Sorry doubters, Starship had a remarkably successful flight
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
On the other hand, you clearly can't call it a complete success. There were three goals that weren't met: water-landing the booster, reaching orbit (or whatever you call where it was trying to get to), and water-landing Starship.
So maybe we should think in terms of a score out of 10. Like with gymnastics, there are degrees of difficulty. SpaceX aimed very high, and delivered...ok. Maybe give them a 6/10?
I’ve followed starship development for a while now. A year ago starship was doomed to fail because 33 engines firing at once would tear the rocket apart. Now it’s a failure because they screwed up the landing. I know this sounds crazy, but I think the rocket company known for landing rockets might be able to fix the rocket landing issue.
I’m unsure what you mean by “screwed up the landing”, both stages exploded in flight.
Scott Manleys analysis and reasoning seems sound: that the error was likely due to hot staging burn causing damage or being mistimed causing propellant sloshing.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hF2C7xE9Mj4
Lots of data from this launch. Definitely a successful test.
Falcon failed 3 times.
Looking forward to seeing if starship beats or matches or if bigger means more.
Well, fine, but that's a bit of a silly goal. I don't think there was any doubt that that would work, after the last test in which they all worked except for the ones that got damaged by concrete.
Also, they were already tested on the ground, so...technically already achieved.
> Now it’s a failure because they screwed up the landing.
They didn't "screw up the landing". Something went badly wrong with the booster shortly after separation. And Starship went off course.
Landing both the booster and Starship isn't some small "nice to have", it's fundamental to the operation of these craft. They didn't even get a chance to test landing either part, because both failed too early.
More broadly, SpaceX prioritizes low total cost and speed of development over everything else. That means they'll have more test flights than NASA and not all of them will be totally successful, and that's fine. The overall program will be.
NASA never before used a vehicle as reliable as Falcon 9, so... You can't compare crazy ambitious development program to established vehicles, and as Falcon 9 shows, given enough time, SpaceX can achieve something close to perfection.
Question: How did SpaceX acquire all the knowledge that brought it to the Falcon 9?
Answer: 70 years of NASA research as their starting point (which was built on the V2 program's learnings thanks to Von Braun).
Being born on third base isn't the same as hitting a home run.
(It's not as hard, but it might be as valuable, in that it still puts you on third base.)
There's no point in doing reusable if it's insanely expensive! The SpaceX innovation was actually making reusability pay off. Sadly the government contractors only ever had an incentive to make each launch as expensive as possible, which they absolutely accomplished.
The GOP was ready to pounce on ANY failure NASA had as an excuse to cancel it, which is a large part of the reason for the huge safety precautions. The o-ring fuckup almost did them in.
If NASA was loose with regulations, they would have gotten cancelled, and if they are too strict with regulations, they get ridiculed. It's a lose-lose.
SpaceX has no such oversight, and the GOP loves Musk. A SpaceX rocket could kill a hundred people and SpaceX would just keep truckin' like nothing happened (recall, Musk has said repeatedly deaths are part of progress).
NASA had no such luxury.
I'm certain there was waste due to nepotism, but let's not pretend Musk isn't the beneficiary of the same nepotism. (It all should end, and hope some day it does, call me naive.)
The people at SpaceX are largely all scientists, engineers and the like and they build the best they could do with available data. It got them a lot further this time based on the previous data. That is the only metric that really counts. If they got good data they can use to “debug” the rocket (to speak in HN familiar terms) that is a great thing for them, and very valuable.
I love it when opinion pieces open with the equivalent of "What follows now is the truth. If you disagree with the truth, as presented by me, the arbiter of the truth, you don't know shit."
Berger must have really good faith in his arguments, if he feels the need to begin an article this way. And, unfortunately, what follows sounds more like a letter by an angry SpaceX fan than a quality analysis weighing the successes and failures of the start.
Feel the need to “win?” It’s easy: report on your fancy like an adult, lending it an air of legitimacy and maturity.
> Since its heady days during the Apollo program, NASA has steadily become an agency filled with checkers, rather than doers... Part of the magic of SpaceX is that it's filled with doers, with relatively few checkers
SpaceX, whatever you think of its CEO, is chock full of people whose brilliance glows in the dark.
And yet every news for the past 5 years or whatever has been "wow it's a runaway success and basically done". Something flies? Great! Something blows up? Ooh actually that's even better because [convoluted argument] and Starship will fly in 6 weeks time.
I wish them well. The crazy optimism still strikes me as a bit mad.
Exploding is not a virtue, but the stuff they accomplished before exploding is quite remarkable.
But it's not a done deal and the I find the sickly sweet optimism jarring - as it seems many other people do.
That is the entirety of my point. I'm not dumping on SpaceX, Starship, or on this particular occasion, Musk himself.
Starship is a crazy idea. Completely nuts. And it could actually work. That's the crazy part. This was only the second launch. It took four attempts to get the first Falcon rocket to space. What we saw a few days ago was a rocket that nearly worked and only developed issues very late into the launch. Next time, they might get a little further. At this point it looks like there are a lot of challenges but none that look like they can't be overcome.
One thing is clear. SpaceX is very well funded and they should not have any budgetary constraints doing this over and over again. There are no 100% guarantees they'll get it right eventually. But it looks like they have a very decent shot at it. If they fail, it won't be for a lack of trying.
The point is, these things may still fail. No shame in that. The fact that Musk rolled a 6 on a die ten times in a row doesn't mean he always does that.
But the narrative around it completely denies it. Any outcome is an unmitigated great success and yet another proof that Starship will succeed and we will colonise Mars.
Good luck to Starship succeeding, but the crazy optimism, denialist of even a chance of failure is unbearable.
SLS? If in 10 years they're still spending money on it to launch it once every couple of years - if it's still in some sort of weird limbo between success and failure - I wouldn't be surprised.
From "Technology Importation, Corporate Strategies, and the Rise of the Japanese Semiconductor Industry in the 1950s" at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/256067/pdf
> In March 1952, Ibuka traveled to the United States to investigate its domestic tape-recorder market and to learn from American firms. It was during this trip that Ibuka ran across a WE newsletter announcing that AT&T was openly licensing its transistor patents for a nominal licensing fee of $25,000. Literally overnight, he decided that transistor radios should be Sony’s next major product. ... Iwama and Tsukamoto, along with three other researchers, officially began Sony’s transistor-development project in July 1953, just months before the company signed a patent-licensing agreement with AT&T (Sony Corporation, 1986, p. 325).
(If that is not accessible, https://project.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/kikkawa/iss-6.pdf says Sony "Concludes transistor license agreement with Western Electric" in October 1953. Western Electric was "the primary equipment manufacturer, supplier, and purchasing agent for the Bell System from 1881 until 1984" says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Electric).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor points out AT&T "first used transistors in telecommunications equipment in the No. 4A Toll Crossbar Switching System in 1953" and "The first prototype pocket transistor radio was shown ... from August 29 to September 6, 1953."
A quick look of publications of the time finds articles like this August 1952 piece from the Illinois Business Review :
> The Electronic Department of the General Electric Company reports that a whole new electronics business is growing out of the development of the transistor, said to be a potential successor to the vacuum tube. Transistors are made of germanium, which is recovered as a byproduct in the smelting and refining of zinc ores. Since they contain no heated element they never “burn out” and last indefinitely. The giant digital computers, or magic brains, which now use several thousand vacuum tubes and occupy a large-size room can conceivably become small enough to be applied to everyday business and industrial problems as are comptometers. Most of the telephone, industrial control, and business machine applications can be filled by the transistor; it will become practical to build amplifiers for use on transoceanic telephone cables. The simplicity and ruggedness of the transistor will have a direct effect also on military electronics, especially on airborne equipment.
or this October 1952 article on some of the uses of transistors - https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iSEDAAAAMBAJ/page/n137/mo... with the subtitle "look for them soon in pocket radios and TVs almost that small" and the comment " RCA has just announced that it has boosted the frequency of several units high enough for use in FM radios and TV sets."
If you don't mind the high noise, the same 1952 issue includes a description of how you can build your own transistor radio, at https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iSEDAAAAMBAJ/page/n239/mo... .
Hard to think Western Electric didn't know of any of these possibilities when discussing licensing with Sony.
My source was Chris Miller's /Chip War/: "Upon landing in the United States in 1953, Morita was shocked by the country’s vast distances, open spaces, and extraordinary consumer wealth, especially compared to the deprivation of postwar Tokyo. This country seems to have everything, Morita thought. In New York, he met AT&T executives who agreed to issue him a license to produce the transistor. They told him to expect to manufacture nothing more useful than a hearing aid."
Certainly many Americans were aware of and were chasing the potential of transistors almost immediately. This is not incompatible with management at the top being slow to grasp same.
That may be a minor point, but you can also read that after Morita signed the patent license, he "returned to Tokyo with a few sample transistors, a piece of high-grade germanium crystal, and a copy of Transistor Technology."
What was Transistor Technology?
"After the first symposium, WE began to license the patent rights to manufacture transistors to anyone willing to pay a fee of $25,000, which was “to be applied as an advance against any future royalties [usually 2% of sales].” This was the news Sony’s Ibuka Masaru heard when he arrived in the United States in early 1952. After the second symposium, the company published the two-volume Transistor Technology—a compilation of articles by key researchers at Murray Hill and Allentown—to be provided to its patent licensees (Riordan & Hoddeson, 1997, pp. 196–197). By 1952, most major U.S. companies, including GE, Raytheon, Texas Instruments, and Westinghouse, became WE licensees (Transistor Technology Symposium, 1952)."
(An updated version of Transistor Technology is available from archive.org, in three volumes, eg, https://archive.org/details/transistor_technology_v1/page/n5... )
I can hardly think the WE execs thought all those licensees were going to make hearing aids at best.
While I don't have a copy of Chip Wars handy, archive.org has a copy of the 1989 book "The Chip War" by Fred Warshofsky. At https://archive.org/details/chipwarbattlefor00wars/page/62/m... you can read how Ibuka told the WE engineers he wanted "to make the world's smallest radio. He was laughed at." The frequency characteristics were too poor for radio. Sony ended up having to develop the ground-junction transistor to solve that noise problem.
I think a fair reading is that WE did not think Sony could do anything with the transistor regarding voice or music beyond a hearing aid as they knew their transistors couldn't handle the bandwidth. We can read that WE needed convincing to provide a license in the first place because "Technology Importation ..." writes:
"When he finally got in touch with WE, the U.S. company reacted suspiciously to small, unknown company from the Far East. WE asked Sony to send more detailed information about the firm, including a brief company history, recent financial reports, and a list of technical achievements."
[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2020/12/29/elon-mus...
We don't call increases in demand 'induced demand' unless we're trying to throw shade on the thing being demanded. The classical case is road use. Add lanes to highways and folks will utilize the capacity to do whatever it is that creates value to them. And we call it induced demand.
If transit headways shrink and there are more riders because the service got better, we don't call it induced demand. Or if milk or eggs get cheaper and consumption of those items grows, it's also not induced demand.
Humanity, from now until the sun explodes, will only get one chance to check mars for life. Right now the first samples are still waiting in tubes to get picked up from the martian surface. Musks' solution to the problem of contamination is to fire as many rockets as he can as fast as he can and hope to contaminate mars completely before anyone can red tape his ass.
We owe it to all future generations to make sure he never lands a single payload before the question can be thoroughly resolved.
Also, it's really boring whether mars has/had bacterial life or not. If it does, then it rejigs the math on everywhere else, making it way more probable we find it elsewhere as well. That leaves us with it's either not there, so it doesn't matter, or it is there and it's probably in a lot of other spots too, so we'll find it on the next one, once we're actually established in space and multi planetary and the cost of not going to said next one isn't as high as holding the whole species up from getting off this rock into space permanently. The only situation where it actually matters is the very slim chance it's both there and deadly to humans in a way that makes it likely the astronauts make it back to earth and contaminate us all before it kills them.
It's a very interesting question. Much like StarLink, I suspect he has some other plan for monetising this lift capability. I don't buy the Moon base/Mars base plan at all.