totm nov 2023 SpaceX Discussion Thread

[Jacke]

22 minutes ago, Beccab said:

Which of these is more likely?

Subsidizing costs with funds from other sources is a common business practice to gain market share before later changing things in the future with some combination of now-possible lower costs and higher prices.  Sometimes it's done a little, sometimes it's done a lot.  Sometimes it works.  Sometimes, like what is happening now with Uber, the money runs out and the rate of things falling apart picks up a lot of speed and what was seen by those skilled in the field years ago is now obvious to many, that the end is nigh.

Maybe SpaceX makes enough over the lifetime of each launch vehicle article to makes some gross profit.  I suspect that's true.  But that's about all we can do until there are a lot more numbers in a lot more detail with a lot more confidence and someone independent with a lot of knowledge of the field weighs in on it.

[Rakaydos]

3 minutes ago, Jacke said:

Maybe SpaceX makes enough over the lifetime of each launch vehicle article to makes some gross profit.  I suspect that's true.  But that's about all we can do until there are a lot more numbers in a lot more detail with a lot more confidence and someone independent with a lot of knowledge of the field weighs in on it.

So over 10 flights, you will accept that SpaceX saves more money flying the F9 booster again than building a new booster.

Superheavy, meanwhile is supposed to be cheaper to build, but also good for a thousand flights.

 

Note that SpaceX will probably not achieve that with their early models. The early F9rs were considered good if they got 3 flights. But once they learned how it worked, the doubled down and have flown boosters past even ULA's expectation of reuse profitability. The early superheavies wont reach 1000 flights, but spaceX will throw them away until they figure out how to make a superheavy that can.

[RCgothic]

 

 

 

[mikegarrison]

4 hours ago, Beccab said:

Something made to be cost effective is more likely to be cost effective than something made to help the USAF

The Shuttle was intended to be cost-effective. That was the whole point of a reusable spacecraft. The only part of the shuttle that was not reused was the external tank -- it was more reusable than Falcon 9 in that regard. And it *was* more cost effective than Saturn launches.

It was a first try, and it also suffered from design requirement bloat. And yet, it flew for 30 years and was absolutely essential to the construction of the ISS. All-in-all, pretty much everything SpaceX fans say Starship will do actually was done by the shuttle. In the same way that the DC-3 had to come before the 707.

[RCgothic]

Starship will go beyond LEO.

[Beccab]

12 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

All-in-all, pretty much everything SpaceX fans say Starship will do actually was done by the shuttle.

Literally the only thing they have in common is being reusable orbiters. They are as similar as Starship and Crew Dragon.

Shuttle:
- wasn't fully reusable

-wasn't a super heavy-lift launcher

- couldn't fly without crew

- couldn't be refuelled in orbit

- couldn't reach or return from lunar orbit

- couldn't land on the moon

- couldn't reach orbit of, return from or land on mars

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, Beccab said:

We can assume SpaceX is reusing rockets only as a PR move and that they are extremely ineffective, but they want to ridiculize the Proton so they continue spending hundreds of billions so that maybe one day they will be able to raise prices by 100 times and gain millions. Or we can think that SpaceX is gaining some money as a launch provider and that reusing rockets 10+ times has finally become less expensive than throwing them in the sea. Which of these is more likely?

The more likely is that some well-known company is a paper screen with a painted Mars and a shiny Tintin rocket, behind which some serious men from absolutely another price category are managing numbers with ten-eleven zeroes to push Boeing and LockMart from the space market.

And a smiling person standing in front of the screen, facing towards the audience, is an anthropomorphic personification of that, and a skilled showman making you believe that the painting is real.

He owns an electric company, manufacturing accumulators and one of electrocar models, and everything one can read from the press about that company, is that its owner is a normal, typical "greedy capitalist shark", a skilled businessman never letting a cent pass by, and even (iirc) never changing it work for the covid measures.
The electrocar factory descriptions are also far from the romantic space communism, it's a pure money-making enterprise, without impurities.

One can remember than when SpaceX finished some stage of Falcon works, he had fired a significant part of the workers, even when currently he keeps building, so this was an act of temporary economy, not of hard financial state.

So, everything we know about this person is that he never lets a billion fall from hands on Martian ground.

And the easiness of spending his own billions on obviously blurry Martian projects, makes to think that he doesn't spend them, but runs the show in front of the screen, while the real investors put (tens of ?) billions on such strange purpose.

And as probably there are not so much billionaires ready to spend their money on Mars, it looks like the only such billionaire can be only Mr. Budget (probably a French surname, idk) and the money are actually spent for mundane purposes. Say, to support with money a bunch of companies against a couple of others, supported by another influential group of investors.

***

About Proton and other premature happiness.

As it was stated not once, most part of world launches don't depend on Starship, Proton, or whatever.
They are pure national activities, and it doesn't matter whose rocket is bigger.

What about the Southe-East Asia and other custom customers, that part of market was anyway unavailable for Roscosmos:

1. After the known events and following sanctions even if Proton was ten times cheaper than Falcon, the NASA owners would just put it under sanctions and push from the market.

2. Even if there were no sanctions, the men behind the screen would throw another bag of money to decrease the Falcon launch price even below the cost, and anyway this part market was lost.

So, the decision to dismiss Proton was absolutely practical, because Angara and Soyuz-5 use the modified engines from Energy (rocket), many times tested, being manufactured, and enough mature to use and upgrade.
While Proton (an ICBM from 1960s, btw) uses engines which aren't used on other space rockets, and now on other ICBM.
So, while RD-253/276 is a good engine, it's now a one-rocket actor, so as the existing part of market was anyway lost, the rocket row could be dismissed in whole.

To the date there is no sense in mass production of Angara, because most of light sats and OneWeb are being launched by Soyuz, while 20 t heavy modules and PTKNP will be required by 2028 when the lunar program starts.
The Angara engines are tested, usual, debugged, manufactured.
The Angara fuel compartments have flown several times, they are OK.
The Angara in whole (different versions) consists of the same Universal Rocket Module which has been tested.

So, it makes sense to start manufacturing and using Angara whenthe lunar program (including the ROSS station) starts, by 2028.

Before that it's no need in it.

 

Actually, the Russian space program is on transfer stage of Hohmann orbit from the previous ignition (ISS building)  to the next one (lunar program and ROSS).

If look with attention, absolutely all parts of it are intact and many of them at least once tested, just it's too early to ignite the engines.

 

Also, that's why I seriously believe that Rogozin is a figure not lesser than Musk.
The former is an officer on the watch, keeping the cruise ship on course between seaports., and a PR person
The latter is a showman for press and a PR person.

Edited August 15, 2021 by kerbiloid

[mikegarrison]

18 minutes ago, Beccab said:

Literally the only thing they have in common is being reusable orbiters. They are as similar as Starship and Crew Dragon.

Shuttle:
- wasn't fully reusable

-wasn't a super heavy-lift launcher

- couldn't fly without crew

- couldn't be refuelled in orbit

- couldn't reach or return from lunar orbit

- couldn't land on the moon

- couldn't reach orbit of, return from or land on mars

That's a huge mix of so-far-unproven aspirational goals for Starship (really, "land on and return from Mars"?) and stuff that's about as meaningful as saying "the Shuttle never launched from Texas". If "couldn't fly without crew" is a big deal, then fine. Buran rather than Shuttle. Whatever.

I just find it incredibly frustrating that many people in this forum are comparing claimed eventual capabilities for a program that, I remind you, is still awaiting its first actual trip to space, versus a program that made hundreds of missions over 30 years and was instrumental in building the biggest and longest-lasting space station the world has ever had -- and complaining that the real historical spacecraft couldn't do everything that the still-in-development spacecraft is promised to do.

The 707 of course turned out to be vastly more capable than the DC-3, but that wasn't a foregone conclusion just because the designers of the 707 expected it to. I mean, the designers of the Comet expected the same thing, but it didn't work out the same way for them.

[Beccab]

11 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

complaining that the real historical spacecraft couldn't do everything that the still-in-development spacecraft is promised to do.

I have literally spent dozens of posts repeating over and over to stop comparing Shuttle and Starship because they have nothing in common, including the post you are replying to. You were the one to say that "All-in-all, pretty much everything SpaceX fans say Starship will do actually was done by the shuttle."; I didn't compare the planned Starship capabilities to Shuttle, you did

Edited August 15, 2021 by Beccab

[mikegarrison]

4 minutes ago, Beccab said:

I have literally spent dozens of posts repeating over and over to stop comparing Shuttle and Starship because they have nothing in common, including the post you are replying to. You were the one to say that "All-in-all, pretty much everything SpaceX fans say Starship will do actually was done by the shuttle."; I didn't compare the planned Starship capabilities to Shuttle, you did

You have been quite literally comparing them.

The post I quoted above, for example.

5 hours ago, Beccab said:

Something made to be cost effective is more likely to be cost effective than something made to help the USAF

[Beccab]

6 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

You have been quite literally comparing them.

The post I quoted above, for example.

Which was answering:

5 hours ago, Jacke said:

Because the Shuttle's use cases were very similar to some of Starship's.  So Starship may recreate in a variant form some of the Shuttle's mistakes.

 

7 hours ago, OrdinaryKerman said:

Also spy satellite ops were never Shuttle's main purpose. Possible use case, yes, and it was studied, but not its reason for existing.

But because the Shuttle was going to exist and was planned to almost completely take over launching US government payloads to space, spy satellite ops and other government payloads massively influenced the Shuttle's final design.

The cross-range requirement that drove the large wings on the Shuttle came from the U.S.A.F.'s desire to have it capable of doing 1-Polar-orbit missions from Vandenberg.  Without that, the Shuttle could have had much smaller straight wings, as it did on some of the earlier designs.

The Shuttle payload bay size and design was strongly influenced by the forecast U.S.A.F. payloads that the Shuttle was planned to deploy and recover.

And so many people talk now about Starship taking over the launch market as if it was a fait accompli.  Before even a test-article Starship has launched to orbit.  Sounds familiar.

People critical of Starship have been making this comparison for years, I have only answered to those. Quoting myself:

5 hours ago, Beccab said:

So, for the 100th time, Shuttle-Starship is a terrible comparison

 

On 8/10/2021 at 6:50 AM, Beccab said:

You are going to ignore it like the previous 50 times, but:

- starship is not shuttle

- starship is not buran

- starship is not a plane

- starship is starship

 

On 8/9/2021 at 10:36 PM, Beccab said:

Sounds like shuttle would be an awful comparison to starship

 

On 8/9/2021 at 9:56 AM, Beccab said:

Different vehicles have different shapes and different functions. Stop trying to compare it to the shuttle, it isn't trying to be a shuttle. Do you remember when the Shuttle made the bellyflop manuevere and landed on its back using the SSME? The shuttle lands like a plane and has the shape to make it land like a plane. Starship doesn't land like a plane and has the shape to make it not land like a plane

 

[Rakaydos]

The shuttle might have been worthy of comparison, if it had been allowed to iterate. But the reward structure was all wrong.

NASA proposed a cheap reusable shuttle, but had to compromise the design with extra, dumb requirements from the military to get enough funding. And once they had the prototypes, development funding was cut off. the expence of maintinance was a plus as far as the political class was concerned, and it's main mission was to keep russia employing soviet rocket scientists, building a russian annex to Space Station Freedom so the soviet scientists didnt go to Iran or northKorea to make ICBMs. 

SpaceX wants to go to mars, on it's own dollar. To do that, they need a mars rocket that can they can afford to fly on their own. A rocket that affordable is ALSO monopoly-formingly good for the existing launch market on earth. Their boss understands that the prototype is not the finished product, and that there's always room for improvement. This is what is pushing Starship development.

[Elthy]

Why are the same things discussed every few pages? There is a forum rule against derailing.

[tater]

4 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

The Shuttle was intended to be cost-effective. That was the whole point of a reusable spacecraft. The only part of the shuttle that was not reused was the external tank -- it was more reusable than Falcon 9 in that regard. And it *was* more cost effective than Saturn launches.

It was a first try, and it also suffered from design requirement bloat. And yet, it flew for 30 years and was absolutely essential to the construction of the ISS.

At the time it first flew the math I believe was that Shuttle would be more cost effective than the Titan family of launch vehicles (not counting all the problems with those, lol) if it launched on the order of weekly. The number I remember as break even was 54 (might be misremembering). That was assuming the annual fixed program costs could result in turn-arounds and reflights at that level. The actual cadence was nothing like that, sadly.

As for Shuttle building ISS... sure, but that was in large part giving it something to do, had something like Shuttle C been built the number of actual Shuttle launches required would have been far smaller to get the same volume station since the modules would have been huge.

As for capabilities overlapping with Shuttle, as a launch vehicle bringing stuff to LEO, obviously, Shuttle brought all kinds of things to LEO. If Starship can actually take 100-150t of cargo to LEO, then being equally cost effective to Shuttle per kg of cargo would require each launch only cost $5.2B to $7.8B. If a Starship launch costs $130M per launch (1/10 Shuttle), it's 40X to 60X cheaper per kg than Shuttle—minus crew, obviously. If a SS launch costs about what a Falcon 9 costs retail, it's 80-120X cheaper.

The crew part... yeah, who knows when crew flies up/down on it. If they were willing to accept Shuttle level risk a crew SS seems pretty likely. Initial Shuttle risk was a 1:9 chance of LOC, program ended at like 1:90 I think as the estimate.

 

4 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

All-in-all, pretty much everything SpaceX fans say Starship will do actually was done by the shuttle. In the same way that the DC-3 had to come before the 707.

Things Starship is supposed to actually be able to do that Shuttle never did (assuming they make it work, big if).

1. Be operationally reusable. This means be reusable the way the 1970s art showed shuttle being reusable. Literally rolled into a regular hanger, serviced like a plane, and remounted for launch.

2. Have an absurdly high launch cadence even as a possibility. Shuttle promised 54 launches a year or so as a minimum to make it useful for cost-effective satellite launches vs expendables. Maybe SS can reach the cadence promised by 1970s Shuttle, Shuttle certainly didn't.

3. Refill with propellant in orbit. Shuttle never tried, and there was not reason for it to.

4. Leave LEO and take cargo or crew to the lunar surface or Mars, then return to LEO or the Earth's surface.

5. Bring truly huge payloads to LEO. Shuttle was on the order of 25t cargo, SS cargo capability is on the order of bringing the Shuttle to LEO as cargo. So the system could leave a new much bigger ISS in space with 2 launches (since the solar, radiators, and other non-crew volume would take some of the available 1000 m3, I'll call it 2X).

Edited August 15, 2021 by tater

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

13 hours ago, Rakaydos said:

SpaceX wants to go to mars, on it's own dollar

I really see that as an aspirational goal or just public relations - as in 'we've already done Moon, let's be the first to Mars!!!' 

I really doubt Mars - if it happens in the next 15-20 years - will be done in-house.  Moon was a contract award (and if Moon works, then Mars should work) - so by snatching the contract he gets to continue to develop on someone else's dime. 

Let's not forget that 'commercially viable space company' is of necessity a for profit enterprise.  And absent competition from BO / ULA / Boeing / etc... What we will get is Ma Bell.*

 

 

 

*(something that works but does not innovate ) 

Oh - and @mikegarrisonis correct - putting up SX aspirations and plans as foregone achievements is naive. 

Edited August 16, 2021 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[Rakaydos]

9 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I really see that as an aspirational goal or just public relations - as in 'we've already done Moon, let's be the first to Mars!!!' 

I really doubt Mars - if it happens in the next 15-20 years - will be done in-house.  Moon was a contract award (and if Moon works, then Mars should work) - so by snatching the contract he gets to continue to develop on someone else's dime. 

Let's not forget that 'commercially viable space company' is of necessity a for profit enterprise.  And absent competition from BO / ULA / Boeing / etc... What we will get is Ma Bell.*

*(something that works but does not innovative) 

Oh - and @mikegarrisonis correct - putting up SX aspirations and plans as foregone achievements is naive. 

If it takes 15 years to reach mars, it means that SpaceX as we know it is dead.

 

Because they carefully pick their shareholders, SpaceX cannot be thought of as a normal "for profit" company. Noone is expecting a return on their investment before reaching mars. For many, reaching mars IS the return on their investment, and will fight any abandonment of that goal.

[tater]

15 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I really see that as an aspirational goal or just public relations - as in 'we've already done Moon, let's be the first to Mars!!!' 

Nope. The SpaceX people really believe in the colonize Mars thing. I think it's kooky—several of us here I know think it's kooky—but they really are all-in for Mars.

[Beccab]

33 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

putting up SX aspirations and plans as foregone achievements is naive. 

You don't say

[tater]

42 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Oh - and @mikegarrisonis correct - putting up SX aspirations and plans as foregone achievements is naive. 

I actually agree completely with this.

I try to add "assuming it works" or something similar to SS/SH posts about capability. If I ever forget to, adding it in can be an exercise for the reader.

Starship/Super Heavy is a transformational vehicle if they get it to work (operational reuse).

If they don't, and merely can make huge, cheap expendable or partially expendable vehicles, it's still transformative and a big win, but not nearly as much as operational reuse.

 

[wumpus]

7 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

The Shuttle was intended to be cost-effective. That was the whole point of a reusable spacecraft. The only part of the shuttle that was not reused was the external tank -- it was more reusable than Falcon 9 in that regard. And it *was* more cost effective than Saturn launches.

It was a first try, and it also suffered from design requirement bloat. And yet, it flew for 30 years and was absolutely essential to the construction of the ISS. All-in-all, pretty much everything SpaceX fans say Starship will do actually was done by the shuttle. In the same way that the DC-3 had to come before the 707.

Note that "cost effective" for the Shuttle likely meant sacrificing ongoing costs to lower upfront costs to avoid complete cancellation (like the other 3/4 of the STS program).  It was an amazing stretch to cover all the requirements, but the design required to cover them all never really had a chance of being as cost effective as originally planned (not going to happen with Senate micromanagement).

I'm not sure why this thread needs to compare Starship to the Shuttle.  Falcon 9 was the rocket that took the Shuttle idea and fixed it.  The Shuttle made the booster expendable (you got some heavy steel tubes back, but the expensive part was expended) and recovered [all but the fuel tank of] the ".5 stage" and rump 2nd stage (OMS engines needed to circularize).  The Falcon inverted this with and recovered the booster (90% of the rocket) and expended the 2nd stage.

Starship+booster goes well beyond the both of them to be fully reuseable, although it is definitely clear that the "shuttle half" (Starship) is keeping  Musk awake at night.  Also from how often Musk says "we're not thinking about that" about things further along than getting Starship into orbit, it is pretty clear that a reliable means of landing a crew isn't likely a current design requirement of Starship.  Presumably after a few landings they will even start on that plan (failsafe/failproof landing?   Use Dragons?  Something else?).  SpaceX is building the capacity to build more Starships than you'd expect a reliably landing vehicle to need (he even admits that he can't send that many to Mars thanks to launch windows), so who knows what the final plan is.

 

7 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

That's a huge mix of so-far-unproven aspirational goals for Starship (really, "land on and return from Mars"?) and stuff that's about as meaningful as saying "the Shuttle never launched from Texas". If "couldn't fly without crew" is a big deal, then fine. Buran rather than Shuttle. Whatever.

I just find it incredibly frustrating that many people in this forum are comparing claimed eventual capabilities for a program that, I remind you, is still awaiting its first actual trip to space, versus a program that made hundreds of missions over 30 years and was instrumental in building the biggest and longest-lasting space station the world has ever had -- and complaining that the real historical spacecraft couldn't do everything that the still-in-development spacecraft is promised to do.

The 707 of course turned out to be vastly more capable than the DC-3, but that wasn't a foregone conclusion just because the designers of the 707 expected it to. I mean, the designers of the Comet expected the same thing, but it didn't work out the same way for them.

"The shuttle never launched without a crew" was more a deliberate political decision by NASA to allow astronauts to piggyback on all military/government launches (pretty much *all* US launches until Challenger).  They decided to risk 7 lives on every launch, but also got >100 crewed missions.

There is a bit in the youtube Everyday Astronaut interview with Elon Musk where Musk contrasts Starship design with Dragon design.  Since Starship will initially fly without a crew, there are far less margins and fast iterations where you don't have time to check *everything* like anything flying people would need.  Did they need to look at Shuttle history to know this or only compare their experience with Dragon vs Falcon1/9 and realize that the "crewed only" option made no sense (all other NASA crewed launcher/spacecraft were fully tested uncrewed.  Only in a fit of insanity did NASA even consider launching the first SLS with a crew, and since recanted).

Probably the biggest "lesson learned" needed (by SpaceX)  from the Shuttle was how bad the tiles worked out.  Starship is clearly using tiles 2.0, after an initial attempt at something more complex to avoid tiles altogether (and might see some use spraying methane out of cracks in the hinges to protect gaps between tiles).  Most of the other critical "lessons learned" were about not mounting rockets on the side of a booster and  running a government program (although in many ways it was an amazingly successful as a government program in ways that NASA would love to duplicate.  Thirty+ years of massive funding is a success, not a failure by any government standard).

If you must use airplane analogies, I'd put the Soyuz as the DC-3.  One of the first commercial haulers.  Rugged, simple, and keeps hauling even after fancier vehicles are available.  The Shuttle would be more like the Concorde: hyper advanced for its time (and currently unequaled by anything regardless of my comparisons with Falcon9), unsafe, and only managed a long lifespan thanks to massive government subsidies.

Edited August 15, 2021 by wumpus

[tater]

 

[Beccab]

 

Edited August 15, 2021 by Beccab

[magnemoe]

10 hours ago, Beccab said:

We don't know, but we can use logic. It possible that SpaceX is spending money developing rockets and spending even more money by selling every single one of them at a loss to try to trick every other launch provider that reusability can be cost effective without ever gaining anything, all this for 15 years, for whatever reason. We can assume SpaceX is reusing rockets only as a PR move and that they are extremely ineffective, but they want to ridiculize the Proton so they continue spending hundreds of billions so that maybe one day they will be able to raise prices by 100 times and gain millions. Or we can think that SpaceX is gaining some money as a launch provider and that reusing rockets 10+ times has finally become less expensive than throwing them in the sea. Which of these is more likely?

The +10 time reuse for profitability is ULA numbers and its probably correct for them as they will have to design and build an new rocket for reuse. 
I does not see it at plausible for falcon 9. First the recovery and make ready for next launch seems to require an fraction of the work making an new rocket. 
Yes as I understand they test fire all the engines on stand and then an static fire but they do this on new rockets to so no extra cost. 

Now it was an development cost for reuse but this looks pretty cheap as they tested on used stages who finished their primary mission, so the cost was development, the grasshopper and parts and ships. 
In short I guesstimate that they paid for the program around the 20 recovery and reuse one stage twice is an saving. 
Yes the payload capacity with reuse is reduced but its looks like current block has enough for most payloads, you can always pay premium and expend the stage if needed. 
Now they tend to have quite some time between reuses, however I guess this has more to do with even out wear and not getting an backlog because an stage is lost or can not be reused. 
If they did serious refurbishment i guess it would include washing them  
 

[MKI]

2 hours ago, wumpus said:

Starship+booster goes well beyond the both of them to be fully reuseable, although it is definitely clear that the "shuttle half" (Starship) is keeping  Musk awake at night.  Also from how often Musk says "we're not thinking about that" about things further along than getting Starship into orbit, it is pretty clear that a reliable means of landing a crew isn't likely a current design requirement of Starship.  Presumably after a few landings they will even start on that plan (failsafe/failproof landing?   Use Dragons?  Something else?).  SpaceX is building the capacity to build more Starships than you'd expect a reliably landing vehicle to need (he even admits that he can't send that many to Mars thanks to launch windows), so who knows what the final plan is.

 

The issue with focusing that far in "the future", for things like crewed capabilities, and overall safety of the current design all goes back to the base requirement being insane. Full re-usability has never been achieved, and instant turnaround time is also something never achieved. Those two by themselves are hard enough requirements. Hence why the production pipeline is the focus, as you need that capacity to achieve those 2 first requirements as the are so gosh darn hard you'll be bound to blow stuff up in the mean time, along with changing the design over time very quickly to address issues you've found.

If Starship itself is keeping Musk at night, he goes to sleep knowing he spent all his time building out a system that is capable of pounding out the problem IE, building Starships+Super heavies as quickly as possible so they can test designs quickly and improve on them. Its less about getting it right, and more about supporting development through mistakes. Every iteration is a step closer to a better system. 

 

1 Shuttle exploding due to a design flaw was a massive disaster that killed people that destroyed a large percentage of the fleets capabilities.

1 Falcon 9 first stage exploding on landing was a learning experience with no risk to the base mission

1 Starship/Super heavy failure will also just be a learning experience for the foreseeable future

 

Again, the biggest weakness is if something happens to the launch tower+pad, as those are not easily fixed which would be a massive hindrance to the entire process. However, if the rest of the system "at least clears the tower" and doesn't ram into it on landing, it would be a success.

 

edit

At some point Starship and Super heavy will fly people. By that time, the primary goals of rapid re-usability should be achieved. If that is the case I see no reason for them to be nothing but the most flown space-flight hardware ever made, which should make for a system that is as safe as a commercial jet.

 

 

 

Edited August 15, 2021 by MKI

[Jacke]

5 hours ago, MKI said:

At some point Starship and Super heavy will fly people. By that time, the primary goals of rapid re-usability should be achieved. If that is the case I see no reason for them to be nothing but the most flown space-flight hardware ever made, which should make for a system that is as safe as a commercial jet.

I see no reason for the reliability of Starship in the short term to be better than the current best for other launch vehicles, about 1% failure rate.  It may get better, but that will have to be demonstrated.  That is about 5 orders of magnitude worse (100,000 times worse) or greater than for current aircraft.

Starship has no abort modes for a lot of the potential failures of a launch vehicle, in a similar way as the Shuttle lacked those same abort modes.

An aircraft always has the abort mode of becoming a glider, even if it's a poor one and perhaps in a very bad place with respect to its altitude and airspeed.  And aircraft are designed and redesigned to have less chance of catastrophic and lesser failures as lessons have been learned from building and operating them, as well as investigating incidents and accidents on thousands of aircraft over millions of flight hours over decades.

That's where those 5 orders of magnitude of safer performance for aircraft come from, a whole lot of sweat and blood over time.  I don't think Starship will get that for rocketry in under 10 years, as other launch vehicles flying for much much longer haven't gotten to that point.

So flying people on Starship before that better safety record is demonstrated without adding in abort modes is condemning 1% of them to die.