Even if it doesn't meet their goals of rapid reuse, I think we've still joined the new era. Replacing tiles is going to be substantially cheaper than building new upper stages, likely less than the cost of fuel for a launch.
Doesn't seem to be that different. Space Shuttle: 27.5t payload/2030t launch weight = 1.4%. Starship: 40t payload/5000t launch weight = 0.8%. For comparison, the Falcon 9 has 17.5t/549t = 3.2%. Bringing back the orbiter appears to still come at a significant cost.
The maximum payload of the current configuration is a matter of conjecture, but 40t is considerably lower than the low end. I think 80t-100t is more likely.
Yeah, but still 40t to LEO with cheap rapid reusability (say 60 days, cheap engine replacement, some mass produced tiles) is still revolutionary, just not as revolutionary as Musk’s vision is. Imagine what research packages you can send to the outer planets with 40t budget from the effin LEO. Approximately infinite delta V with ion drives and fat solar cells.
I’m more concerned with payload bay doors than the spacecraft’s performance tbh.
But Starship does not currently seem to be on track to achieve cheap, rapid reusability.
I know that is what was promised, but I do wonder how many of Starship’s design goals the program needs to miss on before the general public starts to wonder if maybe goals are not the same thing as guarantees.
[−]JumpCrisscross · 2026-11-15 Sun 12:45 UTC ·
link
> Starship does not currently seem to be on track to achieve cheap, rapid reusability
What? Based on what? Starship has had two orbital flights ever. And they’ve gone pretty well.
They still don’t seem to have figured out how to reliably recover and reuse Superheavy. They did it a couple times in 2025, but it’s been over a year and quite a few flights since the last time they successfully caught one.
Raptor isn’t shaping up to be a sufficiently reliable engine. They are still having shutdowns and failures on every flight. That could be a huge problem for cheap and rapid reuse because it implies that quite a lot of inspection and refurbishment will be needed for every engine they re-fly. This was famously a major impediment to cheap reusability for the RS-25 and Shuttle, and they only had to worry about three of those per flight. Starship has 13 times as many engines to worry about, and those engines have thus far had a much higher failure rate.
And then they’ve also been having trouble with the thermal protection system, which seems to require a lot more refurbishment than what they had originally wanted. There have also been some kinks to work out in terms of its actual protection of the vehicle, which is a problem because even minor materials degradation due to thermal stress will limit the reusability of the upper stage.
These are still experimental flights. That could have been a bad procedure or a misconfiguration; we don't know. Claiming it as an upper limit if the design and then comparing it to a fully mature STS (you're quoting Endeavour's payload IIRC; Columbia was heavier and could not match its numbers) is cherry-picking. If you want to organise your claims with "in the absolute worst case..." then that's fine. But this is a subject with a lot of uncertainty around it, and asserting that one end of the error bars is the only one that counts isn't really justified.
That doesn't say much without knowing how the fuel was used. They may have pushed it to the max to give Starship more room, therefore didn't save enough fuel for the booster's return. They may have set higher safety margin. They may have used more conservative thrust settings.
There are so many knobs to turn. Everything is conjecture because it's only the beginning. One thing for sure, Superheavy/Starship in the future -- a year, two years, five years from now, will be very different that what was used for this flight.
These flights use a minimum amount of fuel with a half empty payload.
[−]burnerRhodov3 · 2026-11-15 Sun 17:03 UTC ·
link
That's not how rocket science works lol. You don't put it up and accidently run out of fuel because it used more fuel than you think. Slosh in the internal tank and a sensor failure is most likely. Second most likely is that engine that went out started spewing fuel. You don't "Run out of fuel", when attempting a tower catch.
[−]KineticLensman · 2026-11-15 Sun 08:58 UTC ·
link
Massive refurb / rebuild costs between each flight
They reassembled and checked everything down to every single bolt. With unmanned missions it does not matter I guess, if a rocket occationally explodes.
Reliability is still a huge concern as there is a risk to the public if Starship has issues at the wrong time.
During launch its relatively fine as you are flying into a designated safe zone, but since its designed to survive re-entry there is a much higher chance of parts surviving and hitting something on the ground. We already saw that with multiple of the Starship V2 flights.
The rocket can still explode while in space and parts of the rocket can reach the ground without burning up.
Thats not a big risk with rockets built mainly out of aluminium etc, but Starship with its stainless steel that can handle higher temperatures and its heat shield is more likely to reach the ground.
The 11 Starships that have gone through re-entry have so far had no issues with reaching their designated landing zone/spot in one piece (except from some minor parts melting off in their earlier V1/V2 flights).
So far SpaceX has shown that they are willing to play it very safe, but there is always a risk and their future re-entries will also do go over land like Flight 15 did.
The risk is minimal. Out of all the rockets that have exploded there has been exactly one case of a person being hit by debris in the US and it was fiber glass so they weren't even injured.
The reassembled and checked everything down to every single bolt because they were using too much fancy beading edge technology that was not reliable for reuse. Even if they connect the landing gear to the automatic system to make it unnamed, they would have to disassemble and reassemble each time. Reuse was a lie, or at least a poetic licence.
The motor had like 30 blades and a few of them developed cracks each time, so you have to open it, inspect each blade and replace the bad ones. IIRC Feynman was very afraid
one of them would break and cause another crew lost. Luckily it didn't happen, but they have a last chance in Artemis.
The metal encase of the solid rockets would get deformed in the splash, so they have to make them round again.
The heat shield has to be completely replaced by design.
The hull shape was very complex. Tiles on Starship are mostly identical; the massive number of SKUs involved in the Shuttle heat shield meant there wasn't a lot of mass production.
(Starship still has unique tiles near flap joints and edges, but the main hull itself has mass produced tiles.)
Didn't help that Shuttles had design differences between them as well due to the lessons learned and new technology developed between when they were built which resulted in having differences both internally and externally. Even the heat shield layouts were different.
Who says anything about heatshield tile being revolutionary? The whole package is, however -- Raptor engine, reusability, refueling, mass production, and so on. Together, they allow low cost, fast turnaround time launch service.
As for a different approach, try Stoke's active cooling solution:
The space shuttle program was doomed from the start because it was designed as a manned vehicle. Unlike Starship, it couldn't fly unmanned.
Shuttle had to fly humans, and had to maintain its human-rated safety certification. This meant that any design change or modification had to be tested extensively to ensure it didn't kill the crew. This took multiple design iterations, took a long time, and was not cheap.
After the initial design of the ship, it made the program very risk averse. Changing anything required a lot of testing, so it was easier to not change it. Shuttle got stuck because it became too difficult and expensive to iterate; Congress did not give NASA enough funds to overcome this, so the project stagnated.
Because Starship flies without humans on board, it doesn't have these issues. SpaceX can make radical design changes, perform minimal testing, then put these changes on the next flight and immediately see what happens. Sometimes this fails catastrophically, which is the main reason why Starship keeps blowing up. They can also push the ship close to failure to see how it performs, without worrying about humans on board. This is why Starship burned up multiple times when returning from orbit - SpaceX intentionally ran the ship through excessively steep reentry profiles to measure how the heat shield performed.
The overall result is that SpaceX can iterate on Starship faster and more cheaply than NASA ever could with Shuttle.
Human rating was more of a PR issue. The value of the human lives on the orbiter was much less than the value of the orbiter itself. So the cost of an accident would not have been significantly reduced by making it unmanned.
Shuttle's real problem was it was just an uneconomical design. It was foolish to expect government and its cost-plus contractors to be able to optimize for cost.
(Of course this got downvoted because people are unrealistic about the value of human lives. To pretend they don't have finite value leads to absurd results.)
I see your point financially, however you’re just undervaluing the cost of highly-public deaths then. If a couple missions in a row for any manned program resulted in astronauts being incinerated, it costs the full future value of whole program, because astronauts won’t go on it anymore and the public will also demand its end.
Right, that's a PR issue. It's ultimately because the space program is not actually producing much of tangible value, but rather a perception of value. A program that is producing airy PR is vulnerable to bad PR.
The government has no problem with programs producing tangible value that also cost lives. Consider the military, police, search and rescue, and really any activity where people do anything with nonzero risk. The lives lost are part of the cost.
[−]true_religion · 2026-11-15 Sun 18:13 UTC ·
link
Right. If the space shuttle was crucial to national security or even financial success, politicians would spare no expense in telling the public that blood needed be shed to protect the ongoing accumulation of wealth en infinitum.
But since it's a science project more akin to basic research than anything with a ROI formula attached, then even one death is one death too many.
One death isn't too many. It's a matter of too high a probability of general random catastrophe.
Example: Astronaut Tim goes on an EVA to perform an emergency repair after a micrometeorite damaged the space station. A malfunction of his space suit kills him. Everyone agrees that Tim died a hero doing a high-risk activity that needed to be done, and almost no one would say it means we can't do spacewalks or can't send astronauts to space anymore.
Compare to Challenger or Columbia: The whole crew dies randomly on the way up or down during a routine mission. A program which became known for having like, a 10% chance of that happening would be horrifying (in my opinion).
[−]RhodesianHunter · 2026-11-15 Sun 15:51 UTC ·
link
I sure hope you never work on anything where human lives are in the balance.
> the cost of an accident would not have been significantly reduced by making it unmanned
> people are unrealistic about the value of human lives
Which one is it?
Given 2 is true and extreme, politics dominates all, and anyone acting like you would have been thrown out of political power as fast as possible. So no, "the cost of" does not pertain only to materiel and technical development, etc.
> Human rating was more of a PR issue
And this was demonstrative in limiting efficiencies and iteration, as OP was explaining. He stated the reasons it failed; you're countering with your idealism around why it shouldn't have failed, while inadvertently confirming the various reasons it did.
[−]burnerRhodov3 · 2026-11-15 Sun 16:55 UTC ·
link
Oh... you just met a big space shuttle nerd.
This is not true... The shuttle mission was highly automated. Launch, orbit, reentry was all automated. They only needed human pilots to land on the runway because their algo's weren't good enough. Which, again, was one of many design failures of the shuttle. Having humans on board only slightly increased the chance of success according to nasa. other failures were their ablative heat shield ontop of the ceramica, the carbon-on-carbon plating around the aluminum housing, using aluminum as the body and fins instead of steel, AND DROPPING THEIR BOOSTERS IN THE FUCKING OCEAN.
As opposed to dropping them in the desert or a town? The risk appetite was not there at all to figure out safe capture of the boosters. And if they had the allowance to tackle that problem, it would have been better focussed on improving the shuttle itself, fixing the problems GP has outlined.
Of all the issues, "dropping their boosters in the fucking ocean" probably doesn't even make top 10.
[−]burnerRhodov3 · 2026-11-15 Sun 17:20 UTC ·
link
i'm talking about recovery. They couldn't because they caught it with parachutes.
Again, stage zero is a huge enegineering challange and issue that Nasa didn't even attempt to solve because it was too hard.
Buran proved there was no technical obstacle to uncrewed runway landing, the US could have achieved it a few years earlier if it was a priority. The Buran landing system was more complex than you might expect, and proved to be pretty adaptable in its only orbital flight.
[−]burnerRhodov3 · 2026-11-15 Sun 18:03 UTC ·
link
no, you missed what i said. Having humans only slightly improved the odds of mission success... Meaning they did have algorithms to autonomously land on a runway.. They chose not to.
Every tile on Shuttle was bespoke and had to be carefully hand-glued. Starship depends on heavily uniform tiles that can be robot arm installed, with truly bespoke tiles accounting for a small portion, in ares that are likely to survive well enough to be re-flown. Also, the propellant tanks aren't lost with each flight. That's just a couple of the differences, I think the biggest, but there are many smaller areas that Starship can, if it hasn't yet, dramatically beat Shuttle in refurbishment costs (money, but more importantly, time.)
I’m more concerned with payload bay doors than the spacecraft’s performance tbh.
I know that is what was promised, but I do wonder how many of Starship’s design goals the program needs to miss on before the general public starts to wonder if maybe goals are not the same thing as guarantees.
What? Based on what? Starship has had two orbital flights ever. And they’ve gone pretty well.
Raptor isn’t shaping up to be a sufficiently reliable engine. They are still having shutdowns and failures on every flight. That could be a huge problem for cheap and rapid reuse because it implies that quite a lot of inspection and refurbishment will be needed for every engine they re-fly. This was famously a major impediment to cheap reusability for the RS-25 and Shuttle, and they only had to worry about three of those per flight. Starship has 13 times as many engines to worry about, and those engines have thus far had a much higher failure rate.
And then they’ve also been having trouble with the thermal protection system, which seems to require a lot more refurbishment than what they had originally wanted. There have also been some kinks to work out in terms of its actual protection of the vehicle, which is a problem because even minor materials degradation due to thermal stress will limit the reusability of the upper stage.
There are so many knobs to turn. Everything is conjecture because it's only the beginning. One thing for sure, Superheavy/Starship in the future -- a year, two years, five years from now, will be very different that what was used for this flight.
During launch its relatively fine as you are flying into a designated safe zone, but since its designed to survive re-entry there is a much higher chance of parts surviving and hitting something on the ground. We already saw that with multiple of the Starship V2 flights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_cemetery
were these other craft not headed for Point Nemo? if not then wtf
https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/2019/10/31/ooops-whit...
The 11 Starships that have gone through re-entry have so far had no issues with reaching their designated landing zone/spot in one piece (except from some minor parts melting off in their earlier V1/V2 flights). So far SpaceX has shown that they are willing to play it very safe, but there is always a risk and their future re-entries will also do go over land like Flight 15 did.
The motor had like 30 blades and a few of them developed cracks each time, so you have to open it, inspect each blade and replace the bad ones. IIRC Feynman was very afraid one of them would break and cause another crew lost. Luckily it didn't happen, but they have a last chance in Artemis.
The metal encase of the solid rockets would get deformed in the splash, so they have to make them round again.
The heat shield has to be completely replaced by design.
...
(Starship still has unique tiles near flap joints and edges, but the main hull itself has mass produced tiles.)
As for a different approach, try Stoke's active cooling solution:
https://www.stokespace.com/news/building-rockets-to-fly-and-...
The big one though is that it had schoolteachers inside. The Starship is robot drone. If it blows up on reentry it isn’t a huge deal.
Shuttle had to fly humans, and had to maintain its human-rated safety certification. This meant that any design change or modification had to be tested extensively to ensure it didn't kill the crew. This took multiple design iterations, took a long time, and was not cheap.
After the initial design of the ship, it made the program very risk averse. Changing anything required a lot of testing, so it was easier to not change it. Shuttle got stuck because it became too difficult and expensive to iterate; Congress did not give NASA enough funds to overcome this, so the project stagnated.
Because Starship flies without humans on board, it doesn't have these issues. SpaceX can make radical design changes, perform minimal testing, then put these changes on the next flight and immediately see what happens. Sometimes this fails catastrophically, which is the main reason why Starship keeps blowing up. They can also push the ship close to failure to see how it performs, without worrying about humans on board. This is why Starship burned up multiple times when returning from orbit - SpaceX intentionally ran the ship through excessively steep reentry profiles to measure how the heat shield performed.
The overall result is that SpaceX can iterate on Starship faster and more cheaply than NASA ever could with Shuttle.
Shuttle's real problem was it was just an uneconomical design. It was foolish to expect government and its cost-plus contractors to be able to optimize for cost.
(Of course this got downvoted because people are unrealistic about the value of human lives. To pretend they don't have finite value leads to absurd results.)
The government has no problem with programs producing tangible value that also cost lives. Consider the military, police, search and rescue, and really any activity where people do anything with nonzero risk. The lives lost are part of the cost.
But since it's a science project more akin to basic research than anything with a ROI formula attached, then even one death is one death too many.
Example: Astronaut Tim goes on an EVA to perform an emergency repair after a micrometeorite damaged the space station. A malfunction of his space suit kills him. Everyone agrees that Tim died a hero doing a high-risk activity that needed to be done, and almost no one would say it means we can't do spacewalks or can't send astronauts to space anymore.
Compare to Challenger or Columbia: The whole crew dies randomly on the way up or down during a routine mission. A program which became known for having like, a 10% chance of that happening would be horrifying (in my opinion).
Assigning a finite value to human lives (in the US, it's around $12M) is absolutely essential to evaluating policy tradeoffs.
> people are unrealistic about the value of human lives
Which one is it?
Given 2 is true and extreme, politics dominates all, and anyone acting like you would have been thrown out of political power as fast as possible. So no, "the cost of" does not pertain only to materiel and technical development, etc.
> Human rating was more of a PR issue
And this was demonstrative in limiting efficiencies and iteration, as OP was explaining. He stated the reasons it failed; you're countering with your idealism around why it shouldn't have failed, while inadvertently confirming the various reasons it did.
This is not true... The shuttle mission was highly automated. Launch, orbit, reentry was all automated. They only needed human pilots to land on the runway because their algo's weren't good enough. Which, again, was one of many design failures of the shuttle. Having humans on board only slightly increased the chance of success according to nasa. other failures were their ablative heat shield ontop of the ceramica, the carbon-on-carbon plating around the aluminum housing, using aluminum as the body and fins instead of steel, AND DROPPING THEIR BOOSTERS IN THE FUCKING OCEAN.
As opposed to dropping them in the desert or a town? The risk appetite was not there at all to figure out safe capture of the boosters. And if they had the allowance to tackle that problem, it would have been better focussed on improving the shuttle itself, fixing the problems GP has outlined.
Of all the issues, "dropping their boosters in the fucking ocean" probably doesn't even make top 10.
Again, stage zero is a huge enegineering challange and issue that Nasa didn't even attempt to solve because it was too hard.