If the heat shield holds up then this changes everything. Next step is double catch and re-flying the same ships and catching again, then payloads to orbit become significantly cheaper opening a new era in space flight.
Yeah, I'm eagerly awaiting results from inspection of the heat shield (which hopefully they will disclose). Reflight without refurbishment is the last goal they need to hit before the system can be considered a success. After that, optimizing for increased payload and nailing reliability will be the things to work on. And of course orbital refueling for HLS.
They already recovered a ship from that one time they accidentally landed one in the ocean. SpaceX got to have a lot of heatshield endurance data by now.
Fuel transfer seems like a trivial problem next to the reusable heat shield. And even if for some weird reason it never works, the program could likely pay for itself just launching Starlink/Starshield with full reuse.
Or use SuperHeavy to launch non-reusable second stage and fueled Moon module of different design. After all SuperHeavy doesn’t have to be used exclusively for Starship.
This depends on what you're considering to be the main goal of Starship. Both of you are correct that Starship's stated goals included what you're considering the goal.
If the simple industrial process of pumping liquid from one tank to another is too difficult, one wonders exactly what sort of society anyone could imagine building in space.
The main reason fuel depots and fuel transfer were disparaged was to protect the gravy train of SLS. But that's essentially over.
Nothing is simple in zero g. All our industrial processes have baked in assumption about gravity (and most also about the composition and pressure of surrounding air).
[−]motionlessveloc · 2026-11-14 Sat 23:13 UTC ·
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Only for going to the Moon or Mars. As a launch system, Starship will still be a phenomenal success even if they struggle with fuel transfer, which is really an entirely different problem.
[−]matheusmoreira · 2026-11-14 Sat 23:18 UTC ·
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Orbital refueling seems like a small problem compared to a reusable starship.
Space stations , space manufacturing, different kind of payload eg telescopes that are 10x bigger , you name it , oh and yeah mars , moon , asteroids etc . It all depends on how cheaper and bigger payload . 10x or 100x. If 100x this is new era for humanity
When I was a kid it was like $50k/lb to send something up? Now it's like $1200? That's a big deal.
[−]somenameforme · 2026-11-15 Sun 02:13 UTC ·
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And the even more tantalizing thing is what comes next. You're right that that's a big deal, that's near to two orders of magnitude cost reductions! But on the other hand we're still in a scenario where it costs $1200 to send a 16oz bottle of water to space. So that means the amount of infrastructure that can be deployed out there is limited and mostly restricted to governments or small satellites for private usage.
Now bring it down two more magnitudes, which is the aspirational goal of Starship, and you're talking about a world where regular companies can start to deploy mass infrastructure to space. Suddenly, space as a domain for expansion and development becomes completely viable. That would completely revolutionize space, Earth, and humanity. It would be the official start of the next era of humanity.
[−]ExoticPearTree · 2026-11-15 Sun 03:39 UTC ·
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Give it time. Maybe in the meantime new chemicals are discovered that make space flight cheaper. And new alloys to make the rocket lighter.
And who knows, maybe we discover The Expanse like reaction engines in a few decades.
[−]somenameforme · 2026-11-15 Sun 04:11 UTC ·
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You're speaking of advances well beyond the two magnitudes more we need. This is what I think most people don't get about the concept of full reuse. Those two orders of magnitude are theoretically viable with Starship!
Starship spends around $1 million fuel to send around 100 tons to orbit. That's a baseline cost of $10/kg. But if we get truly aspirational then fuel costs can be significantly reduced through greater vertical integration, and the later block models already are looking at bumping the payload up to 200 tons.
You obviously need some margin to account for maintenance after each flight, but the cost of the rocket itself rapidly amortizes to something near $0 with sufficient reuse. So something around $10/kg is a completely viable aspirational goal with current tech.
And if we get anywhere in the ballpark of that $10 then Starship is going to be at least a big of a revolution in space as LLMs were in the digital/cognitive world. Wild time to be alive!
[−]ExoticPearTree · 2026-11-15 Sun 07:22 UTC ·
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I was reading in the comments that the rocket itself is made of steel. What if they manage to build it out of a lighter alloy that has the same or better properties when it comes to going and coming back from space?
What if, considering how SpaceX simplified rocket engine design figures out that, i don't know, adding a little bit of ammonia to the mix, makes the engines perform 10% better? Or 15%? Obviously not a rocket expert, but I don't think we (as a species) experimented with all the possible combinations of chemical compounds to get the best possible output to make a rocket get to space.
I us a lot of what IFs, because in the past few years we've made technological jumps that prior to that it would have taken us decades.
Read “Ignition!” by John D Clark. The field of chemical propulsion is far more mature than you realise, there are no more basic ‘whatifs’ like your hypotheticals.
> 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.
What makes you think that? That's a nice thing to think but mostly comes out of ignorance of the field.
[−]ExoticPearTree · 2026-11-15 Sun 15:42 UTC ·
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Because we don't know everything. We find out each day new things about chemistry, the universe and so on.
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.
Yeah that’s just wrong. For chemical propulsion we no exactly what sort of valence arrangement of electrons and mass of combustion exhaust products is optimal for getting the most acceleration for your reaction rate. It’s mostly because simpler is better (eg if pure hydrogen could be a combustion product it would he impossible to improve on that). More complex molecules will be strictly worse than anything we know about already. As you said yourself, you know nothing abour rockets or chemistry. Read the book everyone has been recommending.
What alloy would that be? Aluminum? Doesn't have the temperature tolerance. Titanium? Nightmarish to manufacture and expensive. Composites? Temperature intolerance and they tried it; not robust.
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.
The sky is the limit really. The shape and design is sound so now you can test all sorts of options. Internal frames to buttress the structure. Mixed materials. Composites. You name it. Steel is super easy and cheap for prototypes but if you know you can get the ship back you can play with all sorts of variables.
Starship built with new alloys and promises to deliver everything expected. I’m wondering what’s next for spacex beyond starship . It will take 5 years to squeeze all the possibilities from current design(s). What will be next 10x ?
[−]helterskelter2 · 2026-11-15 Sun 05:38 UTC ·
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> a world where regular companies can start to deploy mass infrastructure to space
If we don't start becoming much more careful, I expect we'll live to see the Kessler syndrome, perhaps sooner than we expect.
[−]somenameforme · 2026-11-15 Sun 06:19 UTC ·
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Well how are we going to have big problems to solve if we don't create them!? Snark aside, Kessler syndrome is probably 100% inevitable. Even ignoring development, there's geopolitics. Modern warfare heavily depends on eyes in the sky, and so on day 1 of direct war between two great powers, stuff in space is going to start going pop.
Fortunately it's not as bad as most think. You'd still be 100% capable of launching stuff into space, and even orbital rotations would still be viable, even if it would require more active maneuvering. It's not like it creates a giant impassable shield over Earth that'd just blot out the sky, but more like the odds of a collision per year on a given orbit would tend to increase dramatically.
And the biggest risk would be in stuff quite close to Earth since that's where it'd be the most energetic/fastest, and also where there's the least amount of space meaning the odds of a collision are relatively greatest. Fortunately, that's also the domain where drag is the greatest and where particles would most rapidly end up falling into the atmosphere and burning up, so the worst of it would clean itself up naturally on reasonably short timeframes, like days to months.
Low earth orbit can't sustain a Kessler syndrome for more than a few years. Atmospheric drag is too large. (And it gets proportionally larger for smaller fragments.)
Perhaps, but that's country club problems for their lifespan. I think pollution on earth is a much more worthy issue to allocate resources towards. A lot of Earth's problems won't solve themselves with time.
Starlink is a big deal so I wouldn't discount it. It's significantly expanded the satellite networking market. It's also a key military asset.
Aside from that the F9 rideshare missions have made space accessible to a whole new class of space startup that wouldn't exist otherwise.
Prior to F9 there was no competition in the US market. The result was government customers paid ULA through the nose. Commercial customers largely used Ariane. F9 saved the government money directly but also forced other launchers to lower their prices.
The current list price of Falcon-9 flight at 74 millions is a third more than what Russia used to charge for commercial payloads. Production cost of Russian rocket is below 15M USD and probably was below 10M at the peak of Russian comercial services. This is comparable with Falcon-9 amortized cost per flight.
Also don't forget what a state their launch facilities are in. Just because they could do something before does not mean they can do it now. They haven't invested properly in their infrastructure.
Wouldn’t this imply the SpaceX costs need to adjust for the infrastructure they didn’t pay for? Not slighting them, just acknowledging an apples to apples comparison is hard
You can't compare rocket vs rocket. Cheap Russian rockets are way smaller. Falcon 9 destroyed their market even before it was reusable.
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.
Only if SpaceX can work out how to get it out of Starship. It is not as trivial as it sounds, and so far they have shown no inclination to work on the problem.
[−]actionfromafar · 2026-11-15 Sun 09:42 UTC ·
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They could if they wanted to but for now it seems optimized to poop out little bom... sorry I mean little Starlinks.
Part of the problem was that there wasn't a second provider. I think Blue Origin getting into orbit will be a bigger game changer for launch prices than Starship, because it'll introduce competition into the market.
[−]daniel_iversen · 2026-11-15 Sun 10:17 UTC ·
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Not sure why the parent is being downvoted. Nobody in the comments seem to say anything else than "because Starlink" and a vague "new space startups". I'm a simple retail investor in SpaceX and love it just for Starlink and AI and then it's nice that they'll take humanity to Mars etc, but I was always dubious about how much money and growth would be in generic space cargo business and I fear if NASA stops having big contracts for them then it's a big impact on that side of the business. Would love to hear others' point of view on that! (one angle might be that they can use the current gravy train of NASA and Starlink and what not to invest in rapidly reusable rockets and once they're an order of magnitude cheaper then the future space cargo business doesn't have to be so large?)
Well we should be able to get SpaceShuttle size/tonnage cargo into space again, and on a re-usable platform.
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.
The politicians didn't want prestige, they wanted pork barrel spending going to certain voters. Prestige was just the mechanism to keep the pork flowing.
Starlink is big enough that the military is now concerned SpaceX and NASA won’t have the capacity to launch their payloads in the coming years - seems like there is enough demand!
Starlink is huge, a market many times larger than Falcon 9 launch and Falcon 9 cannot launch Starlink satellites fast enough to keep up with current demand, build for future demand, and maintain a constellation of (already) over 10,000 satellites.
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.
Even if it doesn't meet their goals of rapid reuse, I think we've still joined the new era. Replacing tiles is going to be substantially cheaper than building new upper stages, likely less than the cost of fuel for a launch.
Doesn't seem to be that different. Space Shuttle: 27.5t payload/2030t launch weight = 1.4%. Starship: 40t payload/5000t launch weight = 0.8%. For comparison, the Falcon 9 has 17.5t/549t = 3.2%. Bringing back the orbiter appears to still come at a significant cost.
The maximum payload of the current configuration is a matter of conjecture, but 40t is considerably lower than the low end. I think 80t-100t is more likely.
Yeah, but still 40t to LEO with cheap rapid reusability (say 60 days, cheap engine replacement, some mass produced tiles) is still revolutionary, just not as revolutionary as Musk’s vision is. Imagine what research packages you can send to the outer planets with 40t budget from the effin LEO. Approximately infinite delta V with ion drives and fat solar cells.
I’m more concerned with payload bay doors than the spacecraft’s performance tbh.
But Starship does not currently seem to be on track to achieve cheap, rapid reusability.
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.
[−]JumpCrisscross · 2026-11-15 Sun 12:45 UTC ·
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> Starship does not currently seem to be on track to achieve cheap, rapid reusability
What? Based on what? Starship has had two orbital flights ever. And they’ve gone pretty well.
They still don’t seem to have figured out how to reliably recover and reuse Superheavy. They did it a couple times in 2025, but it’s been over a year and quite a few flights since the last time they successfully caught one.
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.
These are still experimental flights. That could have been a bad procedure or a misconfiguration; we don't know. Claiming it as an upper limit if the design and then comparing it to a fully mature STS (you're quoting Endeavour's payload IIRC; Columbia was heavier and could not match its numbers) is cherry-picking. If you want to organise your claims with "in the absolute worst case..." then that's fine. But this is a subject with a lot of uncertainty around it, and asserting that one end of the error bars is the only one that counts isn't really justified.
That doesn't say much without knowing how the fuel was used. They may have pushed it to the max to give Starship more room, therefore didn't save enough fuel for the booster's return. They may have set higher safety margin. They may have used more conservative thrust settings.
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.
These flights use a minimum amount of fuel with a half empty payload.
[−]burnerRhodov3 · 2026-11-15 Sun 17:03 UTC ·
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That's not how rocket science works lol. You don't put it up and accidently run out of fuel because it used more fuel than you think. Slosh in the internal tank and a sensor failure is most likely. Second most likely is that engine that went out started spewing fuel. You don't "Run out of fuel", when attempting a tower catch.
[−]KineticLensman · 2026-11-15 Sun 08:58 UTC ·
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Massive refurb / rebuild costs between each flight
They reassembled and checked everything down to every single bolt. With unmanned missions it does not matter I guess, if a rocket occationally explodes.
Reliability is still a huge concern as there is a risk to the public if Starship has issues at the wrong time.
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.
The rocket can still explode while in space and parts of the rocket can reach the ground without burning up.
Thats not a big risk with rockets built mainly out of aluminium etc, but Starship with its stainless steel that can handle higher temperatures and its heat shield is more likely to reach the ground.
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 risk is minimal. Out of all the rockets that have exploded there has been exactly one case of a person being hit by debris in the US and it was fiber glass so they weren't even injured.
The reassembled and checked everything down to every single bolt because they were using too much fancy beading edge technology that was not reliable for reuse. Even if they connect the landing gear to the automatic system to make it unnamed, they would have to disassemble and reassemble each time. Reuse was a lie, or at least a poetic licence.
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.
The hull shape was very complex. Tiles on Starship are mostly identical; the massive number of SKUs involved in the Shuttle heat shield meant there wasn't a lot of mass production.
(Starship still has unique tiles near flap joints and edges, but the main hull itself has mass produced tiles.)
Didn't help that Shuttles had design differences between them as well due to the lessons learned and new technology developed between when they were built which resulted in having differences both internally and externally. Even the heat shield layouts were different.
Who says anything about heatshield tile being revolutionary? The whole package is, however -- Raptor engine, reusability, refueling, mass production, and so on. Together, they allow low cost, fast turnaround time launch service.
As for a different approach, try Stoke's active cooling solution:
The space shuttle program was doomed from the start because it was designed as a manned vehicle. Unlike Starship, it couldn't fly unmanned.
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.
Human rating was more of a PR issue. The value of the human lives on the orbiter was much less than the value of the orbiter itself. So the cost of an accident would not have been significantly reduced by making it unmanned.
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.)
I see your point financially, however you’re just undervaluing the cost of highly-public deaths then. If a couple missions in a row for any manned program resulted in astronauts being incinerated, it costs the full future value of whole program, because astronauts won’t go on it anymore and the public will also demand its end.
Right, that's a PR issue. It's ultimately because the space program is not actually producing much of tangible value, but rather a perception of value. A program that is producing airy PR is vulnerable to bad PR.
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.
[−]true_religion · 2026-11-15 Sun 18:13 UTC ·
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Right. If the space shuttle was crucial to national security or even financial success, politicians would spare no expense in telling the public that blood needed be shed to protect the ongoing accumulation of wealth en infinitum.
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.
One death isn't too many. It's a matter of too high a probability of general random catastrophe.
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).
[−]RhodesianHunter · 2026-11-15 Sun 15:51 UTC ·
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I sure hope you never work on anything where human lives are in the balance.
> the cost of an accident would not have been significantly reduced by making it unmanned
> 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.
[−]burnerRhodov3 · 2026-11-15 Sun 16:55 UTC ·
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Oh... you just met a big space shuttle nerd.
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.
[−]burnerRhodov3 · 2026-11-15 Sun 17:20 UTC ·
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i'm talking about recovery. They couldn't because they caught it with parachutes.
Again, stage zero is a huge enegineering challange and issue that Nasa didn't even attempt to solve because it was too hard.
Buran proved there was no technical obstacle to uncrewed runway landing, the US could have achieved it a few years earlier if it was a priority. The Buran landing system was more complex than you might expect, and proved to be pretty adaptable in its only orbital flight.
[−]burnerRhodov3 · 2026-11-15 Sun 18:03 UTC ·
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no, you missed what i said. Having humans only slightly improved the odds of mission success... Meaning they did have algorithms to autonomously land on a runway.. They chose not to.
Every tile on Shuttle was bespoke and had to be carefully hand-glued. Starship depends on heavily uniform tiles that can be robot arm installed, with truly bespoke tiles accounting for a small portion, in ares that are likely to survive well enough to be re-flown. Also, the propellant tanks aren't lost with each flight. That's just a couple of the differences, I think the biggest, but there are many smaller areas that Starship can, if it hasn't yet, dramatically beat Shuttle in refurbishment costs (money, but more importantly, time.)
Apparently the engines damage themselves in the last few meters when the energy required to hover / land that gets blasted out is reflected back at the rocket by the launchpad itself.
Yes! Every kg used for legs is a kg not used for cargo... (And worse because the legs have to be carried up and down while the cargo only has to go up.)
>Surely the same energy reflection happens on launch.
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?
Now that I think about it, why land upright at all? You could do a gentle controlled touchdown in a water pool and slowly tilt to horizontal with a minor splash, like the previous Starship.
I do believe it's mostly the legs, but to the first point, on launch you don't have the vacuum engine bells exposed to this. Or second stage at all, where weight matters much more, so any extra shielding you don't need is good.
If they are as precise as they are now, can't they land on asian latrine type launchpads? Like the ones the shuttle used to take off from, with the guides for the blast to go through.
That was the original concept for the booster. You need some sort of giant rocket manipulator at the launch pad no matter what. If you can make it double as an active landing target, you go from needing cm level to m level landing precision.
That's something that's been irking me whenever I watch the booster and now the ship, come crashing down at triple digit MPH speeds then watching it re-light the engines at the now front (aft end of the vehicle but going head first), what with a bunch of non-aerodynamic surfaces there. I am obviously not qualified to assess this, but I wouldn't bet on those engines being reusable more than 2, max 3 times each.
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...
What they do with Falcon 9 is insane as well - they have a portable heatshield for re-entry. That is, the heat shield is the exhaust of the engines. Which is absolutely glorious, not only do you brake, but you shield the rest of the ship using the exhaust as well, as a blowtorch burning to the atmosphere.
Taking an engine off and putting a replacement on is a fast process. Iirc booster gets all its engines in a day or two. Not quite like changing a lightbulb but I think it’s a fast process.
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 is catching (starship) better than landing (falcon)? The difference is the whole launch platform is reusable, booster and upper stage. Falcon is a reusable booster, the upper stages are always expended. Starship's payload capacity is huge, having that capacity on a fully reusable platform will drastically reduce $/kg to orbit since you aren't building whole new rockets every launch. See Falcon 9 for what a reusable booster can do for cost.
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.
The question for Falcon turnaround is about if this is because of anything related to hardware or logistics and business.
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.
The jury’s still out on whether Starship needs fast reusability, too. The existing market for heavy lift launches is tiny. Starlink creates some demand, but beyond that SpaceX seems to be placing an incredible amount of faith in the idea that if you build it they will come.
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.
> The existing market for heavy lift launches is tiny
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’s such a big if, though. Not just around how long it will take. Around whether it will happen at all. There are still a bunch of unknowns that need to be resolved before we can know whether any such plans are economically viable. What I’ve personally observed is that a lot of these ideas look great when presented as concept art, but iffy at best once you start trying to do any back of the envelope estimates.
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.
[−]burnerRhodov3 · 2026-11-15 Sun 17:12 UTC ·
link
You are right, they will repeat what they did with falcon.. They created the demand. They created starlink because they created so much capacity, they needed to put it somewhere. Now they will create Starlink v3 to completely dominate the internet market worldwide. Ontop of starlink V3, they have Starlink V4 in the works which will include direct to cell capability along with building land based towers worldwide. Finally, they have Starmind, for orbital compute.
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.
SpaceX seems to be rather foolishly planning on completely replacing the Falcon 9 and Falcon heavy with Starship which is going to create demand for it.
I don’t think it’s foolish, for more or less the above reason. Starlink is the market for Falcon 9. Without that it apparently isn’t so profitable, because outside of Starlink the demand for a system with that kind of launch cadence just didn’t really materialize.
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.
[−]burnerRhodov3 · 2026-11-15 Sun 17:07 UTC ·
link
It's about takt time. And that's all elon thinks about. It has nothing to do with the landing gear.. even though as you said that's a slight modification. It's about being able to land it where you build, referb, etc.
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.
Even if they haven't completely solved it. They have shown they can strip the old heat shield off, and put an entirely new design of heat shield on a ship in under 2 weeks. I believe that was one of the doomed block 2 ships that blew up in the Caribbean so it never got to re-entry.
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.