What's Next for SpaceX's Starship? (thestreet.com) 104
The Street interviewed Chad Anderson, founder/managing partner of the "space economy" investment firm Space Capital, who calls SpaceX's progress "unprecedented," and believes their next launch could carry "operational" payloads like Starlink satellites.
Anderson added that Starship reaching orbital velocity and reentering the atmosphere at those speeds (roughly 16,000 miles per hour) was "a really big deal," though it's specifically important for the reusability of the vehicle, which would further cheapen the cost of launch.
"The fact that they did all those things and they can now move into operations as an investor is hugely important and significant," Anderson said. "Having an operational Starship vehicle is really important because, at the moment, they just can't launch Starlink satellites fast enough. Starship is going to be able to launch 10 times more than Falcon 9 can, and that's really important...."
The ship is so big that, according to Anderson, Starship could conceivably serve as a space station, or a hotel, or a manufacturing facility. There is also the potential of Starship actually competing with commercial airlines, flying, for example, from New York to Shanghai in 45 minutes.
Clayton Swope, senior fellow at CSIS, also believes Starship could be used for "last-mile delivery... where you could move something in less than an hour, anywhere from a point on Earth to another point on Earth, and you're just kind of using space as that transit point."
There's also defense applications. Defense One notes the U.S. Defense Department uses SpaceX to launch most of its satellites. "With a payload capacity of 100 to 150 tons, Starship could carry a bunch of satellites simultaneously and increase the Space Force's launch rate as it builds out a network of hundreds of satellites in low-Earth orbit." Once Starship is operational, it will be able to put things into higher orbits, which is key for the Pentagon's push to operate in the cislunar environment, the area between the geosynchronous orbit and the moon. "The Chinese have already begun cislunar operations and have put vehicles on the far side of the moon, which is something the U.S. doesn't really have the ability to do right now," said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
However, the advantage the U.S. will get with Starship "won't last forever," and it will take years to build satellites specifically designed to take advantage of the rocket's payload capacity, said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. "At this rate, they will have Starship operational this year. We need payloads to go on that, if we're actually going to take advantage of it during this window of opportunity when it's a capability only we have. If you want those payloads available next year, you needed to start building them five years ago," Harrison said.
Starship could be used to put very large objects into space, such as fuel barges or energy stations, at a reasonable cost. "You could use this to put up an orbital bus that you can then put on and remove payloads from, so you can have a satellite on orbit that's basically a large docking station," Clark said... "[I]t could be a way to do that kind of thing where you establish essentially an unmanned, little space station that can carry various payloads."
"The fact that they did all those things and they can now move into operations as an investor is hugely important and significant," Anderson said. "Having an operational Starship vehicle is really important because, at the moment, they just can't launch Starlink satellites fast enough. Starship is going to be able to launch 10 times more than Falcon 9 can, and that's really important...."
The ship is so big that, according to Anderson, Starship could conceivably serve as a space station, or a hotel, or a manufacturing facility. There is also the potential of Starship actually competing with commercial airlines, flying, for example, from New York to Shanghai in 45 minutes.
Clayton Swope, senior fellow at CSIS, also believes Starship could be used for "last-mile delivery... where you could move something in less than an hour, anywhere from a point on Earth to another point on Earth, and you're just kind of using space as that transit point."
There's also defense applications. Defense One notes the U.S. Defense Department uses SpaceX to launch most of its satellites. "With a payload capacity of 100 to 150 tons, Starship could carry a bunch of satellites simultaneously and increase the Space Force's launch rate as it builds out a network of hundreds of satellites in low-Earth orbit." Once Starship is operational, it will be able to put things into higher orbits, which is key for the Pentagon's push to operate in the cislunar environment, the area between the geosynchronous orbit and the moon. "The Chinese have already begun cislunar operations and have put vehicles on the far side of the moon, which is something the U.S. doesn't really have the ability to do right now," said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
However, the advantage the U.S. will get with Starship "won't last forever," and it will take years to build satellites specifically designed to take advantage of the rocket's payload capacity, said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. "At this rate, they will have Starship operational this year. We need payloads to go on that, if we're actually going to take advantage of it during this window of opportunity when it's a capability only we have. If you want those payloads available next year, you needed to start building them five years ago," Harrison said.
Starship could be used to put very large objects into space, such as fuel barges or energy stations, at a reasonable cost. "You could use this to put up an orbital bus that you can then put on and remove payloads from, so you can have a satellite on orbit that's basically a large docking station," Clark said... "[I]t could be a way to do that kind of thing where you establish essentially an unmanned, little space station that can carry various payloads."
It's almost hard to imagine what it really means (Score:5, Insightful)
We've never lived in a world where bulk payloads will be so cheap to send into space. The following to that is maybe some things for space can be less well engineered if you can have a thousand of them on hand. Or shielding doens't need to be so high tech because now you can use pure dumb mass as an option.
Or a world where literally anywhere on Earth is essentially as reachable as any other. Where maybe property out in the middle of a dry arid desert is more desirable because it is so reachable yet remote.
It opens up an amazing array of possibilities, and is so useful you can be sure it will be used.
Finally humanity is back on track for the future the space race initially promised.
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Exactly. What I would advocate for and hope to see is a renaissance of the era of 60-70's planetary science where we can design planetary orbiters with more mass, more energy and more capability on some sort of standard platform and just start slinging them out into orbit around our solar system. Imagine an orbiter around almost every planet, operating for a decade plus.
Investigating all of Jupiter and Saturn's moons for life science, doing long term studies on Uranus and Neptune (including Triton which m
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All with enough Delta-V to put these on something much much closer to direct insertion trajectories, no more 10-year slingshots.
Exactly! With so much greater ability to send mass into space at a fraction of today's cost, it completely re-works what is possible with interplanetary science and even as you note the timelines for scientific payloads to other planets or elsewhere in the solar system!
You have to wonder how many groups have planned for Starship to work on and have been working on larger mass payl
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I know that "official" policy is you can't be putting paid research time into a platform that really doesn't exist yet but I really have to imagine folks at JPL and Goddard are looking at old plans and ideas that were scrapped due to impracticality and have a running list of potential operations to pursue once it is.
I think once Starship gets a few successful orbits under it's belt we can start to see some NASA budget go towards these projects.
Something like JIMO [wikipedia.org] suddenly looks within possibility.
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These will be the real workhorses for deep space missions, although imo they will need to assembled in orbit
NASA, DARPA Will Test Nuclear Engine for Future Mars Missions [nasa.gov]
TLDR:
"The ability to accomplish leap-ahead advances in space technology through the DRACO nuclear thermal rocket [wikipedia.org] program will be essential for more efficiently and quickly transporting material to the Moon and eventually, people to Mars.”
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YES! Nuclear reactors in space! It is time!
Such an exciting development and something like Starship means such a reactor does not in fact have to be cut to absolute bones to fit in a fairing envelope or hit weight limits even if we don't use in orbit assembly (although that will be totally rad)
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Depending on how much you can control NIMBY fear, you could just have the whole second stage be nuclear. In this test flight, separation was at 73km altitude and 5660 m/s (overwhelmingly horizontal). You could get a much higher separation altitude if you wanted if you chose a less optimal trajectory. Straight up would IMHO be ~1700km apogee, though obviously you would want *some* horizontal so that any accident means the wreckage lands far offshore.
At high altitudes, it doesn't matter even if you spew
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Note that if it's nuclear thermal, however, you'll need to rethink your tanks. Nuclear thermal basically has to be hydrogen. You're limited by the temperature off your reactor, and the amount of thrust you get from a given temperature is inversely proportional to the atomic mass of the propellant. The downside is a poor thrust to weight ratio (although it's significantly improved since the days of NERVA). But yeah... your fuel needs to be hydrogen, and that means tankage changes.
Note that one could also
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And that's the thing. Probe launches today, because launch costs are so expensive, are mainly designed as one-offs made of unobtanium. If you get launch costs cheap, a given budget simultaneously means you get to stop building out of unobtanium, *and* gain the advantages of mass production, which themselves further lower your costs.
We're - I dearly hope - going to get to the point where we're going to end up with a series of standardized designs for different types of roles, and just churn those out en ma
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Given how bad SpaceX has made naysayers (including blowhards like Neil DeGrasse Tyson) look over the last ten years, the odds are good that the company she leads on a day-to-day basis to continue making punks out of them and you.
Not really (Score:1)
You have been able to reach anywhere on Earth since decades ago
Not realistically, the way you can with a point-to-point spacecraft.
You can reach anywhere on Earth, yes, but not without significant airplane or road infrastructure are also a LOT of time in generally small, uncomfortable, and kind of unsafe craft.
Once Starship is really worked out, the per-hour safety levels will be off the chart compared to planes, small planes especially.
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Where to even start with this?
1) Liquid oxygen is dirt cheap. Generally numbers of $0,10-$0,20/kg are cited for large volumes (the DoD pays $0,27/kg, but well, that's the DoD, and current volumes aren't that great). The energy cost at current US electricity prices is $0,08/kg.
2) Methane is a cheaper, more abundant, easier to manufacture,
Re: It's almost hard to imagine what it really mea (Score:2)
These new rockets burn methane⦠their output is water.
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These new rockets burn methane⦠their output is water
And carbon dioxide.
However, considering that we currently put 35 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in the air per year, the added emissions of even a thousand starship launches is trivial.
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the added emissions of even a thousand starship launches is trivial.
Yeah everything is trivial in the scale of 35 billion tonnes. That's why I roll coal. There's no point in ceasing any optional activity because it's nothing compared to 35 billion tonnes. /s
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These new rockets burn methane⦠their output is water.
Wow. Tell us you failed highschool chemistry without telling us you failed highschool chemistry. Here have a introduction to chemistry question that an average 15 year old gets asked to solve: Fill in the blank: CH4 + 2.O2 -> 2.H2O + ____
And that's before we talk about your understanding of what it means for combustion to be "complete" and how rockets engines fail miserably at it since they prioritise thrust.
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The question is how low?
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Or a world where literally anywhere on Earth is essentially as reachable as any other.
With sufficient money. Starship is cheap... as rocket launches define the word cheap.
Where maybe property out in the middle of a dry arid desert is more desirable because it is so reachable yet remote.
The middle of dry arid deserts are undesirable because there's no water, not because they're hard to get to.
Water is not so hard really. (Score:1)
The middle of dry arid deserts are undesirable because there's no water, not because they're hard to get to.
That depends very much on how much water you need, there is always SOME water...
But occasional 100 ton supply drops of water via Starship would probably supply a small community water for a while.
Just maybe don't have lawns.
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The middle of dry arid deserts are undesirable because there's no water, not because they're hard to get to.
That depends very much on how much water you need, there is always SOME water...
The average American family uses more than 300 gallons of water per day at home.
But occasional 100 ton supply drops of water via Starship would probably supply a small community water for a while.
100 tons is 240,000 gallons, so that's one household for a little over 2 years. Currently Starship launches are quoted at a hundred million dollars, but Musk says that it could cost as little as "$10 million per launch within a few years". So, supplying water for a single household would be just under five million dollars a year... not counting the price of refueling the Starship and flying it back to base.
Just maybe don't have lawns.
Or toilets.
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If sanitary facilities are needed, but the water supply is very limited, you can always use composting toilets [wikipedia.org] to deal with the waste products.
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Or toilets. If sanitary facilities are needed, but the water supply is very limited, you can always use composting toilets to deal with the waste products.
If sanitary facilities are needed and the water supply is very limited, people who have a choice of where to live live somewhere else.
Nope. It really does not (Score:2)
But it gets worse. While 1 company has the lowest costs to space, all of the other companies are doing their utmost to drive their profit margins on space way up. And I mean from 50% up to several magnitudes. The space stations like Axiom, Orbital Reef, or Space Labs? HORRIBLE. Getting billions from NASA and building the smallest possible systems going. These are jokes.
Then you hav
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We've never lived in a world where bulk payloads will be so cheap to send into space.
And we aren't living in one yet. SpaceX with its actually reusable boosters has gotten launch costs down to new lows, $1500/kg is the lowest price now available. Cheap for space launch, but not really cheap yet.
Notice that Starship is no where close to being recoverable at this point. So far it is a one use booster, same as the bad old days of space flight. The current estimate for the cost of the three launch program thus far is around $3 billion, or a billion dollars per launch. It is likely that the incr
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Finally humanity is back on track for the future the space race initially promised.
The upcoming economic collapse and subsequent wars are going to be a real surprise for you then? Ukraine and Gaza are not happening in a vacuum and have reason for being the way they are. Things are getting desperate for many people and it is rubbing off on society in general.
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True. We don't even know what to do with it.
Yes, there are Mars plans, which may or may not materialize soon. However in the meantime, the interior volume is literally as big as the International Space Station itself. Instead of sending 3 to 5 astronauts at a time to the existing ISS, we can furnish one Starship for a 6 months extended mission and carry all the science from scratch. And this is only scratching the surface (pun intended).
I am really looking forward to what the near future will bring in terms
First (Score:2)
Might want to try having one or two successful flights first. "Design by test" only works if you actually do the tests.
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The "going fast up into space" part worked, it was just the "slowing down before the water" and "coming out of space" parts that had some issues. Not a problem if you want to stay up in space
Re:First (Score:5, Interesting)
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By standards of every other launch provider, this was a 100% successful flight.
People seem to have selective memories, and wildly different definitions of "success". They forget that 57 years ago, the very first launch of the Saturn V had a nearly perfect flight and accomplished all of its objectives, including putting the CSM payload in orbit, refiring the S-IVB stage in space, and successfully returning the CM to earth 8.6 nm from the target landing site.
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SpaceX's progress on Super Heavy & Starship is nothing short of breathtaking. They aren't a distributed coalition of the biggest aerospace contractors with an unlimited budget and the might of a motiva
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SpaceX progress on Superheavy and Starship has been pathetic, one step up from a bunch of guys lighting fuses and running away. They are trying to do something difficult. But ignoring almost everything that has been learned to date over the last 70+ years, and bragging about it, while they have failure after failure after failure that even the most rudimentary understanding of the business could have easily avoided, is ridiculous.
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SpaceX progress on Superheavy and Starship has been pathetic, one step up from a bunch of guys lighting fuses and running away. They are trying to do something difficult. But ignoring almost everything that has been learned to date over the last 70+ years, and bragging about it, while they have failure after failure after failure that even the most rudimentary understanding of the business could have easily avoided, is ridiculous.
If you want pathethic try SLS. 23.8 billion to develop, over 2 billion per launch. Starship costs 1 million per unit, so how many they need to blow up to even rise to 1/100 of the trainwreck that SLS is?
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SpaceX progress on Superheavy and Starship has been pathetic, one step up from a bunch of guys lighting fuses and running away.
That sounds a lot more like your posting history on Slashdot than anything SpaceX related... SpaceX has simply gone from massive success after success, from the Falcon 9 recovery and relaunch rates (and mechanism), to crewed ISS missions, to massive leaps in Starship test runs (and the fact it even works!).
SpaceX may be the most success, and important, company on Earth at this poi
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But ignoring almost everything that has been learned to date over the last 70+ years
What exactly has been learned in the last 70+ years about launching a 5000 tonne launch vehicle with almost 40 methalox full-flow staged combustion engines? Could you enlighten us on that matter?
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By standards of every other launch provider, this was a 100% successful flight.
People seem to have selective memories, and wildly different definitions of "success". They forget that 57 years ago, the very first launch of the Saturn V had a nearly perfect flight and accomplished all of its objectives, including putting the CSM payload in orbit, refiring the S-IVB stage in space, and successfully returning the CM to earth 8.6 nm from the target landing site.
And you forget that the next launch was a failure from a mission objective standpoint and was nearly catastrophic.
On the Apollo 6 the booster made it to orbit and did not destroy the vehicle nor the payload. Despite the pogo, the launch was successful.
Restart in orbit did not happen, so the trans-lunar mission objective was not achieved. But then, Starship's third launch also failed to restart in orbit, so you can't say they're doing better.
Shuttle had 25 launches before a loss-of-vehicle failure. Delta-IV had no loss-of-vehicle failures on 40 launches; Atlas-V loss-of-vehicle failures on 99 launches. So far Starship
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"By standards of every other launch provider, this was a 100% successful flight."
NASA could not afford an public relations shortcomings given the Cold War jingoism that surrounded the 60s "space race", so every launch that didn't actually result in an explosion or dead astronauts was crowned as a victory of democracy over those dirty Reds. Even Apollo 13 was cast into a heroic triumph (which it was for the people who had to recover from the disaster--and which it wasn't for the
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...
Everyone interested in this topic would do well to read Richard Feynman's brilliant analysis during the Challenger inquiry: https://www.nasa.gov/history/r... [nasa.gov]
But it's also worth paying attention to Chuck Yeager's minority opinion on the report, summarized as: "Our task was to find the source of the failure, and recommend a corrective measure. We found it: launching in cold temperature caused the failure. Implement a new rule, "don't launch when it's cold", and resume flights tomorrow."
This was the 1950s and early 60s approach, and is essentially the current SpaceX approach.
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Feynman correctly and thoroughly skewered NASA and contractor management culture. SpaceX seems to be following Feynman's advice and testing the hell out of the integrated system, including to its destructive limits, and gathering quantities of data unimaginable during the Apollo and Shuttl
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Re:First (Score:5, Insightful)
And Vulcan just had a perfect first launch. Yes, it's very possible to do Rocket development on a "Must be Perfect" plan - but it also means you can't do much new and untested, and the simulations and small-scale tests you have to do first cost ridiculous amounts.
SpaceX has chosen a different path - a path whose #1 goal is creating CHEAP launch capability, not just launch capability. SpaceX has built and scrapped more boosters than they've launched as they work on the production process and making the boosters CHEAP. Their goal is to launch 6 times this year, which is a lot easier when the hardware is cheap than when it's expensive. As I write, they have three more ready/nearly ready to launch, and at least three more under construction.
Starship, on the other hand, has had a lot more iterations built and tested - it's more complex that the booster, and expected to do more. The last launch was Starship #28, most of the previous versions having been scrapped as the develop their manufacturing processes.
Heck, they've even scrapped ships #33, 34, 35 and started on 36 and 37, because they didn't believe they'd learn anything from 33-35.
SpaceX has gone into their testing phase with the expectation that things are going to fail, and explode. They feel that they'll make the fastest progress in a hardware-rich environment where they can launch early and often, learn from real launches and not just simulations, and use the launches as part of their manufacturing development. Perhaps they are wrong, perhaps building rockets one-at-a-time that can't be allowed to fail, is the fastest and most reliable way to build new rocket technologies. ULA, Blue Origin, Boeing and Arianespace are certainly taking this approach in the West, so there's no shortage of companies trying to make you happy. In a year or two, we'll see whose approach appears to be working best - ULA's Vulcan Centaur launched in Jan 2024, with six more flights scheduled for this year and seven in 2025; that's a ridiculous but also awe-inspiring schedule, and more power to them if they make it. Aerojet Rocketdyne and Boeing's SLS launched in 2022, with the next launch scheduled in 2025 - that's a ridiculous and awe-inspiring schedule also, but in a different sense. Ariane 6 is scheduled to fly this year.
So, I guess in summary there's plenty of launchers in process that follow the approach you seem to prefer. I'm excited about SpaceX because they're doing it differently - out in the open, with an experimental approach, and an end goal vastly different than anyone has successfully had in space travel. Maybe they'll fail; or maybe in 5 years I'll be planning my next vacation trip to Australia on a regularly scheduled Space Liner and getting there in 30 minutes rather than 14 hours. Or, maybe, I'll be watching watching a SpaceX vehicle landing on Mars and deploying a Tesla Cybertruck to pick up all those samples that the Perserverence rover carefully prepared that NASA can't afford to go retrieve - and collecting an extra ton of rocks to also bring back for study.
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Seriously. Talk to us about all the exciting opportunities once deliveries are actually happening.
US Military wanted this decades ago (Score:2)
One of the first considered use cases for Project Orion when it was initially dreamed up was to put large number of troops or supplies anywhere in the world in under an hour.
If they were thinking about nuking the launch and landing zones for that, I imagine a Starship with its more traditional rocket motors is a no-brainer.
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One of the first considered use cases for Project Orion when it was initially dreamed up was to put large number of troops or supplies anywhere in the world in under an hour.
Welcome to InterContinental Ballistic Mail! Please write down the mass of your parcel and indicate whether it contains anything fragile, liquid, perishable, or potentially hazardous, including lithium batteries and perfume.
Re: US Military wanted this decades ago (Score:2)
1. 200x 300kT nuclear warheads
2. 200x maneuverable reentry vehicle
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There is very little difference between an ICBM and a tail-landing troop transport coming in hot... but I don't think using a Starship as a kinetic impactor would be very smart. It could come in at 11km/s (if it could maintain that velocity in the lower atmosphere) and not have all that much mass relatively speaking. It would have less 'kick' than the smallest nuclear weapon, though with the advantage of no fallout.
Still, in terms of efficiency you'd do a LOT better firing a regular old missile with an ex
Not quite operational... (Score:2)
The third launch was a huge success, but it's a bit far fetched to call Starship operational. As I understand it, they put the ship into a suborbital trajectory, in case they could not reignite the engines. In fact, the engines did not relight.
Until the engines can and do reliably restart in space, they likely won't be aiming for orbit. Which means: not yet operational. If everything works in flight 4, they might risk orbit in flight 5.
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Very true. It's all very exciting to see progress but the hardest challenges are still ahead, especially the two big question marks
- High velocity re-reentry, I think there are still valid concerns about the tile shield and especially in regards to how fault tolerant it will be. It seems like progress has been made on attachment but a big question mark for sure. Then even when you survive on both pieces of the ship demonstrate Falcon 9 level landing reliability, onto a set of arms on the landing tower no
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The third launch was a huge success, but it's a bit far fetched to call Starship operational.
No it was not a huge success. The Super Heavy Booster crashed down out of control instead of a smooth descent to demonstrate potential for reuse, and the same then happened with the Starship (the payload part). Re-useablilty is supposed to be one of SpaceX's selling points. Of course, if you accept SpaceX's definition of "success" as "Clearing the launch tower" (they said it) it is different matter, although rockets have been doing that since long before i was born.
Re:Not quite operational... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense. They knew this wasn't the final design, and they were looking for problems. They found them. That was the point. The booster did every test, even though it failed the last one. That means they got data on every part of the booster's operation. I'm sure there were a good number of suboptimal behaviors we don't know about that they'll also fix.
Starship made it much further than it has before, so again, lots of data on parts of the flight that they didn't have previously, and lots of things to fix for the next flight.
Yes, they're still not ready to try to recover the booster or Starship, but they're a lot closer than they were before this flight. The data was the objective, and they got a ton. Mission successful.
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Look buddy, we all know the first Space-X rocket failed and that's why the company was shut down and never built a successful rocket!
Re:Not quite operational... (Score:5, Insightful)
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More likely Blue Origin. I doubt Boeing has any ambitions of ever competing with SpaceX in rockets, and would probably like nothing better than to finish out the Starliner contract so they can stop trying to compete there too.
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SLS was designed to compete with no one. Building rockets for NASA is a good business when you only have to compete with your defence frenemies, but not so good otherwise. ULA is for sale, Starliner is a PR and financial disaster, and SLS is headed the same way, PR-wise anyway. Boeing isn't going to build a Starship competitor, they're finishing up existing contracts and exiting the field.
Re: Not quite operational... (Score:2)
Re: Not quite operational... (Score:2)
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They didn't do a relight test due to excessive roll rates, not because the engine didn't work.
Irrelevant. The point is that the test was not done, so it's premature to call it operational. The reasons why don't matter. Space travel is not based on assumptions. These aren't Australians saying "yah nah she'll be fine mate". They will need to do another test.
Re: Not quite operational... (Score:2)
No one said it was operational yet for general activity. Yes, it might carry payloads on the next flight, but SpaceX acknowledges that there will still be several more test flights before itâ(TM)s doing what Falcon does.
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Re: Not quite operational... (Score:2)
Exactly.
1 hour? (Score:2)
I think the transit time is likely to be irrelevant compared to the scheduling and setup time
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Those 45 minute trips to Shanghai probably won't be particularly comfortable...
Compared to what? (Score:2)
Those 45 minute trips to Shanghai probably won't be particularly comfortable...
Compared to a 24 hour journey by plane from the U.S?
And since it can carry 100 tons why would they not have vastly more comfortable seats that any airline?
But frankly for a difference of 45 minutes to 24 hours, they could put in a velcro suit and stick me against a wall for 45 min and I'd still be happier than the plane flight business class.
Yeah you might be pulling some Gs but not nearly as much as I imagine you are thinking of
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Wow (Score:2)
As with most people who are mainly marketers and promoters, this Chad Anderson guy is probably not someone from whom you should look for sound practical advice. But if you want a cheerleader, he's your man!
The news report is over-optimistic (Score:3)
Starship can go to space now. But it is extremely far away from safe human passenger flight. It took quite some years for Falcon 9/Dragon from routine cargo back-and-forth between ISS & Earth, to actual living humans sitting inside. We don't how long it will take for 1st safe Starship soft-landing. It is pointless to speculate how long will we take from that 1st safe landing to enough safety track record.
And for taking on commercial passenger airline, we still don't know how economic such a ticket will be. We know Starship is targeted to be so cheap that it shall take over all other old rocket launchers. But commercial passenger airline is another matter. Also, safe enough for astronaut is not the same of safe enough for business air travel.
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"If it ain't Starship, I'm not doing the trip."
Probably just a few years (Score:1)
Starship can go to space now. But it is extremely far away from safe human passenger flight. It took quite some years for Falcon 9/Dragon from routine cargo back-and-forth between ISS & Earth, to actual living humans sitting inside.
This is an example of where exponential growth is so hard for the human mind to grasp.
Since we already know the Falcon 9 design is stable, and Starship simply uses a bunch of them, it can advance more rapidly than that design did in terms of carrying humans.
Furthermore becaus
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I'm not sure how any of that is exponential growth. I think you're underestimating the issues with human rating (landing) Starship too. SpaceX put propulsive landing on Dragon, and NASA made them change it to parachutes. As far as something resembling an airliner, contrary to popular belief, you can glide on wings. If your landing engines don't relight you're toast. And relighting rocket engines is hard.
I expect Starship will be rated to take humans to space quite a bit before it's rated to bring them back.
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My guess is humans on Starship in about two years.
If you mean astronauts riding Dragon or Orion to space and then get onboard Starship as a space station, then yes, it is possible within two years.
But if you mean riding Starship to space, no, I don't think the safety standard of USA will drop that low in two years. We may see Starship function as moon lander first, before seeing it function as a vehicle to fly people from Earth directly.
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I think it will primarily depend on how quickly they can ramp up their flight schedule. Two years from now they could be doing their 15th launch, or their 50th. If SpaceX is allowed to ramp up to 2-3 flights per month, they can build the necessary flight experience very quickly. A lot is going to depend on how quickly the FAA lets them proceed.
Note also that Starship doesn't need to succeed at recoverability before it can be man-rated. The second stage could be expendable and carry a capsule as a payload.
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The second stage could be expendable and carry a capsule as a payload.
The human-rated capsule on top of an existing rocket contains emergency escape hardware so that the capsule can eject faster than the (exploding) rocket beneath them.
If you put a traditional capsule inside Starship, such safety mechanism will not work as intended without extreme moderation of Starship.
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The second stage could be expendable and carry a capsule as a payload.
The human-rated capsule on top of an existing rocket contains emergency escape hardware so that the capsule can eject faster than the (exploding) rocket beneath them.
I can think of lots of solutions to this problem, and I'm sure SpaceX engineers can find many others. Also, emergency escape hardware isn't an absolute requirement, though it's obviously very desirable, and not having it would require additional assurance of reliability.
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Musk's estimate less than a year ago was $2 billion for the year. And the latest flight went totally pear-shaped in about fifteen minutes. So at an estimate of $8billion PER HOUR, hahahahaha.
Guy who owns space investment firm.... (Score:1)
Makes wild, unfounded claims in order to get that investment money rolling in.
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Offhand, I would say that your statement is the wild/unfounded one.
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There is also the potential of Starship actually competing with commercial airlines, flying, for example, from New York to Shanghai in 45 minutes.
also believes Starship could be used for "last-mile delivery... where you could move something in less than an hour, anywhere from a point on Earth to another point on Earth, and you're just kind of using space as that transit point."
They have shown no ability as of yet for Starship reentry much less for soft landings. They also have yet to demonstrate the lift capacity beyond and empty Starship. While it's fine for a journalist to speculate on what the potential will be should SpaceX succeed. That's not what this article is doing. It is being used as a vehicle to bring in VC investment money. So he's following the classic Elon ruse of promising the stars tomorrow in order to get the cash today.
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So, if a company has developed multiple Cars and says that they are working on cars that will roll on tires, you think that is wild and unfounded????
Tesla will land it. In addition, they are working on building ocean platforms to land on. Almost certainly, they WILL be doing continent to continent travel. Why? Because they need the $ for going to mars. And being able to travel from CA, US to Japan, Australia, India, Europe, in less than 60 minutes is going to go for a number of things.
And a
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Seems like a pretty nonsensical analogy. But call me when SpaceX actually returns a Starship from space in one piece. Otherwise it's just fanciful hype.
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Also shown no ability for the booster to be reusable, don't forget that.
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How about the part where Starship is a "last mile" solution.
Yes, I definitely want to have a Starship landing within one mile of me - or anything else important - performing just-in-time deliveries. And once it has landed and made its
Re: Tesla offsets SpaceX? (Score:2)
The output is water. Starship burns methane. Moreover, the outputs from even 1000 Falcon rockets (which burn kerosene) is dwarfed by the airline industry.
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As has been said elsewhere, the output is water, CARBON DIOXIDE and the massive amount of heat and force that pulverises the launchpad and damages the nearby wetlands and preserves. I'm looking forward to the resolution of the lawsuit against SpaceX for the damage they did in an earlier launch.
Re: Tesla offsets SpaceX? (Score:2)
It busted the pad once. That was unexpected. The fault has been addressed. It didnâ(TM)t happen on the next two launches. The damage done by the rocks, while not trivial, is hardly destruction of the entire landscape. EPA does regular surveys of the site for compliance.