A very small portion of funding for the Starship program has come from NASA (They won ~ 3 billion for HLS but that is spread over a few years).
SpaceX would almost certainly have gone bankrupt early on if it wasn't for NASA though, so SpaceX does owe it's existence to the US taxpayer in that sense.
SpaceX is a massive vindication of NASA's approach the last 2 decades to do public-private partnerships and commercial-oriented contracting (i.e. where contractors are allowed more latitude in how they accomplish a mission, are actively encouraged to find other customers, and bid on a fixed-price basis instead of cost-plus).
SpaceX is a huge vindication of careful government spending being used to help stimulate commercial activity while also accomplishing government goals more efficiently.
While it's still early days, it's reasonably to say it's seemingly working okay.
The first Starliner mission was, basically, a failure - but it's a failure that Boeing, rather than NASA, is having to pay for, including the reflight of the Orbital Flight Test.
Despite setbacks, the Commercial Cargo program seems to be going well. One note is that Orbital (now Northrup Grumman) had to purchase flights from a competitor to fulfill their contracts, which they did.
The Lunar Gateway appears to be moving/have moved to this model, and so far so good.
I'd say one of the big things to do is to compare this against what NASA has been able to accomplish with traditional contracts, recently. Since 2005, the Ares program launched one model rocket in 2009. (The first stage of Ares 1X wasn't the one intended for Ares I, and the second stage was boilerplate.) SLS will likely have it's first flight later this year or early next year, and then a second flight in 2023, and will probably have cost ~$25B by then.
I think it's probably fair to say the commercial programs have accomplished more, especially for the money.
Bankrupted companies is not necessarily bad for society overall. Besides SpaceX, there was also Kistler in the running for COTS commercial cargo. They failed and were replaced by Orbital.
Also, you seem to be implying that cost plus contracts will allow much smaller companies since they won’t have to absorb as much risk, but in reality, it’s the big boys who win cost plus contracts. SpaceX was tiny when they won COTS/CRS (Elon wasn’t a billionaire and Tesla was looking more like a dead end novelty than the most valuable car company in the world).
Also, Iridium and Orbcomm and OneWeb all went bankrupt but all are still operating today. Bankruptcy doesn’t always mean the business disappears off the face of the planet, and even when it does, often their assets end up being used productively by others (that’s how SpaceX got their McGregor test site).
> Despite setbacks, the Commercial Cargo program seems to be going well. One note is that Orbital (now Northrup Grumman) had to purchase flights from a competitor to fulfill their contracts, which they did.
Also on Commercial Cargo, for phase 2 the competition forced Orbital to have to significantly cut their price. On the flip side, SpaceX raised theirs since they so underbid in the first round.
Additionally, Dream Chaser is supposed to come online soon.
As far as I can tell, this approach works very well. Better than the standard procurement process and better than the processes many private companies use.
I don't think it's reasonable to exclude outliers when you are de-facto angel investing. The expectation is that most companies, especially those pushing technological limits, fail. One or two wild successes is the "expected" outcome in a power-law, winner-take-most distribution, and SpaceX is one of them.
In the US it has worked ridiculously well if you consider the total effect on gdp growth and the fractional percent of R&D bets that have been home runs.
The're a large customer, but probably not the largest. SpaceX has a lot of commercial customers, including a fully private manned spaceflight (Inspiration4) later this year.
When it comes to Starship, it seems like one of the main applications will be to launch hundreds of Starlink satellites at once. I don't believe that there is a noticable amount of NASA funding in Starlink - it's possible they might be using it for some reason, but it'd be as a customer.
Maybe they consider Starlink to be a customer of SpaceX? NASA would still be the largest customer though, with 36 launches versus Starlink's 33. That would probably change by the end of the year though.
That is sort of of what I was thinking. It's not exactly right, but out of 20 launches in the first half of 2021, you have 13 Starlinks, 2 Transporter (SpaceX-brokered rideshare), 2 NASA (Crew/Commercial Resupply), 2 Commercial, and 1 Space Corps.
The second half of the year looks more NASA-Heavy, with CRS-23, Crew 3, and CRS-24, plus 2 science satellite. But that's among 17 other missions.
I guess my point is that SpaceX probably won't lose NASA, but they're not as dependent on government business as ULA is.
Wikipedia has a list of Falcon launches and a column with the customer name. NASA is on there quite a bit but there are plenty of other customers including other US government agencies, other governments, and private companies.
So are ULA, Lockheed, Boeing and other dinosaur OldSpace giants.
Rather than pork going to aerospace contractors working on an already obsolete or soon to be obsolete SLS, I rather that that states get money to work on whatever made possible by the Starship program.
SpaceX does a couple NASA launches a year, for which they make 100-200 million each and have to actually provide a service that costs them a decent fraction of that cost.
They earlier this year had an investment round worth about a billion, which was all dedicated to R&D for Starship and Starlink. Total external investments are around $19 billion [1]
So yeah, some of the NASA dollars probably provide profit to the company that they reinvest in R&D. But a larger portion comes from external investment specifically for R&D.
Most dollars that have been paid to a SpaceX bank account, by investors or customers, came from private parties. NASA was indisputably critical in enabling SpaceX. But SpaceX was not taxpayer funded if that word doesn't encompass virtually all economic activity in America.
Today, SpaceX could do fine without any NASA contracts. Naturally, they help. But there is a lot of demand for launch, in part due to the price competition SpaceX started.
The 5.9 billion (19 was a typo) was investment capital. Per the source, investors were:
Founders Fund, 137 Ventures, Scott Banister, DFJ Growth, Google, Rizvi Traverse Management, Fidelity Investments, Threshold, Rothenberg Ventures, Elon Musk, ACE & Company, Bill Lee, David Sacks, Valor Equity Partners, Sherpa Capital, Ecosystem Ventures, Baillie Gifford, Barney Pell, Vanedge Capital, Matthew Pritzker Company, Capricorn Venture Partners, Musket Research Associates, Tao Capital Partners, DBL Partners, Michael Cheung, Otter Rock Capital, NASA, Syren Capital Advisors, FoundersX Ventures, The K Fund, 7percent Ventures, Space Angels, Troy Capital Partners, M13, Seed-Resolute, Equidate, Microventures, Alphabet, G Squared, Peter Diamandis, Oakhouse Partners, Craft Ventures, Hemisphere Ventures, All Blue Capital, Bracket Capital, TH Capital, #adm VENTURES, ACE Capital, Threshold Ventures, Manhattan Venture Partners, Gigafund, Decacorn Capital, StraightPath Venture Partners, Zillow Group, Aeon Family of Funds, Team in Residence, ADIT Ventures, GC1 Ventures, Ernest H. Pomerantz, Lord Rothschild, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan
Most of these are non-taxpayer sources. NASA was small as far as I know, I don't recall seeing them listed in any of the recent (much larger) rounds. Unless you count the Ontario provincial government paying their teachers including their pensions, and the thus-funded pension fund investing in SpaceX.
This will be a monumental accomplishment, when it launches for the first time.
4-6 times the payload to LEO as the Space Shuttle, but 100% reusable with the aim of fast turn-around times and minimal refurbishment, at a fraction of the price.
Detract from the eccentricity of the company's owner all you want, but the engineers making that rocket happen are doing brilliant work, in my book.
That seems extremely unlikely, there's only so many hours in the day and while I'm sure that he has a keen eye on what's going on the odds of him being personally involved in the actual engineering are close to zero. If he's spending time doing that it'd actually be a huge failure on his part, there are more important things for him to spend his time on.
I lightly disagree, maybe he doesn't do the calculations or write the tests, but he's almost certainly grilling people all the way down to ensure alignment on engineering. His passion being engineering, he's probably not asking 'program management 101' questions, but doing a smell-test on your technical work and your competence level just as a fellow-level senior engineer would.
For Elon Musk, Jim Keller or even Steve Jobs, their value isn't in manually doing the CAD / VHDL / Code, rather, it is being the Eye of Mordor on the critical path and understanding the solution top to bottom. No excuses, only problem solving.
I feel the key insight behind both SpaceX and Tesla is that both the napkin engineering from first principle and then having the force of will to personally see it through /are/ the most important thing. Both qualify as engineering.
Happy to have my fairy tale hero's journey view of success corrected.
Anyone inclined to argue against this could maybe sink 1,000 hours into Factorio. The game is simple enough to require 1-person-engineer, but complex enough that the player must both solve low-level problems AND be The Eye of Mordor. If you don’t relentlessly pursue both, you get stuck in the tarpit and progress stalls.
He's one of the richest people in the world, with a massive interest in space & rockets, and owns the most exciting piece of space technology being built today. Where else would you spend your time in this situation?
I would probably spend my time focussed on growing and sustaining my companies and hiring very skilled people to do that engineering work for me, I'd be very interested in the engineering work, but I wouldn't be doing that work myself. Similarly I don't expect Mark Zuckerberg writes much code at facebook these days, there's just too much other stuff to do
If you're goal is literally just a successful company, then sure that makes sense.
But if you actually have a passion for what you do (and I'm not arguing that Zuckerberg doesn't have a passion for spying on people), and the company is already a huge success, why wouldn't you spend your time doing something that you think is really really cool and hire very skilled people to do the other stuff?
If your goal is to get rich and play golf and relax, that is one thing. The fact that Elon is one of the wealthiest people in the world and also as passionate as someone working in their garage seems kind of like a crazy situation.
I wonder if there is similar historical precedence in terms of an ultra wealthy person being interested and involved like he is.
A while back I saw an interview with a NASA engineer they loaned to SpaceX for six months. He described a meeting in which two engineering proposals were being debated, and at the end Musk said "ok we'll do it this way" and that was the end of it. The guy was kinda blown away, and said at NASA they'd have had a dozen more meetings first.
Given that SpaceX lives or dies by how well their rockets work, I don't think there's really anything more important for Musk to be doing.
Elon Musk contains multitudes, including a stellar mind for engineering, a credible claim to be working on products that are good for humanity, excellent business instincts, and the talent to come across as an obnoxious asshole.
Seriously: when you have Bond-villain levels of fame and fortune, I expect you to be at least as clever as Peter Thiel in fucking over people who crossed you. Musk just randomly calling people he doesn’t like “pedophiles” on Twitter always feels… I dunno, “small”?
Which was pretty funny framing in any case, since Musk's wife Grimes is about 14 years old mentally (just watch any of her recent viral TikTok clips floating around).
He also hired a private investigator to target the guy. I'm a huge fan of his work with SpaceX but let's not downplay what a petty asshole he was during that whole thing.
Absolutely. It is worth noting that Tesla was experiencing "production hell" at the time, so obviously Musk was under a ton of stress. That doesn't excuse the behavior, but does make it easier to understand. Frankly, Musk should have kept out of the whole thing, but staying silent isn't the style that anyone operating at that level is going to have.
Asking his team to build a sub is inexcusable. Still love his product, despite the distraction.
Is that what actually happened? Version I heard is that his engineers came up with the sub idea themselves, the idea didn't actually come from Musk. He just told them they could work on this and use corporate resources/funds to do so.
The sub didn't end up being used in the rescue. But, were the rescuers to any significant degree hindered by SpaceX/Boring/Tesla's offer of help? In a scenario like that, it makes sense to explore different solution options in parallel – the fact that some of them end up being culled doesn't mean it was wrong to explore them to begin with. Musk released an email exchange with the (co-)head of the cave rescue diving team [0], in which he asks if he should stop work on the sub and is told to continue with it. A lot of people paint it as if Musk and his team were hanging around the rescue site doing nothing but annoying the rescuers and getting in their way – but you'd think if that was actually true, they would have told him to abandon the submarine project not continue work on it.
The book "Liftoff" (about the early years of SpaceX) paints a picture of Elon as a very smart person with a mind for engineering, but his true value-add over any other aerospace company at the time was his ability to hire the right people and sniff out bullshit.
That is, he knows enough about the engineering to hire people who know a lot about the engineering.
That, combined with his relentless drive (to the point of overwork both on himself and his employees) seems to be the key to SpaceX success.
He very much reminds me of Steve Jobs in this regard. Steve was actually a competent technician, if not really an engineer at the time of the founding of Apple, and he really cared deeply about the engineering. He understood the language of engineers and the tradeoffs in a design and I think it's the same with Elon. The fact they both ran completely separate very successful and innovative companies at the same time might be a coincidence, but kind of clinches it for me.
If you read any of the fokelore stuff, there seems to be some disagreement there. He wanted stuff to look a certain way, but he didn't really understand the engineering trade off. Like asking for a computer with no holes in the case for cooling.
I've owned one since release and the only time it's even felt warm to the touch is after charging from a low battery. I'm also not running renders or such on them, they're not really designed for that.
No ventilation means more thermal mass in the place of airways to absorb and disperse heat. I specifically bought this model because I am tired of fans in my laptops, which have failed multiple times or become loud to the point that I couldn't even have it in a meeting room without it being a major distraction. Perfect, guaranteed silence at all times from my electronics is a beautiful thing.
The folklore contains a lot of wild exaggerations and things taken out of context. A better source is interviews with people who worked with him, particularly engineers.
What do you think the folklore stuff is? Folklore.org, it's stories from actual engineers that were there. That one was from Andy Hertzfeld if I remember correctly.
He also seems to provide pretty good high level direction for his companies. Also, he seems to be a pretty good gambler, willing to take big risks that sometimes pay off huge, whereas others might play things more conservatively and not get such payoffs.
> That is, he knows enough about the engineering to hire people who know a lot about the engineering.
And he got really exceedingly lucky with his initial hires. One of the founding employees was the best living rocket engine designer in the world, and then later the best rocket salesman in the world convinced him that SpaceX needed proper sales/business development, even in the early stage, and Musk basically replied: "Okay, you're hired", to which she basically replied: "No, that's not what I meant... but okay."
He's not necessarily involved in the intimate engineering of rockets. He's deeply involved in the engineering of a rocket company.
Talent and Engineering prowess are pointless without direction, and Musk provides strong leadership to move the company in the direction he sees fit. The actual rocket scientists are Woz, and Musk is Jobs.
By using a 100% reusable vehicle and the cheapest fuel available the aspirational launch cost of starship is $2M.
Even Apples to Oranges it will be an order of magnitude cheaper than the current paradigm of $35M per Falcon9 launch. When you further consider it has 10x the payload capacity, this experiment gets really exciting.
I don't understand how it can be an order of magnitude cheaper. There are more rocket engines to maintain, far more fuel, a more expensive launch structure and generally more expense in all the ground operations. In a world where this can be launched for $2M, Falcon 9 can be launched for less than $1M.
They expect each vehicle to cost $200m and to fly them 100 times each. Hence $2m per launch. Falcon 9 costs a lot more than that because the upper stage is expended each time and that costs mid single-digit millions, and the first stages may not last much beyond a few dozen launches without significant re-engineering which would also make them heavier.
The Falcon 9 can not be launched for less than $1M. Falcon 9 does not reuse the second stage. Elon has said that the second stage is approximately 20% of the cost of a Falcon 9 launch. A Falcon 9 needs to have some work done between each launch. Some of the Falcon 9 parts are not actually reusable (crush cores for the landing legs as an example). This is why they can not ever simply fill up a landed Falcon 9 booster, put a new second stage on it, and launch it again. The Starship / Superheavy combo is designed to be able to literally just refuel and go. The Falcon 9 booster is mostly made of aluminum, which is up to 60% more expensive than stainless steel. The Starship / Superheavy are stainless steel.
Methane (Starship fuel) is massively cheaper than Kerosene (Falcon 9 fuel). Methane also has a much higher specific impulse, which means you can use less of it to get the same increase in velocity. Methane can be stored in liquid form in same temperature as oxygen, which means less insulation the two propellant tanks. Inversely, Kerosene will freeze at the temperatures required to get oxygen into liquid form.
The combination of Methane and the full flow staged combustion cycle also means significantly reduced coking in the engine, so it drastically prolongs the time between engine refurbishments.
Do you know how a reduced coking works? I've read about the raptor engine[1] and it explains how fuel rich hot mixture leads to coking, it explains how USA solved this problem before (by using hydrogen as a fuel), but how Musk managed to solve it? Partially burned methane should produce free carbon atoms, shouldn't it? Doesn't it raise a coking problem?
In a conventional hydrocarbon fueled engine, you're using a fuel with hydrocarbon chains at approximately room temperature to cool the engine. With only a little heat addition, you get up to a temperature where these chains can shed hydrogens and convert their C-C-H bonds to C=C double bonds. These bonds in turn allow hydrocarbon chains to join together into larger molecules that can coagulate and stick to the walls.
Methane on the other hand is starting out at a much lower temperature, and it's very difficult to get methane molecules to react with each other to form large molecules as you're not starting with any single C-C bonds. Isolated free carbon atoms (soot) aren't much of a problem.
According to the link above they do. Full-flow means to have two pre-burners one going fuel rich while other going oxygen rich. Though I'm not a rocket scientist and I'd be grateful if proven wrong.
> Elon has said that the second stage is approximately 20% of the cost of a Falcon 9 launch.
20% of the cost of the whole rocket. With no reuse. Now that reuse has cut the cost of launch way down, the second stage is much more than that of the cost.
As Elon likes to point out, imagine how expensive it would be to fly if, after every flight, they threw away the plane. That's exactly what people traditionally did with rockets. The result is that the cost to fly a jet is mostly the cost of the fuel, while the cost to fly a rocket is the cost of the rocket.
Consider a Falcon 9 launch. Thanks to reuse, the cost to relaunch is in the neighborhood of $30 million. The cost of the fuel is about $200,000. Over 99% the launch cost is depreciation, maintenance, or having to replace what you didn't reuse.
The aim with Starship is to make the cost of a launch as close to the cost of the fuel as they can get.
I’m not sure you understand the arguments being made here. $1m per launch for F9 is ludicrous because 20% of the rocket, by manufacturing cost, is expended on every launch. For Starship none of the rocket is expended per launch, the only costs are site operations, fuel and depreciation on the rocket over a hundred or more flights.
They are aiming for daily launches of starship, so the site operations costs would be divided by potentially hundreds of launches per year instead of the one or two dozen a year nowadays.
The cost model per flight of Starship is more like that of a jumbo jet than that of a Falcon 9.
I don’t think it is. A medium lift vehicle that is fully reusable could be made to have a $1 million launch price. I don’t know that Falcon 9 could do that, but some MLV could.
SpaceX could absolutely do it. They chose not to in order to focus development resources on starship. It’s all about opportunity cost.
Also, you’d have to redesign F9 somewhat. Starship has the fairing integrated with the upper stage, which reduces recovery costs. Starship’s booster also does Return To Launch Site nominally, which means you don’t need a separate recovery droneship (Falcon 9 does that, too, but to make the most out of every expended upper stage, it makes sense to use down-range recovery). The F9 legs are sort of complicated logistically whereas Super Heavy is supposed to be recovered by the actual launch site, reducing turnaround time and costs. Also, using methane means less coking in the engines, which reduces turnaround costs and maintenance. Lots of things like that you’d need to reengineer to enable $1 million launch costs, but it’s feasible for an MLV. Relativity is planning to do it.
It's amusing how quickly we start taking things for granted.
Right now SpaceX is the only company that recovers their orbital class booster. And that didn't happen until 2016! Prior to that, everyone dismissed landing rockets as impossible. Given the lack of competition for launch vehicles + the fat defense contracts being awarded, there wasn't much incentive for the incumbents to even try to bring the cost down.
Designing a rocket that can land and be reflow is a multiyear process. As other comments have said, more design changes would been needed to F9 to make it more reusable, those changes have tradeoffs. Instead, SpaceX chose to invest in a new design and more capable vehicle.
Other launch providers like RocketLab and Blue Origin are pursuing reusable vehicles.
"Why has no one done it?" give it time... it will happen sooner than we probably expect.
In general, rockets work better the larger they get. Smaller rocket means more structure made per volume of fuel, which will translate to smaller proportional payload capacity. Manufacture cost is mostly a function of the surface while payload capacity is a function of the volume.
I'm not sure that a falcon 9 sized medium lift vehicle would have any room for cargo after using its margin for re-entry shielding, landing fuel and hardware.
Long-term marginal cost is determined by the nonreusable component cost + minimum refurbish & refit costs per launch. Effectively, the benefits of reuse offer diminising marginal benefit per reuse. Though designing for long-term use (say, a personal automobile vs. a rocketship) can still make sense.
An automobile used for daily commute with a 5 year life sees ~1,000 re-uses. You can vary the parameters to get different results. There are fuel, maintanance, garaging/parking, tax/registration, and insurance costs as well.
You raise a few good points. Falcon 9 launches could be 30% cheaper if fully reusable but that only reduces a launch cost down to $25M.
I am skeptical of the claim that they will just be able to refuel and go. Every reusable space vehicle has had that goal and always cost more than expected to refurbish for the next launch. Yes, we may get there eventually but not in the next few decades, the risks of a catastrophic component failure are too high to do no refurbishment.
The starship and super heavy are certainly cheaper to construct but that has more to do with fabrication techniques than the material cost.
Methane is less dense than kerosene so needs larger tanks but it does have more energy per unit mass. The overheads of using cryogenic fuel are reduced on a larger rocket but the performance gain is probably only 10% or so.
I am not aware of any significant insulation between tanks on the Falcon 9 and it certainly isn't a major cost factor.
> Every reusable space vehicle has had that goal and always cost more than expected to refurbish for the next launch.
There have only been 2 reusable launch vehicles ever, and both were only partially reusable. Shuttle and Falcon 9. Falcon 9 has already made massive strides in reducing any refurb costs between missions. there is no reason that you couldn’t build one that requires no maintenance in between flights for the same reason that there’s no reason you can’t make an upper stage that can do multiple firings per flight without any maintenance in between. Upper stage reuse will be trickier, but ultimately there’s no fundamental reason why refurb has to be done in between every flight.
Upper stage reuse doesn’t require a landing. If you could refuel an upper stage in space, you could use it for deep space exploration.
Do they deliberately deorbit the Falcon second stage? Would be interesting if we could keep a couple parked in LEO and refuel them for different missions.
But then you need a different vehicle to refuel the original one. If you're doing that, why not just use that second vehicle for the mission and forget about reuse?
Reusing second stages in space only really makes sense once you are making your fuel in space.
Making fuel on the Moon or on Mars is more or less the plan for any sustainable development of the solar system. Unless we get sci-fi grade engines, it’s just unfeasible to send fuel from Earth.
That's a chicken and egg problem. Making fuel off of Earth is going to require so much mass for infrastructure that it won't be feasible until we have fully reusable vehicles.
An acquaintance of mine who works in the industry (not at SpaceX) called Raptor a “scifi engine.”
For a lot of purposes, Starship should make it extremely cheap to send propellant from Earth. $10/kg in LEO. Cheaper than any lunar mining proposal I’ve seen.
That said, I hope we do make propellant off-Earth eventually.
Yeah if I remember correctly, I read that the solar panels required to ISRU make enough methane on Mars for a starship return flight would be two football fields worth and it would take them a few years to do it.
Rocket engines shouldn't be that cheap to maintain, they are designed to be very reusable, unlike Merlin they were designed for the beginning to be reusable.
The whole reason for the full-flow staged cycle is to have much more reasonable internal temperatures. Methane as well was picked partially because its far more clean burning.
There is no reason rocket engines couldn't be as reliable a jet engines.
> far more fuel
RP1 is very expensive. Methane is much cheaper, and they can even produce it local. Ox is very cheap and is basically gone turn into the cost of electricity and they are using local solar to make it.
Helium is also a very expensive part of the Falcon 9. Starship avoids the use of helium.
Additionally the Falcon 9 used TEE-TAB that is also expensive.
And it used nitrogen as well, that not expensive but just one more thing to worry about.
Falcon 9 has 6 different different consumables, Starship has 2.
> generally more expense in all the ground operations
This is wrong. The Falcon needed to have drone ships operating and tug boats for them as well, to catch the fairing they have another 1-2 boats out there to collect the fairing.
Then the stages need to be brought into port, transported back to the launch site and so on. The fairing have to be refurbished as well.
In additional Starship has multiple design upgrades that make it actually easier. Unlike Falcon 9 Upper stage, the Starship will be fueled from below, meaning there is no secondary fuel infrastructure for the upper stage. Not requiring the fueling of the consumables above also makes it much easier.
Plus they were able to apply everything they learned from Falcon 9 and ground operations to this new launch vehicle and launch site.
> In a world where this can be launched for $2M, Falcon 9 can be launched for less than $1M.
Falcon 9 can not do that. First of all, you need to build an upper stage that cost you 5-10M. You can't build that Upper stage fast enough to reach the required flight rate. Falcon 9 is also more difficult to launch and prep for launch. It wasn't designed to be fully reusable and still need more checks and refurbishments.
Now $2M is extreme, even if it is $10M or $20M that only really matters for stuff like Mars. If you can launch it anywhere under $100M its revolutionary vehicle for space flight.
"They're about to pass the great filter... fire the relativistic impactors!"
Seriously though, this is game changing at even 100X that number or $200M per launch. Even if they don't get close to the aspirational price it's going to make a ton of stuff possible in space that was unaffordable before.
It's not even just that it's cheaper to launch, but the full reusability and planned ability to refuel in orbit really make it a game-changer. A fully fueled Starship in LEO can take a huge payload to the Moon, Mars, etc and ideally land itself, potentially refuel in-situ and get back to Earth. They can make minimally-customized modifications for tanker Starship / Lunar Starship / Mars Starship / etc and it's like a space swiss-army knife.
Just look at the National Team / Dynetics HLS proposals with a bunch of expensive, novel custom hardware vs. Space X proposal which was "basically just Starship". It could obviate a huge amount of resources being poured into one-off disposable space hardware and let us instead focus on actually doing stuff in space.
There's some room for argument, but on the order of 1,000x the stated SpaceX Super Heavy booster.
Even if that turns out to be vastly optimistic (not ... unheard of in rocket surgery), it's all but certain that costs will be 100x lower than the Shuttle. Even a 10x factor would be utterly transformational.
I'm not an uncriticle Musk fan, but he's repeatedly delivered on promises I thought were tots redic initially (long-range EVs, reusable boosters, powered return boosters). He's had a few missed deliveries (hyperloop and Boring Co. both seem infeasible, and Mars colonisation still strikes me as a very long shot within 50 years), but we're indisputably closer to those possibilities than before he came on the scene. Credit to engineering teams, there's also something to be said for vision and force of will.
The government is at its most efficient when its main purpose cutting checks. DARPA, Operation Warp Speed, Social Security, countless grants to scientists. Try to have the government actually achieve things directly and you get the Space Shuttle.
> Try to have the government actually achieve things directly and you get the Space Shuttle.
I don't think that's entirely fair. The Orbiter ( developed by Rockwell, not NASA or .gov ) was the result of two decades of hypersonic aerodynamics research combined with the state of materials art at the time. The solid boosters were ahead of the technology curve. The overall package was compromised by USAF / .mil requirements but otherwise was an advanced product for its time.
> The overall package was compromised by USAF / .mil requirements but otherwise was an advanced product for its time.
[0] presents a somewhat different story. It argues that much of the blame for the compromises, lies not with DOD, but rather with OMB. To give one example, it is commonly claimed that DOD pushed for solids because of the use of solids in ICBMs; according to this account, that push came from Daniel Taft at OMB, not from DOD; Taft wanted solid boosters because they were estimated to be $1 billion cheaper.
Indeed, I consider the Space Shuttle an incredible huge engineering triumph. Basically built in the 70ies, it up to date is the most capable space vehicle built so far. Large crew compartment, huge cargo compartment, can fly space missions for weeks, allows extra vehicular activities, can take cargo down to earth and most importantly, can land on any large airport.
The problem was, while all of this was achieved, the resulting design was a bit too brittle (heat shields) and definitely too expensive to maintain between flights, so the prices were just off and the desired flight frequencies were never met.
While the engineering of the first edition of the shuttle was just great - especially considering some of the disputable design requirements - the failure rather lies in the fact that it never got a meaningful update. There were ambitious projects to produce a "next gen" shuttle with fixes "all" problems with the first gen, but they all failed. What was missing was updates and iteration. Just build a new shuttle which improves some aspects and keeps the rest of the design. Like a new heat shield, or just optimizing internal structures. That might have driven costs down and produced versions which still could be used. As, for example, we lost the capability to service the Hubble telescope.
> The solid boosters were ahead of the technology curve.
It was the wrong curve. RP1 based engines like F-1 would have been far better to get of the ground.
> The overall package was compromised by USAF / .mil requirements but otherwise was an advanced product for its time.
There were many mistakes made. Space fans love to blame the military and politics. But if you actually go back, NASA leadership made plenty of questionable choices.
The biggest issue with the shuttle is the basic architecture.
Governments have provided numerous services and projects at phenomenal efficiencies, including Medicare in the US, national healthcare systems in most of the civilised world, highway and transportation systems, postal delivery, air traffic control systems, aircraft investigations, sewers, numerous municipal utility districts (electric, gas, phone, broadband), and more.
If you look at technologies which have had huge impacts on the world, a 10x change is simply tremendous.
A person walking typically manages about 3 mph / 5 kph.
A typical person on a bicycle can sustain about 15--20 mph (24--32 kph). Early trains operated at about 25--30 mph (40--50 kph), and soon regularly reached 60 mph (100 kph).
The combined factors of speed and cargo capacity make rail utterly transformational to humans (or animals) carrying loads. Even compared with high-tonnage cargo methods of the era (riverboats and canals), rail's speed was a major factor. (The tonnage/speed tradeoff continues between rail and river or ocean shipping today. For bulk, time-insensitive cargos, rail cannot compete.)
Propellor-driven aircraft moved at about 100-250 mph (160--320 kph) --- the DC3 cruised at 200 mph, as an example. Jet aircraft cruise at about 550--650 mph (850--1,000 kph).
And of course, orbital spacecraft / ballistic missiles hit 17,000 mph (27,000 kph), and up.
In the case of marine shipping, speeds didn't vary so much as tonnage did, with the net ton-miles/hour figure increasing accordingly. Clipper ships trended below 200 tons. Maersk's Triple-E class container ships displace 200,000 tons, a factor of 1,000.
The energy cost of lighting over the past 200 years has fallen by a factor of thousands, from candles and oil lamps to LEDs. Lighting uses which were previously unfathomable are now commonplace. Candle-powered outdoor advertising displays might be quaint, however, if somewhat fire-prone.
Again, typically, a 10x gain in some metric pushes applications to an entirely new domain, which was my point. Not that a 10x improvement was the likely limit in this case.
I'm not sure I understood your point correctly. I interpreted what you said as meaning that Starship being 10x better than the Shuttle would be a significant improvement.
I'm saying that the Falcon Heavy has already achieved a 35x improvement from the Space Shuttle, and therefore if Starship achieved only a 10x improvement relative to the Shuttle it would actually be worse than what we already have and so wouldn't be an advancement.
If you meant 10x relative to current rockets, then yes, I agree that would be significant.
The Space Shuttle also was supposed to be cheap and almost completely reusable, it turned out to be one of the most expensive launchers. BFR is not the space shuttle, but I will not make any speculation before I can actually order a launch.
Elon Musk is known for overpromising. The tech is awesome, and SpaceX realizations speak for themselves, but I consider anything Elon Musk says "not even wrong".
I mean, I love SpaceX, and I follow BFR closely, but I think it would be better without the sensationalism.
The test hops that spacex and blue origin did are impressive yes, but you are missing the most impressive part! The booster that landed pushed something to orbital velocity. Getting any significant amount of payload (1-4% of total mass) to orbit is difficult but adding the fuel and equipment needed to accurately land the first stage is another level.
It doesn't take that much extra fuel to land a thing. You have gravity helping you go down, unlike when you're going up. You also have friction to slow you down, which is desirable, unlike when you're trying to speed up.
I'm currently reading "Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days that Launched SpaceX" and I've become convinced that SpaceX's biggest accomplishment is convincing their customers (mostly the US government) to go along with their lean/agile development process.
At a high level everyone was aware that the way the government micromanaging the design/build of rockets with cost plus contracts wasn't sustainable, but the government bureaucracy that awards contracts is heavily entrenched in that mode of operation.
Liftoff is an an excellent book. Recommended for anyone interested in SpaceX or space in general. The writer's style is a bit dry, however it's a fun story regardless. The gritty insides of the early days of SpaceX are both what you hoped to read about and sort of crazy remarkable (like the elaborated story about the imploded Falcon 1 that was being transported by C17 and ultimately saved SpaceX from oblivion). People risked their lives to make SpaceX happen.
It reminds me of a bigger company version of Masters of Doom. Same hacker ethos driving those early days.
>to go along with their lean/agile development process.
This is an accurate take, but in reality I think they convinced the government to outsource a lean/agile development process.
20+ years ago, NASA went through their "better, faster, cheaper" phase to try their own hand at a more agile environment. Unfortunately, it reduced quality and whenever something bad happened more requirements were levied. Now some are beneficial but there's also some that were bureaucratic and process bloat just because of political risk and the fact nobody wanted to be on record saying the risk was acceptable.
I think one unspoken risk is whether the government, as the largest SpaceX customer, will try to enforce the same quality and safety standards as the company matures, particularly with human-rated spaceflight. Or if they are comfortable with a hands-off approach.
> fast turn-around times and minimal refurbishment
This is the biggest risk in the program, along with how many times they can reuse each piece, which is related. Last I looked Musk was projecting using the boosters hundreds of times and the 2nd stage dozens, both obviously very aggressive projections. If the real numbers are lower then the price per flight rises.
As far as I know we don't have any independent way of knowing whether these projections make sense or not. I hope he's right. Even if he's a little wrong and the flight cost was $20M instead of $2M that would be a great thing. But he could also be very wrong and it might not work at all.
> This is the biggest risk in the program, along with how many times they can reuse each piece, which is related. Last I looked Musk was projecting using the boosters hundreds of times and the 2nd stage dozens, both obviously very aggressive projections.
The first re-flight of a booster was in 2017. The practical science of rocket reuse is only four years old. During that time they've flown ~40 missions with reused cores with zero failures. One Falcon 9 has been reused 10 times. My point is that there is no reason to assume that we've reached the limits of reuse in such a short period of time, so it doesn't seem that aggressive to assume that there is room to improve by ~10x
> My point is that there is no reason to assume that we've reached the limits of reuse in such a short period of time, so it doesn't seem that aggressive to assume that there is room to improve by ~10x
There's an enormous gulf between asserting this and the engineering to realize it. Maybe Raptor isn't as reliable as they hope. Maybe 3mm steel is too delicate so they have to stay with 4mm which makes them overweight. Maybe the thermal protection system is too fragile or doesn't provide enough protection. Maybe their novel alloy can't meet its targets. Maybe the tower catch won't work so they need legs which will add too much weight. Etc, etc.
All of those are extremely nontrivial issues, there's a lot of risk because of how ambitious what they are attempting is. I hope they succeed.
I mean, they're using modern computers instead of 1970s computers to do the engineering. The formulas are a lot more turnkey now. Is it that impressive a feat when you adjust for the better resources?
Is there any information available on the activities they actually plan on doing in terms of quality checks and refurbishment? I'm a big fan of SpaceX but I also feel like people talk about this point without actually knowing what goes into aerospace refurbishment regarding the level of quality assurance typically required.
I remember back when they had a Falcon 9 failure attributed to a faulty material spec on a strut and the response was they would perform quality checks on future material.[1] As someone who worked in the industry, my initial question was "Why weren't they already doing this?" as it's a commonplace within industry on safety critical or flight hardware.
I've also been involved in rocket rebuilds and to say they need "minimal refurbishment" is a understatement. Even if none of the components actually need rebuilt, the quality inspections still take a lot of time and money. And there's always the chance you find an issue that warrants a legitimate rebuild.
So, while I'm pulling for SpaceX to succeed, my worry is that every failure or close-call like the strut issue will layer additional quality checks that gradually erode that "minimal refurbishment" claim.
We don’t have to “refurbish” airplanes after every flight. Are the stresses of rocket engines / getting to orbit simply so great there’s no way to engineer away “refurbishment”? And will that always be the case, or could advances in materials change that?
Aircraft are on very strict maintenance schedules and need to be signed off for airworthiness in order to fly. As the plane ages, this certification is usually signed off by an certified A&P mechanic. It's regulated (in most countries) and acts as the form of quality control. It's not like a car where you can just decide to continue operating at your own risk. (This doesn't generally apply to experimental aircraft, though). So in that context, airplanes are being continuously refurbished. That's also why it's relatively inexpensive to buy a plane, but extremely expensive to own one.
Flight hardware typically has much higher quality standards. Sometimes they use more exotic materials that don't have the background testing to ensure that quality. If you want to use a cheaper new seal material, for example, there's probably not much data available for its compatibility with hypergolic fuels. It's not uncommon to use one-off components in a design, which means they may not have the same type of well-tried process control during manufacture. Then you have the costs of maintaining hardware pedigree (chain-of-custody, maintenance of material test data, lot material coupons for later testing, some of which may need to be maintained in a bonded, climate controlled room etc.).
New materials and manufacturing processes will definitely help and I think SpaceX is doing good work here. But the demands of spaceflight adds constraints. Steel and titanium are the most common non-fatiguing materials. Steel may be too heavy so you might be left with only using titanium, which is much more expensive. And you still haven't done the compatibility testing etc. So while it's a trivial example, you can see how it can become a tough problem to factor in cost, quality, and speed.
SpaceX's problem was they trusted the manufacturer who had certified the strut. So theoretically it was already being done by the vendor.
SpaceX is also pretty good about eliminating checks that have become redundant or otherwise redundant. For example they no longer do a static fire on the launch stand before every flight.
The big promise of Starship is the quantity of flights they envision. A thousand flights will give huge insight into reliability, insight that space flight has never had because most articles are never recovered and inspectes.
>So theoretically it was already being done by the vendor.
Organizations with good quality programs know how to assess their suppliers, including those who are ISO/ANSI certified. There’s a lot of information that goes into evaluating a supplier beyond just asking them if they certify their material or have a quality program, including doing site audits. Things can still fall through the cracks of course, but it reduces the probability. I bet if you asked them why they don’t evaluate each lot before the mishap, at least some would claim it’s redundant and unnecessary because the supplier already certified it.
SpaceX Falcon 9 overall has an incredibly good flight record. They very early had one supplier part they didn't correctly validate.
The other failure (non-mission) was when they discovered a real unkown-unkown about COPV tanks and helium tanks in near 0-kelvin temperatures.
So yeah, they should not have made that mistake, but its also the case that nobody has a perfect record. Considering the errors most rocket companies have made, theirs seem fairly reasonable.
I think they’re doing a good job but I don’t think that was a reasonable error. I give them slack in the areas where they’re pushing the into unknown boundaries of engineering. Regarding the COPV, I wish they would’ve added to the fundamental science by really investing in understanding and researching the failure. Unfortunately, they just changed the design and left the fundamental science to NASA, but I guess you can make the case that’s not SpaceX’s role. That strut case, however, is a well known risk within industry that they just didn’t manage very well.
They are aiming to fly Starship over the Straits of Florida (i.e. between Florida and Cuba) which means it will be low inclination. I assume that this is to avoid overflying inhabited area 'early' into the flight and especially not for too long, a trajectory bit further to the south would e.g. mean that they had to fly over the full length of Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. I would expect them to be "out of the woods" already at this point in the flight though. The next critical part would be reentry north-west of Hawaii.
The filing linked from the article is at the FCC b/c they plan to use Starlink terminals on the second stage to maintain telemetry connectivity during the flight (particulary reentry where RF on the windward side is blocked due to plasma effects)
I have tried to draw a circle around the globe based on the images in the article and there is actually a circle which basically misses everything in the Caribean that just goes south of the Caicos islands, crosses southern Africa, skips barely west of Australia and ends slightly west of Hawaii.
SpaceX launches are the best reality TV show. I'm so glad my children get to watch history being made like this. My dad remembers seeing the moon landings when he was a kid and thinking, "Wow, this is HUGE!" My generation didn't get that experience. But I'm glad my kids do.
is my favorite way to watch that launch, just because of the way it integrate the people watching. We haven't had the crowds since the Space Shuttle stopped watching, and DM-2, Crew-1, and Crew-2 all happened during the pandemic - so this shows the old excitement.
That was amazing because they unexpectedly succeeded on their first attempt. The individual falcon 9 landings were a bigger milestone but the success was iterative.
If SpaceX can successfully land starship after the first suborbital flight I think it will dwarf the twin booster landing.
Starship and superheavy are both going to 'land' on the ocean after the first launch. Basically they test the landing process but they don't need to risk one of their (surprisingly expensive) ships and they don't need to request regulatory approval to return to land.
There's so many more things that can go wrong trying to land from orbit that it's not worth the risk trying to land anywhere near people regardless of how much time you have to engineer it.
I had a goal in 2020 to drive from Toronto to Florida to watch the next Falcon Heavy launch and dual-landings. Then the pandemic hit... but conveniently, they pushed back the FH launches by a year as well!
Depending on the status of the border, the pandemic, and all of that, I might take a trip down if they have one this fall.
I've seen a rocket launch at KSC and can highly recommend it. (It wasn't SpaceX though.)
One thing to remember though is that launches can easily get scrubbed due to weather, planes flying into the restricted zone etc., so make sure to plan to stay for most if not all of the planned launch window if possible. When I went I stayed at a hotel in Orlando, which can be fun but it's also a bit of a drive so might be worth finding lodging closer to KSC if you're not too keen on driving a fair bit.
If you're viewing the launch from KSC your ticket won't be refunded either, and they'll only open up tickets for the next attempt after the launch is scrubbed so you can't prebook for all attempts either.
When I went the first attempt was scrubbed, but they launched the next night. This actually worked out better for me, since then I could score tickets to the viewing gantry which was closer to the actual rocket, and an amazing experience.
Pro tip: if you're spending multiple days at KSC just buy a year pass – it's worth it.
Also pro tip: don't forget to visit the nearby warbird museum as well, they've got an amazing collection of airplanes and very knowledgeable volunteers on staff!
If you’re referring to the Falcon Heavy side booster landings, I got to see the first one live at Kennedy Space Center. It was one of the only things in my entire life I’d describe as pure magic. It was amazing and so beautiful to see.
I got to see Falcon Dragon launch in Florida along the A1-A. People there credit SpaceX for single-handedly rekindling the lure and luster of space travel. They were sad when the shuttle program got shut down by NASA but now a whole new generation of space enthusiasts, optimists, and futurists get to see the awesome advances being made in the US. It's patriotic AF. The color, sparkle and glow of it was something I'll never forget. My only regret is I don't have any children to have shared it with. But there'll be more launches!
My parents used to let me stay home from school on days the space shuttle was being launched. I didn't think much of it at the time, but now I realize how awesome that was.
My generation had the space shuttles (I still remember watching the challenger explosion at school that day). Your post is the first one to point out to me that in between the end of the space shuttles and space x we had an entire generation with nothing.
Consider that maybe the space shuttles exploding _was_ our thing. Boomers got to see the surface of the Moon. Zoomers got to see cheap flight and robotic victories. Millennials were raised by a NASA flying an explosive trailer truck.
The USSR tried the "tons of little boosters" approach.
It's taken ~60yr for the manufacturing and control systems to get to the point of being reliable enough to chain together enough boosters to put really big stuff into orbit.
Historically, large quantity of engines has been considered problematic - it brings to mind the USSR N1 rocket and the difficulties with its 30 engines, which have been attributed as a (the?) reason for failure of the USSR Moon program.
Falcon Heavy runs Merlin engines (Falcon heavy is three falcon 9's strapped together). Starship and Super Heavy booster are running Raptor methalox engines which by fuel choice alone has never been done before on an orbital rocket. The Raptor engines have failed to re-start during the landing sequence but I'm not sure we've seen enough of them to attest to any failure rate yet. The issue with restarting had to do with liquid methane sloshing in the nose cone.
I tend to disagree with this. If you actually go threw the N1 and how it was developed, the conclusion to me is that it wasn't really the number of engines that was the main problem.
The main issue they had is basically that the NK-17 engines were not tested before flight. Even worse, since they didn't have good computer back then, their 'what happens if an engine fails' sequence was very sub-optimal.
I would suggest only one of the N-1 failures can reasonable be attributed to the choice in engine configuration. In one case their internal fuel channels were breaking because of vibration.
All of these things seem much less likely to happen. The Booster has a computer and each engine has its own control. The Booster is much more capable of handing an engine shutdown or even an exploding engine. That has been demonstrated on the Falcon 9 a number of time.
Each engine is individually tested before the flight and often they are then fired together on the ground, so there is much less fear of that.
They have experience with 27 engines and the pipes required. Also, the Super Heavy used short Stainless steel tubes that should be fairly resilient. In general our engineering on how do this is just much better, better simulation, more experience, better knowledge oft the materials and the welding.
So this will run on Methane and Liquid Oxygen, right? Is it possible to source this CO2 neutral? Maybe it's not economical right now, but I wonder whether it's realistic to use renewables to produce the fuel in the near future. The massive cost reduction will probably result in far more flights, so I wonder about the environmental impact.
Edit: And would this even be the solution? Methane is a greenhouse-gas after all...
Do you know what happens when the engine burns the fuel? What gets released into the atmosphere? I know methane is a greenhouse gas but when it's getting burned it doesn't get released raw.
They need to build these refineries[0] for fuel creation on Mars, so it's very likely they will build and use them at Starbase on Earth to test and gain long-term maintenance experience.
The happy consequence is relatively low net-carbon emissions.
Methane is a greenhouse gas, until you burn it. Then it's water and CO2.
The wikipedia article on methane says something like "There is little incentive to produce methane industrially". Basically, we have too much of it already, from fracking, from livestock, from all sorts of places.
Giving it to SpaceX to burn as rocket fuel makes it a less potent greenhouse gas.
Musk has stated it's SpaceX intention to create methane from the CO2 in the air, powered by solar panels. (Basically the same technology they want to use on Mars to produce the return trip propellant)
Burning the methane will of course release CO2 back into the atmosphere, but if they indeed make the methane by pulling CO2 from the air, it would effectively make Starship (the fuel anyway) carbon neutral.
(I guess actually it's a bit carbon negative because some of the engine burn will happen in space).
one thing to remember is it will be a static fire of three engines not the full thirty'ish. Now a static fire of 30 Raptor engines will be a sight, and sound, to behold!
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[ 7.5 ms ] story [ 329 ms ] threadIt was no big deal really. Anyone could have been born here and done the same.
Edit- why is it against the rules to spit facts?
SpaceX would almost certainly have gone bankrupt early on if it wasn't for NASA though, so SpaceX does owe it's existence to the US taxpayer in that sense.
SpaceX is a huge vindication of careful government spending being used to help stimulate commercial activity while also accomplishing government goals more efficiently.
The first Starliner mission was, basically, a failure - but it's a failure that Boeing, rather than NASA, is having to pay for, including the reflight of the Orbital Flight Test.
Despite setbacks, the Commercial Cargo program seems to be going well. One note is that Orbital (now Northrup Grumman) had to purchase flights from a competitor to fulfill their contracts, which they did.
The Lunar Gateway appears to be moving/have moved to this model, and so far so good.
I'd say one of the big things to do is to compare this against what NASA has been able to accomplish with traditional contracts, recently. Since 2005, the Ares program launched one model rocket in 2009. (The first stage of Ares 1X wasn't the one intended for Ares I, and the second stage was boilerplate.) SLS will likely have it's first flight later this year or early next year, and then a second flight in 2023, and will probably have cost ~$25B by then.
I think it's probably fair to say the commercial programs have accomplished more, especially for the money.
Or in other words, the US effectively produced the modern primes by pushing more risk onto them. No company wants to go out of business.
And if that would be the result of a single project failure when your primary customer is asking you to do something that's never been done before?
SpaceX having success is great. But had they failed, it would have bankrupted the company. And then we'd be back to Orbital, Boeing, et al.
Also, you seem to be implying that cost plus contracts will allow much smaller companies since they won’t have to absorb as much risk, but in reality, it’s the big boys who win cost plus contracts. SpaceX was tiny when they won COTS/CRS (Elon wasn’t a billionaire and Tesla was looking more like a dead end novelty than the most valuable car company in the world).
Also, Iridium and Orbcomm and OneWeb all went bankrupt but all are still operating today. Bankruptcy doesn’t always mean the business disappears off the face of the planet, and even when it does, often their assets end up being used productively by others (that’s how SpaceX got their McGregor test site).
Also on Commercial Cargo, for phase 2 the competition forced Orbital to have to significantly cut their price. On the flip side, SpaceX raised theirs since they so underbid in the first round.
Additionally, Dream Chaser is supposed to come online soon.
It is de facto tax payer funding as there isn't another customer like NASA for Spacex to go to (realistically).
When it comes to Starship, it seems like one of the main applications will be to launch hundreds of Starlink satellites at once. I don't believe that there is a noticable amount of NASA funding in Starlink - it's possible they might be using it for some reason, but it'd be as a customer.
The second half of the year looks more NASA-Heavy, with CRS-23, Crew 3, and CRS-24, plus 2 science satellite. But that's among 17 other missions.
I guess my point is that SpaceX probably won't lose NASA, but they're not as dependent on government business as ULA is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...
Rather than pork going to aerospace contractors working on an already obsolete or soon to be obsolete SLS, I rather that that states get money to work on whatever made possible by the Starship program.
They earlier this year had an investment round worth about a billion, which was all dedicated to R&D for Starship and Starlink. Total external investments are around $19 billion [1]
So yeah, some of the NASA dollars probably provide profit to the company that they reinvest in R&D. But a larger portion comes from external investment specifically for R&D.
[1] https://craft.co/spacex/funding-rounds
But where do you think that $19billion came from?
Looking forward to the downvote :-)
Most dollars that have been paid to a SpaceX bank account, by investors or customers, came from private parties. NASA was indisputably critical in enabling SpaceX. But SpaceX was not taxpayer funded if that word doesn't encompass virtually all economic activity in America.
Today, SpaceX could do fine without any NASA contracts. Naturally, they help. But there is a lot of demand for launch, in part due to the price competition SpaceX started.
Founders Fund, 137 Ventures, Scott Banister, DFJ Growth, Google, Rizvi Traverse Management, Fidelity Investments, Threshold, Rothenberg Ventures, Elon Musk, ACE & Company, Bill Lee, David Sacks, Valor Equity Partners, Sherpa Capital, Ecosystem Ventures, Baillie Gifford, Barney Pell, Vanedge Capital, Matthew Pritzker Company, Capricorn Venture Partners, Musket Research Associates, Tao Capital Partners, DBL Partners, Michael Cheung, Otter Rock Capital, NASA, Syren Capital Advisors, FoundersX Ventures, The K Fund, 7percent Ventures, Space Angels, Troy Capital Partners, M13, Seed-Resolute, Equidate, Microventures, Alphabet, G Squared, Peter Diamandis, Oakhouse Partners, Craft Ventures, Hemisphere Ventures, All Blue Capital, Bracket Capital, TH Capital, #adm VENTURES, ACE Capital, Threshold Ventures, Manhattan Venture Partners, Gigafund, Decacorn Capital, StraightPath Venture Partners, Zillow Group, Aeon Family of Funds, Team in Residence, ADIT Ventures, GC1 Ventures, Ernest H. Pomerantz, Lord Rothschild, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan
Most of these are non-taxpayer sources. NASA was small as far as I know, I don't recall seeing them listed in any of the recent (much larger) rounds. Unless you count the Ontario provincial government paying their teachers including their pensions, and the thus-funded pension fund investing in SpaceX.
4-6 times the payload to LEO as the Space Shuttle, but 100% reusable with the aim of fast turn-around times and minimal refurbishment, at a fraction of the price.
Detract from the eccentricity of the company's owner all you want, but the engineers making that rocket happen are doing brilliant work, in my book.
I feel the key insight behind both SpaceX and Tesla is that both the napkin engineering from first principle and then having the force of will to personally see it through /are/ the most important thing. Both qualify as engineering.
Happy to have my fairy tale hero's journey view of success corrected.
If your goal is to get rich and play golf and relax, that is one thing. The fact that Elon is one of the wealthiest people in the world and also as passionate as someone working in their garage seems kind of like a crazy situation.
I wonder if there is similar historical precedence in terms of an ultra wealthy person being interested and involved like he is.
Given that SpaceX lives or dies by how well their rockets work, I don't think there's really anything more important for Musk to be doing.
Seriously: when you have Bond-villain levels of fame and fortune, I expect you to be at least as clever as Peter Thiel in fucking over people who crossed you. Musk just randomly calling people he doesn’t like “pedophiles” on Twitter always feels… I dunno, “small”?
Asking his team to build a sub is inexcusable. Still love his product, despite the distraction.
Is that what actually happened? Version I heard is that his engineers came up with the sub idea themselves, the idea didn't actually come from Musk. He just told them they could work on this and use corporate resources/funds to do so.
The sub didn't end up being used in the rescue. But, were the rescuers to any significant degree hindered by SpaceX/Boring/Tesla's offer of help? In a scenario like that, it makes sense to explore different solution options in parallel – the fact that some of them end up being culled doesn't mean it was wrong to explore them to begin with. Musk released an email exchange with the (co-)head of the cave rescue diving team [0], in which he asks if he should stop work on the sub and is told to continue with it. A lot of people paint it as if Musk and his team were hanging around the rescue site doing nothing but annoying the rescuers and getting in their way – but you'd think if that was actually true, they would have told him to abandon the submarine project not continue work on it.
[0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1016684366083190785
https://i.insider.com/5dbc6d222f364a0a9e077c03?width=2000&fo...
That is, he knows enough about the engineering to hire people who know a lot about the engineering.
That, combined with his relentless drive (to the point of overwork both on himself and his employees) seems to be the key to SpaceX success.
No ventilation means more thermal mass in the place of airways to absorb and disperse heat. I specifically bought this model because I am tired of fans in my laptops, which have failed multiple times or become loud to the point that I couldn't even have it in a meeting room without it being a major distraction. Perfect, guaranteed silence at all times from my electronics is a beautiful thing.
And he got really exceedingly lucky with his initial hires. One of the founding employees was the best living rocket engine designer in the world, and then later the best rocket salesman in the world convinced him that SpaceX needed proper sales/business development, even in the early stage, and Musk basically replied: "Okay, you're hired", to which she basically replied: "No, that's not what I meant... but okay."
- Gwynne Shotwell
- Tom Mueller
- Eric Berger
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1nc_chrNQk&t=380s
Talent and Engineering prowess are pointless without direction, and Musk provides strong leadership to move the company in the direction he sees fit. The actual rocket scientists are Woz, and Musk is Jobs.
By using a 100% reusable vehicle and the cheapest fuel available the aspirational launch cost of starship is $2M.
Even Apples to Oranges it will be an order of magnitude cheaper than the current paradigm of $35M per Falcon9 launch. When you further consider it has 10x the payload capacity, this experiment gets really exciting.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1094793664809689089?s=20
100 reuses is not the limit either. The first stage in particular may be made for a lot more.
Methane (Starship fuel) is massively cheaper than Kerosene (Falcon 9 fuel). Methane also has a much higher specific impulse, which means you can use less of it to get the same increase in velocity. Methane can be stored in liquid form in same temperature as oxygen, which means less insulation the two propellant tanks. Inversely, Kerosene will freeze at the temperatures required to get oxygen into liquid form.
Basically, nothing you said is accurate.
[1] https://everydayastronaut.com/raptor-engine/
Methane on the other hand is starting out at a much lower temperature, and it's very difficult to get methane molecules to react with each other to form large molecules as you're not starting with any single C-C bonds. Isolated free carbon atoms (soot) aren't much of a problem.
The raptors don’t run fuel rich, which should reduce that problem.
20% of the cost of the whole rocket. With no reuse. Now that reuse has cut the cost of launch way down, the second stage is much more than that of the cost.
As Elon likes to point out, imagine how expensive it would be to fly if, after every flight, they threw away the plane. That's exactly what people traditionally did with rockets. The result is that the cost to fly a jet is mostly the cost of the fuel, while the cost to fly a rocket is the cost of the rocket.
Consider a Falcon 9 launch. Thanks to reuse, the cost to relaunch is in the neighborhood of $30 million. The cost of the fuel is about $200,000. Over 99% the launch cost is depreciation, maintenance, or having to replace what you didn't reuse.
The aim with Starship is to make the cost of a launch as close to the cost of the fuel as they can get.
They are aiming for daily launches of starship, so the site operations costs would be divided by potentially hundreds of launches per year instead of the one or two dozen a year nowadays.
The cost model per flight of Starship is more like that of a jumbo jet than that of a Falcon 9.
Seemingly, SpaceX is the current best in the world and they couldn’t do it.
Also, you’d have to redesign F9 somewhat. Starship has the fairing integrated with the upper stage, which reduces recovery costs. Starship’s booster also does Return To Launch Site nominally, which means you don’t need a separate recovery droneship (Falcon 9 does that, too, but to make the most out of every expended upper stage, it makes sense to use down-range recovery). The F9 legs are sort of complicated logistically whereas Super Heavy is supposed to be recovered by the actual launch site, reducing turnaround time and costs. Also, using methane means less coking in the engines, which reduces turnaround costs and maintenance. Lots of things like that you’d need to reengineer to enable $1 million launch costs, but it’s feasible for an MLV. Relativity is planning to do it.
Right now SpaceX is the only company that recovers their orbital class booster. And that didn't happen until 2016! Prior to that, everyone dismissed landing rockets as impossible. Given the lack of competition for launch vehicles + the fat defense contracts being awarded, there wasn't much incentive for the incumbents to even try to bring the cost down.
Designing a rocket that can land and be reflow is a multiyear process. As other comments have said, more design changes would been needed to F9 to make it more reusable, those changes have tradeoffs. Instead, SpaceX chose to invest in a new design and more capable vehicle.
Other launch providers like RocketLab and Blue Origin are pursuing reusable vehicles.
"Why has no one done it?" give it time... it will happen sooner than we probably expect.
Something New Glenn sized definitely could.
Long-term marginal cost is determined by the nonreusable component cost + minimum refurbish & refit costs per launch. Effectively, the benefits of reuse offer diminising marginal benefit per reuse. Though designing for long-term use (say, a personal automobile vs. a rocketship) can still make sense.
An automobile used for daily commute with a 5 year life sees ~1,000 re-uses. You can vary the parameters to get different results. There are fuel, maintanance, garaging/parking, tax/registration, and insurance costs as well.
I am skeptical of the claim that they will just be able to refuel and go. Every reusable space vehicle has had that goal and always cost more than expected to refurbish for the next launch. Yes, we may get there eventually but not in the next few decades, the risks of a catastrophic component failure are too high to do no refurbishment.
The starship and super heavy are certainly cheaper to construct but that has more to do with fabrication techniques than the material cost.
Methane is less dense than kerosene so needs larger tanks but it does have more energy per unit mass. The overheads of using cryogenic fuel are reduced on a larger rocket but the performance gain is probably only 10% or so.
I am not aware of any significant insulation between tanks on the Falcon 9 and it certainly isn't a major cost factor.
There have only been 2 reusable launch vehicles ever, and both were only partially reusable. Shuttle and Falcon 9. Falcon 9 has already made massive strides in reducing any refurb costs between missions. there is no reason that you couldn’t build one that requires no maintenance in between flights for the same reason that there’s no reason you can’t make an upper stage that can do multiple firings per flight without any maintenance in between. Upper stage reuse will be trickier, but ultimately there’s no fundamental reason why refurb has to be done in between every flight.
Do they deliberately deorbit the Falcon second stage? Would be interesting if we could keep a couple parked in LEO and refuel them for different missions.
Reusing second stages in space only really makes sense once you are making your fuel in space.
For a lot of purposes, Starship should make it extremely cheap to send propellant from Earth. $10/kg in LEO. Cheaper than any lunar mining proposal I’ve seen.
That said, I hope we do make propellant off-Earth eventually.
The whole reason for the full-flow staged cycle is to have much more reasonable internal temperatures. Methane as well was picked partially because its far more clean burning.
There is no reason rocket engines couldn't be as reliable a jet engines.
> far more fuel
RP1 is very expensive. Methane is much cheaper, and they can even produce it local. Ox is very cheap and is basically gone turn into the cost of electricity and they are using local solar to make it.
Helium is also a very expensive part of the Falcon 9. Starship avoids the use of helium.
Additionally the Falcon 9 used TEE-TAB that is also expensive.
And it used nitrogen as well, that not expensive but just one more thing to worry about.
Falcon 9 has 6 different different consumables, Starship has 2.
> generally more expense in all the ground operations
This is wrong. The Falcon needed to have drone ships operating and tug boats for them as well, to catch the fairing they have another 1-2 boats out there to collect the fairing.
Then the stages need to be brought into port, transported back to the launch site and so on. The fairing have to be refurbished as well.
In additional Starship has multiple design upgrades that make it actually easier. Unlike Falcon 9 Upper stage, the Starship will be fueled from below, meaning there is no secondary fuel infrastructure for the upper stage. Not requiring the fueling of the consumables above also makes it much easier.
Plus they were able to apply everything they learned from Falcon 9 and ground operations to this new launch vehicle and launch site.
> In a world where this can be launched for $2M, Falcon 9 can be launched for less than $1M.
Falcon 9 can not do that. First of all, you need to build an upper stage that cost you 5-10M. You can't build that Upper stage fast enough to reach the required flight rate. Falcon 9 is also more difficult to launch and prep for launch. It wasn't designed to be fully reusable and still need more checks and refurbishments.
Now $2M is extreme, even if it is $10M or $20M that only really matters for stuff like Mars. If you can launch it anywhere under $100M its revolutionary vehicle for space flight.
Seriously though, this is game changing at even 100X that number or $200M per launch. Even if they don't get close to the aspirational price it's going to make a ton of stuff possible in space that was unaffordable before.
Just look at the National Team / Dynetics HLS proposals with a bunch of expensive, novel custom hardware vs. Space X proposal which was "basically just Starship". It could obviate a huge amount of resources being poured into one-off disposable space hardware and let us instead focus on actually doing stuff in space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynetics_HLS#References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle
https://www.space.com/11358-nasa-space-shuttle-program-cost-...
There's some room for argument, but on the order of 1,000x the stated SpaceX Super Heavy booster.
Even if that turns out to be vastly optimistic (not ... unheard of in rocket surgery), it's all but certain that costs will be 100x lower than the Shuttle. Even a 10x factor would be utterly transformational.
I'm not an uncriticle Musk fan, but he's repeatedly delivered on promises I thought were tots redic initially (long-range EVs, reusable boosters, powered return boosters). He's had a few missed deliveries (hyperloop and Boring Co. both seem infeasible, and Mars colonisation still strikes me as a very long shot within 50 years), but we're indisputably closer to those possibilities than before he came on the scene. Credit to engineering teams, there's also something to be said for vision and force of will.
I don't think that's entirely fair. The Orbiter ( developed by Rockwell, not NASA or .gov ) was the result of two decades of hypersonic aerodynamics research combined with the state of materials art at the time. The solid boosters were ahead of the technology curve. The overall package was compromised by USAF / .mil requirements but otherwise was an advanced product for its time.
[0] presents a somewhat different story. It argues that much of the blame for the compromises, lies not with DOD, but rather with OMB. To give one example, it is commonly claimed that DOD pushed for solids because of the use of solids in ICBMs; according to this account, that push came from Daniel Taft at OMB, not from DOD; Taft wanted solid boosters because they were estimated to be $1 billion cheaper.
[0] https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4221.pdf – see pg 417 onwards (pg 435 of PDF)
The problem was, while all of this was achieved, the resulting design was a bit too brittle (heat shields) and definitely too expensive to maintain between flights, so the prices were just off and the desired flight frequencies were never met.
While the engineering of the first edition of the shuttle was just great - especially considering some of the disputable design requirements - the failure rather lies in the fact that it never got a meaningful update. There were ambitious projects to produce a "next gen" shuttle with fixes "all" problems with the first gen, but they all failed. What was missing was updates and iteration. Just build a new shuttle which improves some aspects and keeps the rest of the design. Like a new heat shield, or just optimizing internal structures. That might have driven costs down and produced versions which still could be used. As, for example, we lost the capability to service the Hubble telescope.
It was the wrong curve. RP1 based engines like F-1 would have been far better to get of the ground.
> The overall package was compromised by USAF / .mil requirements but otherwise was an advanced product for its time.
There were many mistakes made. Space fans love to blame the military and politics. But if you actually go back, NASA leadership made plenty of questionable choices.
The biggest issue with the shuttle is the basic architecture.
Your criticism fails to fit the facts.
In fairness, the current best option, the Falcon Heavy, is already 35x as cost effective as the Shuttle.
But yes, even in the worst case Starship will be far cheaper.
A person walking typically manages about 3 mph / 5 kph.
A typical person on a bicycle can sustain about 15--20 mph (24--32 kph). Early trains operated at about 25--30 mph (40--50 kph), and soon regularly reached 60 mph (100 kph).
The combined factors of speed and cargo capacity make rail utterly transformational to humans (or animals) carrying loads. Even compared with high-tonnage cargo methods of the era (riverboats and canals), rail's speed was a major factor. (The tonnage/speed tradeoff continues between rail and river or ocean shipping today. For bulk, time-insensitive cargos, rail cannot compete.)
Propellor-driven aircraft moved at about 100-250 mph (160--320 kph) --- the DC3 cruised at 200 mph, as an example. Jet aircraft cruise at about 550--650 mph (850--1,000 kph).
And of course, orbital spacecraft / ballistic missiles hit 17,000 mph (27,000 kph), and up.
In the case of marine shipping, speeds didn't vary so much as tonnage did, with the net ton-miles/hour figure increasing accordingly. Clipper ships trended below 200 tons. Maersk's Triple-E class container ships displace 200,000 tons, a factor of 1,000.
The energy cost of lighting over the past 200 years has fallen by a factor of thousands, from candles and oil lamps to LEDs. Lighting uses which were previously unfathomable are now commonplace. Candle-powered outdoor advertising displays might be quaint, however, if somewhat fire-prone.
Again, typically, a 10x gain in some metric pushes applications to an entirely new domain, which was my point. Not that a 10x improvement was the likely limit in this case.
I'm saying that the Falcon Heavy has already achieved a 35x improvement from the Space Shuttle, and therefore if Starship achieved only a 10x improvement relative to the Shuttle it would actually be worse than what we already have and so wouldn't be an advancement.
If you meant 10x relative to current rockets, then yes, I agree that would be significant.
You are not reading the message I am attempting to convey.
So, it means nothing.
The Space Shuttle also was supposed to be cheap and almost completely reusable, it turned out to be one of the most expensive launchers. BFR is not the space shuttle, but I will not make any speculation before I can actually order a launch.
Elon Musk is known for overpromising. The tech is awesome, and SpaceX realizations speak for themselves, but I consider anything Elon Musk says "not even wrong".
I mean, I love SpaceX, and I follow BFR closely, but I think it would be better without the sensationalism.
Self landing boosters is just the logical application of control algorithms. As with the "flip".
Super Heavy Boosters, on the other hand, are an interesting new way to solve a problem.
LOL. Reusable rockets left as an exercise for the reader.
It's the difference between iteration and bigger breakthroughs/shifts in technology.
At a high level everyone was aware that the way the government micromanaging the design/build of rockets with cost plus contracts wasn't sustainable, but the government bureaucracy that awards contracts is heavily entrenched in that mode of operation.
It reminds me of a bigger company version of Masters of Doom. Same hacker ethos driving those early days.
This is an accurate take, but in reality I think they convinced the government to outsource a lean/agile development process.
20+ years ago, NASA went through their "better, faster, cheaper" phase to try their own hand at a more agile environment. Unfortunately, it reduced quality and whenever something bad happened more requirements were levied. Now some are beneficial but there's also some that were bureaucratic and process bloat just because of political risk and the fact nobody wanted to be on record saying the risk was acceptable.
I think one unspoken risk is whether the government, as the largest SpaceX customer, will try to enforce the same quality and safety standards as the company matures, particularly with human-rated spaceflight. Or if they are comfortable with a hands-off approach.
This is the biggest risk in the program, along with how many times they can reuse each piece, which is related. Last I looked Musk was projecting using the boosters hundreds of times and the 2nd stage dozens, both obviously very aggressive projections. If the real numbers are lower then the price per flight rises.
As far as I know we don't have any independent way of knowing whether these projections make sense or not. I hope he's right. Even if he's a little wrong and the flight cost was $20M instead of $2M that would be a great thing. But he could also be very wrong and it might not work at all.
The first re-flight of a booster was in 2017. The practical science of rocket reuse is only four years old. During that time they've flown ~40 missions with reused cores with zero failures. One Falcon 9 has been reused 10 times. My point is that there is no reason to assume that we've reached the limits of reuse in such a short period of time, so it doesn't seem that aggressive to assume that there is room to improve by ~10x
There's an enormous gulf between asserting this and the engineering to realize it. Maybe Raptor isn't as reliable as they hope. Maybe 3mm steel is too delicate so they have to stay with 4mm which makes them overweight. Maybe the thermal protection system is too fragile or doesn't provide enough protection. Maybe their novel alloy can't meet its targets. Maybe the tower catch won't work so they need legs which will add too much weight. Etc, etc.
All of those are extremely nontrivial issues, there's a lot of risk because of how ambitious what they are attempting is. I hope they succeed.
Is there any information available on the activities they actually plan on doing in terms of quality checks and refurbishment? I'm a big fan of SpaceX but I also feel like people talk about this point without actually knowing what goes into aerospace refurbishment regarding the level of quality assurance typically required.
I remember back when they had a Falcon 9 failure attributed to a faulty material spec on a strut and the response was they would perform quality checks on future material.[1] As someone who worked in the industry, my initial question was "Why weren't they already doing this?" as it's a commonplace within industry on safety critical or flight hardware.
I've also been involved in rocket rebuilds and to say they need "minimal refurbishment" is a understatement. Even if none of the components actually need rebuilt, the quality inspections still take a lot of time and money. And there's always the chance you find an issue that warrants a legitimate rebuild.
So, while I'm pulling for SpaceX to succeed, my worry is that every failure or close-call like the strut issue will layer additional quality checks that gradually erode that "minimal refurbishment" claim.
[1]https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/07/spacex-says-faulty-s...
Flight hardware typically has much higher quality standards. Sometimes they use more exotic materials that don't have the background testing to ensure that quality. If you want to use a cheaper new seal material, for example, there's probably not much data available for its compatibility with hypergolic fuels. It's not uncommon to use one-off components in a design, which means they may not have the same type of well-tried process control during manufacture. Then you have the costs of maintaining hardware pedigree (chain-of-custody, maintenance of material test data, lot material coupons for later testing, some of which may need to be maintained in a bonded, climate controlled room etc.).
New materials and manufacturing processes will definitely help and I think SpaceX is doing good work here. But the demands of spaceflight adds constraints. Steel and titanium are the most common non-fatiguing materials. Steel may be too heavy so you might be left with only using titanium, which is much more expensive. And you still haven't done the compatibility testing etc. So while it's a trivial example, you can see how it can become a tough problem to factor in cost, quality, and speed.
SpaceX is also pretty good about eliminating checks that have become redundant or otherwise redundant. For example they no longer do a static fire on the launch stand before every flight.
The big promise of Starship is the quantity of flights they envision. A thousand flights will give huge insight into reliability, insight that space flight has never had because most articles are never recovered and inspectes.
Organizations with good quality programs know how to assess their suppliers, including those who are ISO/ANSI certified. There’s a lot of information that goes into evaluating a supplier beyond just asking them if they certify their material or have a quality program, including doing site audits. Things can still fall through the cracks of course, but it reduces the probability. I bet if you asked them why they don’t evaluate each lot before the mishap, at least some would claim it’s redundant and unnecessary because the supplier already certified it.
The other failure (non-mission) was when they discovered a real unkown-unkown about COPV tanks and helium tanks in near 0-kelvin temperatures.
So yeah, they should not have made that mistake, but its also the case that nobody has a perfect record. Considering the errors most rocket companies have made, theirs seem fairly reasonable.
I guess the difference is that not double checking your components is a rookie level mistake, properly vetting vendors is a sophomore level mistake.
https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/05/13/spacex-outlines-plans-...
They are aiming to fly Starship over the Straits of Florida (i.e. between Florida and Cuba) which means it will be low inclination. I assume that this is to avoid overflying inhabited area 'early' into the flight and especially not for too long, a trajectory bit further to the south would e.g. mean that they had to fly over the full length of Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. I would expect them to be "out of the woods" already at this point in the flight though. The next critical part would be reentry north-west of Hawaii.
is my favorite way to watch that launch, just because of the way it integrate the people watching. We haven't had the crowds since the Space Shuttle stopped watching, and DM-2, Crew-1, and Crew-2 all happened during the pandemic - so this shows the old excitement.
If SpaceX can successfully land starship after the first suborbital flight I think it will dwarf the twin booster landing.
I had a goal in 2020 to drive from Toronto to Florida to watch the next Falcon Heavy launch and dual-landings. Then the pandemic hit... but conveniently, they pushed back the FH launches by a year as well!
Depending on the status of the border, the pandemic, and all of that, I might take a trip down if they have one this fall.
One thing to remember though is that launches can easily get scrubbed due to weather, planes flying into the restricted zone etc., so make sure to plan to stay for most if not all of the planned launch window if possible. When I went I stayed at a hotel in Orlando, which can be fun but it's also a bit of a drive so might be worth finding lodging closer to KSC if you're not too keen on driving a fair bit.
If you're viewing the launch from KSC your ticket won't be refunded either, and they'll only open up tickets for the next attempt after the launch is scrubbed so you can't prebook for all attempts either.
When I went the first attempt was scrubbed, but they launched the next night. This actually worked out better for me, since then I could score tickets to the viewing gantry which was closer to the actual rocket, and an amazing experience.
Pro tip: if you're spending multiple days at KSC just buy a year pass – it's worth it.
Also pro tip: don't forget to visit the nearby warbird museum as well, they've got an amazing collection of airplanes and very knowledgeable volunteers on staff!
This both boggles my mind and makes me giddy with excitement.
It's taken ~60yr for the manufacturing and control systems to get to the point of being reliable enough to chain together enough boosters to put really big stuff into orbit.
Now i just imagined the Ultraheavy, which should be 3 Superheavies strapped together.
The main issue they had is basically that the NK-17 engines were not tested before flight. Even worse, since they didn't have good computer back then, their 'what happens if an engine fails' sequence was very sub-optimal.
I would suggest only one of the N-1 failures can reasonable be attributed to the choice in engine configuration. In one case their internal fuel channels were breaking because of vibration.
All of these things seem much less likely to happen. The Booster has a computer and each engine has its own control. The Booster is much more capable of handing an engine shutdown or even an exploding engine. That has been demonstrated on the Falcon 9 a number of time.
Each engine is individually tested before the flight and often they are then fired together on the ground, so there is much less fear of that.
They have experience with 27 engines and the pipes required. Also, the Super Heavy used short Stainless steel tubes that should be fairly resilient. In general our engineering on how do this is just much better, better simulation, more experience, better knowledge oft the materials and the welding.
Edit: And would this even be the solution? Methane is a greenhouse-gas after all...
Methane + O2 <=> CO2 + H2O + energy
https://www.middleschoolchemistry.com/multimedia/chapter6/le...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4VHfmiwuv4
The happy consequence is relatively low net-carbon emissions.
[0] https://cleantechnica.com/2019/10/30/no-you-dont-have-to-wor...
The wikipedia article on methane says something like "There is little incentive to produce methane industrially". Basically, we have too much of it already, from fracking, from livestock, from all sorts of places.
Giving it to SpaceX to burn as rocket fuel makes it a less potent greenhouse gas.
Burning the methane will of course release CO2 back into the atmosphere, but if they indeed make the methane by pulling CO2 from the air, it would effectively make Starship (the fuel anyway) carbon neutral.
(I guess actually it's a bit carbon negative because some of the engine burn will happen in space).