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.
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?