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.
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.