I suspect that Starship will fly to space before SLS ever will. I also think Starship has a significantly higher chance of flying at all than SLS.
Almost certainly the top minds at spacex are focussed on starship, and the 5% number might only be kinda-true because starship is being built with a lot of contractors.
Starship wasn’t built by the Falcon or Crew Dragon manufacturing teams, and the vast majority of the design and engineering currently happening for Starship has long been completed for Crew Dragon.
Let’s also remember that NASA is hardly the only company that pays SpaceX, they have other income sources and what they do with that income is ultimately their choice. Unless they are using NASA money to build Starship there should be no problem.
"Musk said in 2018 that SpaceX was “all hands on deck for Crew Dragon,” and it would be making trips to the ISS by December 2018.
After that, he said, “most of our engineering resources will be dedicated to BFR, and I think that will make things go quite quickly,” he said. BFR was the earlier name for Starship."
"All hands on deck" is not some subjective term, it is naval and means get everyone on deck now to repel boarders.
[1]https://kfor.com/2019/09/28/nasa-administrator-tells-elon-mu...
Elon responded saying he would do whatever it took to go faster, but there was nothing he could do.
The payload of the 2011 version was almost reached by the Falcon 9 itself. That was one of the major reasons for the delay, not design and production issues. The Falcon Heavy profited from all the advancments on Falcon 9 and it made no sense to actually build a Falcon Heavy before Block 4.
In fact the first costumers for Falcon Heavy flew on Falcon 9 instead.
In 2011, FH was supposed to have "arrival at launch site" by 2H 2012. It first launched in 2018 (after arriving at launch site in 2018 not 2012). The same level of delay would mean the first Starship does not reach orbit until ~2025. That seems crazy pessimistic and would be a dramatic departure from the otherwise normal delays faced by SpaceX.
I think it's extremely unlikely that Starship would face FH-level delays. That would cancel the Starlink constellation, cede the space-internet game to others, hand the torch to BO or others working on large projects, and absolutely destroy morale at SpaceX.
I just don't see it happening.
Keeping that in mind, having 5 year delay on brand new design, using totally different materials, new engine, etc isn't far fetched.
Starship has none of those potential delays and has already solved most of the hard problems (as evidenced by the Hopper hopping already). Starship has all of the learnings and experience that FH and F9 didn't have.
There will be delays, sure. But we won't be waiting 5+ years again for a single launch. Those days are over, and SpaceX is proving it.
Some context, I haven't read this yet: https://www.quora.com/What-makes-SpaceXs-Falcon-Heavy-more-t...
Edit:
> Keeping that in mind, having 5 year delay on brand new design, using totally different materials, new engine, etc isn't far fetched.
The first full size Starship prototype is already built though (within ~2 years of initial announcement? Not behind schedule basically at all, so far?). IIRC for FH it was a ~5 year delay before SpaceX even starting construction on the first parts. The difference with Starship is staggering. The pace is dramatically faster, the risks are reduced up-front, and the tests are planned on a much shorter timeframe.
We would frequently go 6 months to a year and hear no news at all about FH. There is news, updates and progress available to the public on an hourly or daily basis about the Starship progress. Night and day.
Experience from FH and F9 is useful, but it's a totally different type of spacecraft, with different use-cases, different materials, engines, cooling, etc. There's TONS of new stuff that they have to research, experiment, fail, try again, etc, until it's doing even 50% of what Elon promised.
StarHopper seems like it can use those learnings, and that was tested recently. The engine was already functioning on a test stand and mated to Hopper for static fires; the Hopper hop itself is testing the engine, sure, but also the complex math of doing a vertical landing with a gimballing engine, etc.
The general space industry considered reusabable spacecraft that land vertically to be pretty much impossible until F9 and FH did it. But Hopper just does that casually, you don't bat an eye, you don't even comment that Hopper was testing a new rocket dynamics/physics for the math that (almost) only SpaceX has figured out.
I just don't see the pessimism here. I've been watching SpaceX for 12+ years and I don't see any of the same issues plaguing them today as did in the past.
New issues, but not the same ones. The new issues have dramatically smaller turnaround time to resolve.
The days of 5-year SpaceX delays are over.
VTVL isn't new. To do it you need ability to throttle engine and do trust vectoring - once you have that, it's "fairly" simple math and physics.
SpaceX is first company that commercialized it, and huge props for that. No one cracked economy of it before (and it's not 100% sure that spacex did - no one saw their financials).
> New issues, but not the same ones. The new issues have dramatically smaller turnaround time to resolve.
We'll see, but I'm extremely sceptic about it. With F9/FH SpaceX did amazing but incremental improvements to current rocket technology. Starship has tons of uncharted territories.
They are building 4 partially functional prototypes to mess up and learn stuff fast.
I'm certain it will be a long time until it can get to Mars, but LEO within the next 2-3 years is probably realistic.
Starship is designed to land from interplanetary speeds (not just LEO orbital speeds), can re-fuel in orbit, and has the world'd most advanced rocket engines. The jump from F9 -> Starship is substantially larger than the jump from F9 -> FH.
edit: spelling
No way, that's where most of the differences are. The Falcon 9 second stage is a classic expendable stage but Starship is a brand new design which aims to be fully reusable.
I know I'm piling on here with this quote but I just don't understand why you'd say this if you'd done the least amount of research. They are about as different as two rockets can be—do you think Starship is "just a bigger version" because it's an upper stage? Because it's built by the same company? Its design and (theoretical, until it flies) capabilities are radically different and expanded relative to F9 stage 2.
What similarities are you referring to? They're designed to be launched atop another, bigger rocket. Other than that...?
FWIW SpaceX is exactly the kind of phenomenon that might spur state investment.
The Artemis thing is like a joke for real, though. After the last 30 years of bullshit we've seen from the US government's manned space exploration efforts I think I'll be living in a SpaceX-manufactured igloo on Titan before Richard Shelby and his obstructionist, pork-slinging ilk manage to put footprints on the moon.
We're talking about rockets here, which should be a million miles away from any discussion of Brexit.