Starship is, essentially, Space Shuttle done right: fully reusable booster without solid boosters (avoids Challenger disaster) and orbiter stacked on top instead of on the side (avoid Columbia disaster).
The original designs for the Space Shuttle had the booster (with wings!) return to the launch site, but the cost for two new crewed vehicles was too large, so they scaled it back to the compromised version.
Even more revolutionary, compared to Shuttle, Starship is built on an assembly line. They can build a booster ever 4 weeks and a ship every 2 weeks.
The future we were promised in the 1970s is about to become real.
[−]enraged_camel · 2026-11-14 Sat 23:53 UTC ·
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>> Even more revolutionary, compared to Shuttle, Starship is built on an assembly line. They can build a booster ever 4 weeks and a ship every 2 weeks.
Note that they are also scaling up production in a big way, because they want to launch weekly soon, and then daily. Not sure if we will get to the latter anytime soon but I'm also not going to bet against Elon.
When Falcon 9 was making its early landing attempts, I'm sure people would have struggled to believe that they'd soon be doing over 120 launches+landings per year with very few mishaps.
The Space Shuttle took 2 people into orbit on its first launch and returned them safely to earth. On the first attempt. On the first test of any of the hardware into space. In 1981.
Starship did not and has not done that and until it does I will continue to hold reservations.
I do not see this Starship and its mission profile ever being a human-rated system in this incarnation, ever.
A really cheap way to launch mass into LEO? Sure, I'll give it that.
The system architecture seems to be more fragile than simple capsules with parachutes or even the shuttle (which was already pretty dangerous). There’s no parachute, if you don’t hit the tower during landing you’re in a lot of trouble (unless they can soft-land the ship without the tower and without the bottom exploding?).
The problem isn’t “it’s more complicated” but more “if something goes wrong there’s not a lot you can do”. There’s basically no redundancy and a lot of single points of failure. Having two sets of Parachutes is a lot harder to screw up than a powered landing.
With a normal capsule, you have multiple fuel tanks and redundant RCS thrusters so you’ll practically always be able to deorbit and land (since you also have redundant parachutes). If starship has a fuel leak, how are you going to land, even if you’re able to deorbit?
There are plenty of flat stretches all over the world: in Arizona, Kansas, West Siberia, Mongolia, all over Sahara, Egypt, Sudan, north of Argentina, etc, etc. There's no need for more than several dozen km. If a out-of-fuel Starship can still maneuver with its rudders, it can likely slow down enough for a rough landing.
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.
The "miracle on the Hudson" was an incredible landing. Water landings pretty much never go that well. The usual result is the drag on the landing gear causes the nose to dig into the water or tears a wing off, and then the passengers (if they survive that) have mere moments to get out before it sinks.
Watch the videos of airliners veering off the runway onto flat ground which wrecks the airplane. The landing gear is designed for flat hard runways, not soft bumpy ground.
An airliner has layers upon layers of safety redundancies.
There are multiple flight computers. Practically every essential sensor has copies. Oxygen generation, ram air turbine, life jackets, inflated boats. Onboard radar. TCAS. The airplane itself glides. Then there are thousands of procedural rules and regulations for safe operation.
A system like starship that relies on precise active propulsion has no such room for error.
You've clearly padded your list to look more negative because your last sentence only applies to the glide part... Starship obviously has the same redundant flight computers and sensors and radar and TCAS and will have thousands of procedures for safe operation.
I was responding to the parent, explaining the layers of safety in an airliner.
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.
Starship’s been in development for over two decades and the design keeps being changed and failing.
Soyuz has a very impressive record, Starship has been horrifically mismanaged by comparison. The falcon heavy flew 14 times and SpaceX is all in on a heavy launch vehicle because what? Even if they hit every target perfectly from now on it was a wasteful project.
The design changing and the development _failing to meet its stated deadlines_ is not a good argument for the system never working. Especially given we know the deadlines were unrealistic to begin with, yet significant milestones have been achieved in (deadline-ignoring) impressive time frame - like landing a second stage rocket from orbit within 8 years of development (by a private company, not a national effort).
Not paying off isn’t the same thing as never working.
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.
An addendum to this is that Falcon's 85th launch was Demo-2 (30 May 2020)... 10 years after Dragon Spacecraft Qualification Unit.
[−]DarmokJalad1701 · 2026-11-15 Sun 00:41 UTC ·
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> Starship’s been in development for over two decades
What? The first version of something that looks anything like Starship was the ITS announced back in 2016, later "BFR" in 2017 and the stainless steel version (which is now flying) in December 2018.
Eight years is very reasonable for a fully reusable heavy lift system - something no one has built before.
The Space Shuttle took roughly 12.5 years from formal concept studies to its first flight (and 9 years from official program approval)
Space Shuttle was an even harder project. Amendments to the Starship project were all directed towards making it fly better. Modifications which various departments demanded from the Shuttle project made it a worse and worse spaceship. They even had to let go of the emergency recovery capability, which eventually led to death of 10 astronauts.
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.
I mean, I could see an option being a detachable landing pod for human missions. Or, more crazily, and I'm not sure of the dimensions but some space-plane like the Dream Chaser or whatever that could fit in the cargo bay then deorbit separately after it's done it's mission? There's a lot of ideas. And we're going to learn so much about how to do reusability now that we just didn't know before. But I would not be surprised if some cockamamie version of this wasn't human rated eventually.
Obviously, we're a really long way away from that from a reliability standpoint? But you know, if they launch 10,000 of these over the next decade... we're going to know a lot more about the safety of this design. I'm sure they'll clobber one in to mechazilla eventually? But what if they don't?
> We haven't seen how Starship would deal with crosswinds in the atmosphere being predicted wrong.
Winds are not a significant factor in the trajectory of the ship. Reason is that it spends almost all of it's time very high, above all weather, and only descends to the less stable areas of the atmosphere at the very end, when it's in a vertical belly-flop, going very rapidly through all the different weather layers. You can see this clearly in the return video, at 2 minutes before landing it was still 15km up. And when it's high, it has much more ability to steer by adjusting drag than any winds can move it up there.
What could actually be a problem is sudden high winds or other problems at the landing site. The ship commits to a landing when it does the deorbit burn ~60m before landing. at L-20m, it has about 1000km of cross-range capability, at L-10m only 200km, and after that it goes down quickly, with only 50km at L-5m.
If it's coming back with something valuable, you'd better have plenty of divert options.
Hmm, interesting question.
Just brainstorming there, but it seems like there are going to be specialized versions of starship:
- a tanker (for in space refueling)
- a moon lander
Could see one that is specialized for taking humans into space and then returning them to Earth. It could have a dedicated abort vehicle that takes over the top half of the ship (similar to the abort vehicles they have now on most human-rated rockets).
And maybe it uses landing legs instead, because they're more fault tolerant than a catch tower.
All this might take up a ton of weight, but starship can carry so much tonnage to space, they'd probably still have a lot of tonnage left for humans and cargo.
Yeah, it could be pretty amazing, able to to take hundreds into orbit instead of just a handful.
Two of the 135 total SLS (space shuttle) launches were destroyed. Two of the last 600 Falcon 9 boosters were destroyed on landing.
If I had to ride along in one of them, I'd choose the Falcon 9 booster over the space shuttle.
Also, the Columbia failure occurred because it was a glider. The Starship doesn't have any leading-edge tiles for debris to fall onto. Arguably, the Challenger failure also occurred because it was a glider, which required the odd fuel tank and booster mounting that failed.
[−]MiroslavPokorny · 2026-11-15 Sun 01:39 UTC ·
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You're saying a development rocket that is pushed past the expected limit fails? Amazing...
Even taking you seriously, it has made it to effective orbit more than it has exploded. Nearly all 'landings' have exploded, because that's what happens when you intentionally land a 30 story building full of fuel in the open ocean
[−]MiroslavPokorny · 2026-11-15 Sun 03:15 UTC ·
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> You're saying a development rocket that is pushed past the expected limit fails? Amazing...
Where did i deny it was not a work in progress ?
So why pretend it is a success until it is ready ?
> Nearly all 'landings' have exploded, because that's what happens when you intentionally land a 30 story building full of fuel in the open ocean
Huh? Space shuttle killed 14 astronauts. It was a flawed design from the beginning and never delivered on its original promise.
Starship has its own design trade-offs, as any engineered object does, but it has the benefit of 50 years of technological development since Shuttle.
I'm not as certain as you about whether or not Starship will ever be human rated. But if successful, it will be launching a couple of hundred times per year. Talk to me in five years and we'll see where we are then.
[−]cucumber3732842 · 2026-11-15 Sun 00:26 UTC ·
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I don't think it makes sense to make starship human rated. They'd likely give up too much. Probably better to have a different cheaper rocket for the people.
Like you don't build a barge to ferry standards, it would defeat the point of the barge.
Maybe you're right--I don't know. But large freight airplanes are the same as large passenger airplanes, except for the seats, etc. I think the same might be true for Starship.
[−]kevin_thibedeau · 2026-11-15 Sun 03:14 UTC ·
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Freight airplanes have additional reinforcement to increase max takeoff weight and manage uneven floor loading.
Starship is a lot cheaper than it looks, because they're mass manufacturing the engines. They're targeting $250k per Raptor 3. The RS-25 used on NASA's SLS/Space Shuttle costs about $100M to make currently, comparable thrust.
The most damning thing I've seen on starship was a video that described how little space there is inside for the humans Elon said it would hold. Something like urban transit personal space.
That is practically all spaceflight. The Apollo LEM - which landed on the moon - had ~2.3 m^3 per person. The command module had ~2 m^3 per person. There is nothing unusual there and depending on how you configure the interior it could be relatively spacious.
My comment was in reply to the parent comment saying "Starship is, essentially, Space Shuttle done right"
, and my claim is that this is not the case, that comparing Starship to the Space Shuttle is a category error, in that I don't see Starship actually being replacement for the Shuttle as a human-transport vehicle, and thus it cannot be considered 'Space Shuttle done right'.
> that comparing Starship to the Space Shuttle is a category error
Both are second stages that return from orbit to Earth. Seems a pretty valid comparison on these fundamentals to me.
(Yes, I know you're extending the comparison to human-transport but that is not fundamental to their ability to take payload to orbit and return, as the Starship can fly without on-board pilots.)
isn't the whole "we put a human into space" symbolic anyway? There's no air up there. If we had a full supply chain of robots that brought us back regolith from the moon wouldn't that be more useful than being able to send a person up there?
[−]colechristensen · 2026-11-15 Sun 00:24 UTC ·
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nah humans going is the point. the science is interesting but not of that tremendous value. we don't view archaeology as the highest human endeavor do we?
It can be both, right? Like, we can put humans there and expand the resources available to humanity immensely by sending teams of robots out to manufacture the future habitats, etc.?
Personally, I'm looking forward to joining the Elench. Humans are allowed to join the Elench aren't they?
What exactly is “the point” of humans going there, other than science? Telling a hero story that ignores the contributions of hundreds of thousands that made this possible? Gratifying a few mammoth-sized egos?
[−]colechristensen · 2026-11-15 Sun 02:32 UTC ·
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You have to start with a justification for "the point" of human life at all which is a struggle with some people who only see utility in whatever their equivalent of a quarterly balance sheet is (this includes publishing papers in academic journals).
I don’t understand why justifying human spaceflight supposedly requires grand philosophical ramblings about the meaning of life. Justifying brushing your teeth doesn’t require that either, does it?
What is the point of humans here on Earth exactly? Some consider that humans can be replaced by AI today/in near future. Should we just give up and live space to a more advanced civilization?
The shuttle had a 2/135 death rate. If Starship becomes the core infrastructure for Starlink, it'll be able to afford hundreds of launches before putting humans on it. You won't have to trust some theoretical calculations, you'll just be able to see in practice what the risk of a Starship launch is.
Design flaws that you don't know about yet are still design flaws.
I'm sure there are plenty of "accepted design flaws" in SpaceX vehicles. Hopefully SpaceX engineers are better at calculating the probabilities than NASA was, but I would not volunteer for early missions.
The two programs don’t manage risk the same way. You’re picturing a younger NASA trying to do the same process as led to the first space shuttle launch.
With the Challenger disaster, the contractor's engineering team that developed the booster gave a no-go for launch and NASA administrators showed off their engineering skills by using social engineering to trick an unqualified and unapproved employee of the contractor into signing the form to go for launch. That's far worse than being bad at calculating the safety risks; the specifically overruled the decision by the people that were good at calculating the safety risk.
Source: Truth, Lies, and O-Rings by Allan J. McDonald, James R. Hansen, and Jonathan Yen
dumb question, but at what point does the cost of fuel start to become an issue with such frequent launches? today I imagine launch cost is dominated by the price of the nonrecoverable parts, but fuel will become the floor no?
Starship is more efficient than F9 but in terms of multiple launches per day, the supply chain is indeed a factor. An hourly launch cadence is going to consume roughly as much natural gas as Houston.
All back of envelope here just to get a rough order of magnitude:
Starship needs 10kg (0.5mcf) of methane and 36kg of oxygen per kg to orbit. The oxygen takes 22kWh to liquefy or about (0.16mcf to generate that onsite). So 0.66mcf/kg to orbit and 66,000mcf from to fully fuel.
That is the daily gas usage of a midisze city, say 200k population, per launch.
For liquid oxygen, Spacex is building an air separation plant at its facility in Texas to grab it from the air.
For methane, didn't know this but looked it up, methane is one of the cheapest propellants, but rocket grade methane needs to be purer (starship is estimated to cost $300k to $1 million to refuel)
Sure but it doesn't launch or land humans on Earth, which is the hardest part. And that's fine for now. Once it's launched and landed a few hundred times we can think about launching people on it.
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.
Liquid fueled rockets are intrinsically safer than solid fuel rockets. There is a floor on just how low you can get the risk level with solid fuel, you can't test the rockets you fly, and the failure mode is catastrophic blow-up à la Challenger.
It's like saying flying is safer than driving per passenger-mile. It is. By orders of magnitude. I don't care how safe your new Volvo or electric vehicle is, flying in a helicopter is still safer, and a passenger jet vastly more so.
"But Starship blew up 5 times!" Yes, and flying a test plane is dangerous too. Apples to oranges. Starship and SLS have vastly different design certification strategies. SLS spends 100x as much to deliver something that works as reliably as it ever will by the second or third launch. SpaceX gets Starship flying quickly and discovers bugs in prod. So you see more failures. But even now, Starship is probably safer than SLS ever will be. If not now, then very, very soon.
You're telling me starship is safe for humans when they failed to land the booster?
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.
SLS has an abort mechanism. That alone mitigates most risks of the first stage in a way starship never can, meaning the latter has to fight an uphill battle to deliver the same safety through flight numbers and experience.
> But even now, Starship is probably safer than SLS ever will be. If not now, then very, very soon.
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.
SLS might be less safe than some hypothetical future version of starship, but in reality the current starship's most recent flight had a 15 minute window where a no-go for orbit was called and the mission plan would have resulted in a loss of crew. Safe crewed launches and earth landings are not a priority for them and likely won't be for a long time. Even then, SLS+Orion have the advantage of an LES and the option for unpowered landings essentially anywhere, both of which are fundamentally unworkable with starship's design.
Not only that, but Starship is a robust system from an architectural point of view (not saying they don't have some bugs to work out of it). As we saw in the previous launch, they can go to orbit with an engine missing. An engine down on the shuttle would have been a catastrophic situation.
The Shuttle did have limited engine out capability. The only in-flight engine-out (as opposed to a pad abort after SSME ignition and before SRB ignition, which happened five times) was STS-51-F with a successful abort to orbit. The various other engine-out contingency modes were never used, but they did exist.
Initially only single engine out was broadly survivable; after the Challenger disaster new abort procedures were developed that made two engines out survivable during all of flight and even all three engines out at some points.
The big caveat here is that most of these modes were never tested, and the risk of failure during the more demanding aborts was substantial. RTLS abort was famously not tested on STS-1 because it was considered riskier than going all the way to orbit on the Shuttle's first crewed flight.
To put it in perspective, the Falcon 9 has had 702 launches and has only lost one payload during launch. A couple didn't make it into the right orbit, but there's contingencies to deal with that in manned missions.
Since 2022, there have been 601 booster landings, with two losses. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-stage_b...) That means that if you could have snuck onto one of the last 600 Falcon 9 boosters, with appropriate life support gear, your chances of survival would have been over four times higher than if you had snuck into the cargo bay for an SLS (space shuttle) launch, and that's with the SLS being designed to be manned, unlike the Falcon 9 booster.
The 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.
Except there was no spec. The only temperature spec that existed was for the motor itself--and it had enough thermal mass that it didn't get too cold. No spec existed for the joints.
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 Challenger disaster could perfectly well have been avoided if they had been willing to look.
The tragedy of Challenger is that Morton Thiokol engineers did look enough to know that the O-ring design was likely to fail under cold weather conditions. This was already a known issue and the engineers specifically recommended that Challenger postpone launch because of the temperature at the pad the night before the launch.
They got overruled... almost certainly for what amounts to political reasons as the big bosses didn't want to throw off the timing of the media-hyped "first class taught from space".
Still remember watching the Challenger launch on a CRT TV propped up on an AV cart in an 8th grade classroom and it being a big deal that a teacher was going up in space.
[−]apical_dendrite · 2026-11-15 Sun 02:23 UTC ·
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The decision to ignore the Morton Thiokol recommendation not to launch wasn't made at NASA HQ. There was a late night teleconference between Morton Thiokol, Marshall Space Flight Center (where the SRB program was managed) and personnel from Marshall and Morton Thiokol on the ground in Florida. The Marshall leadership put a lot of pressure on Morton Thiokol execs to withdraw their recommendation, and Morton Thiokol caved. My recollection is that it's unclear how much if anything was communicated to NASA HQ. These were the people who had taken over after von Braun's retirement, so very much from an engineering rather than a political background.
I don't think that the "teacher in space" part was much of a factor in Marshall's decision-making. There was clearly plan-continuation bias, and there was a clear directive that Marshall should not be responsible for delaying a launch. The management style they had inherited from von Braun also meant that disagreement was highly discouraged. The data was ambiguous enough that they could convince themselves that everything was fine and Morton Thiokol was coming up with a new launch requirement at the last minute.
The person at Morton Thiokol who caved was neither qualified nor authorized to make the decision. The Morton Thiokol engineers said no, and their executives backed them up, but NASA administrators kept asking Morton Thiokol employees that were out of the loop, until they could pressure on into saying yes.
There's a really well written and researched book on the topic, that I highly recommend, called Truth, Lies, and O-Rings by Allan J. McDonald, James R. Hansen, and Jonathan Yen
I was just talking to my son about how absolutely incrediblw it was that apollo 11 1anded on the moon, and here we are we with by comparison unlimited compute and its launch 15 to do the first orbit. I absolutely get its a very different beast, and catching is amazing, but still, serious respect to the apollo program.
The Space Shuttle program started in 1969, the first test fight happened in 1981, 12 years in. The first outline of Starship appeared in 2016, first kinda flight in 2022 (6 years), and a full-scale orbital flight, in 2026 (10 years). As a bonus point, it's nearly 100% reusable.
It's not human-rated yet, but I bet that in 1981, at the height of the Cold War and with Star Wars unfolding, it would be.
[−]throwaway2037 · 2026-11-15 Sun 03:33 UTC ·
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> I do not see this Starship and its mission profile ever being a human-rated system in this incarnation, ever.
Any sentence with such a superlative is bound to be wrong at some point. As they say in finance: "On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
Did you feel similar before the crewed SpaceX Dragon 2 flew successfully?
And because the government said the shuttle was “safe”, six astronauts and a schoolteacher got blown up in front of millions of schoolchildren five years later. The Shuttle never should have been a human-rated system.
It's much cheaper to build a rocket, it blows up, find/fix the fault, send up another, it blows up, find/fix the fault, etc. It's much more expensive to spend endless time checking and rechecking everything.
Given how Americans tend to self-sort into political castes, I suspect that the majority of SpaceX employees are now ideologically aligned with their CEO. Working there would be too risky for them otherwise.
You got me figured out completely. I hate Elon so much I have watched every launch stream since 2010, own stock in his companies, buy his car with $10k beta software, and voted as a shareholder to give him the biggest pay package in human history.
I hate him so much I'll even agree with his quote from this year saying that “Starship Version 3, I think this design can be fully reusable.”
Don't sweat it. Lots of Starship fans (myself included) are overly sensitive because there is so much bad-faith criticism out there.
Still, I think you're discounting the accomplishment here. Boosters have reflown after a catch, so re-usable engines is already demonstrated. And heat shield reuse is going to be iterative: the first few will require lots of work, but they will keep improving until the tiles last for many missions.
But you can't iterate if you don't get the ship back in one piece. That's what makes this accomplishment important.
My understanding is that the real fly in the ointment has been that Starship isn't anywhere near its target payload capacity, and it may be difficult to get it there. I don't know if that's changed with this flight or not.
This launch put 50T in orbit, which is half the stated goal. If it never improved past this, it'd continue to be the largest and least expensive heavy lift rocket into the foreseeable future.
[−]literalAardvark · 2026-11-15 Sun 12:09 UTC ·
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> half the stated goal
It's 1/4 of the design goals though. Pretty massive haircut.
[−]somenameforme · 2026-11-15 Sun 02:06 UTC ·
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Due to the nature of spaceflight, payload tends to be around 1-3% of total mass. You don't tend to max payload during testing for stuff you expect to have a reasonable chance of going boom.
This was the third heaviest payload ever put in orbit. None of the others had a reusable first stage, second stage or fairings, so they cost vastly more (throw away the entire stack each launch)
Even if they never increase it from here, this is an enormous achievement and success.
That's because when launching from Texas, they have to do a dogleg maneuver to avoid populated islands such as Cuba. If they launch from Florida, they claim they'll get 100 tons.[1]
> Flying Starship from Florida, he said, will further improve capacity compared to Texas launches. Launching from Florida offers more favorable trajectories to certain orbits, potentially allowing Starship to carry more satellites without expending propellant on dogleg maneuvers. Dontchev said a single Florida Starship launch will be able to carry up to 20 times the bandwidth of a single Falcon 9.
SpaceX currently claims that each launch is 10x the bandwidth of a Falcon 9 launch, and is 50ish tons of payload, so launching from Florida would be around 100 tons of payload.
That's like saying a 2026 F150 is safe because a 2023 trim passed a crash test, despite a full overhaul of all the crash structures taking place in between
hmm, think it's more like saying a newly redesigned f150 will eventually pass the crash test, because it's basically 80% the same design as the previous generation. It might be in 2027, but if not then and the engineers keep at it, then in 2028 or 2029.
[−]HarHarVeryFunny · 2026-11-15 Sun 01:29 UTC ·
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Only booster engines though. What remains to be seen is how the vaccuum raptors hold up for reuse - pretty brutal temperature cycling.
Sure, and the starship is just a scaled up falcon with more raptors..
But here we are 12-15 years later and it's still not operational.
This would require it being safe for and having facilities for crew. Tool and machinery for service and recovery. The vessel would need to handle re-entry stress with return payloads on board. The heat tiles would need to support the extra mass. The vehicle capture system. Etc. Etc.
Could it all be built on the starship "platform"? Maybe.. One day. But that day is not this day.
Recovery never paid dividends for Shuttle, due to satellites' degradation in orbit, and SPCX seems to have driven the industry even further from 'exquisite systems'. I love the idea of in-orbit servicing, but I am not sure it will ever work for unmanned objects.
The economics and use cases have and are evolving.
I don't see this as "space shuttle done right" as a vehicle or "program" without the ability to carry out maintenance and recovery missions. As expensive as it was, for various reasons, it was actually used for those missions.
For example I don't think "space data centers" are going to work if the upgrade path for the hardware is vaporize it all and replace it vs recover and recycle/resell.
Once you get mass into orbit it's more economical to keep it there so rather than recovery to Earth it would be better to build the facilities in orbit to perform maintenance, refurbishment and refuelling. Starship should make that feasible.
The more cost effective approach is now repair-in-place. Startups in early orbital testing include Starfish Space (autonomous satellite life extension, orbital repositioning/inclination changes, and active debris disposal) and Katalyst (Multi-arm robotic capture, hardware upgrades, and orbital repositioning).
The question on my mind is; does repair-in-place make economical sense for commercial satellites?
Old-space satellites are expensive, so on-orbit repair theoretically makes sense here. The largest obstacle to cost-effective repair in that domain is the one-off nature of these vehicles. This means each repair mission requires R&D, manufacturing, and testing before launch. So for this method to be effective, the repair mission needs time before any faults become lethal. I'm not super confident about resuscitation either; off-nominal thermal/power can cook electronics beyond repair. Plus, any RPO mission risks accidental damage.
And on the other hand, new-age satellites like Starlink are build cheap(er) and designed for replacement. Why bother with repair when you can just build and launch another?
It seems like you're also a satellite repair nerd, so I'd love to hear any thoughts you might have :D
the satellites are life limited whether they have noticeable faults or not (mostly by the remaining propellant, but also by TID radiation and payload obsolescence), and any sensible repair-in-place mission aims to proactively repair satellites near the end of their practical life rather than reactively responding to issues. The robotics (and fluid transfer for refuelling) are basically there, you just need satellites with an architecture that enables repair/replacement/refuelling to move beyond demonstrators. And most satellites are not built in that way.
As for whether it's worth it, it depends a lot on the satellite and the orbit. Starlink: probably not worth upgrading. Geostationary satellites: there's a reason why what goes up there commands oldspace prices (long way up, intensive radiation environment) and that reason also justifies serviceability. Hypothetical LEO datacentre with most of the mass being solar panels and radiators that last a lot longer than the chips are commercially relevant: yeah, probably makes sense to have the chip payload swappable and the thrusters refuellable.
A mission for one satellite to repair a lot of others is complex (it's basically an extra-hard version of the travelling salesman problem) but when the alternative is inserting many entirely new satellites into n orbits, sending a tiny fraction of the mass to n orbits via a reusable servicer starts to make a lot of sense...
Exactly, the scale and scope of payloads is increasing as launch costs are decreasing.
If starship launches ever get anywhere near the 2m-10m claim.. Suddenly fixing or retrieving that 500m-2bn satellite. Or rotating the compute modules on that 150bn space datacenter constellation..
Honestly I could envision regulation requiring it at some point.
It could conceivably capture near-dead satellites and bring them back, deorbit them, or send up a payload of multiple repair ships.
The cost to launch may get to the point that it is cheaper to replace than repair, and we can build 10 of a satellite instead of 1 bespoke unit per program.
Private industry tends to be far more efficient at making “stuff that works” than a non-profit governmental organization.
Even for all the genuinely good and smart people that worked for NASA over the decades, the bureaucratic machinery that makes it run eventually becomes so convoluted, corrupt and bloated for its own good.
I should know; I worked there for over a quarter of a century. Nothing beats the private industry for “making shit that works.”
[−]hn_throwaway_99 · 2026-11-15 Sun 00:59 UTC ·
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I really think it depends. For long running projects with high ongoing costs like a launch vehicle, I agree. The issue with government projects of this type is that they eventually turn into jobs projects, and that can compromise the main goals of the projects.
But NASA has had some phenomenal successes in their science expeditions - the Webb Space Telescope (and its Hubble precursor, despite its need for "glasses"), the Mars rovers, Voyagers, etc. Those projects would have largely been impossible in the private sector because there is no monetary return.
> 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.
> Private industry tends to be far more efficient at making “stuff that works” than a non-profit governmental organization.
If that were true, then why doesn't the US have a single high speed train?
NASA projects are well-known to be expensive because they, similar to military procurement in the US, are handled like inofficial job creation projects involving as many states as possible.
[−]TacticalCoder · 2026-11-15 Sun 02:18 UTC ·
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> If that were true, then why doesn't the US have a single high speed train?
Because building/modifying rails crossing many states and cities means having to deal with a unending shitload of bureaucrats at single every level of power.
While sending something up straight in the air and then into space means all those little bureaucrats from all those cities/communities/states do not get a say in the matter.
> If that were true, then why doesn't the US have a single high speed train?
Planes are faster, cheaper, safer, require much less infrastructure, go anywhere to anywhere, scale elastically with demand, and have less emissions per passenger mile than high-speed trains.
> and have less emissions per passenger mile than high-speed trains
The optimal high speed train is about two orders of magnitude more efficient than the equivalent flight on a passenger mile basis. Might look a little different for crossing oceans or thin routes where it's really not worth building a thousand miles of rail to replace a flight a day, but lack of demand between nearby cities or is not why the US doesn't have any high speed rail network...
[−]s1artibartfast · 2026-11-15 Sun 05:39 UTC ·
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Efficient in what terms? Dollars per mile? In the usa?
The US rail network was created by private industry, including both freight and passenger. This included many of the fastest passenger trainsets at the time, like the Zephyr. In 1971 the US nationalized passenger rail into Amtrak, and Amtrak stopped using off-the-shelf trainsets and managed the development of their own, similar to NASA developing the Space Launch System (the space shuttle) for their use. At that point, the US started falling behind on rail speed records.
In short, the US had stuff that works, including the fastest trains, when run by private industry, but after nationalizing the industry into a non-profit governmental organization, they stopped producing stuff that works.
In 1970 other countries already had state-owned 130+ mph train networks (Germany, for example). Again, the idea that those things can only be done right through private companies is ideology, not fact-based.
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.
US rail network was created by the US government giving gigantic land grants and loans to railroads and used their army and influence to make sure nobody could stop them.
> 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.
+1 "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.
This is an overly simplistic take. In many cases, the private industry moves and innovates faster. In many others, it injects its own forms of waste (regulatory capture, profiteering over mission, etc)
The government was the customer, so it was up to them to decide what to do in house and what to hire out. They chose to manage the project in house, creating specific design requirements and contracting out work to meet those requirements, not to create the designs.
Private industry did do most of the work, but they had no leeway to influence the design. Even when they tried to make choices, e.g. Morton Thiokol's Engineers' no-go decision on the Challenger launch due to low temperatures, NASA administrators effectively overrode that decision, by directly calling unqualified employees at Morton Thiokol, until they found one they could pressure into giving a go.
[−]s1artibartfast · 2026-11-15 Sun 05:33 UTC ·
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Who do you think designed and built all those NASA ships that made the space milestones? Mostly Boeing, Rockwell, and Lockheed
Corruption eventually starts in every organization, when the workplace develops an informal but strict hierarchy where the only way to get ahead is impress someone who matters.
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.
The same Elon who keeps promising things his companies cannot deliver and obviously exerts incredible pressure on his underlings? You think that doesn't create incentives to claim things are better than they are?
> The same Elon who keeps promising things his companies cannot deliver and obviously exerts incredible pressure on his underlings?
Failing to deliver a ReactJS + web services project, and failing to catch a steel cylinder weighing thousands of tonnes, full of combustible liquids, hurtling down from space with two metal arms mounted on a pole are two different things.
If you're a billionaire and not failing enough times doing absolutely crazy things, that's a net loss for humanity. I want billionaires to fail 80% of the time. Heck even 100x millionaires should be failing a lot.
> 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.
I'd rather billionaires not exist at all, personally. Before you say something absurd like "SpaceX wouldn't exist without billionaires" I suggest you check the timeline. Falcon 9 was operational before Elon Musk officially joined the 10 digits club.
Innovation will always happen and Elon didn't personally inject billions into SpaceX either.
Let's cap wealth at 999M and anything over the gets redistributed to poor entrepreneurs.
When was Elon promising ReactJS projects? He promises cars, full self driving, etc. etc. Extremely consistently overpromises and underdeliver.
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.
I was responding to your broader statements, which as stated were not strictly about the original narrow context about Challenger. Every company has pretty much the same or similar repercussions with respect to speaking up/out. Apple, or say Timnit Gebru at Google.
> 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 problem is when internal stretch goals get communicated as business deliverables that drive stock price. There needs to be an expectation of good-faith for the latter.
Normalization of deviance happened because there was so much deviance!
The number of Criticality 1 issues on STS was incredible--literally thousands. Booster seal--yup, they knew about that; foam strikes? check; also turbine blade cracks, reaction control short-circuits, and hundreds of other problems.
They couldn't fix them because (a) the design was locked--they weren't building more orbiters, and (b) Congress controlled the budget and the Shuttle was not a priority.
The point of Starship is to build enough ships and fly enough missions that problems get fixed. And since losing a ship costs the company money, they have a strong incentive to fix the problems. That's exactly what they've done with Falcon 9, and the result speaks for itself.
It's more egregious than just knowing there were flaws. After Morton Thiokol engineers, the manufacturer of the boosters that failed in the Challenger disaster gave a no-go for the flight, because the temperature was too low, NASA administrators cold called a bunch of Morton Thiokol employees that weren't qualified to give go/no-go decisions, and most of them declined, until they found one that gave into pressure and gave a 'go' for launch.
They actively forced deviance.
For more details, check out Truth, Lies, and O-Rings by Allan J. McDonald, James R. Hansen, and Jonathan Yen
[−]HarHarVeryFunny · 2026-11-15 Sun 01:16 UTC ·
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Reusability is all about cost savings. The real question now is how much does it cost to turn Starship around for reuse - how much heat shield replacement, how do the vaccuum raptor engines survive the thermal cycling, what is the lifetime of parts involved in the catch mechanism, etc.
In any case, a cool spectacle.
[−]MiroslavPokorny · 2026-11-15 Sun 01:44 UTC ·
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So losing up 100 starships to reuse one that gets to the moon, is saving money ?
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.
The comment he is responding to didn't deserve the dismissal.
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.
Cost savings are one of the drivers for reuse, but not the only one. Maximum practical flight rate is another. F9's peak flight rate over the past couple years would not have been attainable without first stage reuse, simply because of the manufacturing bottlenecks on stages. And fairing reuse was openly driven by a limited capacity to manufacture fairings fast enough - it's not even clear that SpaceX is overall saving money there, but they are saving time, and their business model is based around putting as much mass in orbit as they can as fast as they can.
I thought the same, the catch was nice and impressive but I’d say it would be a fair bit of stress on the structure too. I’m guessing one day we will actually see these things have landing gears and not need a tower but until then…
I thought the same, the catch was nice and impressive but I’d say it would be a fair bit of stress on the structure too. I’m guessing one day we will actually see these things have landing gears and not need a tower but until then…
I get similar vibes to watching this spectacle to that of the “Tesla flying car” demonstration. Amazing stunt , but is that the primary goal ?
Landing gear is really really heavy. To compare it to a building, the upper stage is 17 stories tall and 700sqft crosssection (9m⌀). The rocket is top-heavy, so you have to have wide legs. Wide legs need big triangular structures that articulate outwards, which dramatically increase the load (torque = force*distance) needed to hold up the 17 story building without breaking when it hits the ground, and are complex and get in the way of all the engines.
In comparison, adding more steel to the tower is effectively free. Additionally the hardpoints on the rocket are at the top (no top-heavy problem to deal with) and very close to the rocket, so the torque is minimal. And the hardpoints already exist, in the form of the attachments to the wings, which already need to be strong.
It is crazy but... it makes some amount of sense? I mean we'll see landing gear when/if it gets to the moon, but there's a lot less gravity there.
I actually screwed up, I mean the rocket itself, not really the tower :) But yeah, agree the tower is probably the more robust piece and you're right, the legs would be heavy and I guess "dead weight".
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".
[−]MiroslavPokorny · 2026-11-15 Sun 01:37 UTC ·
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Let me know when Starship makes it to the moon. Apollo got there after 2 launches. and only had 1x problem and everyone got home.
So you're leaving out SA-1 through 5, AS-101 through 105, AS-201 through 203, QTV, Pad Abort Test 1 and 2, A-001 through 004, and the Mercury and Gemini programs before them to be intentionally deceptive? Or... just disrespectful?
> Which is the more successful ?
Who thinks like this? Who sees what I just saw and has this thought? A wasted opportunity for some wonder and joy.
[−]kQq9oHeAz6wLLS · 2026-11-15 Sun 02:49 UTC ·
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The Apollo 1 crew begs to differ.
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.
not to mention shuttle as we knew it was never supposed to be its final form. the Block 1 Shuttles were more or less intended to be a MVP and they would follow along with Block II orbiters. But of course Block Two never happened, and we just got incremental updates of the block 1s.
I understand what you’re saying, but in a larger sense the fact that distributing labor and increasing costs is necessary as risk-prevention against our own politicians is a sign of a broken system of incentives and representation
Consider this: had they not, NASA may not exist. Considering Musk himself said SpaceX would not exist had NASA not bailed them out, it also means SpaceX likely wouldn’t exist. In other words, SpaceX also needed those distributed wastes, they just were externalities to the company. A broader context of the system is important when diagnosing systemic issues.
I usually agree that the hybrid approach gives the best outcomes. The govt is necessary when the risk is too great for private industry to bear and the private side tends to move faster on innovation.
NASA paid SpaceX for a service, and SpaceX delivered that service on time and vastly cheaper than their competitors who were also paid by NASA (ISS resupply).
In the case of transporting humans to the ISS, SpaceX did it vastly cheaper than the competitor who was also paid by NASA. That competitor has never done what they were paid to do.
If there is anyone or anything to be angry at, it seems mighty strange to be angry at the company who actually did what they were paid to do when another company took much more money and didn’t deliver.
Fair, “bailout” is not a good term for an era where taxpayers give loans to floundering companies.
What Musk admitted to was NASA “saved” SpaceX with a last minute contract to prevent their bankruptcy. I would make the argument that SpaceX would not exist without all those early government contracts. It’s a shrewd business move: use a self-insured entity (the govt) when risk is the highest because it pushes the financial risk to the taxpayer, and gradually move to more privatized customers when risk is lower and insurance costs can make such launches economically viable.
I do agree Boeing CST was not run well and I’ve thrown plenty of ire there way. But that is an entirely different argument and a bit of whataboutism.
Taxpayers did not give a loan to SpaceX anymore than they gave one to any contractor they pay for a service.
The government paid SpaceX for a service, which was delivered as promised. This happens hundreds of thousands of times a year with tons of companies being paid to do things for the government.
I was clear that it was a contract that saved them from bankruptcy. A contract they could leverage for loans, but I clearly said contract. I wish HN would limit accounts that are very new and seem to misrepresent other posts.
There’s a common theme in HN discussions where people mistake understanding a system for evangelizing it. Really nothing could be further from the truth.
this is well and truly common all over the internet -- you explain how some system, something fairly non-technical even, say, a common social failing, some institutional bias or what-have-you, works, and you have a bunch of people go on the offensive as though you've just endorsed the thing. so you have to hedge practically anything with a token virtue-signal, even in communities where it's pretty strongly implied that you're on the same page about considering the thing bad.
if you'll indulge a tangent, i can only chalk up the increase in this phenomenon over the time i've been online to the consolidation of online discussion to a handful of sites that have become ever more adept and efficient at creating filter bubbles. and it's always the sites where that hasn't taken root, where everyone's seeing the same thing, that then catch a reputation for being hellholes full of terrible people, because naturally, the majority of people engage with those sites not directly, but through screenshots shared on the major socials, and those major socials are incentivised to push you content that you engage with. then, as we all know, angry people click more. so of course as a user of one of those major socials, a majority of those screenshots the site pushes you end up being those that depict speech your own filter bubble cohort finds abhorrent. hn is actually subject to this dynamic a little bit.
It’s evidence that they are solving different problems. Does the fact that Musk spends hundreds of millions on election cycles mean he’s incompetent, or he’s trying to mitigate a political risk you and I don’t have to deal with?
As said elsewhere, that simplistic take falls apart when you realize there would not be a SpaceX if there wasn’t a NASA.
[−]servo_sausage · 2026-11-15 Sun 04:38 UTC ·
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I'm not super convinced that the commercial aerospace industry really needed NASA once super high value satellite services came about in the 90s.
The ideal of a good government industry program, is to create a domestic industry, and A: maintain it at a minimum level for whatever goal is in focus (defence, technology familiarity, investment certainty). And B to help it grow to be independent of the government, so the profits and funding can go elsewhere.
To me, most of what NASA did after Skylab are a bit questionable. With most of the high profile stuff being of limited value compare to the RF and solid state electronics projects.
I mean, Musk himself stated SpaceX needed NASA. New entrants especially benefit from a self insured customer because private industry won’t accept that level of risk.
I agree with a lot of your point, but would probably caveat a lot of the JPL work.
You are shoehorning in an entirely different argument. The question is not about whether NASA invested, or loaned, or contracted or whatever other funding mechanism. It is whether their existence is predicated on the existence of the other, and whether they are both dealing with the same problems.
When people fail to acknowledge that, it becomes a vehicle for a digression and creates tired discussions that follow the same well-worn paths.
I mean, considering nothing like it had been done before (or since) kinda proves the inefficient approach worked. I'm not defending gov inefficiency but often it still leads to good results somehow (and also major disasters, sigh)
What does worked mean in this context? A barely reusable craft that risked human lives to launch mundane satellites and was so unreliable DOD stopped using and was so expensive NASA couldn’t afford to keep it running?
With the technology available and the requirements of the missions it was intended to fulfill, that is what was built. You are being stubborn and annoying.
Can see your point, that spreading the constructions sites across different states was necessary in order to get it built, but in terms of pure engineering, this is probably a negative.
Guess the point is that generally speaking, large scale engineering is typically not done at efficient and creative-levels when directed by the government. Governments have too many stakeholders that have needs that have little do with with engineering that need to be satisfied
...And of course, there are exceptions -guessing the Gemini and Apollo programs would be a good examples.
... oh, and am not trying to call you out, just trying to think through this for myself as well.
What makes you think Gemini and Apollo are counterexamples? They were successful, but were also heavily dependent on contractors and occurred when NASA funding was many multiples of today’s budget when measured by percentage of GDP.
Well, they seemed like highly effective government programs as they were able to get people to the moon under a very tight deadline (and also knew they were extremely expensive programs. Kind of crazy the amounts relatively to gdp they were spending).
And, if they weren't, backs up that the government is not typically a good overseer when it comes engineering programs
(although, still seems like when there is a very strong need, governments can be very good partners).
There is nothing inherently wrong with 'government' providing the source of funding for these programs, and there's nothing wrong with spreading parts of the program across different regions. In fact, in a way it can be cheaper. With the Apollo testing facilities in Mississippi, the Apollo program being built out of Huntsville, and the other 7 locations across the US--you can adequately tap higher end talent while moving some components to cheaper locations to work on.
Agree actually. The government basically funded Spacex for Falcon 9 through the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, and probably some of Starship's development too. Yeah, the funding wasn't the question, it's whether the government is a good overseer of programs like this.
Regarding spreading the parts of the development/manufacturing across different regions, am sure there are good benefits to doing this, and cost efficiency is definitely one of them (Boeing's manufacturing is a great example, as well as most auto companies). So yeah, you're right there. But when the government does it, it often is for political reasons, so you wonder if they really do gain cost efficiencies? Hmm...
Personally, my take is the earlier in the development process you are of a product (or vehicle), the better it is to keep everything tight knit (yeah, am a believer in the major concepts of agile development - small, integrated teams working close together, able to iterate fast). And feels like this is also true for design teams in general, no matter what the size of the company. It pays to keep them together as much as possible.
But the more mature a product gets, like a car company that's been building cars for decades, it seems like spreading out manufacturing could be a cost savings.
[−]Alive-in-2025 · 2026-11-15 Sun 06:08 UTC ·
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No, he's trying to bully his way into forcing the government to do what he wants, and he can because he is extremely wealthy. It just happens that in this case, it yields something useful. That is a poor model, the rich should not arbitrarily get their own way.
“Solving different problems” means intentionally creating inefficiencies in an engineering project so that voters can get a little cut of the government funding. It’s a roundabout way of buying votes.
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.
Said elsewhere, but if NASA didn’t spread their resources around, there likely would not be a NASA. As Musk said, if there was no NASA, there would not be SpaceX. People act like they SpaceX exists in a govt vacuum. They do not.
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.
Solving different problems is a good way to put it, but to even be in that position implies they’re trying to meet false objectives and artificial constraints that are beyond the scope of the original endeavor even if there’s some intersection remaining. These extra constraints I imagine have a high likelihood of compromising the original objective by forcing tradeoffs that don’t move the needle and carry costs with ill spent efforts.
It's more like the cost of the political system we run. Yes, it's not the most streamlined, but it's stable. Quite a number of people yearn for the efficiency of a system under one will of an enlightened monarch. We have a bunch of examples, from Lycurgus and Cyrus back in the day to Mr Putin today; there is a cost to such a system, too.
[−]narnarpapadaddy · 2026-11-15 Sun 05:19 UTC ·
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It’s always entertaining to hear engineers ridicule inefficient government programs while simultaneously setting up a load balancer, backups, or a high-availability db cluster. Completely unable to generalize the lesson that redundancy and overhead aren’t necessarily bad, and that efficiency is in tension with other desirable attributes in every system, political, biological, computational, whatever.
[−]TheOtherHobbes · 2026-11-15 Sun 12:29 UTC ·
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Incorrect. Governments can - and should - have goals beyond simple engineering problems. Traditionally government funds corporate and academic R&D which is then productised and commercialised by the private sector.
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.
publicly funded means funded by the people. its not really unreasonable that people demand the economic benefits of investing their money to be spread around a bit.
its not ideal from logistics POV, but it is not what I would take as the prime example of incompetence. its just the government way of doing thinngs.
If the economic benefit summarized as employment, then the goal is wrong. And indeed space conquest oftem just makes our child brains dream, instead of being something useful per itself. So we tout employment and side-effects as a prime benefit of space. Why not create a broken-window factory, it will create more jobs.
[−]TheOtherHobbes · 2026-11-15 Sun 12:34 UTC ·
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A broken-window factory like Microsoft?
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.
[−]Alive-in-2025 · 2026-11-15 Sun 06:06 UTC ·
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The "government" doesn't make those decisions, it's the political class that chooses to do those choices of putting money in each district.
I think people understand this wrong. The problem with Shuttle was not that they had multiple masters. The problem was that they were not able to experiment and build multiple versions. Many bad choices were already made by the time DoD came in.
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.
The Starship requirements across those missions are generally much more aligned than what NASA vs DoD wanted out of STS. Most of Starlink reqs could be considered a subset of Artemis. I would venture the biggest distort is reliability requirements between crewed/uncrewed missions.
The issue isn’t really how many masters per se, but how competing their respective requirements.
The US government realized this in the late 90s-early 2000s and started pushing NASA to go outside to utilize private industry in more a competitive way (instead of giving contracts to the same tiny group of gov contractors). This started initially under GWB and later Obama expanded it, which helped open the door to companies like SpaceX and X PRIZE type competitions.
The defense industry could use this sort of thing, which we saw with the costs/shortages of missiles in the Iran war.
[−]throwaway2037 · 2026-11-15 Sun 03:45 UTC ·
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From SpaceX Wiki page[1]:
> The first three launches of the rocket, between 2006 and 2008, all resulted in failures, which almost ended the company. Financing for Tesla Motors had failed, as well, and consequently Tesla, SolarCity, and Musk personally were all nearly bankrupt at the same time.
> The financial situation started to turn around with the first successful launch achieved on the fourth attempt on September 28, 2008. Musk split his remaining $30 million between SpaceX and Tesla, and NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract in December, thus financially saving the company.
Yeah, bad gov't (NASA). Get out of the way for private industry. Or, wait, help us when we are desperate and nearly bankrupt. Which one? The correct answer is "both, in harmony".
I feel like I’m not reading the same passage of text. NASA didn’t give SpaceX anything. They were a customer, paying the best company for the best service. That’s how free markets work.
It's funny how people can look at the exact same program and draw wildly different conclusions. From where I'm sitting, Starship is a deeply flawed and highly risky program with an uncertain future. There are two keys problems:
1. It's not clear what the product-market fit for Starship really is, specifically there is limited demand for these super-heavy payloads. What's my evidence? Falcon Heavy. It averages about 1 launch a year, typically by the military, compared to >100 for Falcon 9.
There are five standard counterarguments to this:
a) "You can carry multiple payloads." Most of the time this simply isn't true. The payloads have to be on almost identical orbits for this to work. Different inclination? No shot. Different altitude? Almost no shot. This brings us to the second;
b) "But Starlink." Yes, Starlink can take advantage of this although to justify its massive expansion, Starlink really has to launch a satellite-based handheld mobile phone network and it has to be pretty much global. It's unclear if this can be from a legal and regulatory standpoint or if it will be able to effectively compete with traditional terrestrial 5G networks. It's unclear what customer density can be supported;
c) "It will induce demand for bigger payloads." Falcon Heavy is relatively cheap, particularly compared to the alternatives from Ariane and ULA yet launch cadence is still particularly slow. Satellites, which are the bread and butter of commercial rocketry, just don't need to be that big;
d) "Starship will replace Falcon 9 launches." Yes, but other companies will fill the Falcon 9 gap if SpaceX abandons it. If you're only carrying one payload to LEO (or even geostationary orbit) and you can do that with a smaller launch system that you can reuse, it's simply going to be better eventually; and
e) "Space based AI data centers." This is never going to happen. it doesn't make any sense. You can't get enough power or distribute the heat. You're subject to cosmic rays and solar radiation, which the atmosphere otherwise mostly protects you from, and you have no way to economically service the inevitable failures.
2. The whole Mars thing is BS, basically, kinda like space-based data centers. It's not happening. There's absolutely no reason to go;
3. Starship isn't suited for lunar missions, which is one reason (IMHO) why Elon tried to scuttle NASA's lunar program [1]. Basically, a 40 meter high vessel that has to land horizontally is hard to land, hard to get in and out of (with your astronauts 40 meters off the surface) and much harder to get off the Moon and back to Earth.
4. Between (2) and (3) a whole lot of new capabilities have to be developed anyway, none of which have even begun yet (eg in-orbit refueling).
Now the one really useful thing from the Starship program (IMHO) is the Raptor engine. For context, the Falcon 9's Merlin engine used oxygen and RP-1 (kerosene, basically). Only the oxygen had to be kept really cold. But it has coking issues (ie solid carbon build up from the RP-1 being consumed). Raptor replaces RP-1 with LNG. No coking but now you have two cryogenic fuels instead of one.
I'll float a use case, which I admit though borders on science fiction. Still, it could be done without breaking the laws of physics.
"Construction of a multi-generational ship, in orbit, designed to travel for hundreds of years between stars".
Discussing this in-depth would take a book, but by necessity this ship would be very (very) large and would require an extraordinary amount of mass to be ferried into orbit.
Of course this unlikely to happen during starship's lifetime, but hey, it's at least a legitimate use case.
They don't need super heavy payloads, it seems pretty clear that they'll be able to launch even just a Falcon 9 payload in this for less than Falcon 9, because they're not throwing away the expensive upper stage.
Also, my understanding is that Starlink v3 just doesn't fit inside F9. The larger phased arrays that that enables lets them make much better use of spectrum than the v2 minis. There are lots of potential uses for larger payload volumes.
The space DC thing has been beaten to death online, with tons of very confident commentators claiming it will never happen for the reasons you've mentioned. Some counterpoints, Google just launched their first ML infra to space with their Project Suncatcher launch, and if you actually run the numbers, the radiators are smaller than the solar arrays, so obviously it's feasible to launch the radiator if it's feasible to launch the solar array to power it. Who knows if it'll make economic sense, but it seems pretty clear that it's getting harder to build DCs on the ground in the US, there's a lot of backlash against it, we just saw what it did to Abbott. Many areas don't have the spare power, and doing it in space makes solar into reliable baseload power rather than 1/8th nameplate and intermittent.
Anyway, I don't work in that industry, I've just been following along with them because I've been an investor since before Starlink was a thing, but I really think people should keep an open mind about whether SpaceX can pull off things that sound a bit nutty.
I don't know why people go on about the radiator, it's pretty obvious to me that the biggest challenge is your solar panels and radiators acting as wind sails that increase atmospheric drag. This is a manageable problem at small scales but it limits the maximum node size.
I'm having trouble going from the facts I know to your conclusion ("Starship is deeply flawed"). I supposed "deeply flawed" is subjective, so I doubt I'll change your mind, but I can't help myself when "someone is wrong on the internet."
You say, "It's not clear what product-market fit for Starship really is" but then you list a pretty good market fit: Starlink. Starship is the only vehicle that can launch Starlink v3 satellites, and one single Starship launch can put up as much bandwidth as 10 Falcon 9 launches.
The internal launch cost of a Falcon 9 launch is ~$20 million, so effectively, one Starship launch is replacing $200 million worth of Falcon 9 launches. Current speculation is that it costs $100 million to build a Starship stack, so even if they never recover either booster or ship, they would still be saving $100 million per launch.
That's pretty good product-market fit, if you ask me.
Next you talk about Mars. I assume the argument is basically: Starship was designed to go to Mars, but there's no reason to go to Mars, ergo Starship has no purpose. But that sounds like a self-refuting argument. If Starship was designed to go to Mars, that implies that Musk wants to go to Mars (which I actually think is true), which means Starship has a purpose: to go to Mars.
Alternatively, let's say Musk is just conning and he doesn't really care about Mars. He's really just building Starship for Starlink or Starmind or whatever. In that scenario (which I don't believe but can't disprove) then Starship still has a purpose: Starlink and Starmind.
Your next argument is that Starship isn't suited for lunar mission. I actually agree with this--Starship was designed for Mars, which is why it runs on methane (for in-situ propellant generation), and relies on a aerobraking to enter Mars orbit. But the same architecture that can take Starship to Mars will be able to land 50 tons on the lunar surface--something that no other lander can do.
[Your arguments about landing difficulties and astronauts descending 40 meters are not very strong. Starship is bottom-heavy because of the engines, so very hard to tip over, and elevators are a 100-year-old technology.]
Lastly, you bring up "a whole lot of new capabilities" to be developed, but you only mention in-orbit refueling. That's true: in-orbit refueling is yet to be demonstrated. But that's a new capability that (a) no other vehicle has performed, and (b) would open up the solar system to exploration. That's a case of Starship being more ambitious than any previous space vehicle--almost the opposite of "deeply flawed". And even if in-orbit refueling never works (which I doubt), Starship would still be revolutionary for being reusable.
We both have wildly different conclusions on Starship. Maybe one way to see who's right is to make predictions. I think Starship will continue to launch Starlink satellites and that SpaceX will continue to make a profit from Starlink. My guess is between 10-20 Starship launches in 2027 and 50-70 launches in 2028. I also predict that Starship will land on the moon, with astronauts, before the end of 2030.
If my predictions come true, I think that would make Starship a very successful program.
It isn't necessary to refuel in orbit. Just add fuel by releasing the empty rocket and attaching a fully fueled one. Rendezvous in orbit has been done since the 60s.
So cost is a funny thing. You have to amortize the program cost across the launches. So far the program cost is at least $15 billion [1]. This is a huge multiple (40x+) of the original Falcon 9 program, which was expendable originally and has gone through many upgrades since obviously. But Starship also isn't done. We also don't know how many uses each Starship stack will get and what the refurbishment cost will be. I think it's safe to say there'll need to be continued development just like there has been with Falcon 9.
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.
> You can't get enough power or distribute the heat
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.
The primary cost benefit of orbital data centers is the availability of efficient, around-the-clock solar power. Any time spent idling for heat reasons directly eats into the profitability of the concept so there's no reason* to design a system that isn't optimized to operate in a steady state. You would instead just put fewer GPUs on it or increase the size of your panels and radiators. The only question is whether or not that steady state is cost effective.
*There are reasons, but none that justify very large scale compute clusters in space
At this point it's getting hard to care about mars when 2-3 generations is enough time to really see this planet heat up. It doesn't help that we are draining lakes like crazy right now. I dunno, I used to get sooooo excited about this stuff and this past couple years it really is starting to feel like I can't reserve much joy for private industry since there's such little regard for the people and the planet in which we are surrounded by. Not even trying to be a hippie here, it's just so brazen these days. This is probably the part of me that sticks out the most in my engineering role, I tend to be surrounded by people who can just ... turn it all off in light of any and all "advancement". No matter the cost. I can't, I spend a lot of my time outside of work these days trying to take in being a human, connecting with others and taking in nature. Whenever I center myself there, it's just kind of difficult to care about getting to Mars. And you're very correct, there is literally no guarantee future generations can justify the effort/resources for such a venture. I dunno.
I don't think you intended to dis the space shuttle (much) but it's important to recognize that half a century has passed since the start of the shuttle design process. Comparing the two is like comparing the 747 to the Ford Tri-motor.
No, it’s not like that at all because airplanes improved significantly between the 1920’s and 1960’s whereas spacecraft improved marginally in some respects and regressed significantly in other respects between the 1970’s and 2000’s.
> The original designs for the Space Shuttle had the booster (with wings!) return to the launch site, but the cost for two new crewed vehicles was too large, so they scaled it back to the compromised version.
Can you cite a source for this claim? My understanding is that the control algorithms for landing a rocket did not exist at the time of the space shuttle. The algorithms were invented in 2010s[1] and space shuttle operated from 1981-2011[2]
I'm not sure what you actually want a source for. The design I'm talking about had the booster as a giant winged and crewed spacecraft with a winged and crewed orbiter attached. That did not require computer control algorithms (although I question your claim about the algorithms not being invented until the 2010s--the Russian Buran shuttle did an uncrewed, automated mission in 1988).
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.
> Starship is, essentially, Space Shuttle done right
There's lots to praise here, but they haven't flown a single manned mission yet
(Also hindsight is 20:20)
> without solid boosters (avoids Challenger disaster) and orbiter stacked on top instead of on the side (avoid Columbia disaster)
We know of the failure modes of the Shuttle, we don't know about the failures of Starship
Or better, the two obvious ones: it will fail to be caught or it will fail to bellyflop
And of course Starship benefits immensely from computers getting thousands of times better and lighter (and cheaper)
> Even more revolutionary, compared to Shuttle, Starship is built on an assembly line
Yes this is a big win
[−]enraged_camel · 2026-11-15 Sun 16:33 UTC ·
link
>> We know of the failure modes of the Shuttle, we don't know about the failures of Starship
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.
Moving the article being built means it moves to the machines that do each stage of the work. As opposed to moving the machines to where the article is being assembled.
I think you forget that in Apollo time all people ever wanted was to get out of earth and see what's actually out there, with human presence. All the other stuff, would be done later, like this.
The 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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50503535
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX
1. It's not clear what the product-market fit for Starship really is, specifically there is limited demand for these super-heavy payloads. What's my evidence? Falcon Heavy. It averages about 1 launch a year, typically by the military, compared to >100 for Falcon 9.
There are five standard counterarguments to this:
a) "You can carry multiple payloads." Most of the time this simply isn't true. The payloads have to be on almost identical orbits for this to work. Different inclination? No shot. Different altitude? Almost no shot. This brings us to the second;
b) "But Starlink." Yes, Starlink can take advantage of this although to justify its massive expansion, Starlink really has to launch a satellite-based handheld mobile phone network and it has to be pretty much global. It's unclear if this can be from a legal and regulatory standpoint or if it will be able to effectively compete with traditional terrestrial 5G networks. It's unclear what customer density can be supported;
c) "It will induce demand for bigger payloads." Falcon Heavy is relatively cheap, particularly compared to the alternatives from Ariane and ULA yet launch cadence is still particularly slow. Satellites, which are the bread and butter of commercial rocketry, just don't need to be that big;
d) "Starship will replace Falcon 9 launches." Yes, but other companies will fill the Falcon 9 gap if SpaceX abandons it. If you're only carrying one payload to LEO (or even geostationary orbit) and you can do that with a smaller launch system that you can reuse, it's simply going to be better eventually; and
e) "Space based AI data centers." This is never going to happen. it doesn't make any sense. You can't get enough power or distribute the heat. You're subject to cosmic rays and solar radiation, which the atmosphere otherwise mostly protects you from, and you have no way to economically service the inevitable failures.
2. The whole Mars thing is BS, basically, kinda like space-based data centers. It's not happening. There's absolutely no reason to go;
3. Starship isn't suited for lunar missions, which is one reason (IMHO) why Elon tried to scuttle NASA's lunar program [1]. Basically, a 40 meter high vessel that has to land horizontally is hard to land, hard to get in and out of (with your astronauts 40 meters off the surface) and much harder to get off the Moon and back to Earth.
4. Between (2) and (3) a whole lot of new capabilities have to be developed anyway, none of which have even begun yet (eg in-orbit refueling).
Now the one really useful thing from the Starship program (IMHO) is the Raptor engine. For context, the Falcon 9's Merlin engine used oxygen and RP-1 (kerosene, basically). Only the oxygen had to be kept really cold. But it has coking issues (ie solid carbon build up from the RP-1 being consumed). Raptor replaces RP-1 with LNG. No coking but now you have two cryogenic fuels instead of one.
[1]: https://futurism.com/elon-musk-scrap-nasa-moon-program
"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]
[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6428631
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle
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.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=wv9n9Casp1o
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.