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Comment by gpt5 | Hacker News Reader

Realistically, what stage of testing/maturity starship need to pass so that SLS is officially cancelled?

If Starship works, it's going to be almost a state-change moment in the space industry. They aren't just building a single test vehicle for a demo mission, they're building factories churning out engines, rockets, GSE, building launch pads, etc. They might take a few tries to nail a first orbital launch, once that happens (and assuming no undue regulatory hurdles) their launch cadence may start picking up dramatically within 3-6 months of a success.

If eighteen months from now Starship has launched a ~dozen or more times and SLS once, I'd imagine they might wrap up SLS with Artemis 2, which should be mostly complete by then. At a total program cost of ~$24 billion for 2 flights it would be quite ... something, but it's hard to see them continuing much beyond that. They'd just figure out a way to use Crew Dragon/Starliner to get to Starship for lunar missions (assuming they're not going to want to launch/land humans on Earth on Starship for a while).

When. When Starship works

I share your optimism but I think it it is unrealistic to unquestionably assume that SpaceX will continue to succeed. The very nature of the problems that they are trying to solve is such that failure is always a possibility.

I don’t say this as a slight to SpaceX… on the contrary the risk is what makes them so exciting!

I mean, the way they succeed with Starship is failing over and over again until they don't anymore. In that sense it is (now, not before SpaceX was scaled up) solely an issue of funding: will it work before the company runs out of cash?

At this point, I imagine most every investor in Earth would be tripping over their own legs to buy SpaceX stock if they could. If they ever run low, their ability to raise more money is as sure a thing as anything in this world these days. Additionally, Starlink is going to be an absolute revenue monster very soon, even if Starship for some reason ends up taking another decade to get working.

The only way Starship fails is if SpaceX goes broke. SpaceX is not going to go broke. Therefore, Starship will eventually work, after some variable and as yet indeterminate number of prototype failures.

> If eighteen months from now Starship has launched a ~dozen or more times and SLS once, I'd imagine they might wrap up SLS with Artemis 2, which should be mostly complete by then.

Starship needs to be crew-rated by NASA before it can replace SLS+Orion. I'm sure that will happen at some point, but that point may well be after Artemis 3 has happened.

Some people propose hybrid architectures – putting Orion+ESM inside Starship, and using F9+Dragon to ferry the crew to LEO. However, I think NASA will view those hybrid architectures as even more complex, and hence riskier, than the current SLS+Orion(+Gateway)+StarshipHLS architecture. Plus, pro-SLS forces in Congress will oppose NASA doing that. Bridenstine proposed launching Orion on Falcon Heavy, and Senator Shelby's response was to ask Bridenstine for his resignation. Shelby may be gone from Congress but there are other members of Congress with the same attitude. It is harder for Congress to oppose a NASA project to crew-rate Starship because it would be less obviously directly competitive with SLS+Orion, even if the death of SLS+Orion would be its ultimate consequence.

Out of curiosity, do we know how much SpaceX has spent in total on the Starship program?

It's irrelevant. For Congress, SLS is primarily a jobs program. They want it to continue as long as they can make up any reason to do that, regardless of the practical use.

The jobs program is the practical use - national security requires maintaining an industrial base, or at least that's the theory (don't know how valid it is).

If only there was such a project for advanced fabrication for chips maybe we wouldn’t find ourselves in the current situation.

We do, EUV LLC. was subsidized by the US govt (via DARPA) and a US industry consortium in the 90s. Lots of the tech went to European allies in I think a sale/collaboration at some point but we maintained power due to that initial seed and have used it for things like trade restrictions on the technology.

(1998) https://www.semiconductoronline.com/doc/euv-llc-enters-devel...

I will never understand why jobs programs can't also be useful. Didn't we build a lot of infrastructure that way in the 30s?

Senator Richard Shelby's retirement, for one.

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