is practical, but…” <—- we are here.
Coming up next:
"They'll never be able to re-use the ship"
"They can re-use it, but it's not economical".
"They can re-use it economically but can't be fast enough"
"They can re-use it economically and fast back to back...but look at the amount of environmental damage!"
"They can't generate enough power to fix the damage"
"They generated enough power to undo environmental damages but ruined the sky"
...
I mean, you need to get money from somewhere to fund your dreams. If it's datacenters in space then let be it. They are pretty cool as well. It seems a lot of people don't like them on Earth.
>They are pretty cool as well.
That remains to be determined. The math with blackbody radiation cooling borderline works. So they may be cool, but whether it is enough ...
But I don't think we will see success before the craziness down here has settled down and they don't face the political headwinds they currently do. And I don't think that they can compete with ground based per unit cost no matter what kind of black magic they do.
That's your reaction to watching this? Pretty sad.
Those exploration dreams can only exist via the bankrolling of government contracts and riding bubbles.
Google is only able to fund Waymo, Quantum Computing, etc because of their questionably moral ads cash cow.
What actually is the point of all this? I'm not trying to be a snarky contrarian, I've never had any interest whatsoever in space, star trek, "what's out there?", so I genuinely don't get it.
I'm not trashing people's interests, obviously I am the odd man out in not giving a damn, I just don't see what we're trying to achieve when there are so many issues we can't even figure out on earth.
> damn, I just don't see what we're trying to achieve when there are so many issues we can't even figure out on earth
Earth issues are mostly coordination problems. Space issues are technological problems. Elon Musk has been very successful at solving technological problems: electric vehicles, space flight, mind-machine interfaces.
It makes sense that people like him who can solve technological problems point their attention and substantial agency to the things that their unique skills place them in a position to solve.
The Elon Musk of coordination does not currently exist. One must imagine that the kind of person or school of people who instituted NATO and the US-Japan MDA and turned our one-time enemies into our staunchest allies were people of such caliber but there’s no one I know today who qualifies for that.
Musk definitely has mastered firm-level coordination but clearly national coordination (let alone international coordination) is a problem beyond even him. His teams nearly religiously point the same way, and they have achieved wonders. It is truly remarkable what these people have done. Good for them, and I’m glad to see them at it!
Thank you for the well thought out reply. I will try to do better to understand the larger technological breakthroughs of space flight as a key development in how things modernize on earth itself
Elon Musk is not the person building any of it. Not EVs, Space Flight or mind-machine interfaces.
He is reckless and ignorant and yes it works for some of his stuff and it doesn't work for others.
His ignorance alone in DOGE probably killed children and humans. Don't get me wrong, US of America doesn't has to pay for aid around the planet even if they contribute massivly to climate change and consumes a lot of resources importet around the planet, but his abrupt cancelation and involvment in USAID killed chilrden and humans.
Do we also ignore everything else if you list up things which are only positive? Like Boring company? Solar city? Buying Twitter and manipulating democracy around the planet? Doing an Ad tour in front of the White House and disrespecting anyone else who can't buy themselves next to Trump?
If you don’t get it, nothing anyone says is going to convince you otherwise.
The people who “had an interest” in pursuing the unknown built the entire modern world that you exist in, since so many things have some connection back to the space program, including ironically the very device you’re using to express your opinion. So it’s probably worth paying them a little respect.
> since so many things have some connection back to the space program, including ironically the very device you’re using to express your opinion.
Well there you go. I did not know that. And yet, instead of saying, "The space program is useful because of X and Y, it's pretty cool actually, I recommend book Z about it.", I get replies that I am a lost cause who doesn't respect scientists.
Unreal. I could have a more balanced conversation with a Muslim imam about religious beliefs.
So we did the moon landing btw.
Shouldn't you be able to articulate a proper answer without any issues?
Is it an engineering feat? Yes.
But i would bet James Webb Telescope and Moon landing were a lot bigger?!
A single one of these Starship's payloads can deliver a telescope approximately 20-25x larger than the James Webb Telescope.
Okaaayyy? We still were able to send James Webb up without a Starship?
Soooo?!
Its cheaper okay, we can send up bigger things good but the comment stated
"So it’s probably worth paying them a little respect."
It sounds like i get down to my knee for Space-X and i still don't get it
With Starship, it will cost about $70-90 to put 1kg of payload into orbit.
That will open vast new opportunities for space-based researh and services.
For example a university that has to pay at least $50k to launch a research cubesat today will be able to do it for about $2k.
And? We can't live in space, we can't travel because distances are too large, it's still polluting our orbit and a huge waste of resources, for what? Just build more satellites? Is there even the demand for more satellite internet?
I'm all for doing R&D for research's sake, like medicine research in zero G, but this exagerated "everything related with space is magical and life-changing" view is ridiculous. This whole HN thread is ridiculous, this is the crowd that would fall hook line & sinker for datacenters in space.
This is the most powerful rocket ever constructed. It has the largest possible payload. The James Webb is tiny compared to what is possible. No other rocket can do that. End of. Please stop. You are embarrassing yourself.
You can assemble stuff in space - like the ISS.
The ISS took 125 Billion and 12 years to assemble. Starship can put the same amount of payload into space in 5 launches for less than 1 billion.
And inflatable modules would also help, at least with the living quarters. Not so much for the science modules.
Ah I see a fanboy.
Okay I get it, discussion useless.
Just to be clear: James Webb was build and designed with nanometer aligned optical system, has to be cooled down while being at L2, can't be serviced and repaired and it was only enough money there to build it once and took 5 years of building and 25 years of planning.
A rocket is an engineering joke inc omparision.
That's why a car salesman could build it with fraction of cost while nasa sucking on thumb and spending 100x more money to launch anything. Cool
It is an achievement, i'm not disagreeing with it.
I'm disagreeing with the level of it.
I'm also disappointed that we celebrate this and ignore that the richest man on the planet is also involved in reducing usability of starlink in a real war were real humans are dying. And his involvment in USAID, DOGE and co.
Starshield is govt controlled.
Starlink is not allowed for offensive usage.
So take your complaint to govt. Also, nobody is stopping you from using starlink-alternatives.com . In fact, since you hate him, that's what you should do.
Ukraine is defending itself and just before Trump, US of America put a lot of pressure on my country germany and the europeian union to stop doing business with Russia.
Now Elon Musk, the richecst person on the planet and part of US of America is interfering with his system, which gives him A LOT more power than a single human and non gov should have in a WAR which is not his probably due to some indirect garbage between him and the current US of America Gov.
While the EU is paying for it.
And i do not use anything Musk.
Musk has only direct negative impact on my life, no posive one. He used his money to buy twitter because he couldn't shut up and then leveraged it to manipulate and allow manipulation in our elections in germany (search for Elon Musk and AfD).
He is potentially poisening our atmosphwere with his rocket launches.
And in general, I do care about fellow human beings and i'm pissed in their names for all the people he is responsible for being killed (after all he is also responsible apparently for all the invention of the companies he invested in eh?).
Why does EU rely on a system built by a private person?
Where is EU's innovation? Oh wait, we are busy with bottle caps, stays together like family lmao https://x.com/moritzkremb/status/2107021822155985254
Where is Germany's nuclear power plants?
Where is Germany's industry? Why is Germany axing its own legs and then crying about it? Why did Germany laugh when Trump complained about over reliance on Russian gas? Why is Germany predicted to not have enough gas this January? Why is Germany fucking up the middle class with more and more taxes? All that tax, yet almost nothing to show for. Keine geld!! Economy going to shit. People taking sick days like candy. More people dying to heat than gun violence in USA. Hours of notary to open a company. Effing europoors and you come to complain...
PS: Statistically, when I walk on the streets, every 4 German I meet, there's one nazi (as per your definition I would strongly assume). Look inside first.
> Why did Germany laugh when Trump complained about over reliance on Russian gas?
Any idea that Trump is a perceptive genius with regard to energy security should have been throughly dispelled with the Iran fiasco that rolls on.
A broken clock can be right once or twice a day but that doesn't mean one is not an idiot to deny it (the time; not the clock) _when_ it is right.
If a private person from another country is the only one controlling space, it becomes a geo politicial and military issue.
So either we should advocate for destroying it, or we are allowed to leverage.
And for all the other things you ar ementioning: Non of them have anything to do to what i said. Its just strawman left and right.
Are you also joking about the Gas and winter? Because Donald Trump, the President of the US of America used his power to start a war with Iran.
More people in USA die from gun and heat than germans die from gun and heat.
And just because there are nazis around the world, i'm not and this is part of my argumentation. If you are a nazi and it doesnt matter to you, of course you don't understand it.
You argue with your Salesman, but don't care of anything negative about Elon Musk? As long as he catches a Rocket eh? Get a spine?
A private person is building things, he "controls" the space because he built things. Nobody stopped Europe from building those things. Again, Starlink is not for military purposes. You have an issue, go complain to US Govt who controls Starsheild.
No, it is because Germany decided to eff up the economy in the name of bogus crap by removing nuclear before enough solar came online.
> heat
Europe*
You, as a German, have zero right to complain when 1/4 (soon 1/3) of your country men are Nazi. As I said, look INSIDE (and stop blaming everyone else).
Perhaps you don't have any clue that earth and it's inhabitants are very, very likely to be the only one, - - or, of the very few planets in our known universe, with such a sequence of events over millions if not billions of years that allow us to be living beings, evolving - - while out in space is a vacuum, intense radiation, no oxygen, no food or water for many hundreds if not thousands of light years distance away. Incredibly few of our species grasps this fact and actually appreciates it ...
What's the point of heating sand - we barely have enough food to feed our pre-industrial society.
Well considering we gave SpaceX a contract to get us to the moon and for that to happen it needs to do something ridiculous like 20+ in orbit refueling yeah it's a pretty important thing to criticize.
Holy cow.
It's very impressive
This is incredible. Huge respect for the engineering team. What a time to be alive.
As an aside, it’s been fun watching the number of UFO posts on Reddit while Starship orbited Earth. They all refused to believe it was SpaceX.
It's crazy how far you have to scroll to even see this on the front page of NYT.
Maybe people have bigger problems ? War, cost of living crisis etc ?
Would be nice if the good news got some room on the front page, no wonder people are so hopeless when the things that would give them hope and optimism are buried under a pile of doom
I forgot to mention Space X has again limited Ukraines star link again so people are dying from their inability to intercept Russian ballistics…personally I find that more important front page news…you reap what you sew ?
I don’t disagree with you but this exciting for “tech people” who are into engineering. That’s about all.
What good news though? These days it's a tie at best between humanity reaching new levels of space access and trillionaireity reaching new levels of stranglehold on humanity.
Sorry, as much as I'd like to separate the two, I can't.
What great top comments in here. The others finally keep quiet. Facts speak for themselves.
Congrats to SpaceX engineers! But for those who are not fans of the guy at the top here's a video of Blue Origin landing their rocket. Competition is good! https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XjSmNf3y37U
They only have a 60% catch rate on the booster. The elimination of the landing feet has reduced it's reusability.
Magical era. What a feat!
will scaling the size of the rocket continue to be the way to go? will doing a three stage setup make sense?
The tyranny of the rocket equation says no, probably not. As you add mass the amount of fuel you need goes up exponentially.
Fuel costs practically nothing, a tiny percentage of the total launch cost. At some point an additional 1000 tons of liquid oxygen only sets you back $250k. Kerosene or LNG is cheap too. At the very least your booster and first stage fuel cost is more or less irrelevant, make them as simple and big as possible. Just gotta avoid hydrogen and specialty gases.
I don't think they were talking about dollar cost but rather mass ratio cost.
Congrats to the engineers.
(But lose the bastard at the top, OK?)
He's actively holding the program back at this point. Top engineers in this industry are increasingly reluctant to join a company with a such a toxic culture and public reputation tainted by musk.
The top engineers are already there. The top engineers care more about engineering than politics.
Source: Everyone else in SpaceXs rearview mirror - If the top engineers were elsewhere they would be ahead
I'm an actual aerospace SWE
Pre-trump 1 SpaceX was a tough place with a slightly off vibe but otherwise strong industry reputation.
Post-trump 1 SpaceX became a place you put in a couple years so that you could get a more stable job wherever you wanted
Post DOGE SpaceX is a place you really have to hold your nose to work at and coming out of that company increasingly labels you as a possible culture problem. I've seen a lot of SpaceX people getting turned down during interviews because they're either toxic or present a risk of toxicity.
If a carsales man can do it, you can too. Go on. Open up your own SpaceY and do better. I'm sure all the top engineers will flock to yours.
The amount of stress that these vehicles go through as they ascend to orbit and then descend back through the atmosphere to the surface is mind-boggling. To create a rapidly usable vehicle that can do this pushes the limits of material science.
Starship is finished - jsut ask Elon, thats why he sold it.
Feels good.
Can anyone explain this to an idiot like to me? I follow information tech, but am pretty ignorant on engineering/space.
I recall the SpaceX chopsticks catch from about a year ago, which looked great.
This looks similar (heavy thing lands smoothly on a platform) but I gather it's very different from the comments?
Previously they successfully caught the booster returning to the launch site from ~100 km about ~10 minutes from launch.
Here they caught the upper stage ,called starhip, which went to ~260 km orbit, deployed 50 tons of satellites and after 22 hours shed its orbital velocity and manuevered to be caught with centimeter precision. :)
Oh nice, it's great to see each milestone along the way.
I suppose the challenges with this step are that after starship did its job, we expect it to be worse-for-wear, and so maybe less able to stably land? (But it did it!)
It's more a difference of speed. A less known fact is that rockets and orbital mechanics is more about going fast than it is going high.
The booster has a max speed of mach 5 before it returns to the tower. The upper stage which landed had a max speed of mach 25 which has to be shed off somehow without breaking the ship!
It is very impressive that they can control the return trajectory accurately enough for a tower catch, and to coordinate the arms on the tower (which are very slow and heavy), to grab the rocket without damaging it.
But this was already convincingly demonstrated by catching the booster three times.
It is very hard to return the second stage from the orbit due to its vastly greater kinetic energy. Protecting the rocket from the heating during the reentry is something that has never been done until SpaceX started to practice with the Starship.
But they have already demonstrated this feat before, with pinpoint landings into the ocean.
The significance of today's event is mostly in demonstrating that they have such a high confidence in this system that they were able to satisfy the safety requirements for obtaining a licence to fly the Starship return trajectory over the populated landmass, crossing Mexican territory on the way to the tower. This is the cherry on the cake. Now all the pieces are in place, and once the remaining wrinkles in the system are ironed out, we can expect the flights to become routine, and eventually, the reuse of Starship to become routine as well.
The other, somewhat more modest, but still important milestone was that they kept the Starship in orbit for a whole day, and after that they still had the fuel for a deorbit and the landing burns. It did not all boil off.
Edit: Here is an interview with Lars Blackmore, the guy in charge of Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) for Starship, where he talks about flying the descent over land for the first time: https://youtu.be/POrMxoZbXVI?t=390
Congratulations
Amazing. Doesn't even look real.
Legendary ♥
New tech tree unlocked for humanity.
Impressive how reliable they've made those engines!
Haven' they had engine failures on every Starship launch? They lost one this time during the boostback burn.
Kind of crazy to reduce the hardware on ship so much and move so much complexity to the ground. This can really only happen in a situation where anybody can throw out any dumb idea, because if you suggested this 20 years ago people would think you are an idiot.
That's...the point. You can hire commercial welders to work on the ground side and build everything out once, cheaply.
The issue with the shuttle era was that they needed huge teams of specialized technicians to refurbish the insanely complex orbiter after every mission.
If we ever get sufficiently improved materials science for heat shields and engines there's still always a possibility of returning to the SSTO space plane concept. That would allow a more austere launch and recovery environment, but given current limitations this is the local maxima.
The actual problem with the shuttle was the same as the same as the actual problem with all space technologies -- there just isn't that much value in launching stuff into space. It's nonzero, but it's a rounding error when compared to terrestrial applications.
What do you mean? Reducing the complexity of the drive doesn't mean moving anything to ground?
Or do i miss something?
>This can really only happen in a situation where anybody can throw out any dumb idea, because if you suggested this 20 years ago people would think you are an idiot.
Indeed.
Musk's biographer tweeted the pages from his book <https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942> discussing how in late 2020 Musk suggested, then insisted against considerable opposition from his engineers, that Superheavy be caught with chopsticks instead of landing on legs like Falcon 9.
Also according to the book, Musk is the person who suggested and, against considerable opposition from his engineers, insisted on Starship switching to stainless steel instead of carbon fiber <https://x.com/richardprice100/status/1728106606616015097>.
(Hint to others: Musk was right and his engineers were wrong. Both times.)
perfect. hyperbole failure moment
Elon Musk is a real life version of D.D. Harriman, the protagonist of Heinlein's The Man Who Sold the Moon. An excerpt taken from Wikipedia:
""I", he says, "would cheat, lie, steal, beg, bribe—do anything to accomplish what we have accomplished". Children donate money for a promise of all contributors' names engraved on a plaque left on the Moon. The names, however, will be microscopic in size. Harriman sells land and naming rights to craters, and plans to sell postal covers canceled on the Moon to collectors. He starts rumors that diamonds exist in moondust, intending to secretly place gems in the rocket to convince people that the rumors are true."
And anyone who's read Machiavelli knows what kind of man it takes to succeed at this level in non-fiction.
Given the fact that men of his abilities and motivations have existed throughout history, and will continue to exist as long as we have men, for all his perceived flaws I'm quite pragmatically relieved he is ensconced with a Western power rather than any other in the world.
Damn, that looked smooth and glorious. This is how I'd like the future to be.
I hope they can make significant progress before the socialists take over. They were practically begging for launch permits under Biden.
Nice! I wonder how the engineering involved here compares to the engineering behind manufacturing TSMC chips (including ASML machines, Zeiss optics etc.). Which is harder?
As it seems building rockets has historically been a capital intensive business with low profits and limited demand, so there just wasn't much competition in the space industry.
Many countries are capable of space flight & deploying satellites.
Only a few companies in the world can manage the top-tier fab processes for modern chips.
Only one company in the world has successfully caught a rocket. *Edit: 2!
It's hard to directly compare, safe to say they are 2 of the pinnacle examples of modern human engineering.
> Only one company in the world has successfully caught a rocket.
China did that too.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/10/china/china-reusable-rock...
I would say that they're orthogonal except for the requirement for exacting results and standards. Doing anything once is hard. Doing anything repeatably is hard^2.
Chips are harder.
Do we just look past the failed primary booster objective? (I didn't write the brief)
Edit: Yes, ignore that bit.
We don't have to look past it. Musk said it failed because engine underperformance caused too little fuel margin. He added that they have upgrades due on future flights.
If they ran out of fuel with 50 tons of payload it certainly begs the question of whether they will get to the goal of 100 tons of payload even with upgrades.
They also had engine fail on boostback. Reliability has been a persistent problem, they'll have to fix it for refueling and manned operations.
Booster catch has been done as has booster re-flight. The only remaining part of the full functionality that has not been proven out is ship reuse.
I see.
"The booster’s primary objective on Flight 15 will be executing a successful launch, ascent, stage separation, boostback burn, and return to the launch site for catch. This will be the first return and catch attempt for a Super Heavy V3 booster." [1]
[1] https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-15
Please go back to reddit
Reusable stages is very neat, but seems a little crazy to pay the tyranny of the rocket equation twice. I heard one person say that carrying fuel to land over the whole flight means it takes 23x more launches to get an equivalent payload to orbit.
Using modern technology, couldn't disposable first stages be produced much more cheaply than during the space race?
How much of modern manufacturing disposable booster's cost would be fuel vs metal?
I heard one person say that carrying fuel to land over the whole flight means it takes 23x more launches to get an equivalent payload to orbit.
I recommend talking with people who know more about spaceflight.
Starship HLS is estimated to require 22 refueling launches to support 1 moon mission.
OP, this is probably the source of the confusion. Some people are claiming that SpaceX will need 20+ refueling launches for human lunar landings. However, that's a very different claim than reusable rockets requiring 23x more launches just to carry the same amount of payload to Earth orbit.
Without knowing how much it would take in expendable configuration, that doesn’t imply that it takes 23 times as many launches
How is that even relevant? The Starship HLS launch won’t be landing the upper stage.
> I recommend talking with people who know more about spaceflight.
Yes, because asking on HN if such people would be willing to answer obviously gets you downvotes and comments like this.
It's not paying it twice. The rocket equation is about the ratio of the wet and dry mass, so for an expendable rocket you're always limited by the fact that there's an upper stage (and for the second stage the payload etc).
This is why SpaceX cares more about TWR for their engines than traditional rockets did. It goes from making a negligible difference to a huge component of how much fuel they need to keep for landing.
This seems a little confused.
The 23x more launches figure comes from HLS (Nasa sponsored mission to the moon). They may well change the configuration of that anyway, but if you want to refuel in orbit, that's what it costs. It's hard to get fuel to orbit (or any sort of payload). Previous Moon missions haven't refueled anything, but they couldn't return anything heavy from the moon's surface, the vehicle got smaller and smaller as it went and many parts were left behind, so it's not comparable. You can be sure if it's cheaper to somehow do this mission with expendable boosters, they'll think about doing that.
On a normal mission just to earth orbit, there is one booster and one starship, and reusing the booster is more a question of why not save some money for a little more propellant use? The reususable booster doesn't contribute much extra weight, it uses little propellant for boostback and landing.
The booster also doesn't go all the way and you need a booster if you're going to reach orbit (due to that equation), so it doesn't take much to make it reusable. So all in all, why not make it reusable if you can? What would you save from using expendable ones?
Fuel is so much cheaper than ships.
But you need more ship to carry that fuel, which is exactly what the tyranny of the rocket equation refers to.
Correct. Economics still work out pretty solidly in favor of reuse.
This claim doesn't make sense to me, you need most of the fuel to escape gravity. Coming back is almost free.
It costs less, but it is not free. The stages need to be designed to come back and that adds weight. Additionally you need some fuel, it is not all air breaking. And every bit of weight is really bad, because of the rocket equation.
Without internal figures no one can say what is ultimately financially better. Especially now that the development is a sunken cost.
Yes, they should just parachute people out of planes, why reuse them thousands of times, carrying that extra fuel to land, they could go another few hundred miles.
The point is the ship and rockets are expensive vs fuel. Fly a Starship 100 times the cost is amortised over the flights and fuel+bit of refurb maintenance is tiny.
If the fuel (+ oxidizer) ends up costing as much as 1% of the cost of launching a conventional single-use rocket then the people behind it will be very happy. That means that their rocket (+ cost of ground facilities + all the people prepping the rocket and monitoring the launch) is very cheap.
The fuel (+ oxidizer) is basically free compared to all the other costs.
Those numbers don't make sense.
It doesn't take the same amount of fuel to land as it does to lift.
Speaking as a Kerbal Space program playing, internet commentor, It's probably <1% of the fuel to briefly counteract terminal velocity as it is to lift off and reach space.
That 23x number is trivially refuted simply by looking at the fact that this flight delivered 52 tons of cargo to orbit. Could a similarly sized expendable rocket like the Saturn V deliver 1196 tons?
How is it twice? Braking on the way down doesn't take nearly as much fuel as lift off so the "tyranny of the rocket equation" should be paid only once.
"I heard one person say that carrying fuel to land over the whole flight means it takes 23x more launches to get an equivalent payload to orbit."
I don't think that this is the case when using the atmosphere to shed most of your velocity, which is what we do when landing on Earth. Propulsive braking would be another story, but you can avoid that on bodies that do have some atmosphere. In our proximity, only the Moon and Mercury would need propulsive braking, but Moon's gravity is low and Mercury is hard to visit anyway.
That said, once you use the atmosphere to cushion what is basically a fall, the weight of the necessary heat shield comes to the equation too.
They use the atmosphere to brake, not fuel.
That's like saying we shouldn't reuse airplanes after one flight because you'd have to fly it 23 times to have it pay for that reuse.
That's still 1000x cheaper than... building a new airplane every flight.
And anyway those numbers area about moon missions, not low earth orbit.
Congrats to the everyone involved (more than just engineers!).
Here's hoping Musk gets kicked before he sinks this project too, as he's already severely burdened it with his short-sighted fascistic endeavors. As a formerly very enthusiastic follower of SpaceX's activities the specter of Musk's evil beliefs really ruins the messaging of making progress for all of humanity.
It's difficult to underline how huge this is. This marks the first time in the history of rocketry that the upper stage of a rocket has returned home from orbit to a safe, upright landing.
(And to preempt the obvious objection: yes, maybe you can call the Space Shuttle an "upper stage of a rocket" if you squint hard enough, but it didn't do upright landings, its external tank was not reusable and even the Shuttle itself was effectively rebuilt from scratch at exorbitant cost each time.)
It's sad to see a lot of media missing the point, eg as I type this BBC is reporting this as "SpaceX successfully catches part of Starship rocket on its return to Earth".
Edit: corrected to note that the SRBs were reusable, but the ET was not.
> none of its boosters were reusable
Notably, they were reusable! Sure, they had to refurbish them, same with the shuttle’s main engines. The only thing they threw away was the external tank which didn’t have any engines.
Yeah this guy is smoking something. I actually think the shuttle landings were more impressive than this one. Not taking anything away from what they're doing here, but they're still only up to the mid-1970s technology-wise.
> none of its boosters were reusable
The SRBs of the shuttle landed by parachute and were recovered from the water and reused
Everyone saw the space shuttle be reusable, no one cares in the public when the cost of living is so high.
I get it’s exciting but it means almost nothing for 99% of people.
Don't forget the X37
> yes, maybe you can call the Space Shuttle an "upper stage of a rocket" if you squint hard enough
Why wouldn't it count? It is not the first time in the history of rocketry that the part that is not the boosters returns home intact.
Sure, you can say "it's the first time in the history of rocketry that it lands upright", but you could also say "it's the first time in the history of rocketry that it is not white".
If you want to say how huge this is, tell me how different it is from landing the boosters. Because from the outside it sure as hell looks very similar.
The Space Shuttle has four parts, namely the Orbiter, the External Tank, and the two SRBs. Only the Orbiter is reusable and actually lands, the rest are jettisoned in flight. (SRBs are recovered, the ET is not.) However, the Orbiter is completely incapable of flight without the other three, so it's not a rocket stage on its own, just part of one.
As for why it's harder to catch Starship than Super Heavy, where do I begin:
* Super Heavy is suborbital, its maximum velocity is far, far less than Starship.
* Super Heavy returns upright. The Starship does the famous but aerodynamically very complex "belly flop" to reduce speed.
* Super Heavy only has two static fins to guide it. Starship has four actively controlled fins that need to survive the extreme forces of launch and re-entry.
> The Space Shuttle has four parts, namely the Orbiter, the External Tank, and the two SRBs. Only the Orbiter is reusable and actually lands, the rest are jettisoned in flight and burn up in the atmosphere.
Nitpick- the SRBs were also recovered and reused
Right you are, corrected.
Thanks, the insights about Super Heavy vs Starship are interesting.
About how "huge" it is, I understand that it is economically huge: Musk will get even richer.
I would be interested in knowing how "huge" it is in terms of engineering. Like, my understanding is that they needed to invent new maths to go to the moon in the 60s. Does SpaceX compare with that, or is it "just" what you can do with a lot of money and powerful computers?
Genuinely interested, even though rocket fans will hate me for not knowing the answer and daring asking. Bring the downvotes!
Whatever you call it, the Shuttle Orbiter wasn’t a complete stage in any case. It needed the external tank, which was never recovered.
SpaceX has now demonstrated all the pieces of a fully reusable launcher. Next comes putting them all together in the same flight, and hopefully demonstrating that the flights can become frequent and cheap. There’s no guarantee of that, but it’s looking good.
You know what was huge? James Webb telescope.
Look its cool to see a catch like this, it doesn't necessarly feels that difficult tbh?
And I just don't get it? Is it cool to watch? yes, but whats the endgoal besides reducing costs for starlink and military stuff?
Do you want more cool stuff like James Webb in orbit? Fully reusable huge rockets like Starship is how you get them there.
Also, remember how JWST had to do that incredibly complex and fiddly in-orbit expansion and alignment to fit together the mirror after launch? If Starship had been available at the time, this would have been far easier, since Starship has twice the diameter (four times the area) of the Ariane rocket they used to launch it.
Can Starship get to L2?
Yes without a shadow of doubt it could deploy two JWST on a single launch. Add in the refuling they successfully demonstrated and the sky is no longer the limit.
Besides that I really really wished it wouldn't be Elon Musk, i'm looking forward to cheaper stuff so its easier to send science stuff up. Don't get me wrong at all.
But it feels like hyperbole.
Pure technically speaking, if you can fly a rocket up and control it properly, whats the crazy thing flying a rocket back down and controlling it?
Or do you see it more like a milestone seeing?
And for me, it still feels like if Elon Musk tries his Dataenter 'idea' and really sneds up everyday a Starship, we will lose a lot of control as normal humans whats going on in space and what will happen to our atmosphere.
I think the main challenge is really the heat shielding. That is the part that is so different from the takeoff. And it actually remains to be seen if that is good enough for repeated rapid reuse.
> Pure technically speaking, if you can fly a rocket up and control it properly, whats the crazy thing flying a rocket back down and controlling it?
It only took the entire existence of humanity to reach this point.
I'm not willing to hand-wave that away as some kind of technologically-obvious conclusion.
"It only took the entire existence of humanity to reach this point." as everything else.
EUV required genuine new engineering for an example.
To pick just one achievement among many, the Raptor engines on the Starship are literally revolutionary. First ever full-flow staged combustion engine, designed for both extreme reliability and cheap mass production, even the fuel they use (methalox) had never been tried at this scale.
I agree with the engineering of Raptor engines, fair and square but does that have anything to do with catching ar ocket?
Did you watch the landing video? That great big plume of fire nudging the Starship into the chopsticks with millimeter precision comes from Raptor engines!
> Pure technically speaking, if you can fly a rocket up and control it properly, whats the crazy thing flying a rocket back down and controlling it?
You are absolutely right. Same thing about just putting a battery and some motors to make a car like RC car! Same about 48v/replacing canbus. Same thing about putting some satellites on orbit for internet! Same for mobile service! Same about if humans can use eyes to drive, computers should be able to using cameras! All _simple_ things, obvious in retrospect.
Yet one man is marching forward, poking his nose in industries he does not belong, and still almost always coming on top.
Makes you wonder why existing incumbents can't do these "simple" things.
One man who got money, has money and a cult following.
Of course he is flexible enough mentally and ignorant enough to disrupt markets, sure and for this he got rich.
But why does every Musk follower ignore all the bad things he leaves in his march forward?
All the humans around the Space-X 'city'?
Kids and Humans affected by USAID and DOGE?
His lying around everything he promised to people?
This thread is about an achievement made by the thousands of people working at one of his companies. Elon is only a small part of the equation.
Also, I don't understand what you're even trying to say by "ignorant enough to disrupt markets". There are plenty of rich people flinging money around, few have achieved anything near what Musk did. Look at Blue Origin, which is still playing catch-up despite SpaceX already proving everything and Bezos throwing basically infinite money at it.
Its a comment and comments reflect discussions.
Every success of his companies, give Elon Musk power and deminishes everyone who is or was affected negativly by Elon Musk.
What would you expect if HN had an article about Fat Boy launched successfully on Japan?
Pure positive comments?
> it doesn't necessarly feels that difficult tbh?
Are you for real?
?! We know how to send rockets up, we know how to send them back to earth. We know how to stabilize a rocket. I mean we fly them for ages?!
'that difficult'
Look at projects like James Webb telescope.
You don't understand the precision required to catch a 70m tall behemoth when you have Earths atmosphere. It's not even close to bringing a capsule to an approximate area, a small ship somewhere with almost no atmosphere, or even landing a rocket on a pad (which we've only had since Falcon 9)
But others are also working on it and showed they can do it too?
Today was literally the first time humanity flew a rocket to orbit and landed it vertically.
brother... we launched and autonomously put a car on mars using a sky crane, now that is damn amazing
“The James Webb telescope is just a three mirror korsch telescope in space. We’ve known how to build those since the 30s and we’ve been putting telescopes in space since the 60s. Doesn’t seem that impressive”
This is what you sound like to everyone else here
And i can easily explain to you why this is not the case.
They put the most advanced telescope at L2 which is the most remote location 1.5 million km away which can't be serviced and can't be rebuild easily.
It has nanometer optical precision in space which needs to be cooled through multiply layers of high tec foil.
Its mirrors are precicse to nm level.
Took 25 years of planning and 5 years of building.
people don't understand how amazing the heat shield is
no not even close.... please look up how insane the James web telescope technology is
From Wernher von Braun to Elon Musk... It seems we're living in a Mel Brooks movie (with the funny parts removed).
von Braun just wanted to build rockets. He was a Nazi, yes, and he did Nazi things, but he would have been (and was) just as loyal to any other country that let him build rockets.
Musk, OTOH... joke's on us, he's into that shit.
My understanding is that von Braun was fine with using slave labor to build the wartime rockets. He wasn't just some nerd totally detached from Nazi atrocities.
I don't know what Musk's real politics are, but at the moment at least there is no evidence that he is as bad as von Braun.
He disowned his own daughter because he found her transition so offensive.
> I don't know what Musk's real politics are
Really? That's pretty funny. Hilarious, actually, or sinister.
This is exactly the most impressive feat of engineering I have ever seen.
Only catching both the booster and the rocket would top this one. But the rocket only being caught is still impressive regardless.
SpaceX below $1T is criminally undervalued.
SpaceX below $1T is criminally undervalued.
Launch itself isn't super profitable and doesn't have a very big TAM, especially if you carefully treat the TAM as a present value and discount future cash flows. Also, at least by my personal guesswork, Starlink alone shouldn't get close to a $1 trillion valuation. It seems like the current valuation is based on people's guesses about the likelihood that space data centers pan out in a big way.
> It seems like the current valuation is based on people's guesses about the likelihood that space data centers pan out in a big way
The Starship program is one of - if not the - biggest risks here. Making starship work could bring the launch cost down far enough to derisk that whole program, and today just made it a lot less risky
Starlink is going to be using a lot of launches for satellite replacement. Target constellation size is 40K satellites, which with a 5 year satellite lifetime means they need to replace 8000/year (160 launches of 50 satellites each => 3 launches per week).
We've seen the booster landing/catch before, but seeing the ship do it with the belly flop definitely looked cooler to me. I still remember the awe of watching two boosters land at the same time after a heavy launch. Watching the transition from bellyflop to landing gave me the same awe and being impressed.
Why is Space-X undervalued because they can catch a rocketship?
You do understand that a company needs to have a business case equivilient to its valuation right?
Going to Moon only costs money, going to Mars only costs money.
Our whole planet sends 1000-2000t of payload into space, most of it is now starlink.
> Why is Space-X undervalued because they can catch a rocketship?
The market values SpaceX over multiple areas of the business and their future plans and it isn't just this event which they have proven to accomplish.
> You do understand that a company needs to have a business case equivilient to its valuation right?
Nope. That is not how this works nor how investors see it. It is about their total addressable market (TAM) which SpaceX can capture over everyone else. So here are some more further questions:
1) Who is paying SpaceX for the compute that they have?
2) How quick is SpaceX building their data centers to support their customers?
3) How many people use Starlink as their primary internet provider?
You understand that almost all of where SpaceX businesses can expand into those areas and grow into that valuation and higher?
> Our whole planet sends 1000-2000t of payload into space, most of it is now starlink.
Your point is?
So who else can catch and reuse a rocketship to frequently deploy satellites into space in a very short period of time? (Don't say Blue Origin.)
1) Anthropic because Elon Musk bought too much Compute and doesn't need it for his own AI proudct. In parallel Neoclouds are building up the same compute and its more like a negative sign that they got lucky
2) ? I don't understand what you mean. Are we now talking about Datacenters for others or the space thing?
3) probably below 8 million. 10 Million customer overall, plenty as an alternative or for camping etc.
Amazon Leo is an alternative. But for sure Space-X started a race to the bottom (china, blue origin and co) so they have to start moving and use their first mover advantage.
My point is, that Space-X is already responsible for the most amount of payload which gets send into space. We as a whole planet don't have that much payload and Space-X made it alot cheaper to send payload up.
So were is the 1 Trillion evaluation? Btw. its currently at 1.89T
God bless you for arguing with the Musk/SpaceX Stans on here, but there's honestly no point.
> 1) Anthropic because Elon Musk bought too much Compute and doesn't need it for his own AI proudct.
The Grok models and products also use the compute in SpaceX's data centers. It only makes sense to provide that excess compute to others such as Anthropic that don't own any, and that is worth tens of billions a quarter.
> In parallel Neoclouds are building up the same compute and its more like a negative sign that they got lucky
It is not the same. You can ask any chatbot, how many GPUs do the neoclouds have over SpaceX in their data centers?
Then:
> 2) ? I don't understand what you mean. Are we now talking about Datacenters for others or the space thing?
Both. The point being that they (SpaceX) are already quickly building new ones on land codenamed "Gun Range" and "Spam" and are the only ones that can launch and connect all of them via Starlink (if they eventually launch new ones into space) and serve both themselves and new customers.
> Amazon Leo is an alternative. But for sure Space-X started a race to the bottom (china, blue origin and co) so they have to start moving and use their first mover advantage.
Amazon Leo is not even generally available. So that doesn't even count.
> My point is, that Space-X is already responsible for the most amount of payload which gets send into space. We as a whole planet don't have that much payload and Space-X made it alot cheaper to send payload up.
So what happens when the neoclouds are not able to build data centers on land anymore due to legislation that prohibits more of them getting built [0] and ultimately they get paused? Most of the neoclouds are already sold out and cannot build more of them and have deadlines on these loans with interest on them.
Maybe the compute has to be deployed somewhere else in the long term....
> So were is the 1 Trillion evaluation? Btw. its currently at 1.89T
Exactly. It if goes lower than 1T it is cheap. This is not even pricing in the building of their own semiconductor fabricator (Terafab).
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/nov/04/datacenters-...
If you start building Datacenters up in space, you need to send A LOT of Starships up there for MONTH to get ONE normal avg size GPU based DC in Space.
This DC can then poisen our atmopshwere btw. and burns up limited resources on our own planet.
They don't need the compute because their product Grok is not competitive. They don't use the compute to make Grok better because?!
Amazon Leo will be though. Space-X has a first mover advantage, what did Tesla do with it?
> If you start building Datacenters up in space, you need to send A LOT of Starships up there for MONTH to get ONE normal avg size GPU based DC in Space.
This isn't a massive problem for SpaceX as you want to believe it to be.
> This DC can then poisen our atmopshwere btw. and burns up limited resources on our own planet
So are you going to tell them to pause everything? (You won't) What solution do you have to them to solve this? (You don't have any solution.)
> They don't need the compute because their product Grok is not competitive.
That is false. Otherwise they would have given up on scaling Grok already.
> They don't use the compute to make Grok better because?!
So Cursor does not have any customers that use Grok on a regular basis beyond Twitter / X? Nor does Grok Bot need the compute either? (They most certainly do.)
Efficiency gains in their inference engines allow them to use less GPUs for themselves, and also sell that excess compute to others who are otherwise sold out. Both scenarios can be true and it doesn't mean they "don't need it" either.
> Amazon Leo will be though. Space-X has a first mover advantage
With what launch pad? SpaceX has plenty of their own and are building even more.
> What did Tesla do with it?
They built self-driving cars with "FSD" and autopilot with that advantage, and your point is?
Don't you think the US government is very likely to put restrictions on what other countries can use SpaceX services for?
Well, both booster and ship catches have been demonstrated now.
Did they catch both of them in this mission?
It was meant to be a dual catch of the booster and the rocketship and only the rocketship itself was caught.
Catching both of them in another mission would top this one.
... especially if they reuse either part.
A fool and his money...
This achievement likely changes the course of life in this solar system.
What?
Why?
Are suddenly aliens on the moon or mars and now because its cheaper to send stuff there, its now suddenly economically worthwhile to do so?
The course of human life, now much closer to Mars colonization, thanks to reusable launch being so much cheaper than expendable.
Mars colonization doesn't make sense though. You can't colonize a planet which is not self sufficient and depends on planet earth.
If you do'nt 'fix' earth why fixing up mars?
The point of Mars colonization is to create a self-sufficient civilization on Mars.
Nothing in the laws of physics prevent that. So at the very least, we know that it's not impossible.
space colonization is a fantasy from the era of rapidly growing population. now that the population is shrinking at near-extinction speed, what's the point of it? the Earth is not and will never be as inhospitable to us as dystopian sci-fi depicts. even Antarctica is a better target for colonization that Mars, where the gravity is wrong, the air is poison, and the soil is poison.
Population decline is due to government restrictions. Space colonization offers an escape from those restrictions.
huh? what restrictions? China's one child policy was abandoned more than a decade ago, replaced with pro-natalism policies that don't work.
Of all the things that aren't going to happen, human's colonizing mars has got to be near the top.
If you want the Vulcans to take notice, you gotta get to warp speed. Building the transporter of the parts/pieces of that kind of ship is just the first step.
I do like this take though
SpaceX made me watch engineering feats live on stream. I love it!
bet they used lidar
(let's see who gets the joke)
seriously though, do we know the names of the engineers who made this possible or is it a secret?
You could go to LinkedIn and look at people in the:
* structures
* propulsion
* avionics
* flight software
departments, because they all work together to make this happen, along with support from IT/SRE. The person most responsible for ensuring that it happens is Lars Blackmore[1], who was also the Responsible Engineer in charge of making sure Falcon 9 landed successfully
[1] - https://linkedin.com/in/lars-blackmore-78a237
It's just mostly newtonian physics ... nice job but not that impressive. With the right investments we could have done this decades ago.
I want you to comment on the first commercial fusion reactor too, please
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Obligatory XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/793/