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Comment by hnthrowaway0315 | Hacker News Reader

I can't wait for the next one. How many tests are we expecting? 7-8? Seems to be too long! I wish we had the spirit of the Apollo.

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> I wish we had the spirit of the Apollo

Careful what you wish for. The Saturn test program peaked at 3 tests / year (unless you want to count the separately tested launch escape system for the crew capsule), and the fully stacked Saturn V was only tested twice (in 1967 and 1968) before crewed missions.

For all its speed, Apollo was not a SpaceX-style rapid iteration program.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apollo_missions#Uncrew...

Tortoise and hare, perhaps.

Starship development started in 2012, and now 11 years later has had 2nd launch and failure to reach orbit.

Apollo program started in 1961 and had men on the moon in 1969 - with 60's tech.

Measuring Apollo's start point in 1961 can be very misleading. Apollo was the culmination of a more or less continuous development process stretching back to the early 50s with the start of the ICBM programs.

For example, the F-1 engines that powered Saturn V first stage actually began development in the late 50s, with the first static firing happening in 1959. The (in)famous combustion instability challenges of the engine were solved by 1961.

Apollo had a tremendous running start in many areas - to say nothing of having the resources and know-how of the entire US military-aerospace-industrial complex at it's disposal. This isn't to minimize what an accomplishment Apollo was. I just don't think you can meaningfully compare the timelines of what SpaceX is trying to do with Starship, and what Apollo accomplished.

True, but in same way SpaceX has also been in the rocket business for over 20 years, and building upon know how and organizational expertise gained from the Falcon 9.

Wiki says Raptor development started in 2009-2012 with no predecessor, with first test firing in 2016.

Since this is a thread about pedantry (rocketry pedantry), I'll allow myself to be pedantic about words.

"A wiki" is a type of software. But when you use "Wiki" as a proper noun, referring to one specific instance, that's the name of Ward's Wiki, the original wiki, also known as wikiwikiweb, available at wiki.c2.com .

I'm guessing that you were not citing Ward's Wiki, but were rather citing some other site, in particular the site that contains this advice on citing it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_abbreviate_%...!

You should note the banner at the top of your reference:

> This is a humorous essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors and is made to be humorous. This page is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. This essay isn't meant to be taken seriously.

The humor tag is there because the community is self-aware that it's mildly pedantic. The views of the essay are held by a strong majority of the community at least. Nobody ever abbreviates Wikipedia as "wiki"; we have far too many wikis floating around and it would be confusing.

While we're at pedantry, English is a descriptivist language... I guarantee you that when I say "the wiki", approximately nobody thinks of Ward's.

(Yes, I think Wikipedia's Don't Abbreviate... page is just wrong about this.)

It's entirely context dependent. For me and the people I deal with (which deal with various wikis in our lives for both work and play), "the wiki" refers to the specialized wiki on the topic we are speaking (for work it's the work wiki, for the game were playing it's the wiki for the game, etc), and Wikipedia is used to refer to Wikipedia, because it's not specific to anything. If someone just mentioned "the wiki" or "wiki says" in a conversation and was intending to imply Wikipedia, it would just confuse me by making me think there's some specific wiki they were referring to that I missed previously or they weren't clear in communicating, unless we were specifically referring to Wikipedia earlier.

To be fair, Apollo also had government funding to the tune of approximately 2.5% of GDP. Starship would probably go a bit faster too with an annual budget of half a trillion.

I suspect Starship would also go a lot faster with the weight of the President directly behind it, helping to remove those pesky regulatory issues :)

Start of the Apollo program literally precedes the Clean Air Act, establishment of EPA etc.

When the government decided to build Kennedy Space Center in Florida wilderness, they just did. No lengthy environmental impact assessment process in the way.

Well we have the Canaveral National Seashore to enjoy today, which was constituted from the undeveloped portion of the space program reservation. Otherwise, that area today might be a wall of hirise condos instead of a pristine coastal barrier island.

Sure, but most of the (anyways rapid) turnaround time from Starship launch #1 to #2 was rebuilding and deluge system .. can't be more than a month or two max delay attributed to regulations.

The pad rebuild and deluge system install was in parallel with the other work. Give or take, it was complete by the end of July [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOtw3ucIKng

True, this was a major engineering obstacle that had to be overcome.

Perhaps, although not obvious that it's cash starved.

NASA's slow but meticulous approach has had a few failures, but also incredible successes such as the sky crane martian rover landing - got to get it right first time, tough to move fast and break things when the test environment is 100 million miles away!

Edit: Same goes for 1969's lunar lander - had to work first time.

And NASA can be fast too. If I recall the Genesis of the Voyager missions correctly, someone noticed the once in a lifetime opportunity where the planet would align properly for a probe to visit a lot of them in using clever gravity assists. And from there NASA acted quickly to get funding, design and launch 2 probes that are still active today!

Seems to be great for deep space missions but not launch vehicles.

More like it's better with little-noticed science programs which can get by with a minimal amount of politics involved... which to be fair includes the details of deep space missions. Big, flagship projects which attract more attention are where things fall to crap for the most part.

Still very impressive. We all know that adding more resources to a project does not necessarily make it go faster.

Starship didn't really start in a meaningful way in 2012. In 2012 there were at best some vague concepts of a large rocket and some initial concept ideas for Raptor. But at that time for Raptor they were still thinking about Hydrolox.

SpaceX simply didn't have the resource to fully invest in Starship until much later. Even by the early presentations around 2016 it was a tiny part of SpaceX and was prototyping with limited resources. Real ramp up of spending happened significantly later.

Your understanding of Apollo is also flawed. The F-1 engine started development as early as 1955, not 1961. So if anything your 2012 date would be more like 1955.

Starship is also twice as powerful as Saturn V and designed to be reusable in both stages. That's a significantly harder task. Had SpaceX just wanted to match Saturn V, that would have been significantly easier.

Well, whether you want to call it 8/9 years ('61-'69) or 14 ('55-'69), I don't think NASA looks too shabby landing men on the moon in that time frame without the decades of experience we have to draw on today, and with 1950's/60's technology, and so far no-one else has done it.

The Apollo missions were certainly an achievement worthy of getting memorialised.

I also think that, given the size of the Apollo landers, if SpaceX had actually wanted to they could've redone those missions years ago with a Falcon Heavy and a variant of the Crew Dragon design.

Yeah they did less than 20 launches, had 6 successful missions, and then had to kill the program because the costs were too high at a $500B equivalent annual budget. Apollo 1 also burnt up and killed 3 astronauts on the ground.

Modern day NASA could not redo the Saturn V missions again. They lost the talent that achieved those missions a long time ago.

The NASA of that time has been long gone for decades

Nobody said it was 'shabby'.

It also seems that Saturn V's performance wasn't flawless, even on crewed missions (though some of the problems were down to external factors like lightning or debris from Skylab): https://www.wired.com/2012/03/great-balls-of-fire-apollo-roc... .

Where did you get 2012 from? BFR wasn't announced until 2016

Apollo was also dual use military technology to accelerate the development

Apollo also killed three astronauts on the ground in the posthumously named Apollo 1, and almost killed at least three more with Apollo 13. Apollo 6 (the final uncrewed test) suffered from pogo oscillations and also had two engines go out in the second stage. Apollo 11 had problems with the LM guidance computer, but was saved by Neil Armstrong's piloting skill.

This is all to say, Apollo was an extremely risky program.

> Apollo 11 had problems with the LM guidance computer, but was saved by Neil Armstrong's piloting skill.

This is a common misconception but mixes up at least three things.

1) Yes, Eagle was long, but not because of a software bug. The exact reason is unclear and there may have been multiple factors.

2) Yes, there were unexpected computer alarms but these were caused by a hardware bug that manifested because a switch was in an unexpected position. The software handled this appropriately.

Margaret Hamilton said: “To blame the computer for the Apollo 11 problems is like blaming the person who spots a fire and calls the fire department. Actually, the computer was programmed to do more than recognize error conditions. A complete set of recovery programs was incorporated into the software. The software's action, in this case, was to eliminate lower priority tasks and re-establish the more important ones. The computer, rather than almost forcing an abort, prevented an abort. If the computer hadn't recognized this problem and taken recovery action, I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful Moon landing it was.”

3) Neil Armstrong did adjust the landing point late in the descent after noticing rough terrain. He utilized semi-automatic control to do this. Essentially adjusting the target point for the autopilot. Eagle wasn’t directly flown like an aircraft.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11

A great video on the AGC and Apollo 11 landing: https://youtu.be/B1J2RMorJXM?si=Ypn6Gtp16_DEkpK9

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