SpaceX is preparing for Starship’s 13th test flight. Starship is still experiencing issues during ascent and has yet to successfully launch anything from orbit. This test flight will only be sub-orbital.
Is Starship’s design flawed? Is it too heavy to achieve its goals? Rocket development is notoriously time-consuming, but SpaceX promised it had cracked that code.
NASA selected SpaceX’s Starship Human Landing System (HLS) to transport astronauts from lunar orbit down to the Moon and back. Starship had a tremendous set of goals to achieve before taking on the Moon. Including mastering space-based & lunar refuelling & becoming a crew-capable craft that can land on the Moon, refuel there, and take off again with people on board.
Does any of this have any chance of happening soon if Starship is more fundamentally flawed and cannot reliably reach orbit with cargo?
SpaceX’s 1st Starship test flight since going public is set to launch
@Lugh
Yet how much is space x worth? What a joke of a company. LolPathetic.
This will be a great episode of the Swindled podcast.
The only reason these test flights aren’t reaching orbit is because they’re actively aiming for a suborbital trajectory. They’re not “yet to successfully launch anything from orbit”, they’re yet to want to go to orbit in the first place. The difference between what they get and an actual orbit is minute, relatively speaking. They’ve amply demonstrated that if orbit was what they wanted, they’d be there with every flight.
They’re sticking with suborbital flights for now because they still have things to work on to make it more reliable, but none of them are “the rocket’s too heavy”
Well they also aren’t aiming for orbit because they are legally not allowed to do so. Their flight license only allows for suborbital until they can show they can reliably control the craft until touchdown. They don’t want something up in orbit that might come down at any random place. With a suborbital path, even if they lose control early (which they have done a couple of times) the crash path will be known. Obviously they select a trajectory with a minimal chance of hitting anything.
Once they show the craft can be controlled reliably, they will get a flight clearance for an orbital attempt. The booster has plenty of delta-V, so no doubt in my mind something will make it up into orbit. No telling what state the ship might be in once it gets there tho and if they can get it down in one piece and on target.
The development plan they chose is especially difficult, because they are changing stuff all the time. This makes it very hard to prove the thing is actually reliable. With a dozen critical changes that might kill the entire vehicle at any time, I expect getting a license would be pretty hard. However with the huge amounts of de-regulation and corruption going on these days, I’m sure Musk will get his license if he wants it.
Right now they’re trying to get the best shield good enough, that and make engines that keep working and don’t explode
Also they are making larger changes each flight, intruding new problems as they fix others
The upcoming flight test is expected to perform a stage 2 engine relight to prove it can deorbit itself, it wasn’t able to prove that last test flight as stage 1 didn’t deliver enough energy so stage 2 spent too much propellant and didn’t have enough spare for the relight
How many other rockets have needed more than a dozen sob-orbital flights to work out all of the issues?
How about falcon 9? That was flying for years before it worked properly. The only reason it didn’t get the same criticism as starship is that they were using it to actually launch payloads during that time.
Starship can’t get away with that because the upper stage is big enough they can’t be careless about letting it drift back to earth, they have to be in control, but it’s not actually taking more time than falcon 9 did.
Meanwhile falcon 9 is now the most successful and reliable rocket in human history, so criticisms you can level at spacex, you can’t claim their approach doesn’t work
the only reason it didn’t get the same criticism as starship is that they were using it to actually launch payloads during that time.
And that’s a very valid reason. Falcon 9 was accomplishing things even when it wasn’t fully reusable. If instead of Starship they had a second stage rocket with some heat tiles and it was deploying payloads, it would be fine. If the first stage and second stages weren’t reliable in terms of being re-used they’d still be making progress in the space program as long was reliably getting payloads into orbit.
The problem with Starship is it’s trying to be a big cargo carrying reusable human rated spacecraft. It’s a shittier version of the space shuttle. The space shuttle wasn’t a good idea, we should’ve learned this. Making a shittier version of the space shuttle is obviously a bad idea.
They already have a way to get humans into space with the Falcon 9 / Dragon system. So why are they trying to build a human rated super-heavy launch system?
Remove the human rated requirement, build a second stage with heat tiles. If the heat tiles fail on your second stage, you lose that, but not the payload. You’re losing money, but nobody dies and you’re still successfully launching payloads into space. Get a moon lander, an Orion capsule, and a rocket with enough fuel to get to the moon and back into space. Once you have the stuff you need for a moon mission up in space, send a Dragon up on a Falcon 9 with people on it.
Trying to build a super-heavy cargo carrier that’s also human rated is just dumb. Remove the human rated requirement and just build a launch system that can get large payloads into space. The Starship thing is all about Elon Musk’s ego and wanting to have something like in science fiction where you have a ship that you give a name and you can take that spaceship around wherever you want to go. Elon Musk and his fanbase don’t want to admit it was a dumb idea and kill the whole Starship idea.
Currently the US space program is blocked from getting heavy payloads into space until SpaceX can make a dumb idea work. It’s the space shuttle program all over again.
Yeah, fuck making money sending shit into space for a profit.
All the best businesses pursue billions in debt to work out problems their competitors don’t have.
Dont worry though, after the initial capital burn of a few trillion, and the half a billion that Elon steals from the company each year they’ll make that money back after just a few decades. Maybe.
I guess one thing we can be sure of is that Elon will make a ton of money before space x goes under, or gets bought out.
NASA is gonna have to rescue it. Unless maga goons are still in charge in which case they’ll just keep subsidizing it.
Basically anyone who is going ‘omg starship is a failure’ really has zero understanding of what’s going on.
they’re actively aiming for a suborbital trajectory.
Or because they can’t?
Musk was 80% confident this issue would be fixed by test flight 3 back in 2023.
On March 17, 2023 -“So I think we’ve got, hopefully, about an 80% chance of reaching orbit this year,” Musk said on March 7 during an interview at the Morgan Stanley Conference. “It’ll probably take us a couple more years to achieve full and rapid reusability.”
He also said tesla will be a fully auto pilot in 2018, and that we should have datacenters in space…
Fuck musk. But gwynne knows what she’s doing
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What was it that Nazi said again? That they would be on the Moon by the end of 2024? Going great…
First he build a flying tesla by 2016 and then go to the moon by 2024? That man is truly one of a kind.
Elon is a sleazy salesman who somehow keeps getting away.
I’m sure they will be able to get it into orbit at some point. The issue is they need to do ~10 successful launches of this thing to be able to get enough fuel into orbit to get it to the Moon. They haven’t been able to pull off one successful launch to orbit yet.
So the problem isn’t weight in regards to getting to orbit. But weight is a problem for getting this thing to the Moon. Making a 100% reusable spacecraft of this size seems to be difficult to make reliable.
Why is it so important to have a 100% reusable spacecraft when you’ve lost more than a dozen of those “reusable” spacecraft while trying to make it work? If they just sent up a dedicated moon lander, and Orion capsule, and a disposable booster, would that it have been any worse to have disposed of those things a dozen times and actually had a dozen moon landings? Or is it better to dispose of a dozen spacecraft (and counting) in an attempt to make a reusable spacecraft… some day… maybe.
I think we’re deep in the sunk cost fallacy now. They have had so many failures (which they’ve characterized as successes) and spent so much money, and have NASA’s planing based around this thing working, that they can’t even consider that this may be a bad idea.
Why is it so important to have a 100% reusable spacecraft when you’ve lost more than a dozen of those “reusable” spacecraft while trying to make it work?
Seriously?
You don’t understand why having a fully reusable rocket would be useful, even if it takes awhile to figure out?
Whether NASA should rely on it for the moon at this phase is an entirely separate matter, but humanity figuring out a fully reusable rocket is paramount to any proper space exploration. 12 launches to the moon isn’t going to cut it, we’ve sent hundreds to the ISS alone.
Also, this is the 3rd version of Starship/Super Heavy.
The first version after a few tries was successfully going up and down and landing where they wanted.
The second version (essentially a new rocket) took a few extra tries, but was also mostly successful in that sense.
This 3rd version (also a essentially new rocket) has all the improvements they’ve learned from the prior two and should be the one they start doing real work with.
They even caught and relaunched one of the boosters on their first attempt, but now they’re toying around with different descent patterns and burn patterns to eek out every extra % of performance that they can.
That’s not the kind of thing you care about when it’s disposable. Does it go up and deliver the payload? Yes? Done. Not, how much performance can we optimize out of this thing before we finalize it and start building thousands of them.
Edit: Just an example of performance gains - SpaceX successfully did hot staging numerous times with the booster being able to land exactly where they wanted. Then they were like, what if we can coax the booster (the size of a sky scraper building) to flip a certain way during hot staging, so we use less fuel overall getting it in the right position after separation? They’ve only tried this 2-3 times now, with it working at least once (can’t remember if it was bad/good/bad or good/bad) but on the last v3 launch it had issues, which they will fix. Did they have to do this? No, what they did for multiple prior launches was working just fine, but because they are trying this out, they will be able to launch more payload per launch now.
Thank you for adding this perspective to the thread.
np, I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding of what they’re trying to do, and how they’re going about it. By no means am I saying they will be successful either, they got a lot of work still ahead of them and some very difficult problems.
I also hink this picture is a great picture as well that showcases it on just one part of the ship
Raptor 1: Works, may have been as far as NASA ever went for the entire moon project if they were in control.
Raptor 2: Okay we’ve figured out how to optimize some things, lets see how this works and get more data
Raptor 3: Okay we should be able to cost effectively mass produce this version after we work out the kinks. (edit: also the jump from 2 -> 3 was them doing 3d printing to make those tubes/channels in the structure to make it more reliable and easier to manufacture. It’s not like all that plumbing wasn’t needed)
Internet: They keep having engine problems, Starship is broken!
Edit: For reference, the RS-25 engine that SLS is using, and how the engine works is less complex than the Raptor engine which is the first ever flown full-flow staged-combustion rocket engine. The optimized v3 Raptor engine meanwhile has about 2.25x the thrust/weight capabilities
Maybe we just stop this shit? Lets at least expend fuel on launching useful science satellites and telescopes, instead of for-profit projects for billionaires.
why would anybody do r&d that sounds stupid, just build something that already works.
