Huge congratulations to the team.
Amazing that a one-second difference can matter, but those things go through tons of fuel every one of those seconds!
source: Scott Manley https://youtube.com/shorts/m2oGDCvDmdE?si=0AlX8sgHDihXCED6
If I understand correctly, the margin was tight enough not to take the risk of damaging the tower.
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.
(In case that distinction is missed, I do mean "implode" as the antonym of "explode".)
This was the Flight Termination System (FTS)
booster was low on fuel, plus no mood of risking tower with boom, boosters are cheaper than towers.
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.
Trivial compared to what we already did with Deepwater Horizion.
I'm sure you can dig it up somewhere if you too need a study to confirm such.
It blew my teen mind.
This day marks a fabulous advancement for the human species.
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.
On May 27, 2025, Starship’s ninth flight test successfully lifted off at 6:36 p.m. CT from Starbase, Texas. The flight test began with the first Super Heavy booster to be reflown starting up successfully and completing a full-duration ascent burn with all 33 of its Raptor engines before separating from Starship’s upper stage in a hot-staging maneuver. During separation, Super Heavy performed the first ever deterministic flip followed by its boostback burn." -- https://www.spacex.com/updates#flight-9-report
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?
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.
I don't think this is happening with the current design. If there's a human version of Starship, it would have to have meet some safety standards. Namely abort options on launch and safe failure modes on return. I can see a Starship with a classic pod on top, but no way this design carries humans from/to earth.
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.
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.
... 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.
I don't think the period is entirely declassified? If it ever will be
Given they launch in full view of many people, not from behind a fake mayan temple in the middle of the rain forrest.
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.
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.
But tjis was IIRC used on single stick ICBMs and won't be really applicable for anything more delicate.
And the whole dispersed engine system of the Shuttle made any sort of engine out quite dangerous due to imbalanced thrust. When the engines are all right next to each other it's much more resilient against the failure of one, but the Shuttle would be in trouble if it lost any of it's three legs.
Incidentally, presence of perchlorates is also one of the main concerns with martian soil.
At least a hydrogen or methane explosion is quite clean, even cleaner than kerosene.
> Then there was pressure to make use of solid propellants
As far as I remember the decision was based on development costs (like most decisions).
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.
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.
Until each side accumulated enough ICBM nukes that it was clear mutually-assured destruction would dominate.
Wings are useless in a vacuum.
But if you could pull it off (and Soviets apparently beleived it was possible) you have an unique capability not really available to regular satellites l, where low orbit quick plane changes are basically impossible with any realistically available delta-v.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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
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-...
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?
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?
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.
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
Or do i miss something?
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.
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.)
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 recommend talking with people who know more about spaceflight.
Not the 4 ton lunar lander of the Apollo era.
Yes, because asking on HN if such people would be willing to answer obviously gets you downvotes and comments like this.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Without internal figures no one can say what is ultimately financially better. Especially now that the development is a sunken cost.
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.
That's still 1000x cheaper than... building a new airplane every flight.
And anyway those numbers area about moon missions, not low earth orbit.
The fuel (+ oxidizer) is basically free compared to all the other costs.
(But lose the bastard at the top, OK?)
Source: Everyone else in SpaceXs rearview mirror - If the top engineers were elsewhere they would be ahead
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 same top engineers not achieving the same or even similar things? It's okay to dislike the culture, in fact they should be mad as hell at it. But if you can't/won't join'em, beat'em.
- 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.
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.
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.
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?!
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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).
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.
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...
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".
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.
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.
But imagine engineering hearts so that we did not have to ask?
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.
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.
There are ample government and private support mechanisms, including housing and food, but most choose not to take advantage.
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 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.
edit: Rate limited so adding link to interview the reply mentions here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujfF_SnxvZQ
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2069_Alpha_Centauri_mission
“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.
"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 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"
...
Google is only able to fund Waymo, Quantum Computing, etc because of their questionably moral ads cash cow.
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.)
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.)
- 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.
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...
(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.
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.
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.
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.
Nitpick- the SRBs were also recovered and reused
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!
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.
The SRBs of the shuttle landed by parachute and were recovered from the water and reused
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?
Are you for real?
'that difficult'
Look at projects like James Webb telescope.
This is what you sound like to everyone else here
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.
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.
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.
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.
EUV required genuine new engineering for an example.
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.
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?
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.
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?
I get it’s exciting but it means almost nothing for 99% of people.
Definitely a name that won’t be forgotten anytime soon.
Shotwell = make it
mind bottling
This kind of stuff hasn’t been done before. So by definition, new.
Edit: Yes, ignore that bit.
"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]
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.
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?
If you do'nt 'fix' earth why fixing up mars?
Nothing in the laws of physics prevent that. So at the very least, we know that it's not impossible.
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.
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.
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.
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 can catch both stages & be used to stack the thing as well, simple and genius!
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.
You could say the same thing for terrestrial internet. Not trying to be contradictory, I just find this a very interesting ethical topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
It would be a pretty inefficient way to deploy offensive weapons.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The origin of SpaceX with Michael D. Griffin and Pete Worden really make it clear though.
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
> If not Russia than who?
then*
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
we can use planets for their resources or industry.
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.
Things to notice: it's undergoing yearly upgrades despite NASA having literally decades of experience in this. They still hold a contingency reserve of 8OOL, despite being hours from the ground and being able to evacuate almost any time.
SpaceX has zero experience managing the water cycle even when it's measured in months, much less years, with spares and help many months away in the very best case. They show zero effort trying to acquire such experience.
Let's be real: at this point, Mars for Musk is about as much of a goal as Hyperloop. If we look at actions, not mere words, his goal looks much more like yeeting more GPUs into orbit as a "biological bootloader" [1] than colonising Mars. That's not even touching the fact that SpaceX is now a public company, has a duty for its shareholders, and colonising Mars is a strictly cash-negative enterprise.
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
Saying how you imagine a solution would look like is cheap, figuring out an actual system is expensive and slow. Hell, just very basic things like extracting water from urine is actually difficult (organic matter forms a tar of sorts and gunks up machinery) and in the past unforeseen problems did pop up (amount of calcium in urine from disintegrating bones was a problem and didn't show up until in-orbit testing).
Musk is observably not doing things that Mars colonisation would require.
I wasn’t necessarily thinking of Biosphere 2, just the fact that you won’t be getting a resupply on short notice.
The problem is that Mars is 6-12 months away depending on launch window, at least with current rockets. If something goes wrong you must be able to respond locally and at least survive. The Moon is 3 days away (ish) and LEO is hours away (including time to align and dock).
If you want to send people to Mars you need to build a Mars sim on Earth and actually test your life support systems.
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.
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…
That’s like saying 25% of Exxon’s development came from tax payer money because the government uses a shitload of oil.
It's like saying tax payers are funding charmin because the pentagon uses its TP.
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.
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.
China did that too.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/10/china/china-reusable-rock...
(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?
* 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
The main reason fuel depots and fuel transfer were disparaged was to protect the gravy train of SLS. But that's essentially over.
It might not change much for mars
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.
And who knows, maybe we discover The Expanse like reaction engines in a few decades.
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!
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.
What makes you think that? That's a nice thing to think but mostly comes out of ignorance of the field.
When it comes to rockets, yes, I have zero knowledge beyond the basic functioning of one. On the other hand, I look at how the Raptor engines were simplified to make them more reliable, with fewer failures and so on. And my gut says they are not yet with enhancing their performance and reliability.
I may not know much about chemistry, but, call me ignorant, I don't think we discovered all the combinations between elements in order to ignite something or make it go boom.
Like with fusion reactors, in theory they work, in practice we haven't figured out how to initiate a reaction and keep it stable "forever".
More progress will come, at a much faster rate than ever before.
https://www.amazon.com/Ignition-Informal-Propellants-Univers...
Stainless steel lets the structure get very hot on entry without failure, beyond the temperature where aluminum alloys would lose substantial strength. This reduces heat shielding requirements.
If we don't start becoming much more careful, I expect we'll live to see the Kessler syndrome, perhaps sooner than we expect.
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.
I guess that gives the rebels time to organise for the next wave of fragmentation and shrapnel launches.
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.
That and the Russians. But SpaceX is cheaper than both of them.
You are also missing that Falcon 9 costs as much as costumers pay, SpaceX internal cost are significantly less. They just don't have competition to make it cheaper.
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.
To put it bluntly, rocketry has been stagnant for a while. The spaceshuttle never really got design iterations because politicians wanted prestige more than results.
We will start to see chinese/european copycats of starship, the same way there are many orgs trying to replicate Falcon 9. That is in my opinion kicking us into a new age. The launch cadence of SpaceX just with Falcon/FalconHeavy is already unprecedented as it is.
Multiple orgs chasing starship, and starting a new spacerace. That is what I hope for.
SpaceX has contracts with NASA committing SpaceX to manned lunar missions, soon. Falcon 9 cannot do that.
Long term (5-10 yrs) SpaceX will almost certainly send these to Mars and return them home. Falcon 9 cannot do that.
I’m more concerned with payload bay doors than the spacecraft’s performance tbh.
I know that is what was promised, but I do wonder how many of Starship’s design goals the program needs to miss on before the general public starts to wonder if maybe goals are not the same thing as guarantees.
What? Based on what? Starship has had two orbital flights ever. And they’ve gone pretty well.
Raptor isn’t shaping up to be a sufficiently reliable engine. They are still having shutdowns and failures on every flight. That could be a huge problem for cheap and rapid reuse because it implies that quite a lot of inspection and refurbishment will be needed for every engine they re-fly. This was famously a major impediment to cheap reusability for the RS-25 and Shuttle, and they only had to worry about three of those per flight. Starship has 13 times as many engines to worry about, and those engines have thus far had a much higher failure rate.
And then they’ve also been having trouble with the thermal protection system, which seems to require a lot more refurbishment than what they had originally wanted. There have also been some kinks to work out in terms of its actual protection of the vehicle, which is a problem because even minor materials degradation due to thermal stress will limit the reusability of the upper stage.
There are so many knobs to turn. Everything is conjecture because it's only the beginning. One thing for sure, Superheavy/Starship in the future -- a year, two years, five years from now, will be very different that what was used for this flight.
During launch its relatively fine as you are flying into a designated safe zone, but since its designed to survive re-entry there is a much higher chance of parts surviving and hitting something on the ground. We already saw that with multiple of the Starship V2 flights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_cemetery
were these other craft not headed for Point Nemo? if not then wtf
https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/2019/10/31/ooops-whit...
The 11 Starships that have gone through re-entry have so far had no issues with reaching their designated landing zone/spot in one piece (except from some minor parts melting off in their earlier V1/V2 flights). So far SpaceX has shown that they are willing to play it very safe, but there is always a risk and their future re-entries will also do go over land like Flight 15 did.
The motor had like 30 blades and a few of them developed cracks each time, so you have to open it, inspect each blade and replace the bad ones. IIRC Feynman was very afraid one of them would break and cause another crew lost. Luckily it didn't happen, but they have a last chance in Artemis.
The metal encase of the solid rockets would get deformed in the splash, so they have to make them round again.
The heat shield has to be completely replaced by design.
...
(Starship still has unique tiles near flap joints and edges, but the main hull itself has mass produced tiles.)
As for a different approach, try Stoke's active cooling solution:
https://www.stokespace.com/news/building-rockets-to-fly-and-...
The big one though is that it had schoolteachers inside. The Starship is robot drone. If it blows up on reentry it isn’t a huge deal.
Shuttle had to fly humans, and had to maintain its human-rated safety certification. This meant that any design change or modification had to be tested extensively to ensure it didn't kill the crew. This took multiple design iterations, took a long time, and was not cheap.
After the initial design of the ship, it made the program very risk averse. Changing anything required a lot of testing, so it was easier to not change it. Shuttle got stuck because it became too difficult and expensive to iterate; Congress did not give NASA enough funds to overcome this, so the project stagnated.
Because Starship flies without humans on board, it doesn't have these issues. SpaceX can make radical design changes, perform minimal testing, then put these changes on the next flight and immediately see what happens. Sometimes this fails catastrophically, which is the main reason why Starship keeps blowing up. They can also push the ship close to failure to see how it performs, without worrying about humans on board. This is why Starship burned up multiple times when returning from orbit - SpaceX intentionally ran the ship through excessively steep reentry profiles to measure how the heat shield performed.
The overall result is that SpaceX can iterate on Starship faster and more cheaply than NASA ever could with Shuttle.
Shuttle's real problem was it was just an uneconomical design. It was foolish to expect government and its cost-plus contractors to be able to optimize for cost.
(Of course this got downvoted because people are unrealistic about the value of human lives. To pretend they don't have finite value leads to absurd results.)
The government has no problem with programs producing tangible value that also cost lives. Consider the military, police, search and rescue, and really any activity where people do anything with nonzero risk. The lives lost are part of the cost.
But since it's a science project more akin to basic research than anything with a ROI formula attached, then even one death is one death too many.
Example: Astronaut Tim goes on an EVA to perform an emergency repair after a micrometeorite damaged the space station. A malfunction of his space suit kills him. Everyone agrees that Tim died a hero doing a high-risk activity that needed to be done, and almost no one would say it means we can't do spacewalks or can't send astronauts to space anymore.
Compare to Challenger or Columbia: The whole crew dies randomly on the way up or down during a routine mission. A program which became known for having like, a 10% chance of that happening would be horrifying (in my opinion).
Assigning a finite value to human lives (in the US, it's around $12M) is absolutely essential to evaluating policy tradeoffs.
> people are unrealistic about the value of human lives
Which one is it?
Given 2 is true and extreme, politics dominates all, and anyone acting like you would have been thrown out of political power as fast as possible. So no, "the cost of" does not pertain only to materiel and technical development, etc.
> Human rating was more of a PR issue
And this was demonstrative in limiting efficiencies and iteration, as OP was explaining. He stated the reasons it failed; you're countering with your idealism around why it shouldn't have failed, while inadvertently confirming the various reasons it did.
This is not true... The shuttle mission was highly automated. Launch, orbit, reentry was all automated. They only needed human pilots to land on the runway because their algo's weren't good enough. Which, again, was one of many design failures of the shuttle. Having humans on board only slightly increased the chance of success according to nasa. other failures were their ablative heat shield ontop of the ceramica, the carbon-on-carbon plating around the aluminum housing, using aluminum as the body and fins instead of steel, AND DROPPING THEIR BOOSTERS IN THE FUCKING OCEAN.
As opposed to dropping them in the desert or a town? The risk appetite was not there at all to figure out safe capture of the boosters. And if they had the allowance to tackle that problem, it would have been better focussed on improving the shuttle itself, fixing the problems GP has outlined.
Of all the issues, "dropping their boosters in the fucking ocean" probably doesn't even make top 10.
Again, stage zero is a huge enegineering challange and issue that Nasa didn't even attempt to solve because it was too hard.
I would imagine it’s the weight savings of not having to carry thousands of pounds worth of landing legs onboard the rocket.
Don't the launchpads have systems in place to prevent that? Eg the sound suppression system where they basically spray water into the air to absorb the sound. Does the landing pad have that?
Then again, I wouldn't know how to solve this better -- if you say, have a cover protecting the engines before re-lighting, you're not shedding speed any better than without it, and after re-entry and when the speeds are relatively modest (only, say, 400mph 2-3km up vs 4000mph at 100+km) the air itself doesn't do anything to the engines anyway.
The booster has flaps that help it shed speed, but the Starship's flaps are very different, aren't they? And it's not exactly the kind of a flying brick that Space Shuttle was, either -- having it coast longer before it flips to be caught by Mechazilla, isn't a solution then...
Just ramblings of an amateur :B
I don't think catching (vs. landing) is a "new space era" game changer, but it offers several advantages in a game (chemical rocketry) where some margins are very thin -
- No need for a separate landing pad. Which might need its own flame trench, for reasons others have noted.
- You already have the chopsticks for pre-launch stacking.
- Because you're stacking with chopsticks, you already have those hard points on the Starship. (Hard points are spots engineered to bear heavy loads, in contrast to fragile areas. On large aerospace structures, hard points are expensive in engineering, manufacturing, and weight.)
- Landing legs on a hard surface require larger safety margins. Or a lot of springs, shock absorbers, and such. (Falcon 9's landing legs include those.) That's because the transient loads during an off-by-5-cm landing can be 3X or more the static loads on your landing legs. Vs. if you land on the chopsticks - all the springs and stuff can be built into them. With chemical rocketry's thin margins, not needing to carry that extra weight to space and back is a serious win.
If you mean why catching is (anything) better than landing (anything)? Landing gear is heavy. All the weight and mechatronics and complexity of the landing gear systems takes mass that could've been payload. Put the "landing gear" on the tower instead and the launch vehicle doesn't eat the cost of the weight. It's an optimization but not an order of magnitude revolution compared to a fully reusable heavy lift platform.
Fastest Falcon 9 turnaround was 9 days, I wouldn't expect Musk's 1 hour turnaround target for Starship to ever be reached.
And even 5 reuses matter if you want to do many launches. Because building them will be slow. So even if financially theoretically its not worth it, if you can increase your launch rate its still worth it.
And that gives you the time to continue iterating.
But what happens if there isn’t actually that much pent-up, latent demand for flinging heavy things into orbit? What happens if people still mostly want to launch the same size stuff they already do? Starship could become the paratransit shuttle of space: inexpensive, yes, but also inconvenient because of having to share the ride with so many other people that all have different destinations and schedules. In that case we might see that demand for Starship remains low due to potential customers deciding the extra cost of a different option is worth the added convenience. Anyone who’s chosen an Uber even though the city bus can get them to their destination for 1/10 the price should be familiar with the principle.
I can see the value in this though if we end up developing space and Moon, and a vehicle like this could open the doors for that, unlike now. If China has long term plans for that, it's probably a good indicator of future market.
That certainly doesn’t mean it will never happen or that it’s not worth trying. But I’ve noticed that in these online discussions there’s a tendency to treat moonshot programs as if they’re sure bets.
Also don’t forget social factors. The US had been actively working on establishing more of a presence on the moon, too. But the current administration more-or-less killed it because they didn’t like how much it was costing.
They don't need/ want to sell capacity. They want to constrain the capacity for themselves, which is obviously the better business move. Look at falcon 9 launches... It's not like they drastically lowered their pricing, they've been raising there pricing dramatically because they want to phase falcon 9 out.
But that’s also why I’m skeptical about whether Starship will live up to the hype. The whole case for how it’s supposed to revolutionize spaceflight rests on the assumption that it can tap into a huge well of latent demand to put stuff in orbit. If such a well really does exist then we have to ask why Falcon 9 wasn’t able to tap into it despite all of its obvious merits.
Do you know how expensive it is to transport a 40 ton skyscraper? Now they can just put it on the transport stand, drive it over to mega bay, refurb while they are putting they next payload on board, and drive it back over to the pad.
More like a new era in littering space.
I don’t disagree with you but this exciting for “tech people” who are into engineering. That’s about all.
Sorry, as much as I'd like to separate the two, I can't.
[1] Estimate of Falcon 9's booster + fairings being 60% (by cost, not by mass) of the launch package.
Originally they aimed for 150 tons of payload to LEO for Starship V1. Then they lowered that goal to 100 tons. But then Starship V1 only managed to achieve approximately 0 tons, which prompted them to target 100 tons for a larger, more powerful Starship V3 (and 200 tons for Starship V4). But now Starship V3 only achieves around 50 tons to LEO, based on the estimated weight of 26 Starlink V3 satellites.
I think the main issues were that Starship dry mass continued to be heavier than expected, and that the Raptor engines performed lower than they thought they would. Elon Musk recently said the Raptor V3 engines could only reliably achieve 230 tons of thrust per engine (a measure of force) instead of the originally projected 280.
Are all of these comments comparing hypothetical production loads to small test scenarios?
That is true for any rocket.
Remember that Starship V1 was announced to have a payload margin of 150 tons to LEO, by around 2021 if I recall correctly. Now it's late 2026 and the payload is something like 50 tons. You may still call this "lightning fast", but it is far less progress than what we thought would happen several years ago.
"ULA began development of the new launch vehicle in 2014, primarily to compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and to comply with a Congressional mandate to phase out the use of the Russian-made RD-180 engine that powered the Atlas V. "
"The Vulcan Centaur conducted its first launch on January 8, 2024, carrying the Peregrine lunar lander as part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. Its second flight, conducted on October 4, 2024, as part of the U.S. Space Force's National Security Space Launch (NSSL) certification process, achieved its planned orbit despite the loss of a nozzle on one of the GEM-63XL solid rocket boosters, which resulted in reduced and asymmetrical thrust. Following a five-month review, the Space Force certified Vulcan for NSSL missions in March 2025. In February 2026, a second issue involving a solid rocket booster occurred, after which launches were paused pending investigation."
Centaur has flown 4 times since 2014. SpaceX began active development of the Starship program in 2018.
Flight data drives continuous tweaks to control software (throttle profiles, mixture ratio schedules, startup sequences, health monitoring). Those are software updates
But not everything is achievable just because we want to achieve it. Physics/chemistry also have a say in it.
> Had they put another couple of tonnes of propellant and oxidizer on the Booster they might have caught both of them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
May I know why ? And if the feat was done by NASA or China, would you change your conclusion?
A passenger airliner is vastly more complicated than a parachute, yet both work.
(You’re also in a lot of trouble if you don’t hit the runway in an airliner)
With a normal capsule, you have multiple fuel tanks and redundant RCS thrusters so you’ll practically always be able to deorbit and land (since you also have redundant parachutes). If starship has a fuel leak, how are you going to land, even if you’re able to deorbit?
There aren't many flat stretches of land.
As of the ocean, given low waves and the airspeed of say 200 km/h, most likely the craft will withstand it if it has withstood the reentry. At least one Starship demonstrated some limited seaworthiness.
But during landing? You can't send another ship to rescue the crew that is aboard another Starship that just failed being caught.
There are multiple flight computers. Practically every essential sensor has copies. Oxygen generation, ram air turbine, life jackets, inflated boats. Onboard radar. TCAS. The airplane itself glides. Then there are thousands of procedural rules and regulations for safe operation.
A system like starship that relies on precise active propulsion has no such room for error.
And you missed the point. The airplanes wings give it a passive way to glide down. Parachutes also give a passive way for a capsule to fly down. Starship has no such system, either the propulsion works or the rocket just falls out of the sky. There are thousands and thousands of different ways that the propulsion can get screwed up.
Launch vehicles with capsules have redundant escape systems. If the vehicle during ascent is malfunctioning the crew can escape and safely land. In starship the crew will just blow up and die.
Starship is NOT man rated so let’s see what SpaceX comes up with. But one cannot ignore the glaring issues with the design.
Soyuz has a very impressive record, Starship has been horrifically mismanaged by comparison. The falcon heavy flew 14 times and SpaceX is all in on a heavy launch vehicle because what? Even if they hit every target perfectly from now on it was a wasteful project.
Opportunity cost is a real thing. The obvious alternative buying stock (or handling out dividends to investors who buy stocks) would have created a new revenue stream larger than a working starship in 2027 represents.
Thus even if nothing else fails, the project was a poor investment. The market just isn’t big enough that making launch cheaper would be worth it at this point, profits might grow in the future but the deficit keeps growing in the meantime.
They're averaging over 2 successful launches+landings per week now, and it's so routine that nobody cares.
What? The first version of something that looks anything like Starship was the ITS announced back in 2016, later "BFR" in 2017 and the stainless steel version (which is now flying) in December 2018.
Eight years is very reasonable for a fully reusable heavy lift system - something no one has built before.
The Space Shuttle took roughly 12.5 years from formal concept studies to its first flight (and 9 years from official program approval)
Look at the change in airplane designs over the years.
If you asked me if I wanted to return to earth on something that glides like a plane and lands on a runway with no propulsion... or a pressure vessel that needs it's engines to work perfectly to get you back to a single spot at the pad, within a few meters, to be 'caught', and if that doesn't happen, you hit the ground vertically and explode...
I know which one I'm taking. Yes I know the shuttle had no 'go-around' as a glider. But wings and wheels and a big runway in the desert.... versus the insane acrobatics of Starship...
We haven't seen how Starship would deal with crosswinds in the atmosphere being predicted wrong. What happens when it knows it is off course on the way down and can't make it back to the pad? If there were people onboard? I assume there would be a contingency where it just vents fuel and hits the ground and hopes to act as a crush-can at terminal velocity but I don't know how people survive that. By comparison, ditching the shuttle like a plane with an engine-out failure seems easy by comparison.
I am not demeaning the amazing achievement of the Starship and its booster and this ability to catch it and reuse it. I think that is indeed an amazing achievement that should be celebrated. But I don't see this as being a thing to put people on that can somehow be intrinsically safer than the Shuttle, just yet. These are just my basic opinions, I think they are opinions with some merit, and I don't feel that deserves downvotes.
Obviously, we're a really long way away from that from a reliability standpoint? But you know, if they launch 10,000 of these over the next decade... we're going to know a lot more about the safety of this design. I'm sure they'll clobber one in to mechazilla eventually? But what if they don't?
(I flew for a living for over a decade)
Winds are not a significant factor in the trajectory of the ship. Reason is that it spends almost all of it's time very high, above all weather, and only descends to the less stable areas of the atmosphere at the very end, when it's in a vertical belly-flop, going very rapidly through all the different weather layers. You can see this clearly in the return video, at 2 minutes before landing it was still 15km up. And when it's high, it has much more ability to steer by adjusting drag than any winds can move it up there.
What could actually be a problem is sudden high winds or other problems at the landing site. The ship commits to a landing when it does the deorbit burn ~60m before landing. at L-20m, it has about 1000km of cross-range capability, at L-10m only 200km, and after that it goes down quickly, with only 50km at L-5m.
If it's coming back with something valuable, you'd better have plenty of divert options.
Could see one that is specialized for taking humans into space and then returning them to Earth. It could have a dedicated abort vehicle that takes over the top half of the ship (similar to the abort vehicles they have now on most human-rated rockets). And maybe it uses landing legs instead, because they're more fault tolerant than a catch tower. All this might take up a ton of weight, but starship can carry so much tonnage to space, they'd probably still have a lot of tonnage left for humans and cargo.
Yeah, it could be pretty amazing, able to to take hundreds into orbit instead of just a handful.
If I had to ride along in one of them, I'd choose the Falcon 9 booster over the space shuttle.
Also, the Columbia failure occurred because it was a glider. The Starship doesn't have any leading-edge tiles for debris to fall onto. Arguably, the Challenger failure also occurred because it was a glider, which required the odd fuel tank and booster mounting that failed.
Even taking you seriously, it has made it to effective orbit more than it has exploded. Nearly all 'landings' have exploded, because that's what happens when you intentionally land a 30 story building full of fuel in the open ocean
Where did i deny it was not a work in progress ?
So why pretend it is a success until it is ready ?
> Nearly all 'landings' have exploded, because that's what happens when you intentionally land a 30 story building full of fuel in the open ocean
Thanks for agreeing with me.
Starship has its own design trade-offs, as any engineered object does, but it has the benefit of 50 years of technological development since Shuttle.
I'm not as certain as you about whether or not Starship will ever be human rated. But if successful, it will be launching a couple of hundred times per year. Talk to me in five years and we'll see where we are then.
Like you don't build a barge to ferry standards, it would defeat the point of the barge.
As is, your comment has a bold claim backed by seemingly unrelated fact.
Both are second stages that return from orbit to Earth. Seems a pretty valid comparison on these fundamentals to me.
(Yes, I know you're extending the comparison to human-transport but that is not fundamental to their ability to take payload to orbit and return, as the Starship can fly without on-board pilots.)
Personally, I'm looking forward to joining the Elench. Humans are allowed to join the Elench aren't they?
Bad things happen, and spaceflight is a hard problem. But that’s not what killed two Shuttle crews.
I'm sure there are plenty of "accepted design flaws" in SpaceX vehicles. Hopefully SpaceX engineers are better at calculating the probabilities than NASA was, but I would not volunteer for early missions.
Source: Truth, Lies, and O-Rings by Allan J. McDonald, James R. Hansen, and Jonathan Yen
Propellant for a Falcon 9 launch is ~$500K.
Starship needs 10kg (0.5mcf) of methane and 36kg of oxygen per kg to orbit. The oxygen takes 22kWh to liquefy or about (0.16mcf to generate that onsite). So 0.66mcf/kg to orbit and 66,000mcf from to fully fuel.
That is the daily gas usage of a midisze city, say 200k population, per launch.
For methane, didn't know this but looked it up, methane is one of the cheapest propellants, but rocket grade methane needs to be purer (starship is estimated to cost $300k to $1 million to refuel)
I like the rocket less, imho solids have no place in human spaceflight, but the Orion has a LES, which elevates it to being more safe than any spacecraft without one.
It's like saying flying is safer than driving per passenger-mile. It is. By orders of magnitude. I don't care how safe your new Volvo or electric vehicle is, flying in a helicopter is still safer, and a passenger jet vastly more so.
"But Starship blew up 5 times!" Yes, and flying a test plane is dangerous too. Apples to oranges. Starship and SLS have vastly different design certification strategies. SLS spends 100x as much to deliver something that works as reliably as it ever will by the second or third launch. SpaceX gets Starship flying quickly and discovers bugs in prod. So you see more failures. But even now, Starship is probably safer than SLS ever will be. If not now, then very, very soon.
How about we let them succeed first before pressuring them to perform and inevitably embarrass themselves because the silly SpaceX fans were too smug on the internet.
Any failure to orbit is essentially a guaranteed loss for Starship. Any booster explosion or total engine failure on starship would also be essentially a guaranteed loss. Even the space shuttle had better backup options than the current version of starship.
Idk about you, but if I'm the astronaut I'd take 1-(P(SLS failure)*P(LES/parachute failure)) over P(superheavy success)*P(Starship to orbit)*P(Raptor relight) every time.
Initially only single engine out was broadly survivable; after the Challenger disaster new abort procedures were developed that made two engines out survivable during all of flight and even all three engines out at some points.
The big caveat here is that most of these modes were never tested, and the risk of failure during the more demanding aborts was substantial. RTLS abort was famously not tested on STS-1 because it was considered riskier than going all the way to orbit on the Shuttle's first crewed flight.
Since 2022, there have been 601 booster landings, with two losses. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-stage_b...) That means that if you could have snuck onto one of the last 600 Falcon 9 boosters, with appropriate life support gear, your chances of survival would have been over four times higher than if you had snuck into the cargo bay for an SLS (space shuttle) launch, and that's with the SLS being designed to be manned, unlike the Falcon 9 booster.
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.
And they didn't even realize the actual conditions. The ice team had taken temperature readings that showed the booster well below ambient temperature, these were dismissed as wrong. They weren't wrong, the weather that morning was calm enough the LOX boiloff was falling pretty close to straight down, cooling the booster.
The tragedy of Challenger is that Morton Thiokol engineers did look enough to know that the O-ring design was likely to fail under cold weather conditions. This was already a known issue and the engineers specifically recommended that Challenger postpone launch because of the temperature at the pad the night before the launch.
They got overruled... almost certainly for what amounts to political reasons as the big bosses didn't want to throw off the timing of the media-hyped "first class taught from space".
Still remember watching the Challenger launch on a CRT TV propped up on an AV cart in an 8th grade classroom and it being a big deal that a teacher was going up in space.
I don't think that the "teacher in space" part was much of a factor in Marshall's decision-making. There was clearly plan-continuation bias, and there was a clear directive that Marshall should not be responsible for delaying a launch. The management style they had inherited from von Braun also meant that disagreement was highly discouraged. The data was ambiguous enough that they could convince themselves that everything was fine and Morton Thiokol was coming up with a new launch requirement at the last minute.
There's a really well written and researched book on the topic, that I highly recommend, called Truth, Lies, and O-Rings by Allan J. McDonald, James R. Hansen, and Jonathan Yen
Since SLS's only human rated payload is Orion, that's basically saying that Starship can land on earth coming from the moon, right now.
The other's total was less than just the Senate Launch System.
In your fucking dreams. NASA’s entire budget has never been more than 4 or 5% gov spending a year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
Many people don't know it hasn't been more than ~1% of the budget since 1975 (which I did remember, I just thought the peak was higher).
How many people died in the nasa space program vs the Starship one?
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.
Did you feel similar before the crewed SpaceX Dragon 2 flew successfully?
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.
Reducing their work to the (self-serving) political alignments of the CEO is a big part of the optics issue.
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.”
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.
Calling it a fully reusable vehicle is just fantasty.
Something something Ship of Theseus.
It's 1/4 of the design goals though. Pretty massive haircut.
Even if they never increase it from here, this is an enormous achievement and success.
> 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...
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?
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.
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.
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).
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
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...
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.
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.
But a fleet of Hiluxes is a whole lot more useful for actually getting shit done than a couple Ferraris.
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.”
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.
Sell the data you get back from the probe.
Many of the Age of Exploration endeavors were funded by non-government institutions for various reasons, such as getting an exclusive on the story and selling newspapers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
This claim is not even in the right ballpark.
Planes are faster only when ignoring the time at/to/from the airport.
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.
Not intending to derail (hah) the thread, but with trains there just are more examples to look for vs. rockets, while still being broadly comparable. In about 6-7 years we can look to China for a comparable, public project with Long March 9 and 9b.
> they stopped producing stuff that works.
No they reluctantly nationalized a broken industry well past its profitable time and then refused to invest anything into it.
Any development needs investment. If you nationalize and don't invest, of course you will not produce anything new.
While when you nationalize and you do, you might produce something new, just like in private industry.
The technology behind high speed trains literally came from British Rail technology development center and was then used by Japan. Both done by government.
I don't understand why on HN the debate between public and private has so cliche and on a level of 3rd graders. Its obviously way more complex than that in the real world.
This was a topic I wrote papers about in middle school and HS.
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.
Most federal agencies have been running for 50+ years so they're further along than a company that started 10 years ago. You can't just start a second NASA to compete with the first one. Private companies also become corrupt but they can fail and get replaced.
I think the biggest factor behind it is misaligned benefits. In a state agency you're paid out of a fixed budget so there is no incentive to work harder or push for changes. But it's the same in a corporation where shareholders and top executives capture profits.
The only permanent way out is make workers collectively responsible for outcomes. Set up an independent employee owned agency that takes fixed price contracts from the government. That way it's guaranteed to never go over budget, and they will often deliver ahead of time so they can take on a new contract sooner.
Your ad hominem attack doesn't take away from my point.
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.
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.
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.
Anyway, "I want billionaires to fail" is fine, cool, I probably agree, but the question being argued was "is Elon running things inherently safer than the situation that led to Challenger etc.". I do not agree with the idea that Elon's companies have a culture where it is safe and repercussion-free to report that things are busted.
That's what I'm saying. Promising to deliver brain-computer interfaces and failing at it is not the same as, pretty much anything else.
> I do not agree with the idea that Elon's companies have a culture where it is safe and repercussion-free to report that things are busted.
And this is different from say Apple (or the majority of large corporates) how?
> If you read up in this thread, the argument was that Elon is safer than NASA.
There's nothing to decide either way. There have been failures at his companies, and at the same time 13 crewed missions on SpaceX rockets without human casualties.
The idea is to set a goal to strive towards.
What he has delivered is incredible.
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.
They actively forced deviance.
For more details, check out Truth, Lies, and O-Rings by Allan J. McDonald, James R. Hansen, and Jonathan Yen
In any case, a cool spectacle.
read comments
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.
> Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
100 launches per landing is wrong. It's 40 launches at most and even that is somewhat pessimistic because it assumes a return starship to bypass Orion.
In order to get passing tests, they have to fail first.
Hope is not physical reality.
Something is only successful when success is delivered.
I get similar vibes to watching this spectacle to that of the “Tesla flying car” demonstration. Amazing stunt , but is that the primary goal ?
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 just find this reusable Starship thing pretty Elon, crazy impressive demo, actually a good concept, let's see if it truly goes "into prod".
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?
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 ?
> 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.
Also, Apollo had Gemini before it and Mercury before that. It was an iterative process.
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.
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 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.
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.
>reasons that Starship doesn’t have to deal with
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" ??
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.
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 agree with a lot of your point, but would probably caveat a lot of the JPL work.
When people fail to acknowledge that, it becomes a vehicle for a digression and creates tired discussions that follow the same well-worn paths.
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.
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.
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).
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.
It shows that the government’s incentives are not aligned with the project’s goals and why privatization works better for this type of project.
I don’t take umbrage with the govt/private model when done right. I take issue when people act like one deserves all the credit while ignoring the larger system that is required to bring that success about.
This is literally how the computing industry was built.
Ignoring those goals for short-term corporate profit is politically incompetent, and has terrible consequences - as most of us are about to find out.
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.
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.
Can we stop pretending the private sector isn't a labyrinth of idiocy, opportunism, petty infighting, and inefficiency?
The private sector is very, very bad at thinking strategically in useful terms. Profit is a fool's proxy for progress.
Corporate values have been the single biggest brake on human development since the 1970s. We would be far further ahead on every metric with the kind of smarter strategic management that corporate culture makes unimaginable.
Government issue? Or, let's be more honest, the issue here is with the people expecting government programs to become job programs?
People always act as if everything is only because of a few requirements from DoD, but this is just not correct.
The fundamental problem was that they had limited budget and they wanted to build something that could achieve almost absurd spec without building any intermediate steps.
Spreading it around districts was also not really a huge issue because it was such a new program and you had contractors all over the US already, so it was actually sensible. The problem is just that even today they can't change it because they locked it in back then.
Can you elaborate on this point?
1) Starlink 2) NASA Artemis 3) Mars
Each of these variants will have significantly different designs demanded by different organizations or organizational units.
The issue isn’t really how many masters per se, but how competing their respective requirements.
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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
As for the whole 10x the payload, well that goes back to a big chunk of my comment. The only real demand for this is Starlink. Nobody else needs this kind of capacity in volume. Exactly how many launches are required depends entirely on how large the constellation gets. that could be anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000+. That'll be driven by demand for satellite broadband. I've seen estimates on Starlink-related Starship launches anywhere from 30 to 150 per year.
But how much demand is there really? The receivers are expensive. Wired broadband is superior wherever it's available. Obviously there are some use cases (eg ships, planes) where being mobile is required.
I spent a little time looking into how realistic phone-based Starlink is and... it's not particularly realistic. Phone transmitters are too weak. You'd lose service inside because the phone is too low powered. And more power means a bigger, hotter phone with less battery life. This is a significant disadvantage to terrestrial 5G and is arguably a limit of physics. After all, an iPhone's signal doesn't need to travel 300-600km.
So there's a market for Starlink but is it enough to sustain a $15-30B program cost and 100 Starship launches a year? The jury is out. And if there isn't that demand, it gets a whole lot more expensive because you need to amortize the program cost over fewer launches.
Oh, and new capabilities means redeveloping the capability to carry crew, assuming we have some space station to replace the ISS. The original Crew Dragon was meant to support up to 6-7 crew. There was no demand for that so it got scaled back to 4. Well, what's a 10x payload going to do if you can't even fill 6 seats on Crew Dragon?
As for your launch cadence predictions, I'd argue they're optimistic but not wildly optimistic. I think it's going to take some time to scale up. But the Moon by 2030? No shot. This requires in-orbit refueling, some kind of lunar lander, some kind of crew vehicle and certification for all of the above. If this happens by 2035 I'll be pleasantly surprised.
[1]: https://kfgo.com/2026/05/01/exclusive-spacex-spending-on-sta...
At the very least, one can turn off the data center components, wait till it cools down, then start it again. Nobody says all of it has to run continuously.
> you have no way to economically service the inevitable failures
The data center's components can communicate with each other by radio, meaning failed components can be simply replaced.
*There are reasons, but none that justify very large scale compute clusters in space
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?
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]
https://web.archive.org/web/20200531171908/https://history.n...
> The algorithms were invented in 2010s
The McDonnell Douglas DC-X first vertically landed in 1993 and had an autoland capability. NASA also soft-landed probes autonomously on the moon way back in the 60s with Surveyor, though they would have been way easier to control than a booster.
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
This is blatantly false. SpaceX learned a ton about different failure modes by launching many Starships during testing and watching them explode. The Shuttle had to take a conservative approach because it was expensive and there was no budget for the type of just-launch-it-and-see-what-happens approach SpaceX takes.
I hope other great minds at SpaceX are well remembered into the far future.
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?
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. :)
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!)
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!
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
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 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! :-)
They do a lot of cool and clever stuff - for example for the partial solar eclipse in August, it was not well observable from their grounds, as it was happening low above the horizon near sunset. So they rented a hot air baloon, which even launched from a meadow next to the Planetarium (which is often used for hot air baloon launches during the summer) and then they live streamed the eclipse for as long as possible - IIRC about ~5 minutes longer than what was possible to see on the grounds. the Stream recording is here, end to end from baloon launch to night landing in a field: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wWrs-36nvg4&pp=0gcJCVgCo7VqN5t...
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.
The Chinese catcher is pretty cool, and seems like an upgrade compared to the Falcon 9. However with the chopsticks you're effectively landing on the crane which loads it onto a transport or even stack it directly back on the pad for the next launch (far more likely with boosters, though it could happen with fuel tankers I suppose). So I don't think anyone at SpaceX is currently sad they chose chopsticks.
The cable catch system for long march 10B is superior to the landing legs of falcon 9 - of the 11 falcon 9 failures, a cable catch system would have avoided 4-6 of them. Removing the landing legs also reduces the rocket dry mass and increases payload mass to orbit.
If SpaceX did Falcon 9 again, they would likely use a cable catch system, as it resolves about half of falcon 9's historic landing failures.
I had trouble visualizing your comment until I saw 2 YouTube videos from another commenter down thread of their alternate rocket catching mechanism.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GJ-wZLLuh9M
""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.
I connect from EU.
From the engineering perspective what's the real challenge here? Because senors are so capable and control software are mature already.
My mind exploded watching that plasma.
nevertheless, the people who made it work should be proud of themselves.
Starship plus Booster load roughly 1000 tons of methane. We use roughly 1,000,000 tons of kerosene a day (world wide).
Starship is methalox so it's somewhat more ecological than the kerosene burning falcon, but with the increased launch capacity, the rate at which it can deliver stuff to orbit, practically all of which eventually burns up in the upper atmosphere when EoL will likely have much more of a polluting effect in total.
There's about a thousand tons of methane on starship which come out to about 2750 tons of CO2.
For reference an average natural gas power plant produces 2000 tons 10000 tons of CO2 every day.
So if you fly a starship once per day that's as bad as one (1!) gas power plant.
The US emits 14 million tons of CO2 per day, out of which 4 million comes from power plants.
Now, suppose Starship is very successful and they have 10 launches a day. That will certainly have some environmental inpact, though it would hardly be noticable at the national scale.
However! It would be silly to restrict Starship, for the very simple reason that we have no alternative for space travel, when we do have alternatives for energy generation.
Surely you need way more than 10 per day to achieve the goals of the program.
CO2 is not an issue. There's way bigger issues out there.
I can’t wait for the time in the near future when catching starship and its booster is old hat.
Amazing day today!
The Falcon 9 landing legs were some excellent engineering, but scaled up to the size of starship they would weigh many tons (note the square-cube law makes them more unfavorable proportionally, not just massive considered amsolutely).
This would be a big deal for the booster, but it's absolutely vital for Starship itself because any additional dry mass subtracts directly from the payload (actually, it's even worse since it also increases the fuel needed for landing).
Another advantage is that it's better for reuse, as they don't have to spend hours or days restowing legs, recharging deployment cylinders and replacing crush cores.
> The strong gravity of Earth makes the physics of a fully reusable rocket with positive payload margin extremely difficult to solve, which is why it has never been done before.
> Removing the mass of landing legs from the booster and ship by making the tower do the work of final velocity attenuation greatly improves payload margin.
> This architecture also simultaneously substantially increases launch cadence, because the same arms that lift the booster and ship onto the launch stand also catch them, allowing immediate placement of the booster back on the launch stand and the ship back on top of the booster.
Edit: Spaceship is also more delicate than the booster. They have to be careful to not damage the tiles during the catch.
AI likely becomes much more efficient on earth than making sense in space for the foreseeable future.
Part of the importance is due to the fact that while the space shuttle was a technical success in terms of being able to build and operate a reusable upper stage, it was hella expensive. It required a lot of expensive refurbishment between missions. Launch cadence had a fairly low upper bound. And it wasn't safe enough.
The true believers will claim that catching a starship upper stage marks a new era. It marks the possibility of a new era. It proves it is plausible that a vertical landing upper stage could possibly be a better approach than a space plane. But it hasn't proven any of that. There are about a dozen major milestones between here and actually having a rocket system that meets all of its claimed specifications, both technical and financial. Here's just one big hairy example: to fly manned missions, starship either needs to be redesigned to accommodate an escape system, or it needs to show a level of reliability and safety never previously achieved by a rocket.
In my estimation, it will take at least another five years to know what starship really can do and what it will cost.
And even Space Shuttle wasn't a demonstration of that, since the propellant tankage (the largest volume of any stage) wasn't reusable.
SpaceX has pretty conclusively shown the Shuttle architecture (stage and a half, using LH2 at launch) was not the right choice.
[1] https://www.space.com/22432-reusable-dc-x-rocket-space-hall-...
The space shuttle was retired for a reason? This was already known. The only thing it shows is that with that knowledge, you can design something better. Hindsight 20/20 etc
This is a complete apples to oranges comparison.
A more apt comparison would be the space shuttle being a kin to Vasco da Gama's discovery of the sea route to India. After that point, the concept was demonstrated and the challenge was in optimizing cost-savings of commercial endeavours.
I mean, orbital lift services have been a thing for how many decades?
How are you measuring "safe enough" in this context? My understanding is that the Shuttle didn't have programmatic probabilistic requirements for mission safety. Ie, they didn't use overall reliability estimates and instead relied on engineering judgement (which the Challenger report showed varied widely depending on who you interviewed). It's hard to make a claim on whether it was safe enough without explicitly defining the safety goal.
Early 1970s documents were given safety requirements of 1:20 flights being successful. [1] That's the closest I've found to an actual requirement, and the shuttle record falls well within that requirement. I do think such an early spec is not a good basis for final performance, though.
[1] page 326: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19700005884/downloads/19...
Shuttle started at 1:10 and ended with 1:90 chance of loss of crew. That was bad and got it canceled as soon as the station was built, and supposedly ISS was finished only because international obligations. The last mission to extend Hubble's life was almost canceled because the NASA admin thought it was too dangerous.
NASA wanted 1:270 (so just "3 times safer than shuttle at the end of the shuttle program") from commercial crew (i.e. SpaceX Crew Dragon and Boeing Starliner).
Current US law for commercial space works on consent: passengers sign a waiver saying they know it's dangerous, and then the company doesn't have to promise safety the way an airline does. The company is on the hook for debris and innocent bystanaders on the ground though.
SpaceX plan to fly Starship a lot and gain so much experience they can find and fix all problems and reach airline safety. At least private jet level of safety, at a start.
There are multiple layers of risk consent, from engineering, safety, medical, and crew, for NASA. Of those, I think crew are the least likely to say no because they tend to come from a very risk tolerant population.
Whatever official spec that did or did not exist is irrelevant.
I don't think it's that hard. "We're not sure exactly how safe it is, and do not have any actual requirement that it meet any specific level of safety" is clearly not safe enough for manned flight. (At least not outside of war-time or other such times we're willing to take on extra risks)
Would you get on an elevator that has a weight limit listed as "hasn't fallen yet", "has only fallen that one time", or "did fall that one time, but not since the redesign". Would you trust millions of dollars of human training and several lives to such an elevator?
I think we can say that it wasn’t safe.
The point was that wasn’t explicitly defined up front…they seemed to have fallen into the same trap you did of “we’ll know it when we see it”. CCP has a loss of crew threshold requirement of 0.37%.
We do not design civilian, optional, exploratory space missions with a threshold for acceptable fatalities. There is no number of dead astronauts that we can accept as a design goal.
Unforeseeable fatalities can happen, but death rate should not be a predetermined design parameter.
I bet there are lots of people willing to fly on Starship even if it had Falcon 9’s level of reliability even without an escape system.
Current (2026-11) FSD in “sloth” mode requires less attention (in software), and, having used it a fair bit myself, I would probably ride in it unsupervised. The Cybercab customers do.
Flight 13 launched 20 Starlink v3 sats for a total payload of 34,100 kg.
Flight 14 launched 26 Starlink v3 sats for a total payload of 44,330 kg.
The Space Shuttle's max payload capacity was only 22,780kg (https://i.redd.it/8t8j1n4032lh1.png)
I have yet to be convinced that Starship’s payload capacity is actually a good thing, from a big picture perspective. It looks to me like a possible case of shouting, “I meant to do that!” after a pratfall. On a months-long trip to Mars, you need a vehicle that big for the sake of the human occupants. For launching Starlink, it’s less clear whether the ability to deploy so many satellites at once was worth the vehicle’s development costs. Perhaps it’s just inherited from an earlier iteration of the program that had different goals, and a more modest design would have been more economical. Worse, so far it seems like Starlink might be it. Most other use cases people have proposed for putting 40 tonnes in orbit on a regular cadence are the kind of highly speculative grasping at straws that accompanies any technically impressive solution in search of a problem.
A lot of the vision was actually around building orbital solar arrays (remember the microwave power plant from sim city 2000?) to resolve the oil crisis.
The oil crisis went away and the microwave arrays idea didn't make much progress and shuttle' budget got cut until they could only do one vehicle, so they tried to combine both and have a reusable heavy lift manned space glider.
But because the microwave arrays weren't going to happen nor was the earlier L1 space station idea (and skylab deorbited before shuttle's first launch) they had nowhere to shuttle anything to, so instead they just ended up with a heavy lift LEO launcher that had people onboard for some reason.
Ofc they eventually got the ISS as a destination, much later.
In it's current design, there's no way to do that. Which is also why starship can be a lander on the moon, but it's crew will board after it gets to orbit (for now, at least).
The reason the shuttle was so expensive and costly was because they used ablative cooling. SpaceX came up with some novel material produced entirely in house to make the heat shield hot swappable. They new this was a problem from the start and specifically designed this thing to be rapidly reusable, not just reusable in namesake.
Atleast, on elon time it's super easy to get these haters to eat their words. They are producing one of these every month, so he will see how fast they scale from here. Even if it takes a month to referb and put back on the pad, they are scaling exponetially pretty fast.
Even if they have to do that every flight, which I doubt, SpaceX can achieve a very high flight rate with relatively few Ships.
The whole “catch the giant rocket” thing is (was?) the hard part
Now, would I let my children fly on one? I'm hesitant now, and I'd like to see how they handle the flip maneuver with humans aboard. But no hard yes or no yet. Let's see how long it takes to become as reliable as the Falcon family - or the 747 family even as that is SpaceX's stated goal.
I assume they'll do the latter. If the vehicle is truly rapidly reusable, that's less crazy than it sounds. Just fly it 10,000 times and fix all the problems you find :) Escape systems are only really useful during launch anyway. The only way to protect the crew from a failure during reentry is reliability.
The previous flight launched 20 sats and that is the equivalent (in Starlink bandwidth) to 10x F9 launches.
This one launched 26 sats. That'd be 13x F9 launches in Starlink bw.
F9 internal cost is 20M$.
Starship stack is rumoured to cost ~100M$ to build.
If they can launch a stack once every month, they've already achieved more "capacity" for Starlink than their best year using F9s (last year). At half the price.
So that's already proven, even if nothing else works (i.e. reusability, etc). But of course they'll keep working the problem and make it work. They're also scaling at a crazy pace (3 more pads in various stages of readiness, plus even more planned in the next ~5 years). They've just finished the gigabay and they're planning even more in Louisiana.
Anything they do from here on out is "the cherry on top".
Are we ready to put passengers and NASA interplanetary missions on Starship? No.
Is SpaceX ready to count on Starship for replenishing or expanding their main moneymaking satellite fleet? Yes.
Starship doesn’t need a 1960's style launch escape system. The whole ship is the crew vehicle. If the booster fails, Starship separates and flies away on its own Raptors. That’s the plan SpaceX has stuck with for years. NASA requires high reliability and failure tolerance for crewed flights, not a regulatorily mandated escape system.
If you extrapolate the safety record of Falcon onto Starship, which seems conservative given that Starship is going to be their focus, it will be far safer than the Space Shuttle.
The Space Shuttle blew up 2 out of 135 flights, 1.5%. Falcon has 3 blow-ups out of 720+ flights. That's more than 20x as safe, and includes the aggressive/early R&D.
Starship is still being developed. Unless they go under somehow, it's going to be safer than the Space Shuttle by similar orders of magnitude.
stop repeating this lie, please
shuttle costs per-launch were on falcon 9 level
the only reason for the cost was lack of payloads (!) to spread per-year costs
there's a reason why spaceX now gets far far FAR largest part of its income from Starlink and most most MOST of its launches are Starlink. It's sattelite company with launch side business
Falcon rockets don't seem to be exploding on ascent anymore, they're doing 2-3 launches per week now, no explosions in a decade.
Perhaps an escape system could be deployed from the dorsal side of Starship, too.
Given their track record of achieving the impossible, I wouldn't bet against SpaceX as they head towards commercial deployment of Starship.
https://youtu.be/jHlpfNSpBmw?t=3233