Pretty bad: it blew up on the pad before the static fire test even started. I can’t imagine this provides much in the way of useful information, and it looks like the pad was completely destroyed as well.
> I can’t imagine this provides much in the way of useful information
I can't really comprehend this statement, since it appears, in a spectacular fashion, that there's some useful information to be learned involving the top half of the ship, especially the flammable bits that you can see burst out before igniting. A rocket ship isn't just its engines, it's a system, with all the bits of it being not only useful, but entirely necessary.
You're very clearly mistaken. I can tell you, with a very reasonable estimate, how much the information is worth: one launch cost + ground infrastructure, in cold hard cash, multiplied by the number of times the flawed design/process will cause it to reoccur.
Again, it's a system. Anything learned that prevents that system from literally disintegrating is of value to all components of the system.
I'm sorry, but fittings don't just leak. It's not something that "just happens". A leaking fitting means a design or process flaw exists, and must be fixed, or the whole thing blows up again. It may not be interesting to you, but it's now very very interesting to every other team working at SpaceX, who just had all their shit blown to pieces. It's a (I hope this is obvious to you) critical component of the system, just as critical as, say, the control system and fuel pumps. Serious innovation may be required (yes, things like gaskets still involve PhD's), and was probably already required.
It's really interesting seeing software perspectives of a hardware world. A mech-e would have a stroke reading your comments.
Was able to reverse to about -1:49:00 to see it "live". But probably this relative timestamp was only current then. In any case, that was a massive explosion
Unfortunately just on Twitter, haven't seen much elsewhere yet. But the link seems to work.
The frame of the video has a burnt in clock in the top left corner though, so if you get that to be about 11:01:50 PM CDT you'll be at the point of the explosion.
NASA astronauts continue to regularly fly on Crew Dragon missions with the next one (Crew-9) scheduled for August 2025, suggesting professional astronauts maintain confidence in SpaceX's human-rated vehicles despite development issues with Starship.
This was a entire ship (not just an engine), and nobody was hurt or killed. Is this a major or minor setback for SpaceX? Rapid unscheduled disassemblies may look spectacularly bad but may be par for the course during testing (in order to push things to their limits to learn where they break) - curious to learn how bad this one is.
In terms of losing a ship, probably not too bad. The ground equipment might take a bit longer to replace, and they will probably want to understand what happened here before continuing.
Or, as you suggest, this was a more stressing test than usual, but I doubt they'd do that with a complete ship like this.
It's a gigantic setback. Most directly, it will delay their launches for a good time while they repair and rebuild the site. But it also shows some kind of severe design flaws if this can happen even with no engines running.
This could be a "simple" production error (think "cracked pipe") which can be fixed with more effective monitoring of the construction, and not a major design flaw.
It might be someone forgot a wrench somewhere for what we know.
So then we'd have to assume that the error was not a 'simple' one. Which is a lot harder to find and fix, almost by definition.
I mean, look, this isn't a good sign for spacex. Whatever problem there is, clearly it's hard to find and fix. Could be some alloy, could be some pressure sensor, could be the whole management chain. Who knows yet.
Scenario 1 is Starship is run as competently as Falcon 9. If this is true, then basic errors won't have escaped the QA process, just as they don't for Falcon 9, the safest rocket ever flown. So, we would conclude that the issue must have been a complex one that eluded the competent QA process.
Second scenario, Starship is not run as competently as Falcon 9. That is also a huge problem, because it's very hard to fix people and procesa problems in general.
A simple error like that should be caught before you fill the rocket with methane and liquid oxygen. If a simple error gets through to this point your procedures are bad, which is a big problem for a complex rocket with many parts that could have simple errors.
Obviously it's not trivial, since they already flew a few spaceships and rockets, but it could be an edge case not considered until now which can still be fixed, rather than a "well, it turned out to be impossible to fly a rocket with this design".
The error itself is probably easily fixed. Usually the bigger the effects, easier to fix.
The real problem is the damaged infrastructure. They don't have several launch towers in the pipeline like they have Starships. This is a "pause and rebuild" scenario, with the wait time much harder to parallelize with something else. Whatever time they spend until they have the second launch tower functional, I'd bet about half of it will be an overall addition to the whole project.
The test site is severely damaged, and they don't have another one. It took what ,6 months to rebuild the launch tower after IFT-1? And it wasn't destroyed, just damaged, on the test site the tanks and pipes and all the rest are right near the vehicle so I see a lot of destruction.
So what, 6 to 9 months while they repair/build new test site(s)?
Might as well cut the losses and scrap Block 2 altogether, and move on to Block 3.
> This could be a "simple" production error (think "cracked pipe") which can be fixed with more effective monitoring of the construction, and not a major design flaw.
Good luck trying to get launch insurance for that without a full root cause and proof in double triplicate that this has been fixed.
Are you going to put you payload on one of those, a payload that will take 3 years to rebuild, and might end the company?
Starship has never carried a real payload, so insurance is irrelevant. Nobody will be putting billion dollar satellites on it until (if) it has been flight proven.
Beyond whatever design or production issues caused this particular anomaly there will also be the delays due to the fact they just blew up a lot of ground support equipment.
Might actually not be a design flaw, just a leak due to rushed production. But these should be caught BEFORE the thing blows up and causes X million worth of damage.
In normally run project, it would be pretty big. As you would need to do proper analysis just what failed and how. And then decide, design and implement needed fixes. With SpaceX engineering culture who knows...
In "normal" project a serious misshap of this kind often ends the project - see how the DC-X VTVL rocket testbed fell over due to one landing leg not extending, ending the whole project. Nothing related to what was being tested or developed and it ended the whole project.
As a result we got booster landings delayed by 20 years - and SpaceX would also not get there with Falcon 9 if they would call it quit after spcetacular failures (see Falcon 9R test bed).
I think those were available off the shelf at thet time ? Not sure what else would be suitable in early 90s, provided you did not build your own like basically all modern rocket companies since then.
Armadillo Aerospace (and many others, a decade or two ago) showed that rocket engines could be developed and built quickly and cheaply. The cost is in the optimization.
Choosing a hydrogen engine (which only really makes sense for upper stages) also means you need a hydrogen tank... a cryogenic hydrogen tank. They chose to make such a tank with a weird shape that fit the unnecessarily weird shape of their prototype. I think the major cost of getting their craft repaired (or more realistically, having a new one built) was to build a new custom hydrogen tank.
Crazy, when they didn't need anything optimized/complicated for testing launch and landing.
Also wild that they went with an F/A-18 accelerometer/gyro package. The first commercial mass market MEMS accelerometer was introduced in 1991 and was in volume production in 1993. I mean, they had to pick something and the ADXL50 wasn't ready yet (and they would still have had to design a 3-axis solution around it if it were), so I don't blame them for that (expensive) decision.
I do very much blame them for the choice of the RL-10, though. And for going immediately to such a large size -- that's the same thing as saying "we plan on not making any mistakes".
I agree, but still - what could they have used that was not "build your own engine" ? They seemed to have preferred (or maybe were forced to ?) use off the shelf hardware, even if sub-optimal.
The only engines that were not hypergolic & used kerolox were those used on the Atlas rockets or on the Deltas. Not sure if they had the necessary throttling range and other characteristics. I guess now I need to find some sort of a biography from someone working on the DC-X project. :D
As for Armadillo Aerospace - their efforts were admirably and I really enjoyed watching their progress. And they did manage to get a working engine. :)
It's going to be a relatively minor setback. Biggest issue will be pad repair time. Starships is still in development and has been going boom pretty regularly, though not before launch usually! The investigation of the cause will be interesting. Given the current political context it's probably going to be AMOS-6 ramped up exponentially.
AMOS-6 was a pretty similar situation where a rocket exploded prior to a static-fire, and in fact is the reason that static fires are done without payloads, though Starship would not yet have a payload. The difficult to explain nature of the explosion, alongside some quite compelling circumstantial evidence, caused a theory of sabotage (sniping an exact segment of the rocket) to become widespread. Of course the cause here could be more straight forward to pin down - we'll know a lot more in a few days!
The fact that they didn't even make it to the test seems really bad. It's one thing for a test to fail. It seems downright dangerous if it fails before the test even started.
That seems like a poor example given how many failed attempts to land something on Mars that took place before they got to designs that would get it right in the first go.
The Viking landers were the first attempt by the US to land on Mars. The Soviets actually soft-landed first on their second try but the lander failed after transmitting one corrupted image. There were certainly many failed Mars missions by various countries, but the Vikings at least got it right on the first go.
Yeah, this is a remarkably good score - for comparison Europe is at 0 out of 2. :P
The first one [1] actually landed but failed to send back any data (kinda like the soviet example) due to deployment failure.
But the second one will at least have an impact on future generations, with people being confused why there are two Shiaparelli[2] craters on Mars. ;-)
I think its premature to blame this on Raptor. At least, I couldn't see anything suggesting the static fire was imminent, so my money would be on "anything but the engines" over "the engines". At least with what we know so far.
But SpaceX's brand of rocket development is certainly exciting
That's what it seems like to me too. From the slo-mo video, it looks like one of the propellant tanks (likely the methane tank on the top) burst open, spilled a lot of the propellant and then caught fire. Engines are unlikely to be the culprit here. Interestingly, there seems to be a crack or a gap already on the surface, along which the tank bursts open when the accident occurs.
So that's 3 issues in the last 2 flights and one static fire, all different, all with different root causes, all catastrophic. Block 3 will be a different vehicle, should they just skip Block 2 (scrap however many they already built) and move on to Block 3?
I don't necessary think its a problem with the engine as such. The problem seems much more to get the fuel to the right place in the right pressure at all parts of flight.
If an engine blows up, because its pulling in bubbles, its not the engines fault.
I think Raptor 2 has a few issues still but as we can see on the booster, the can perform fine for what most rocket engines have to do.
In the spacex subreddit there are comments claiming that key engineers have left the company because of differences with leadership/culture. Not sure how credible those are, but spacex has had suspiciously many failures recently.
It’s not even just a binary state of an engineer being there or not. The morale and general attitude of the environment can cause engineers still there to just not have their hearts in it.
I think about the countless engineering success stories I’ve read where you can tell the people involved were just living and breathing the problem.
It's hard to tell whether key engineers were the differences between success and failure but Comparably lists SpaceX’s Retention Score as an A– grade, placing it in the top 15% of similarly sized companies based on employee feedback. Additionally, SpaceX boasts an Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) of +25, placing it in the top 25% among peer companies
comparably.com.
Sounds impressive, sure. Question is how much weight do you put into survey stats like those given Musk's extensive history of things like buying the influence he wants, putting his thumbs on the scales of his truth-bot, getting generous valuations based on hype and stories, knowing about "those vote counting computers" (Trump's own words), ruthlessly firing anyone who disagrees with him, etc etc etc.
Then again, they are launching tons of rockets, and any cult leader has his followers, so what do I know...
Not to say that Musk's been particularly endearing lately - but what would the normal turnover in an engineering-centric company the size of SpaceX be?
Especially with how hot the field is these days. I suspect "key" SpaceX engineers do not lack for lucrative offers.
We haven't really seen any problems with the engines themselves, so much as the plumbing that has try to keep them fed through radical changes in the rocket's orientation.
Here's a framegrab showing what looks like the initial visible release of gas (before it becomes a big fireball), near the top where the arrow points: https://i.ibb.co/qYrn4vSf/image.png
In that image, you can see a white horizontal line on the heat shield, slightly below the point where the tank bursts. That was already there when the longer video clip starts. The tank later bursts along that line, even before the spilled propellant (which I assume is methane) catches fire. In fact, that line seems to be breaking apart even before the crack from the top reaches that point. However, the failure from the top might have propagated to that line out of our view, underneath the heat resistant tiles.
The crack propagation indicates that the line was a weak point on the structure. However, I'm surprised that it was already there. It's too early to make a reliable guess. But if I were to hazard one, I would say that the tank had too much pressure, well ahead of the explosion.
The earlier Starships were just manually welded steel. Is still so? If any failed weld can lead to a catastrophe like this, how would you guarantee the quality of each weld without going into nuclear power plant construction level of costs?
These tests are applicable only to manufacturing or service-time defects. Pipelines can still break in the dynamic environment of spaceflight. Such problems are design problems, not manufacturing defects.
> The earlier Starships were just manually welded steel. Is still so?
I don't know if they use manual welding or robotic welding. But robotic welding is well established and is justified for the volumes of work that SpaceX carries out. What is more difficult is to avoid vertical weld seams on its cylindrical segments. I'm yet to encounter a roll forged cylinder that big, especially with stainless steel. (Disclaimer: I have no direct experience with industrial metalworking)
> If any failed weld can lead to a catastrophe like this, how would you guarantee the quality of each weld without going into nuclear power plant construction level of costs?
That is done using Non-destructive testing (NDTs). The usual methods are high-energy X-ray imaging, ultrasound testing (UT) and dye penetration testing (DP). These methods are usually reliable in catching such faults - even for machinery that's in use. For example, turbine blades in a jet engine.
Updated: As the other commenter pointed out, robotic welding doesn't ensure elimination of defects. The robotic process is more consistent and therefore reduces the defects. But uncontrollable random variations can still cause defects that could fail later. The only way to eliminate them (almost) entirely is to identify them with NDT and rectify them as long as the defects are within a certain tolerance limit.
NDT also will detect a range of defect shapes/sizes. The structural design also probably defines the maximum acceptable size of defects. That critical size depends on analysis that basically asks "what size of defect could we see, and be confident a defect smaller than this size won't grow sufficiently during operation, to a size that would challenge the structure or leakage etc requirements".
With this being metal, small defects tend to grow over time- called metal fatigue. This all depends on the stress in the material which depends on a lot of things: fluid flows and pressures, temperatures (and temperature differences and rates of change), vibrations (structural or induced by fluid flow), etc etc.
Mechanical engineering at this level is very complex! So many of these things boil down to probability distributions of each process involved. I don't know how "close to the edge" the design is, but this is the kind of thing you have to do when optimizing for weight.
> The structural design also probably defines the maximum acceptable size of defects. ... what size of defect could we see, and be confident a defect smaller than this size won't grow sufficiently during operation
Very much so! I have seen hardware being accepted and rejected on the basis of those limits. There were also cases where medium sized defects were reworked and rectified after careful assessments and reviews.
> With this being metal, small defects tend to grow over time- called metal fatigue
The tank and feedline welds don't cycle too often. But that also makes it very critical in reusable rockets. It may fly fine ten times and then show up unexpectedly.
> I don't know how "close to the edge" the design is
That's the fun part! As you suspect, they have ridiculously low structural margins in order to optimize for mass. What it means is that many physical phenomena that you don't usually worry too much about (when margins are splendid), suddenly turn into critical issues. Then you're off to doing doing materials research and other scientific studies, instead of doing just design and engineering (rocket engineering suddenly becomes rocket science. literally!). I've seen cases where the engineers were forced to study the algorithms used by finite element analysis software used for structural simulations. It can get that 'close to the edge'!
I guess how much of a setback this is will be determined by how much damage is there on the facilities and the nature of the cause of the explosion(do they need to re-work the next 6 already being assembled so it doesn't happen again?).
The problems with Starship make the Saturn V and STS programs even more impressive. However, I still don't get the rationale of building a rocket with such a large payload. The rocket equation will always force you to build an absolute monster compared to a series of smaller rockets. Even worse if you have to haul up a massive orbiter each time. No wonder that small/medium sized rockets (Soyuz, Atlas, Ariane, Falcon 9,...) have always been the most successful.
The shuttle was a deathtrap. It had inadequate abort modes and a launch process that practically guaranteed minor (until it wasn't) damage to the heat shield during launch.
Sure, the Saturn V and STS were much less safe than smaller rockets. Still, they blew up an awful lot less than other rockets of their size like N1 or Starship.
Cost equivalency ignores the R&D and decades of scientific progress and advancements in tooling capability. The prices of materials have shifted, but designing and manufacturing a precise propulsion system with modern CAD and simulation tools is a lot cheaper than the hand work hundreds of people used to be doing to verify much simpler engine designs. Precision machining and tools to inspect metal fatigue and imperfections have also come a long way.
Of course commercial rockets are always going to be as shoddy as they can get away with rather than as good as possible, but if it still takes SpaceX or Boeing as much money to build a rocket as it did back in the Saturn V days, they're doing something wrong.
I recall reading the engines blew up in testing, the rockets on the pad, on and on. And why wouldnt it?
No one has ever built a plane, or even a car without breakage during testing. The very idea is absurd. There's a whole profession called "test pilot".
I don't know why anyone would suggest otherwise.
I'm sure there are links aplenty, but the absurd suggestion here would be building a rocket and having zero incidents of failure. That beyond weird. That's what needs a "do you have a link" question.
> I recall reading the engines blew up in testing, the rockets on the pad, on and on. And why wouldnt it?
You're recalling wrong, or you were reading nonsense. Lots of engines were destroyed in testing (particularly before computer modelling, this was basically how rocket engines were _developed_), but no, no Saturn V ever exploded on the pad. Prior to this incident, the most-impressive on-pad boom was one of the N1s.
No fully assembled Saturn V ever failed, though a few of them had near-misses.
Well we're discussing testing only here, so are you sure none explpded on a test a
pad?
It's a weird debarc point to discuss non testing craft vs testing. And "fully assembled", when spacex is flying non-final builds on purpose, using a different test methodology.
"First all-up S-II stage, assembled between 1963 and 1965. Completed several engine tests at the Mississippi Test Facility (now the Stennis Space Center). Destroyed by accidental LH2 tank overpressurization during pressure testing May 28, 1966[7][6]"
"The S-II program was beset with problems and delays. NASA had planned on North American making an S-II stage, S-II-D, for dynamic testing but the order for that stage was cancelled in early 1965 in favor of using the structural static test stage, S-II-S, as a combined static/dynamic test stage; that stage was renamed to S-II-S/D. Unfortunately, the S-II-S/D stage was destroyed during testing, leaving S-II-F to take on the added role of dynamic testing and being redesignated as S-II-F/D."
I though all of the Saturn V stages were destroyed during testing at least once but it looks like I remembered it wrong. :)
Well the military purpose was why the Shuttle was so crappy. The original design was smaller and meant to sit on top of its rocket. This would have probably prevented loss of crew in both of the instances where shuttle failed.
Shuttle regularly launched spy sats and was designed to grab an enemy one in a single orbit mission. Also Soviets believed it would nuke Moscow by sudden plane change via its wings & build their own version as a result.
The bombing of the Soviet Union was to happen via polar launch. The wings were there not for plane change, rather for cross range landing after the single orbit polar mission.
The Space Shuttle never had a combat mission, in the sense that it was never used to drop bombs via polar orbit over the Soviet Union. But of course it had tens of military missions, the Shuttle launched many department of defense satellites.
Does Starship have launch abort boosters? Seems infeasible with the amount of fuel and mass on it since it also serves as a second stage, but maybe they solved that somehow?
DearMoon was supposed to launch 2022, passenger space service between LA and Ridhya by 2028 (announced in 2018 and they said it was on track for 2028 still several years later). They said it would be around the price of business class air travel and be in full commercial operation by then. That might have been after they started adding "aspirationally" to most Musk company statements following some lawsuits.
I suggest you read up on the rocket equation again. There is a massive difference between payload mass fraction and payload. The latter scales linearly with respect to the total mass.
That's the problem. Building a heavier rocket is much harder than building a lighter one (see explosion above). So why not send a few lighter ones instead of a heavy one? This is what the launch market has concluded for a long time.
Let’s assume starship works out and they come up with a nifty wide-opening payload door solution, one of the advantages will be payload volume as well as mass - the JWST’s main mirror would have fit inside without being folded (although the heat shield would not have).
Disagree. The overall Starship system's problems are obviously in Starship, not in the Super Heavy booster. The latter is far heavier. But it only has to do 2 things well - sub-orbital launch, and sub-orbital precision return. And the launch tower's chopsticks give it a lot of help with the latter.
Vs. the Starship has to do far more things - all of them mission-critical - while being ruthlessly optimized for weight.
There's also many advantages to being able to lift something large/heavy in one go, rather than smaller payloads that need to be unfolded (like JWST) or assembled in space, which can drastically increase the development costs.
Even more impressive to me is the fact that Saturn V did in a single launch with 1969 technology, what we're now proposing to do with 10-15 Starship launches (each as large as a Saturn V) and an additional SLS launch for Orion return capsule. What's more, the US had orbital launch expereince of just 3 years (Explorer 1 in 1958) when the Apollo program began, and 8 years later they were on the moon. Perhaps web development is not the only thing that is susceptible to bloat.
>Saturn V did in a single launch with 1969 technology,
for up to 0.8% US GDP per year. Today that would be $200B/year, pure spent. Where is Space X today is making, ie. it has a revenue, $15B/year.
>Perhaps web development is not the only thing that is susceptible to bloat.
similarly - web dev today can be done on $300 laptop by any schmuck. Even simple programming back then required a computer which cost a lot, and it was an almost academic activity.
Sure, but spacex are building on the shoulders of what came before. Easy to save 200bn on research and development if someone else has already paid for it and shares the results for free.
This is true, but also a bit trivial to observe. Even the Primitive Technology channel, which usually starts with mud and clay, builds on knowledge of other people.
The value added is interesting. For example, both the Merlin and the Raptor family of engines. These are some fine engines, and they are remarkably cheap and reusable.
> for up to 0.8% US GDP per year. Today that would be $200B/year, pure spent. Where is Space X today is making, ie. it has a revenue, $15B/year.
The likes of SpaceX are reporting costs in the range of $15B/year because NASA front loaded the cost of trailblazing launch technology half a century ago, with the technology available half a century ago.
Let's not fool ourselves into believing the likes of SpaceX are reinventing the wheel.
Also, those $15B are buying a fraction of the capabilities of SaturnV, and while SaturnV was proven effective and reliable 50 years ago, here we are discussing yet another "anomaly". Perhaps half these "anomalies" wouldn't exist if they weren't lean'ed into existence?
It's not unreasonable to suggest that most of specifically rocket and spacefaring technology SpaceX uses now was introduced by someone else. Their main achievement is reusability and adjacent technical solutions.
The grandparent comment was pointing out that it cost NASA 200bn, and spaceX 15bn.
The parent comment pointed out that spaceX are actually saving money because they already got what nasa spent 200bn on.
My comment pointed out that they aren't just saving money by using NASAs tech, but tech from the Soviet Union as well - suggesting that their savings are far beyond just 200bn R&D
Not sure about parent poster, but to be fair NASA built on German WWII rocket/missile development, and Canadian know how after the collapse of Avro Canada.
How many billions was that?
This sort of "they're just building on" talk is weird to me, and not really relevant.
What SpaceX has accomplished is astonishing, and no belittling of their accomplishments should be tolerated.
> This sort of "they're just building on" talk is weird to me, and not really relevant.
Not really. You're not talking about technology. You're debating the economics behind it. You're seeing naive fanboys praising SpaceX's costs for the likes of Starship by comparing them to the cost of the SaturnV project, arriving at the simplistic conclusion that Starship is cheaper. This is like comparing your cheap Android phone as being far cheaper than a 1950s UNIVAC. And when the silliness of this specious reasoning is called out, your reaction is to downplay it as "not really relevant"?
That said, you're upset that I said comparing costs isn't relevant? Isn't that the case you're making right now, that the costs cannot be compared, therefore aren't relevant in this discussion?
My tact on non-relevance, is that saying "it was built on another program's tech!" is not relevant, because everything meets that criterion. For example, as I said, the Saturn was built on decades of German research, including war time research during WWII, into rockets. Saturn's US development costs were a fraction of overall rocket research done by the Germans!
So if upthread is going to argue "but it's all built on the Saturn, and free knowledge!", then the same argument can be carried further back, thus negating this argument. Why?
Thats the whole point for this entire thread. Pointing out that you CANT compare the costs of spaceX with NASA because spaceX is building on NASAs (and others) achievements.
Maybe you need to go back and reread this entire thread rather than suggesting others do so.
Well there are many reasons as to why - i just gave a single example. I don't see why you don't think prior knowledge has any value, but I guess you are entitled to your opinion.
I never even hinted that prior knowledge has no value. Not once.
Instead, I said it is an impossible thing to compare, for everything is built upon another. In fact, everything is built upon a myriad of other things.
Really, both the Heavy and the Saturn cost about the same. That's because they both depend upon the entire sum of human knowledge and research, to be built.
A billion trillion trillion trillion in today's dollars of knowledge gained and experience honed, over millions of years. So what if one cost a billion trillion trillion trillion, and another cost a billion trillion trillion trillion + a few billion more. The difference is meaningless, and not even worth considering.
And then there's the whole "how much is new" argument, and there's new knowledge aplenty thanks to SpaceX.
I really don't get these arguments. People seem to really love to denigrate the effort, the excellent results. It's beyond bizarre. And worse, mock because test flights, expected to possibly go sideways, do?
So weird.
"Hi, I'm going to see if this will work. It'll probably explode. But if it does, I'll learn something"
Because in NASAs case it was "the stuff that came before" + 200b (or whatever the fantasy figure truly is).
Its unfair to say spaceX did what NASA did on a smaller budget (which is what the comment that kicked off this thread implied) because they DIDNT do what NASA did, and instead got "the stuff that came before" + "the stuff that NASA spent 200b on" + "the stuff from other sources that also cost billions" + the 15b that they actually spent to get where they are.
How can you disagree with that? You may think this discussion is silly - but its DIRECTLY as a response to someone implying that spaceX are achieving what NASA did with less money: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44316227
To be fair, they're also doing launches at a pace NASA could only have dreamed of back then. In 2024 SpaceX had 134 launches, we're far into the Space Shuttle program before Nasa had made that in total.
I wonder what "tons of payload to orbit" vs "dollars budget" would look like for Saturn era NASA vs Current SpaceX.
No doubt they're standing on the shoulders of giants, but let's not forget that they've helped transform the "go to space"-business.
Actually, this version 2 of Starship was explicitly designed for lower the dry mass of the vehicle. It seems like SpaceX is exploring the lower limit on acceptable mass, and thus strength, of the Starship. This is a development program, after all.
This comparison doesn't make sense, the USD 200B/year was to invent the capabilities, do trailblazing work on something that needed to be proven even feasible as a concept, to do fundamental/foundational work, not to productionalise technology.
I'd expect SpaceX to do much more now than NASA in the 60s if granted USD 200B/year, considering they are already standing on the shoulders of giants.
Starship hasn't had a mission yet that I'm aware of. I love the Saturn V but I don't think this is a fair comparison. Just because your software didn't compile first try doesn't mean it's bad. Those two vehicles fundamentally have different approaches to development and that's fine.
> Starship hasn't had a mission yet that I'm aware of.
Then you will agree that comparing an unproven launcher which seems to be far far away from being able to fulfill a similar role is a very silly endeavour, let alone talk about it as a vast improvement which just so happens to blow up.
I don’t think it’s _that_ silly, there are plenty of cases where comparisons are useful. SpaceX’s development approach is radically different from traditional aerospace, but it’s clearly working for them. A bunch of Falcon 9s blew up too, and now it’s one of the most reliable and frequently used launch platforms in history. Why would you expect Starship to follow a completely different trajectory?
Testing on the ground and problems with what most people would call the payload (Apollo 1 & 13), sure.
But we're comparing to SpaceX launches. Plenty of Raptor engines have blown up on the ground too.
There were 13 Saturn V's launched and all of them basically performed their mission (Apollo 6 being a bit of an exception) with 0 rapid unplanned disassemblies...
What a ridiculous point of view.Do you know how many anamolies nasa had on the way to make the Saturn 5? Orders of magnitudes more blow ups than Space x has ever had
Total lunar effort from 1960-1973, adjusted for 2024 USD: $326 billion
Launch vehicle costs (Saturn V): $113 billion
I think this is what should be compared against the total Starship program cost starting from 2020 until such time it completes 6 lunar landings (not counting SLS or other costs).
I love this quote from Gwynne Shotwell when asked how they achieved that no government has: "The first is that we're kind of standing on the shoulders of giants."
You are comparing "sending a small crew for a few days on the Moon ASAP for propaganda purposes" with "setting up a permanent outpost on the Moon".
Do you know the McMurdo permanent Antarctica base is costing us far more than the dogs, sleds, and tents of Admundsen and Shackleton? Incredible, isn't it?
Starship is “the program to build a permanent base in the moon”. It’s not even the only vehicle involved in the moon program. It’s a rocket designed to take astronauts from moon orbit to the moon’s surface. The astronauts will actually fly to the moon in SLS.
So far it’s proved incapable of being launched, attaining orbit, and returning to earth as designed. That’s without a payload.
It has no life support system built and is literally years behind schedule.
Rather than making progress it is being redesigned on the fly to mitigate fundamental problems with its capability which Musk laughs off as “moving fast and breaking things”.
The problem is we aren’t moving fast at all.
The rocket is a disaster. Saturn V was better by an order of magnitude and likely cheaper if you consider how much fundamental work went into creating it which is now easy to buy off the shelf.
Comparing the programs while ignoring the fact that hobbiest regularly reach the Karman line is deceitful.
Starship is doing this on easy mode and it’s failing.
> Starship is doing this on easy mode and it’s failing.
But this 'easy mode' is still so incredibly hard that nobody else will even attempt it.
I'd love to see some serious competition emerge in the reusable rocket space, but SpaceX is far, far ahead with Falcon 9 being an incredible success, even if the Starship project may be headed for failure. Nobody reports on 100+ successful Falcon 9 launches/landings in a year, those are now mundane. But a small number of Starship failures - test flights of an experimental vehicle - become big news, mostly because they involve spectacular explosions.
It seems that Starship may be too big to 'fail fast', mostly because of the visual spectacle of those failures.
The 'easy mode' is incredibly hard at least partly in terms of nobody else having the capability to finance it (with the possible exception of two superpowers and Jeff Bezos)
But yeah, I tend to agree that whether it ultimately succeeds or not, blowing Starship up is a "fail fast" strategy because they have the money (and the reputational capital from successful Falcon 9 launches) to learn from their mistakes that way, and not many others do. Much as the waterfall approach of big space projects gets derided, there's a reason entities that can't take the reputational hit of visibly blowing stuff up on a regular basis do it that way...
> Saturn V was better by an order of magnitude and likely cheaper if you consider how much fundamental work went into creating it which is now easy to buy off the shelf.
One year of Saturn V development cost the same as the entire Starship program so far. One launch cost 20-30x more than the projected cost of a Starship launch.
It is also said that it’s simply impossible to rebuild a Saturn rocket. Not only you can’t “buy components off the shelf” because they simply don’t exist anymore, even if you had all the component blueprints (which we don’t, they were lost to time), the manufacturing know-how is long gone.
Starship was developed from scratch. SpaceX developed their own engines, their flight control surfaces are novel, the rocket structure and materials are novel, the entire approach is different. Yes, our modern electronics industry makes it “easier” but this is like saying Porsche is playing in easy mode because of the Ford Model T.
IMO calling it "easy mode" really misses the mark. If you ever get the chance to hear directly from the engineers working on Starship, I think you’d come away with a deeper appreciation for the scale and complexity of what they’re building. The solutions they work on go far beyond "just" launching a rocket.
> You are comparing "sending a small crew for a few days on the Moon ASAP for propaganda purposes" with "setting up a permanent outpost on the Moon".
No, OP is comparing a launcher that worked reliably (it's in the history books) with a launcher which never performed a mission and is reporting "anomalies".
Many Saturn V stages blew up on test stands as well (its also in the history books) and some flight were very much on the edge of success. It was also not trying to make the whole system reusable and economicaly sustainable (just check when the last Saturn V flight was - if it was sustainable it would be still flying, right ?).
I don't think GP meant 10-15 Starships missions needed to carry the same payload, but 10-15 test launches necessary before it's ready for real. I think the Saturn V had only two test flights before it took people around the moon.
No, GP is referring to the refuelling missions that will be required to put Starship on the moon and bring it back.
Which as the person you're replying to is point out isn't really a fair comparison because Starship and Saturn V deliver vastly different amounts of mass to and from the moon despite the mission being only to ferry some people there for a few days.
If Starship ends up flying to the moon it effectively enables the landing of a lunar base that could be occupied for years at a time with sufficient resupply of food and the right equipment for extraction of water/oxygen from the moon.
The Saturn V as amazing as it was could never have brought that much equipment to the moon in a cost effective manner.
Significant parts of the Saturn V (including the S-IVB 3rd stage, and the instrument unit which controlled the entire stack) were previously flight tested in Saturn IB launches.
> That's complete nonsense. 10-15 Starship launches would land a lander that can carry like 100tons of payload orbit.
The burning question that I have now is whether a Starship explosion during lunar testing will be visible from Earth. I sure hope they would do it during a new moon too for maximum effect.
Whenever my Volkswagen car software glitches I can't help but to observe it was done by a 6000 people strong development team vs 600 in Apollo programme within similar timeframe. The latter had vastly more primitive hardware, tools and younger programming culture available too.
And some serious financial capital working on enabling technologies. NASA funding peaked at 4.4% of US GDP. Even considering that this was 1960s GDP and they weren't standing on the shoulders of 100 years of automobile development or decades of previous launches, NASA got (and needed) a lot more resources than car manufacturers or newspace companies
It's not just infotainment though. We had all instruments blanked out on a motorway. Granted not as terrifying as with Apollo 13 but we had 3 people onboard too.
If something were to happen to Apollo, the blast radius would be limited to those 3 people. If something happens to your car with 3 people onboard while travelling down the motorway, the blast radius could affect other cars with their people onboard. This would make the failure even more spectacular having unsuspecting civilians affected vs 3 highly trained volunteers for mission. All this to say that I think we are way underplaying "it's just a car" type of thoughts here
Funding as percent of GDP is a meaningless metric. You need to adjust for inflation, but funding as a percent of GDP was some weird argument made to try to explain why modern NASA has become relatively ineffectual, but it has no meaningful connection to reality.
The Apollo Program cost a total of $183 billion, inflation adjusted, over 12 years. That's about $15 billion a year. NASA's budget has been for the past 40 years has been $20-$30 billion a year. Even the 'burst funding' wasn't particularly extreme relative to what they now regularly receive. The highest their budget ever was was in 1966 in $57 billion (inflation adjusted) dollars.
To visualize the absurdity of this argument imagine somebody claiming that Uganda funding a space program for $5 billion is receiving some serious financial capital, because that happens to be 10% of their GDP. $5 billion is $5 billion, regardless of your GDP. Ok technically there's PPP calculations, but that doesn't apply to the discussion here.
I mean, I was responding to a thread implying that the Apollo programme had access to fewer resources than Volkswagen firmware updates...
Obviously percentage of GDP isn't an ideal multiplier for reasons you've mentioned, but then inflation indexed mainly to mass produced common consumer goods tends to significantly underestimate the increase in cost over time of running complex operations involving the world's smartest and most on-demand minds and an almost unfathomably large number of subcontractors. Either way, NASA's overall budget is half that of the 1960s in regular inflation adjusted dollars, and whilst its current research and satellite/ISS maintenance maybe aren't as exciting as the first lunar landing, they're not obviously dramatically lower cost (the %GDP argument gets brought up nearly as often to suggest the Apollo programme wasn't worth it...)
Sat in a lecture theatre with NASA's last chief economist using both metrics earlier this week. Although those slides were looking at cumulative funds spent on Robert Goddard's programme, which was about the size of a largish Series A using the inflation metric or Series B using the GDP adjustment. Whether that's value for money or not depends on whether you're considering being the father of modern rocketry more impressive than sending a handful of moderately complex 16U Cubesats or rideshares or note that the actual rockets were no more sophisticated than some student projects, I guess...
NASA's modern budget isn't eaten up by satellite and ISS maintenance, it's eaten up by pork/corruption like the SLS. The SLS was already largely obsoleted by the Falcon Heavy 7 years ago. And Starship will make it look like a 13inch black and white CRT (with a million dollar price tag) in the era of cheap 80" bendy flat screens. Artemis is a similar story. Artemis simply isn't going to work. The entire project is filled with unrealistic handwaving.
Yet NASA continues to cheerlead for these things. I briefly thought NASA might right their heading under Bridenstine but then at some point he suddenly just did a hard 180. It seems every man has his price. He eventually just turned into another Boeing cheerleader (and his new found rubber stampage is a big part of why that Boeing monstrosity left astronauts stranded on the ISS) and went straight from out of office to a high level advisory gig for some MIC company which is almost certainly just a laundered paycheck.
Car software is, perhaps counterintuitively, doing a lot more than the Apollo software did. Just think about the computers available at the time and how much memory they didn't have.
Apollo project software was controlling the stages of Saturn V flight vehicle, orbital and lander modules, and ground systems. So no, it was not doing less than a family SUV Javacsript blob; certainly not 10x less. And most of the things it did were mission critical.
All isolated systems or sensors that simply notify humans or providing them with basic calculations. The MP3 and entertainment systems on modern cars are orders of magnitude more complex. Again, you don't have to take my word for it, just look at the memory available at the time.
Computers in Apollo programme controlled most of the function with minimal human involvement in the loop. The dynamic systems were orders of magnitude more complex than what you find in a modern vehicle.
Also I can assure you no-one at Cariad had to write an MP3 decoder. And speaking of sensor control, my car (on its 4th year now) still fails to unfold the mirrors once in a while.
We also have huge, orders of magnitude advances in tooling and process since mid-1960s. For starters you don't have to weave your program into magnetic core fabric by hand.
Starship was designed from the very beginning to land humans on Mars and it is correctly sized for that. It's apples-and-oranges to compare its design to Apollo.
(edits:) It's clearly not ideal for a short lunar landing, considered in isolation. But: what else would you do? Whatever you build, it would land on the moon perhaps once, and never again. Would you, being in charge, design a one-off vehicle for one or two moon landings—spend that R&D budget, in that way? That's not cheaper than 15 Starship launches; it's considerably costlier. (But the Apollo engineers didn't need to worry about this; it's was their express remit to spend $200 billion on one-off designs that would never be used again).
And: I hope no one suggests the "just make a unique lunar Starship variant that's simply a bit smaller". There's no "simply" resizing things in engineering. Recall that the last time Starship's length was altered by 2 meters, new mechanical resonances appeared, and it blew up three times in a row. Any "one-off" change for lunar landings is a less-tested, less-understood machine you'd be putting human lives on.
> Whatever you build, it would land on the moon perhaps once, and never again.
But it would also never land on Mars, so it would be a waste to build it for that. Build it for what it will actually spend its life doing.
Not saying SpaceX won't go to Mars, but if/when they do it will likely be several rocket generations later and possibly with specialized rockets, with a significant portion of it being one-time-use as you ain't returning.
I completely forgot about this. Current aerodynamics and heat shielding are optimized for Earth reentry. They may have to significantly rethink the design for Mars. What they land on Mars will likely be very different from what we see today.
Even if it does go to Mars there are some major warts on the design. When you land you're 35-40 meters or so up in the air so there's a whole other elevator assembly needed just to get people out of the rocket to the ground.
We've been hoisting people and cargo up/down with pulleys and cables for thousands of years. This seems like the smallest obstacle Starship has to face.
We’ve been opening and closing doors for even longer and yet it has still posed a challenge for SpaceX when dealing with the payload door on Starship. Space makes even trivial things hard.
The satellite door is completely different from what they'll need for MarsShip, that's even larger and has to function as an airlock. None of what they're trying to do now matters for the Mars door.
That's a lot of certainty for something that hasn't even been designed yet.
The outside door needn't be part of the airlock. It's certainly big enough to have an internal airlock leading to depressurized internal space.
The things that make a door that tests fine on Earth break in orbit are likely to be things that need fixing for a similar door on Mars. They won't be all the same challenges, but some will absolutely be shared.
A smaller purpose build lander that doesn't need the fuel capacity for the entire journey would be significantly shorter and could be wider too. That would get it significantly closer. Enough that a simple ladder would be viable so they aren't reliant on a winch/elevator.
So you're suggesting something similar to the Apollo LEM that will land, and carry enough fuel to return to orbit to dock with something that will contain enough fuel that will return to Earth?
Wouldn't that make the mission unfeasible because it requires ISRU of return fuel?
You know the saying about OSHA rules "they're written in blood"?
That's what happens with most domains. At first people don't know the dangers and can go fast and loose: surgery, radioactive material, planes, cars, trains, rockets. Then people start losing their lives or part of their bodies to "easily preventable accidents". So some rules are enacted. Decade after decade, accident after accident, more rules, more red tape: things cost more, take more time. But you get a lot less victims.
So yeah, with a good budget and in a less strict country you could get something to the moon in no time. And potentially many people' parts all over your launchpads too.
Not to mention that before natural gas people used to light and heat their homes with coal gas/town gas, which was basically carbon monoxide. Yes, that highly poisonous thing that binds better to hemoglobin than oxygen molecules. So you could get poisoned and then still explode.
Falcon 9 is by no means small or even medium. In the history of rockets its quite a large and powerful rocket. And so is Ariane 5. Not sure what you are referencing with Ariane, I guess Ariane 1-4 were small.
So far in history, we didn't have enough to launch. If the volume we launch increases then a larger rocket flying often is helpful.
We are at the peak of what a rocket the size of Falcon 9 can do. If you want full re-usability, the size helps you out quite a bit.
And hauling the 'orbiter' into 'orbit' is only wasteful if you can't reuse it. I would argue what's actually wasteful is throwing the second stage in the ocean, even when it costs minimum 10million $, and likely more.
A larger rocket mitigates the effects of the rocket equation.
The wet (loaded with propellant) to dry (empty of propellant) mass ratio is determined via the rocket equation to be the exponential of delta V divided by exhaust velocity.
Certain parts of the rocket, such as the external tank structure, scale sub-cubically with the rocket's dimension, as do aerodynamic forces; whereas payload and propellant mass scale cubically.
Hence if the rocket is smaller than a critical threshold size, the requisite vehicle structures are too large relative to its propellant capacity to permit the required wet:dry mass ratio to achieve the delta V for orbit.
At exactly this size, the rocket can reach orbit with zero payload.
As the rocket increases in size beyond this threshold, it is able to carry a payload which is increasingly large relative to the rocket's total mass.
Added to that, Full-flow stage combustion engines are bigger, heavier, and more expensive, but are way more efficient. So a bigger rocket is the only option to get one of those onboard, and helps with taking more mass to orbit because they are more efficient than other options.
I don't believe there's any performance advantage for full-flow, which SpaceX alone is attempting. The only point is to lower the combustion temperature inside the turbines, at the expense of (much) higher flow rates through those turbines, in order to increase their lifespan.
(There's a large difference between staged combustion generally and gas-generator engines, which throw away performance by dumping fuel out of the turbine exhaust).
Since the temperature limit of available materials is the fundamental limitation (even after making custom high-temp alloys), this allows them to maximize mechanical power from the turbopumps, which raises performance.
We might imagine a conservative FFSC design which accepts very low temperatures in exchange for making it easy (low R&D cost) to reach high longevity. Raptor is not a conservative design, so it requires more R&D to achieve that longevity.
This is also why no hobby rockets get to orbit. Even a 1 gram payload to low earth orbit is beyond what a human-sized rocket can manage due to the way rockets don't scale downwards well.
How does this compare to the cube-square law scaling effects applied to propeller- and wing-lifted vehicles like quadcopters/helicopters and RC aircraft/jumbo jets? Or even the squat shape of a housefly that zigs and zags through the air like an acrobat compared to the ponderous lift-off of a large goose?
I understand vaguely that those operate and scale based on the area (a square function of their length) of their lifting surfaces, and are pulled down by their mass (a cube function of their length).
A little Estes toy rocket lifts off the pad much more aggressively (in the blink of an eye!) than a full size rocket...
They are almost entirely unrelated. When trying to leave the gravity well of a planet, the atmosphere is only a dragging force acting to reduce your thrust. It might be proportional to the surface area of the vehicle, but likely not - I think it's only proportional to the surface area of the "nose" of the rocket. But what's certain is that it's strictly a force that hinders you - in a rocket, all of your thrust comes from the engines, you don't get any boost from the air.
However, even if you're taking off of a planet with no atmosphere, you still have a huge force to deal with - you need to maintain an acceleration to exit the gravity well of the planet, and you need to burn fuel for that. But you also have to carry the fuel you'll burn with you, so the more fuel you have, the more fuel you'll need - this is what the rocket equation codifies.
> But you also have to carry the fuel you'll burn with you, so the more fuel you have, the more fuel you'll need
Isn't this the entire point of using methane as fuel so that they can build a gas station once they get there so that return fuel is not required to be considered in this equation?
I'm not talking about fuel that you need to get back, we're still at the "leaving Earth" case. The point is that you need, say, 1000 tons of fuel to leave the Earth. Your rocket then will weigh [weight of empty rocket] + [weight of payload] + 1000 tons. And it is this mass that the engines will have to push while ascending. Of course, the fuel gets spent as you ascend - by the time you reach orbit, your rocket is now 1000 tons lighter.
The refueling idea is so that for example you don't need to carry the fuel needed to get to the moon or Mars all in one rocket. You just need to carry enough to get to the refueling orbit - which is much less.
The toys have to be aggressive. You have less than three feet worth of launch rail--by the time the rocket clears the rail it must be going fast enough that the fins make it stable. Meanwhile, it's light, overengineering the body to take a high g load is trivial.
An orbital class rocket--taking that kind of g load is going to break it (just look at the payload specs for the Falcon Heavy--its maximum permitted payload is well below it's performance to low orbit. You load it up to what the engines can do, it breaks. The only use case is when it's going farther than low orbit.) And an orbital class rocket has active steering rather than fins, it doesn't need to be booking it to be stable.
Smallest orbital anything so far is 31ft(9.54m) long, 20in(54cm) wide, 2.9t/2.6t(2600kg?), does 9lbs(4kg) to random-ish LEO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS-520
> Our satellite launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California (USA) on Jan 14, 2025. The rocket mission is a Transporter, and SAT GUS was dropped off in low-Earth orbit at about 375 miles above the surface of our pale blue dot.
But you also have a limit on the other side: going extreme to make the point, we haven't managed to build a mile-tall building yet, and a rocket that size would be a nightmare to engineer (while perhaps technically possible -- you might have to scale up another 10x or 20x to make it physically impossible).
So there's some sort of curve, zero at both ends, between overall rocket size and the payload to orbit. The question is where Starship sits on that curve, and to your point it seems likely that it's looking good on that metric alone.
But then you have another curve that I think starts small and increases near-monotonically, which is the complexity/likelihood-to-fail factor to the size of the rocket. It's (relatively) easy to launch a toy rocket, (fairly) simple to build a missile-sized sub-orbital rocket, difficult to build a small-to-medium orbital rocket, and apparently very difficult to build a Saturn/N-1/Starship-sized rocket. More props to the crazy '60s team that pulled it off.
> So there's some sort of curve, zero at both ends, between overall rocket size and the payload to orbit.
This doesn't follow. Engineering complexity is not a limit on payload to orbit, it is a fundamentally different parameter. Yeah building a mile tall rocket would be hard, but it would get a shit ton of payload to orbit. There is no maximum beyond which making a bigger rocket starts to reduce your payload to orbit.
> But then you have another curve that I think starts small and increases near-monotonically, which is the complexity/likelihood-to-fail factor to the size of the rocket. It's (relatively) easy to launch a toy rocket, (fairly) simple to build a missile-sized sub-orbital rocket, difficult to build a small-to-medium orbital rocket, and apparently very difficult to build a Saturn/N-1/Starship-sized rocket.
Complexity does not increase with size, people just become more risk averse with size. Toy rockets fail all the time, just nobody really cares. No one would bet the lives of multiple people and hundreds of millions of dollars on a successful toy rocket launch. If complexity increases, it is with capability. If you want to land on the moon, you need something a bit more advanced than a hobby rocket. There is no reason to believe a floatilla of physically smaller rockets capable of achieving any given mission will be less complex in aggregate than a single physically larger rocket.
>> So there's some sort of curve, zero at both ends, between overall rocket size and the payload to orbit.
> This doesn't follow. Engineering complexity is not a limit on payload to orbit
At this point I'm merely talking about size (which I think is clear from the words I use. I don't think "building a mile tall rocket would be hard" adequately describes the difficulty when we haven't even built a mile tall building.
Sea Dragon[1] was only envisioned as 490 feet tall, and as near as I can tell even the Super Orion[2] would only have been 400-600 meters tall. And of course, neither of those was even close to implementation. Therefore I stand by my statement that a mile tall rocket is, for all practical purposes, impossible, and thus has a payload to orbit of zero. If you disagree then add a zero -- surely you agree we can't build a ten-mile-tall rocket?
As far as complexity, I'm not sure what to say. Toy rockets might fail all the time, but the point was complexity, and a toy rocket can be constructed from under a dozen parts. Even larger model rockets have at most a few dozen to a few hundred parts. The part count of the Falcon 9 has to number in the thousands, if not tens of thousands (9 merlin engines with at least several hundred parts each?).
To be clear, I agree with you that complexity increases with capability.
But also, to push back a bit, I don't think complexity aggregates the way you're saying it does. A box of hammers is not more complex than a nailgun, even if it has more parts in total.
> At this point I'm merely talking about size (which I think is clear from the words I use. I don't think "building a mile tall rocket would be hard" adequately describes the difficulty when we haven't even built a mile tall building.
I was assuming you were using a comical example to illustrate a "nightmare to engineer." The comparison to a building doesn't actually work at all. The practical limitation on how high we can build buildings is how fast we can make elevators. Just making something tall is not a problem.
> Sea Dragon[1] was only envisioned as 490 feet tall, and as near as I can tell even the Super Orion[2] would only have been 400-600 meters tall. And of course, neither of those was even close to implementation. Therefore I stand by my statement that a mile tall rocket is, for all practical purposes, impossible
First, the optimal design for a rocket is not to just keep making it taller, and second, size was not the obstacle to either of these projects not being built. That does not at all prove that it is impossible. What kind of world would we be living in we presumed anything that hadn't already been actively pursued was impossible?
> and thus has a payload to orbit of zero.
My point was that this does not equate to a payload of zero. Surely you wouldn't argue that the weight of this mile high rocket is zero, and therefore that there is some curve for the weight of rockets where making the rockets larger starts to make them lighter. Just as we can calculate the weight for something without actually building it, so too can we calculate the payload, and it can increase far beyond anything we can actually implement.
> If you disagree then add a zero -- surely you agree we can't build a ten-mile-tall rocket?
I agree it would be impractical, but not that it would be so non-physical that we couldn't calculate what its payload capacity would be were it to be built.
> Toy rockets might fail all the time, but the point was complexity, and a toy rocket can be constructed from under a dozen parts. Even larger model rockets have at most a few dozen to a few hundred parts. The part count of the Falcon 9 has to number in the thousands, if not tens of thousands (9 merlin engines with at least several hundred parts each?).
Falcon 9 is a liquid rocket designed to take people into space. That is the source of its part count. You could scale up a solid rocket motor to an arbitrarily large size while keeping the parts count exactly the same. It's probably not the optimal way to make a solid rocket of that size, and you'd be missing out on a lot of capabilities that are important for a real rocket, but if you just wanted a toy no more capable than what you buy in a hobby store it would be no more complicated. Conversely, try to make a fully functional falcon 9 complete with 9 working liquid rocket engines small enough to hoverslam on your desk and you have an immense engineering challenge on your hands.
> But also, to push back a bit, I don't think complexity aggregates the way you're saying it does. A box of hammers is not more complex than a nailgun, even if it has more parts in total.
I concur that part count is not the same as complexity, but that point is in my favor. Making something bigger is like adding hammers to a box of hammers. The quantity goes up, and at some point you're going to need to make some improvements to the box if you want to keep adding more hammers, but conceptually it is simple. Making something more capable, like a nail-gun, is much harder.
Compared to Starship, Falcon 9 may look like a medium rocket, but it is actually quite big, and Falcon Heavy is bona fide a heavy launcher, not just a hype-name.
What Saturn V and the Shuttle were trying to do pales in comparison to what the design goals of Starship are. If you were trying to repeat what those vehicles were doing you would've designed the launch vehicle significantly different.
SpaceX supporters can only call this "moving fast, breaking stuff" for so long as the entire program regresses in on itself in terms of milestones. This was never easy, but the Falcon program sure made it look so.
Falcon also was hard. They had a few failures and nearly went bankrupt in the process of successfully launching for the first time.
> the entire program regresses in on itself in terms of milestones.
The alternative would be looking at the competing programs from Boeing, Blue Origin, etc. It's not like they are hitting their milestones particularly well with their more traditional waterfall approach. The point of rapid iteration is that it is an inherently open ended process that has no milestones other than to launch the next iteration within weeks/months of the previous one. Which they have been doing fairly consistently.
If SpaceX gets starship in a launcheable and recoverable state, they'll still have many years of competing against competitors that have to rely on single launch vehicles exclusively. They would be very early to market. And there's a decent chance they might start nailing things with a few more launches.
They didn't regress like starship has though... they literally just went from orbit to controlled landing in ocean and catching the booster on a fork to the ships blowing up in orbit or not making it there and the boosters aborting the catch for a controlled landing offshore or blowing up as well.
Now they have regressed to blowing up on the pad during static testing.
Seems very different to me than the Falcon story, 100%. Granted, they had luck too.
I wonder if astronauts will be excited to be the first to ride on the Starship given the statistics. Obviously they aren't going to be too keen on the Starliner but that didn't blow up.
Considering NASA has a 50 percent loss rate on their space shuttles and SpaceX hasn't lost anyone yet I don't think it's a problem.
I'm surprised that people are losing their minds over a few explosions as if the US government didn't blow up hundreds of rockets in order to get a working product.
That's a wonderful way to bend stats to make a point i.e. to compare probability of failure of one flight to probability of eventual loss of one craft that might last many flights.
The risk angle is that this isn't about national security or a government enterprise. This is commercial - you can't spend your money if you're dead.
And then when they disabled safety checks it just worked.
How can you be confident that, given the circumstance, their lower-cost competitor, the one pushing iterative startup style move fast approach, has the same extensive safety checks AND had zero hardware bugs in 10 or so years?
Which one do I want to ride? Soyuz? Or maybe upgraded Starliner?
I don't want to listen to the maddening tictictictictic sound[1] on Dragon doing best it can to deorbit by mashing H key, or experience human excrement contamination problem[2] caused by toilet system becoming autonomously unassembled. Soyuz with intact main engines don't seem to have those kinds of problems[3], only spinal injury risks in ballistic modes.
Dragon V2 is a Tesla rocket, after all. In hindsight, why would have it not been one, and how could have it ever been a good thing? Sure, Starliner practically died and rebooted during docking with the ISS, which is surely extremely dangerous, but when it comes to Dragon V2, they had proper kaboom during ground testing.
Tell me, which human spacecraft in past 20 years had a full on explosion, and why should I want to be on it?
LOL okay. Well you do what's best for you. I'll do what works and doesn't involve going to Russia or Flying on Starliner which literally left the last Astronauts stranded.
It's not a regression every flight. The last flight was pretty successful. You are acting as is this isn't an unprecedented launch vehicle. Even if they lost 20 in a row, as long as they get there that's all that matters. Space X has shown how well things work once they get something working.
They have yet to re-light an engine in space, which has been a mission milestone several times now. Either the ship explodes in hot staging, orbit, or re-entry (and now, static testing) and hasn't made it to the controlled spot in the ocean in quite some time.
If Bezos made a bridge building company, I'd expect it to use something similar to waterfall. That's not to say it is right for rockets, but it is a different domain than software.
Traditional non-SpaceX US launch companies does not seem very conpetent at the moment.
But there seems to be a lot of progress in reusable launcher development outside the US, mainly in China and apparently also among Japanese car manufacturers!
Scott Manley observes the breach was in the cargo section, and not at the PEZ dispenser door. It appeared to split longitudinally. There are header tank downcomer lines that might fit that bill.
The part that I found interesting was ~"Anyone can build a bridge, but it takes an engineer to just barely build a bridge. That's what Starship V2 is, a mass and complexity reduction. Maybe they took away too much."
The pad might actually have less damage than one might assume; that explosion started at the top. The bottom parts of the pad will mostly have heat & fire damage, but not explosion?
(It'll still be fucked, I just wouldn't expect a crater?)
With the Amos explosion on Falcon 9 IIRC the issue was with burning kerosene seeping into the pad, damaging it quite a bit. Both methane and liquid oxygen should burn or evaporate before really pooling on the pad infrastructure, so there could really be less damage.
Still, there was probably more energy stored in the Starship propelants than in the Falcon 9 case.
I'm not so sure. The biggest explosion I saw in the video was right at the base. I think that the liquid methane spilled and fell to the ground. Probably the oxygen tank also burst by that time, spilling LOX right into the path of the falling liquid methane - creating a nice mixture of methane and oxygen right at the base, ready to explode.
In spaceflight, an anomaly is an anomalous outcome compared to what was expected. The severity of the anomaly varies. Typically, if the world outside of the organization hears about an anomaly, it was severe enough to cause a Loss of Mission (LOM) or Loss of Vehicle (LOV). Internally, when things behave anomalously, they're referred to as off-nominal, and are subject to internal investigations to determine the cause.
This is a _very_ off-nominal outcome and the investigation will absolutely involve outside organizations and halting the program during the investigation until the investigation completes with a sufficient determination of faults and accompanying remediation plans.
There's a comment above that gives Loss of Vehicle (LOV) as an example of a more specific term. Sure "anomaly" is a known technical term, but it's also ambiguous and buries the lede.
579 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 303 ms ] threadHopefully the ground equipment is not too damaged (unlikely) and block 3 has more success.
I can't really comprehend this statement, since it appears, in a spectacular fashion, that there's some useful information to be learned involving the top half of the ship, especially the flammable bits that you can see burst out before igniting. A rocket ship isn't just its engines, it's a system, with all the bits of it being not only useful, but entirely necessary.
What they were hoping to test never got started.
We're not talking about cold hard cash. The discussion is useful information.
I'm sorry, but fittings don't just leak. It's not something that "just happens". A leaking fitting means a design or process flaw exists, and must be fixed, or the whole thing blows up again. It may not be interesting to you, but it's now very very interesting to every other team working at SpaceX, who just had all their shit blown to pieces. It's a (I hope this is obvious to you) critical component of the system, just as critical as, say, the control system and fuel pumps. Serious innovation may be required (yes, things like gaskets still involve PhD's), and was probably already required.
It's really interesting seeing software perspectives of a hardware world. A mech-e would have a stroke reading your comments.
However, that is absolutely not what they were testing for. Whatever the test's purpose, this failed to actually test it.
Importantly this was a test pad a few miles away, not the main launch pad.
Unfortunately just on Twitter, haven't seen much elsewhere yet. But the link seems to work.
The frame of the video has a burnt in clock in the top left corner though, so if you get that to be about 11:01:50 PM CDT you'll be at the point of the explosion.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1lf3g...
This could be a "simple" production error (think "cracked pipe") which can be fixed with more effective monitoring of the construction, and not a major design flaw.
It might be someone forgot a wrench somewhere for what we know.
There's a simple fault, and then there's the question of why did it happen anyway?
I mean, look, this isn't a good sign for spacex. Whatever problem there is, clearly it's hard to find and fix. Could be some alloy, could be some pressure sensor, could be the whole management chain. Who knows yet.
But we very much do know this isn't a good sign.
Why?
Second scenario, Starship is not run as competently as Falcon 9. That is also a huge problem, because it's very hard to fix people and procesa problems in general.
Obviously it's not trivial, since they already flew a few spaceships and rockets, but it could be an edge case not considered until now which can still be fixed, rather than a "well, it turned out to be impossible to fly a rocket with this design".
The real problem is the damaged infrastructure. They don't have several launch towers in the pipeline like they have Starships. This is a "pause and rebuild" scenario, with the wait time much harder to parallelize with something else. Whatever time they spend until they have the second launch tower functional, I'd bet about half of it will be an overall addition to the whole project.
They didn't lose a launch tower. It happened at a site only used for static fire tests.
(And they kinda do have several launch towers in the pipeline...)
So what, 6 to 9 months while they repair/build new test site(s)?
Might as well cut the losses and scrap Block 2 altogether, and move on to Block 3.
Good luck trying to get launch insurance for that without a full root cause and proof in double triplicate that this has been fixed.
Are you going to put you payload on one of those, a payload that will take 3 years to rebuild, and might end the company?
As a result we got booster landings delayed by 20 years - and SpaceX would also not get there with Falcon 9 if they would call it quit after spcetacular failures (see Falcon 9R test bed).
Choosing a hydrogen engine (which only really makes sense for upper stages) also means you need a hydrogen tank... a cryogenic hydrogen tank. They chose to make such a tank with a weird shape that fit the unnecessarily weird shape of their prototype. I think the major cost of getting their craft repaired (or more realistically, having a new one built) was to build a new custom hydrogen tank.
Crazy, when they didn't need anything optimized/complicated for testing launch and landing.
Also wild that they went with an F/A-18 accelerometer/gyro package. The first commercial mass market MEMS accelerometer was introduced in 1991 and was in volume production in 1993. I mean, they had to pick something and the ADXL50 wasn't ready yet (and they would still have had to design a 3-axis solution around it if it were), so I don't blame them for that (expensive) decision.
https://qringtech.com/TryMe/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Histo... https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/obso...
I do very much blame them for the choice of the RL-10, though. And for going immediately to such a large size -- that's the same thing as saying "we plan on not making any mistakes".
The only engines that were not hypergolic & used kerolox were those used on the Atlas rockets or on the Deltas. Not sure if they had the necessary throttling range and other characteristics. I guess now I need to find some sort of a biography from someone working on the DC-X project. :D
As for Armadillo Aerospace - their efforts were admirably and I really enjoyed watching their progress. And they did manage to get a working engine. :)
AMOS-6 was a pretty similar situation where a rocket exploded prior to a static-fire, and in fact is the reason that static fires are done without payloads, though Starship would not yet have a payload. The difficult to explain nature of the explosion, alongside some quite compelling circumstantial evidence, caused a theory of sabotage (sniping an exact segment of the rocket) to become widespread. Of course the cause here could be more straight forward to pin down - we'll know a lot more in a few days!
And also (IIRC) the reason Starship abandoned helium COPV tanks and switched to autogenous pressurization.
https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1lf8huf/preli... ("Preliminary data suggests that a nitrogen COPV in the payload bay failed below its proof pressure...")
There’s no way it’s COPV
It was COPV
(Adapted from https://www.cyberciti.biz/humour/a-haiku-about-dns/)
We knew from the Soviet that it was going to be really hard but after the successful flights I thought they had it in the bag.
We might be touching on the limits of SpaceX constant tweaking fail fast approach.
It doesn't mean the approach SpaceX is taking isn't valuable in some contexts, but it's certainly not the only method.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars
The first one [1] actually landed but failed to send back any data (kinda like the soviet example) due to deployment failure.
But the second one will at least have an impact on future generations, with people being confused why there are two Shiaparelli[2] craters on Mars. ;-)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_2 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schiaparelli_EDM
But SpaceX's brand of rocket development is certainly exciting
So might as well use up the remaining Starship 2 & Raptor 2 inventory in destructive testing (both intentional and emergent).
[1] https://x.com/dwisecinema/status/1935552171912655045
I like the idea of hardware-rich development, but it seems they might have fiddled too much here or maybe just tried to go too fast.
If an engine blows up, because its pulling in bubbles, its not the engines fault.
I think Raptor 2 has a few issues still but as we can see on the booster, the can perform fine for what most rocket engines have to do.
I think about the countless engineering success stories I’ve read where you can tell the people involved were just living and breathing the problem.
https://www.comparably.com/companies/spacex/culture/seattle
https://www.comparably.com/companies/spacex/enps
U.S. tech companies are notorious for high turnover and SpaceX doesn't seem particularly bad.
Then again, they are launching tons of rockets, and any cult leader has his followers, so what do I know...
Especially with how hot the field is these days. I suspect "key" SpaceX engineers do not lack for lucrative offers.
The problems all started with v2.
Still in hindsight, a couple more flights to test the improved heat shield could help move that are forward & reduce some of the unknowns.
The crack propagation indicates that the line was a weak point on the structure. However, I'm surprised that it was already there. It's too early to make a reliable guess. But if I were to hazard one, I would say that the tank had too much pressure, well ahead of the explosion.
I don't know if they use manual welding or robotic welding. But robotic welding is well established and is justified for the volumes of work that SpaceX carries out. What is more difficult is to avoid vertical weld seams on its cylindrical segments. I'm yet to encounter a roll forged cylinder that big, especially with stainless steel. (Disclaimer: I have no direct experience with industrial metalworking)
> If any failed weld can lead to a catastrophe like this, how would you guarantee the quality of each weld without going into nuclear power plant construction level of costs?
That is done using Non-destructive testing (NDTs). The usual methods are high-energy X-ray imaging, ultrasound testing (UT) and dye penetration testing (DP). These methods are usually reliable in catching such faults - even for machinery that's in use. For example, turbine blades in a jet engine.
Updated: As the other commenter pointed out, robotic welding doesn't ensure elimination of defects. The robotic process is more consistent and therefore reduces the defects. But uncontrollable random variations can still cause defects that could fail later. The only way to eliminate them (almost) entirely is to identify them with NDT and rectify them as long as the defects are within a certain tolerance limit.
With this being metal, small defects tend to grow over time- called metal fatigue. This all depends on the stress in the material which depends on a lot of things: fluid flows and pressures, temperatures (and temperature differences and rates of change), vibrations (structural or induced by fluid flow), etc etc.
Mechanical engineering at this level is very complex! So many of these things boil down to probability distributions of each process involved. I don't know how "close to the edge" the design is, but this is the kind of thing you have to do when optimizing for weight.
Very much so! I have seen hardware being accepted and rejected on the basis of those limits. There were also cases where medium sized defects were reworked and rectified after careful assessments and reviews.
> With this being metal, small defects tend to grow over time- called metal fatigue
The tank and feedline welds don't cycle too often. But that also makes it very critical in reusable rockets. It may fly fine ten times and then show up unexpectedly.
> I don't know how "close to the edge" the design is
That's the fun part! As you suspect, they have ridiculously low structural margins in order to optimize for mass. What it means is that many physical phenomena that you don't usually worry too much about (when margins are splendid), suddenly turn into critical issues. Then you're off to doing doing materials research and other scientific studies, instead of doing just design and engineering (rocket engineering suddenly becomes rocket science. literally!). I've seen cases where the engineers were forced to study the algorithms used by finite element analysis software used for structural simulations. It can get that 'close to the edge'!
https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1lf3g...
Chinese static fire accidentally becomes not-static.
I guess how much of a setback this is will be determined by how much damage is there on the facilities and the nature of the cause of the explosion(do they need to re-work the next 6 already being assembled so it doesn't happen again?).
The shuttle was a deathtrap. It had inadequate abort modes and a launch process that practically guaranteed minor (until it wasn't) damage to the heat shield during launch.
Classic example of https://danluu.com/wat/ --- the normalization of deviance.
STS crews were lucky that only two of the things got violenly disassembled.
I think the only reasonable comparison would be after cost equivalency. The Starship has a long way to go, to catch up.
Of course commercial rockets are always going to be as shoddy as they can get away with rather than as good as possible, but if it still takes SpaceX or Boeing as much money to build a rocket as it did back in the Saturn V days, they're doing something wrong.
Your arguments are strange, a mirage concocted to fit a narrative of denigration and darkness. You mock with zeal, yet have no point to the mocking.
Always with the mocking, you cause an ache which cannot be balmed. Cease, I pray you. Stop these machinations, this mad canter.
Falcon was built the same way. It blew up many times too, explosions aplenty. Now it is the most successful lift on the planet.
No one has ever built a plane, or even a car without breakage during testing. The very idea is absurd. There's a whole profession called "test pilot".
I don't know why anyone would suggest otherwise.
I'm sure there are links aplenty, but the absurd suggestion here would be building a rocket and having zero incidents of failure. That beyond weird. That's what needs a "do you have a link" question.
You're recalling wrong, or you were reading nonsense. Lots of engines were destroyed in testing (particularly before computer modelling, this was basically how rocket engines were _developed_), but no, no Saturn V ever exploded on the pad. Prior to this incident, the most-impressive on-pad boom was one of the N1s.
No fully assembled Saturn V ever failed, though a few of them had near-misses.
It's a weird debarc point to discuss non testing craft vs testing. And "fully assembled", when spacex is flying non-final builds on purpose, using a different test methodology.
Yes! I am sure! That did not happen!
Early development of Saturn V rocket engines involved destructive testing, but a whole rocket would not have been involved at that point.
Here's some later ground testing of final engines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rP6k18DVdg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-II
"First all-up S-II stage, assembled between 1963 and 1965. Completed several engine tests at the Mississippi Test Facility (now the Stennis Space Center). Destroyed by accidental LH2 tank overpressurization during pressure testing May 28, 1966[7][6]"
and
"Destroyed in test stand September 29, 1965"
Also described here: http://heroicrelics.org/ussrc/s-ii/index.html
"The S-II program was beset with problems and delays. NASA had planned on North American making an S-II stage, S-II-D, for dynamic testing but the order for that stage was cancelled in early 1965 in favor of using the structural static test stage, S-II-S, as a combined static/dynamic test stage; that stage was renamed to S-II-S/D. Unfortunately, the S-II-S/D stage was destroyed during testing, leaving S-II-F to take on the added role of dynamic testing and being redesignated as S-II-F/D."
I though all of the Saturn V stages were destroyed during testing at least once but it looks like I remembered it wrong. :)
And Saturn V never had a military mission, neither had Shuttle.
That sounds military enough for me.
Does Starship have launch abort boosters? Seems infeasible with the amount of fuel and mass on it since it also serves as a second stage, but maybe they solved that somehow?
Disagree. The overall Starship system's problems are obviously in Starship, not in the Super Heavy booster. The latter is far heavier. But it only has to do 2 things well - sub-orbital launch, and sub-orbital precision return. And the launch tower's chopsticks give it a lot of help with the latter.
Vs. the Starship has to do far more things - all of them mission-critical - while being ruthlessly optimized for weight.
Operations cost. They are sublinear on payload/size. At least this is what Space X/Musk seem to go for.
There's also many advantages to being able to lift something large/heavy in one go, rather than smaller payloads that need to be unfolded (like JWST) or assembled in space, which can drastically increase the development costs.
for up to 0.8% US GDP per year. Today that would be $200B/year, pure spent. Where is Space X today is making, ie. it has a revenue, $15B/year.
>Perhaps web development is not the only thing that is susceptible to bloat.
similarly - web dev today can be done on $300 laptop by any schmuck. Even simple programming back then required a computer which cost a lot, and it was an almost academic activity.
The value added is interesting. For example, both the Merlin and the Raptor family of engines. These are some fine engines, and they are remarkably cheap and reusable.
The likes of SpaceX are reporting costs in the range of $15B/year because NASA front loaded the cost of trailblazing launch technology half a century ago, with the technology available half a century ago.
Let's not fool ourselves into believing the likes of SpaceX are reinventing the wheel.
Also, those $15B are buying a fraction of the capabilities of SaturnV, and while SaturnV was proven effective and reliable 50 years ago, here we are discussing yet another "anomaly". Perhaps half these "anomalies" wouldn't exist if they weren't lean'ed into existence?
Not even just NASA. SpaceX are building on technologies that originated from both sides of the iron curtain (and beyond)
How far back is the "start" of history in this telling, and (more importantly) why?
The grandparent comment was pointing out that it cost NASA 200bn, and spaceX 15bn.
The parent comment pointed out that spaceX are actually saving money because they already got what nasa spent 200bn on.
My comment pointed out that they aren't just saving money by using NASAs tech, but tech from the Soviet Union as well - suggesting that their savings are far beyond just 200bn R&D
How many billions was that?
This sort of "they're just building on" talk is weird to me, and not really relevant.
What SpaceX has accomplished is astonishing, and no belittling of their accomplishments should be tolerated.
Not really. You're not talking about technology. You're debating the economics behind it. You're seeing naive fanboys praising SpaceX's costs for the likes of Starship by comparing them to the cost of the SaturnV project, arriving at the simplistic conclusion that Starship is cheaper. This is like comparing your cheap Android phone as being far cheaper than a 1950s UNIVAC. And when the silliness of this specious reasoning is called out, your reaction is to downplay it as "not really relevant"?
That said, you're upset that I said comparing costs isn't relevant? Isn't that the case you're making right now, that the costs cannot be compared, therefore aren't relevant in this discussion?
My tact on non-relevance, is that saying "it was built on another program's tech!" is not relevant, because everything meets that criterion. For example, as I said, the Saturn was built on decades of German research, including war time research during WWII, into rockets. Saturn's US development costs were a fraction of overall rocket research done by the Germans!
So if upthread is going to argue "but it's all built on the Saturn, and free knowledge!", then the same argument can be carried further back, thus negating this argument. Why?
Because it makes the Saturn cost trillions.
Thats the whole point for this entire thread. Pointing out that you CANT compare the costs of spaceX with NASA because spaceX is building on NASAs (and others) achievements.
Maybe you need to go back and reread this entire thread rather than suggesting others do so.
Simultaneously, I am also using my same logic to argue that you cannot compare costs due to my reasoning.
I agreeing with the point (you can't compare costs) while disagreeing as to why.
Instead, I said it is an impossible thing to compare, for everything is built upon another. In fact, everything is built upon a myriad of other things.
Really, both the Heavy and the Saturn cost about the same. That's because they both depend upon the entire sum of human knowledge and research, to be built.
A billion trillion trillion trillion in today's dollars of knowledge gained and experience honed, over millions of years. So what if one cost a billion trillion trillion trillion, and another cost a billion trillion trillion trillion + a few billion more. The difference is meaningless, and not even worth considering.
And then there's the whole "how much is new" argument, and there's new knowledge aplenty thanks to SpaceX.
I really don't get these arguments. People seem to really love to denigrate the effort, the excellent results. It's beyond bizarre. And worse, mock because test flights, expected to possibly go sideways, do?
So weird.
"Hi, I'm going to see if this will work. It'll probably explode. But if it does, I'll learn something"
<boom>
hahaha it exploded you suck
I don't get it.
Its unfair to say spaceX did what NASA did on a smaller budget (which is what the comment that kicked off this thread implied) because they DIDNT do what NASA did, and instead got "the stuff that came before" + "the stuff that NASA spent 200b on" + "the stuff from other sources that also cost billions" + the 15b that they actually spent to get where they are.
How can you disagree with that? You may think this discussion is silly - but its DIRECTLY as a response to someone implying that spaceX are achieving what NASA did with less money: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44316227
I wonder what "tons of payload to orbit" vs "dollars budget" would look like for Saturn era NASA vs Current SpaceX.
No doubt they're standing on the shoulders of giants, but let's not forget that they've helped transform the "go to space"-business.
That's like comparing how many containers Maersk moves today with how much sea cargo was moved back in the age of discovery.
Also, Saturn V worked and fulfilled it's mission, whereas Starship blows up.
I'd expect SpaceX to do much more now than NASA in the 60s if granted USD 200B/year, considering they are already standing on the shoulders of giants.
Then you will agree that comparing an unproven launcher which seems to be far far away from being able to fulfill a similar role is a very silly endeavour, let alone talk about it as a vast improvement which just so happens to blow up.
Its impressive how ignorant HN is about how many failures the S5 had during testing, falling for cold war propoganda at full speed
But we're comparing to SpaceX launches. Plenty of Raptor engines have blown up on the ground too.
There were 13 Saturn V's launched and all of them basically performed their mission (Apollo 6 being a bit of an exception) with 0 rapid unplanned disassemblies...
Total lunar effort from 1960-1973, adjusted for 2024 USD: $326 billion
Launch vehicle costs (Saturn V): $113 billion
I think this is what should be compared against the total Starship program cost starting from 2020 until such time it completes 6 lunar landings (not counting SLS or other costs).
Or, for the year that Starship actually lands on the moon, compare against the Saturn V launch vehicle costs for 1969, inflation adjusted: $5.9 billion. See: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTKMekJW9F8Z...
Source: https://youtu.be/Dar8P3r7GYA?si=RHZ8lWFYKrd7qQhy&t=321
0.8% US GDP in 1969 would be about 8B/yr today. Very different answer
Do you know the McMurdo permanent Antarctica base is costing us far more than the dogs, sleds, and tents of Admundsen and Shackleton? Incredible, isn't it?
Starship is “the program to build a permanent base in the moon”. It’s not even the only vehicle involved in the moon program. It’s a rocket designed to take astronauts from moon orbit to the moon’s surface. The astronauts will actually fly to the moon in SLS.
So far it’s proved incapable of being launched, attaining orbit, and returning to earth as designed. That’s without a payload.
It has no life support system built and is literally years behind schedule.
Rather than making progress it is being redesigned on the fly to mitigate fundamental problems with its capability which Musk laughs off as “moving fast and breaking things”.
The problem is we aren’t moving fast at all.
The rocket is a disaster. Saturn V was better by an order of magnitude and likely cheaper if you consider how much fundamental work went into creating it which is now easy to buy off the shelf.
Comparing the programs while ignoring the fact that hobbiest regularly reach the Karman line is deceitful.
Starship is doing this on easy mode and it’s failing.
But this 'easy mode' is still so incredibly hard that nobody else will even attempt it.
I'd love to see some serious competition emerge in the reusable rocket space, but SpaceX is far, far ahead with Falcon 9 being an incredible success, even if the Starship project may be headed for failure. Nobody reports on 100+ successful Falcon 9 launches/landings in a year, those are now mundane. But a small number of Starship failures - test flights of an experimental vehicle - become big news, mostly because they involve spectacular explosions.
It seems that Starship may be too big to 'fail fast', mostly because of the visual spectacle of those failures.
But yeah, I tend to agree that whether it ultimately succeeds or not, blowing Starship up is a "fail fast" strategy because they have the money (and the reputational capital from successful Falcon 9 launches) to learn from their mistakes that way, and not many others do. Much as the waterfall approach of big space projects gets derided, there's a reason entities that can't take the reputational hit of visibly blowing stuff up on a regular basis do it that way...
The program that was paused pending new NASA director, and has burned more money than SpaceX without a single (usable) launch?
I’m making things up out of memory here, but suffice to say SLS does not have my confidence.
How are the astronauts supposed to get on lunar soil on SLS?
One year of Saturn V development cost the same as the entire Starship program so far. One launch cost 20-30x more than the projected cost of a Starship launch.
It is also said that it’s simply impossible to rebuild a Saturn rocket. Not only you can’t “buy components off the shelf” because they simply don’t exist anymore, even if you had all the component blueprints (which we don’t, they were lost to time), the manufacturing know-how is long gone.
Starship was developed from scratch. SpaceX developed their own engines, their flight control surfaces are novel, the rocket structure and materials are novel, the entire approach is different. Yes, our modern electronics industry makes it “easier” but this is like saying Porsche is playing in easy mode because of the Ford Model T.
I propose my own imaginary rocket. It costs $0 but it doesn't exist. Totally beats the Saturn V on cost!
I have much respect to this guys that works in here that really pushing the innovation beyond the limit
reusable rocket is the future if you want permanent present in space, there is no way you throw rocket for only 1 launch
No, OP is comparing a launcher that worked reliably (it's in the history books) with a launcher which never performed a mission and is reporting "anomalies".
Was it required to launch more?
How many moon missions did Starship fulfilled? It seems 50 years ago SaturnV launched 12 times more than Starship.
That's complete nonsense. 10-15 Starship launches would land a lander that can carry like 100tons of payload orbit.
Saturn V landed 15000kg on the moon, but most of that isn't payload.
But of course with Saturn V you are throwing away a rocket that cost 1 billion $ or more per launch.
You are comparing 'thing lands on moon' to 'things lands on moon' without any nuance.
But you are right Apollo was insane in how fast it was done.
So yes, I suppose that is more inefficient, in a way.
Second, SpaceX has consistently shown lower development cost then anybody else. Starship is expensive its likely cheaper then New Glenn.
Remember, Ariane 6, a marginal upgrade over Ariane 5 with only a new upper stage engine cost 6 billion $.
And SpaceX is already at much higher launch rates and manufacturing rates for thing like engines. SpaceX is investing into mass production already.
Which as the person you're replying to is point out isn't really a fair comparison because Starship and Saturn V deliver vastly different amounts of mass to and from the moon despite the mission being only to ferry some people there for a few days.
If Starship ends up flying to the moon it effectively enables the landing of a lunar base that could be occupied for years at a time with sufficient resupply of food and the right equipment for extraction of water/oxygen from the moon.
The Saturn V as amazing as it was could never have brought that much equipment to the moon in a cost effective manner.
also military (space force)
The burning question that I have now is whether a Starship explosion during lunar testing will be visible from Earth. I sure hope they would do it during a new moon too for maximum effect.
The Apollo Program cost a total of $183 billion, inflation adjusted, over 12 years. That's about $15 billion a year. NASA's budget has been for the past 40 years has been $20-$30 billion a year. Even the 'burst funding' wasn't particularly extreme relative to what they now regularly receive. The highest their budget ever was was in 1966 in $57 billion (inflation adjusted) dollars.
To visualize the absurdity of this argument imagine somebody claiming that Uganda funding a space program for $5 billion is receiving some serious financial capital, because that happens to be 10% of their GDP. $5 billion is $5 billion, regardless of your GDP. Ok technically there's PPP calculations, but that doesn't apply to the discussion here.
Obviously percentage of GDP isn't an ideal multiplier for reasons you've mentioned, but then inflation indexed mainly to mass produced common consumer goods tends to significantly underestimate the increase in cost over time of running complex operations involving the world's smartest and most on-demand minds and an almost unfathomably large number of subcontractors. Either way, NASA's overall budget is half that of the 1960s in regular inflation adjusted dollars, and whilst its current research and satellite/ISS maintenance maybe aren't as exciting as the first lunar landing, they're not obviously dramatically lower cost (the %GDP argument gets brought up nearly as often to suggest the Apollo programme wasn't worth it...)
Sat in a lecture theatre with NASA's last chief economist using both metrics earlier this week. Although those slides were looking at cumulative funds spent on Robert Goddard's programme, which was about the size of a largish Series A using the inflation metric or Series B using the GDP adjustment. Whether that's value for money or not depends on whether you're considering being the father of modern rocketry more impressive than sending a handful of moderately complex 16U Cubesats or rideshares or note that the actual rockets were no more sophisticated than some student projects, I guess...
Yet NASA continues to cheerlead for these things. I briefly thought NASA might right their heading under Bridenstine but then at some point he suddenly just did a hard 180. It seems every man has his price. He eventually just turned into another Boeing cheerleader (and his new found rubber stampage is a big part of why that Boeing monstrosity left astronauts stranded on the ISS) and went straight from out of office to a high level advisory gig for some MIC company which is almost certainly just a laundered paycheck.
Also I can assure you no-one at Cariad had to write an MP3 decoder. And speaking of sensor control, my car (on its 4th year now) still fails to unfold the mirrors once in a while.
We also have huge, orders of magnitude advances in tooling and process since mid-1960s. For starters you don't have to weave your program into magnetic core fabric by hand.
(edits:) It's clearly not ideal for a short lunar landing, considered in isolation. But: what else would you do? Whatever you build, it would land on the moon perhaps once, and never again. Would you, being in charge, design a one-off vehicle for one or two moon landings—spend that R&D budget, in that way? That's not cheaper than 15 Starship launches; it's considerably costlier. (But the Apollo engineers didn't need to worry about this; it's was their express remit to spend $200 billion on one-off designs that would never be used again).
And: I hope no one suggests the "just make a unique lunar Starship variant that's simply a bit smaller". There's no "simply" resizing things in engineering. Recall that the last time Starship's length was altered by 2 meters, new mechanical resonances appeared, and it blew up three times in a row. Any "one-off" change for lunar landings is a less-tested, less-understood machine you'd be putting human lives on.
But it would also never land on Mars, so it would be a waste to build it for that. Build it for what it will actually spend its life doing.
Not saying SpaceX won't go to Mars, but if/when they do it will likely be several rocket generations later and possibly with specialized rockets, with a significant portion of it being one-time-use as you ain't returning.
Winching stuff out of said open door seems like a much, much easier task.
The outside door needn't be part of the airlock. It's certainly big enough to have an internal airlock leading to depressurized internal space.
The things that make a door that tests fine on Earth break in orbit are likely to be things that need fixing for a similar door on Mars. They won't be all the same challenges, but some will absolutely be shared.
A hatch with a winch (or two!) seems likely to be one of the smaller ones.
Wouldn't that make the mission unfeasible because it requires ISRU of return fuel?
https://newspaceeconomy.ca/2022/05/27/how-will-spacex-make-r...
That's what happens with most domains. At first people don't know the dangers and can go fast and loose: surgery, radioactive material, planes, cars, trains, rockets. Then people start losing their lives or part of their bodies to "easily preventable accidents". So some rules are enacted. Decade after decade, accident after accident, more rules, more red tape: things cost more, take more time. But you get a lot less victims.
So yeah, with a good budget and in a less strict country you could get something to the moon in no time. And potentially many people' parts all over your launchpads too.
Gas pipework: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR486zloao0
So far in history, we didn't have enough to launch. If the volume we launch increases then a larger rocket flying often is helpful.
We are at the peak of what a rocket the size of Falcon 9 can do. If you want full re-usability, the size helps you out quite a bit.
And hauling the 'orbiter' into 'orbit' is only wasteful if you can't reuse it. I would argue what's actually wasteful is throwing the second stage in the ocean, even when it costs minimum 10million $, and likely more.
The wet (loaded with propellant) to dry (empty of propellant) mass ratio is determined via the rocket equation to be the exponential of delta V divided by exhaust velocity.
Certain parts of the rocket, such as the external tank structure, scale sub-cubically with the rocket's dimension, as do aerodynamic forces; whereas payload and propellant mass scale cubically.
Hence if the rocket is smaller than a critical threshold size, the requisite vehicle structures are too large relative to its propellant capacity to permit the required wet:dry mass ratio to achieve the delta V for orbit.
At exactly this size, the rocket can reach orbit with zero payload.
As the rocket increases in size beyond this threshold, it is able to carry a payload which is increasingly large relative to the rocket's total mass.
(There's a large difference between staged combustion generally and gas-generator engines, which throw away performance by dumping fuel out of the turbine exhaust).
We might imagine a conservative FFSC design which accepts very low temperatures in exchange for making it easy (low R&D cost) to reach high longevity. Raptor is not a conservative design, so it requires more R&D to achieve that longevity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twnZYPdFgbU
I understand vaguely that those operate and scale based on the area (a square function of their length) of their lifting surfaces, and are pulled down by their mass (a cube function of their length).
A little Estes toy rocket lifts off the pad much more aggressively (in the blink of an eye!) than a full size rocket...
However, even if you're taking off of a planet with no atmosphere, you still have a huge force to deal with - you need to maintain an acceleration to exit the gravity well of the planet, and you need to burn fuel for that. But you also have to carry the fuel you'll burn with you, so the more fuel you have, the more fuel you'll need - this is what the rocket equation codifies.
Isn't this the entire point of using methane as fuel so that they can build a gas station once they get there so that return fuel is not required to be considered in this equation?
If you really want to, you can reach Mach 10 (~3300 m/s) with a 8 meter long 3500 kg missile in 5 seconds:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile)
All of that in the lower atmosphere with the missile heat shield glowing white hot. :)
An orbital class rocket--taking that kind of g load is going to break it (just look at the payload specs for the Falcon Heavy--its maximum permitted payload is well below it's performance to low orbit. You load it up to what the engines can do, it breaks. The only use case is when it's going farther than low orbit.) And an orbital class rocket has active steering rather than fins, it doesn't need to be booking it to be stable.
> Our satellite launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California (USA) on Jan 14, 2025. The rocket mission is a Transporter, and SAT GUS was dropped off in low-Earth orbit at about 375 miles above the surface of our pale blue dot.
https://space.crunchlabs.com/
So there's some sort of curve, zero at both ends, between overall rocket size and the payload to orbit. The question is where Starship sits on that curve, and to your point it seems likely that it's looking good on that metric alone.
But then you have another curve that I think starts small and increases near-monotonically, which is the complexity/likelihood-to-fail factor to the size of the rocket. It's (relatively) easy to launch a toy rocket, (fairly) simple to build a missile-sized sub-orbital rocket, difficult to build a small-to-medium orbital rocket, and apparently very difficult to build a Saturn/N-1/Starship-sized rocket. More props to the crazy '60s team that pulled it off.
This doesn't follow. Engineering complexity is not a limit on payload to orbit, it is a fundamentally different parameter. Yeah building a mile tall rocket would be hard, but it would get a shit ton of payload to orbit. There is no maximum beyond which making a bigger rocket starts to reduce your payload to orbit.
> But then you have another curve that I think starts small and increases near-monotonically, which is the complexity/likelihood-to-fail factor to the size of the rocket. It's (relatively) easy to launch a toy rocket, (fairly) simple to build a missile-sized sub-orbital rocket, difficult to build a small-to-medium orbital rocket, and apparently very difficult to build a Saturn/N-1/Starship-sized rocket.
Complexity does not increase with size, people just become more risk averse with size. Toy rockets fail all the time, just nobody really cares. No one would bet the lives of multiple people and hundreds of millions of dollars on a successful toy rocket launch. If complexity increases, it is with capability. If you want to land on the moon, you need something a bit more advanced than a hobby rocket. There is no reason to believe a floatilla of physically smaller rockets capable of achieving any given mission will be less complex in aggregate than a single physically larger rocket.
> This doesn't follow. Engineering complexity is not a limit on payload to orbit
At this point I'm merely talking about size (which I think is clear from the words I use. I don't think "building a mile tall rocket would be hard" adequately describes the difficulty when we haven't even built a mile tall building.
Sea Dragon[1] was only envisioned as 490 feet tall, and as near as I can tell even the Super Orion[2] would only have been 400-600 meters tall. And of course, neither of those was even close to implementation. Therefore I stand by my statement that a mile tall rocket is, for all practical purposes, impossible, and thus has a payload to orbit of zero. If you disagree then add a zero -- surely you agree we can't build a ten-mile-tall rocket?
As far as complexity, I'm not sure what to say. Toy rockets might fail all the time, but the point was complexity, and a toy rocket can be constructed from under a dozen parts. Even larger model rockets have at most a few dozen to a few hundred parts. The part count of the Falcon 9 has to number in the thousands, if not tens of thousands (9 merlin engines with at least several hundred parts each?).
To be clear, I agree with you that complexity increases with capability.
But also, to push back a bit, I don't think complexity aggregates the way you're saying it does. A box of hammers is not more complex than a nailgun, even if it has more parts in total.
I was assuming you were using a comical example to illustrate a "nightmare to engineer." The comparison to a building doesn't actually work at all. The practical limitation on how high we can build buildings is how fast we can make elevators. Just making something tall is not a problem.
> Sea Dragon[1] was only envisioned as 490 feet tall, and as near as I can tell even the Super Orion[2] would only have been 400-600 meters tall. And of course, neither of those was even close to implementation. Therefore I stand by my statement that a mile tall rocket is, for all practical purposes, impossible
First, the optimal design for a rocket is not to just keep making it taller, and second, size was not the obstacle to either of these projects not being built. That does not at all prove that it is impossible. What kind of world would we be living in we presumed anything that hadn't already been actively pursued was impossible?
> and thus has a payload to orbit of zero.
My point was that this does not equate to a payload of zero. Surely you wouldn't argue that the weight of this mile high rocket is zero, and therefore that there is some curve for the weight of rockets where making the rockets larger starts to make them lighter. Just as we can calculate the weight for something without actually building it, so too can we calculate the payload, and it can increase far beyond anything we can actually implement.
> If you disagree then add a zero -- surely you agree we can't build a ten-mile-tall rocket?
I agree it would be impractical, but not that it would be so non-physical that we couldn't calculate what its payload capacity would be were it to be built.
> Toy rockets might fail all the time, but the point was complexity, and a toy rocket can be constructed from under a dozen parts. Even larger model rockets have at most a few dozen to a few hundred parts. The part count of the Falcon 9 has to number in the thousands, if not tens of thousands (9 merlin engines with at least several hundred parts each?).
Falcon 9 is a liquid rocket designed to take people into space. That is the source of its part count. You could scale up a solid rocket motor to an arbitrarily large size while keeping the parts count exactly the same. It's probably not the optimal way to make a solid rocket of that size, and you'd be missing out on a lot of capabilities that are important for a real rocket, but if you just wanted a toy no more capable than what you buy in a hobby store it would be no more complicated. Conversely, try to make a fully functional falcon 9 complete with 9 working liquid rocket engines small enough to hoverslam on your desk and you have an immense engineering challenge on your hands.
> But also, to push back a bit, I don't think complexity aggregates the way you're saying it does. A box of hammers is not more complex than a nailgun, even if it has more parts in total.
I concur that part count is not the same as complexity, but that point is in my favor. Making something bigger is like adding hammers to a box of hammers. The quantity goes up, and at some point you're going to need to make some improvements to the box if you want to keep adding more hammers, but conceptually it is simple. Making something more capable, like a nail-gun, is much harder.
> the entire program regresses in on itself in terms of milestones.
The alternative would be looking at the competing programs from Boeing, Blue Origin, etc. It's not like they are hitting their milestones particularly well with their more traditional waterfall approach. The point of rapid iteration is that it is an inherently open ended process that has no milestones other than to launch the next iteration within weeks/months of the previous one. Which they have been doing fairly consistently.
If SpaceX gets starship in a launcheable and recoverable state, they'll still have many years of competing against competitors that have to rely on single launch vehicles exclusively. They would be very early to market. And there's a decent chance they might start nailing things with a few more launches.
Now they have regressed to blowing up on the pad during static testing.
Seems very different to me than the Falcon story, 100%. Granted, they had luck too.
I'm surprised that people are losing their minds over a few explosions as if the US government didn't blow up hundreds of rockets in order to get a working product.
The risk angle is that this isn't about national security or a government enterprise. This is commercial - you can't spend your money if you're dead.
How can you be confident that, given the circumstance, their lower-cost competitor, the one pushing iterative startup style move fast approach, has the same extensive safety checks AND had zero hardware bugs in 10 or so years?
Which one do you think the astronauts want to ride on?
I don't want to listen to the maddening tic tic tic tic tic sound[1] on Dragon doing best it can to deorbit by mashing H key, or experience human excrement contamination problem[2] caused by toilet system becoming autonomously unassembled. Soyuz with intact main engines don't seem to have those kinds of problems[3], only spinal injury risks in ballistic modes.
Dragon V2 is a Tesla rocket, after all. In hindsight, why would have it not been one, and how could have it ever been a good thing? Sure, Starliner practically died and rebooted during docking with the ISS, which is surely extremely dangerous, but when it comes to Dragon V2, they had proper kaboom during ground testing.
Tell me, which human spacecraft in past 20 years had a full on explosion, and why should I want to be on it?
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADFlgu-3GgU
2: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/01/tech/spacex-crew-dragon-t...
3: https://youtu.be/fr_hXLDLc38?t=298
Starship = regressing every flight.
This isn't hard to parse man.
Is Blue Origin following waterfall? Why would the founder of Amazon follow the polar opposite strategy of the rest of his businesses?
But there seems to be a lot of progress in reusable launcher development outside the US, mainly in China and apparently also among Japanese car manufacturers!
The thing detonated from the top down... that was spectacular. Anomaly doesn't really describe that very well.
https://youtu.be/0C_L-qgHsE0?t=299
(It'll still be fucked, I just wouldn't expect a crater?)
Still, there was probably more energy stored in the Starship propelants than in the Falcon 9 case.
The linked tweet literally says "it blew up", though. "Anomaly" is just a word used in rocket science lingo that makes for a funnier headline.
Well…
This is a _very_ off-nominal outcome and the investigation will absolutely involve outside organizations and halting the program during the investigation until the investigation completes with a sufficient determination of faults and accompanying remediation plans.
Delta 2 rocket exploded during launch, raining flaming debris everywhere and the announcer says we had an anomaly