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Comment by mdbug | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to deny the successes at all. But everything SpaceX has achieved so far was possible before. I guess the statement that Starship is getting closer to its promise can be expressed that way, but it almost sounds like it's already close and in reality it's far from being ready.

Also consider that it took NASA about 9 years to fully develop the Space Shuttle from ground up and they didn't lose a single vehicle during testing - 50 years ago!

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> But everything SpaceX has achieved so far was possible before.

This is not accurate: reusable orbital first stages is a SpaceX first, and the cost savings it yielded enabled Starlink, which is another SpaceX first (high speed, low-latency, low-altitude LEO satellite internet).

Reusable rockets were developed by a private company 30 years before SpaceX.[1] Using such rockets as first stages is what SpaceX did first, I give them that. But it's more of a means to an end than an achievement. The savings so far are much lower than claimed. Deploying LEO satellites is nothing new. StarLink is burning a lot of money and it is questionable if they will ever become profitable.

[1] https://youtu.be/JzXcTFfV3Ls

The reusable DCXA in that video is not an orbital rocket. The F9 first stage is.

No, there was no reusable first stage before SpaceX, and pretty much everyone in the industry was laughing at Elon for even proposing it. Would you please stop lying about SpaceX?

Reusable first stages are not an achievement. Reusable rockets were invented 30 years before SpaceX. Using such rockets as first stages is a questionable decision by SpaceX, which may be a means to an end if it can save costs.

Who had a rapidly reusable first stage 30 years ago?

And how is it questionable? They've got the cheapest (for their class) launch prices in the world.

Exactly. And us Europeans just got our collective ass handed to us, realizing that our new shiny planned rockets wont cut it in direct competition even if us tax payers shoulder the development costs.

Elon says stupid things sometimes, but I would rather have most of the time, than more stupid manager talk from our German companies with their 'electrified intelligence' and AI in our dashboards (because they bind a GPS coordinate to a setting like Tesla).

You are surely trying hard to rewrite history.. Who had reusable first stages 30 years ago?

Reusable rockets: https://youtu.be/JzXcTFfV3Ls

Please stop trolling.

No, they lost one when it mattered most: when humans were on board. Besides, Starship is meant as more of a replacement for Apollo than for the shuttle.

This does not contradict what I wrote.

It's not a contradiction what I wrote, it's a fair point. Two of the five shuttles eventually exploded with passengers on board. Better to learn the hard edge cases in testing.

You probably shouldn't have started the sentence with "No" then, but never mind. Let's hope that space travel will be safer in the future.

Anyway, I really just wanted to point out that 50 years ago it was apparently possible to develop spaceships in less time without a "move fast and break things" approach.

The Apollo program cost about $156 billion in modern money. Starship's approach is very cheap in comparison. Must estimates about $5bn.

Correction they lost 2 shuttles not one

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