This is good. Flight 1 had 63 corrective actions and it took 5 months to complete the report. This one took 3 months and had 17 corrective actions. They'll get to orbit this year for sure
The ambition level is really high with Starship but if there's any company that can get it done it's spacex.
Basically what they are doing is a form of agile development where instead of speccing out the whole thing years in advance, they basically iterate and redesign what needs redesigning. Even if the project ultimately fails, there are multiple things coming out of the project that are at this point valuable. Like the merlin engines. Or their welding innovations. The notion of launching a steel contraption this size to orbit is ludicrous. Yet, they almost pulled it off last time. Worst case they have learned a lot to do a better falcon rocket. Best case, this thing actually starts working.
It is not exactly cheap to do it like SpaceX does, but the savings in time and increases in robustness may very well offset the cost of all the prototypes that undergo a RUD.
E.g.,
Design_A fails. We quickly pivot to Design_B, which works. However, we don't spend the time ultimately understanding why Design_A failed. This can be operationally great, but it can also risk conflating being lucky with being good. If you don't fundamentally understand why the thing failed the first time, it's much harder to understand if those failure modes are fully mitigated.
Personally, I think the ideal approach is to have SpaceX continue the rapid enginneering iterations, but give NASA (or some other entity) the resources to research the rest.
Take for example the work on the failure of Amos 6. They went really deep into that one and its a pretty interesting result from a scientific perspective.
On the other hand, there is no point in doing endless science on why the pad blew up during the first orbital flight test. They solution was already in development anyway and its pretty clear that the solution would migrate the problem. It might introduce new problems but the old one wasn't happening again.
So there is a limited need to the exact detail of underground steam explosion or whatever exactly happened there.
Did you read TFA? It's about the release of an extensive report documenting why Design_A failed and what corrections are to be made regarding each specific failure.
Also, from the HN Guidelines: "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "
This is just basic science: theory experiment result.
And with all the documentation and instrumentation on the flights, The theories can be experimentally validated or invalidated.
This isn't like some agile programmer shoving in a couple hundred lines of code over the course of a one week sprint.
1) Risk on safety critical operations is not something people tend to want to roll the dice with.
2) The nature of the industry makes each trial pretty expensive. Over decades, the shuttle only had something like 135 launches and the managers still didn't have a good handle on the actual risk.
Sort of proving the point here, no? There is a reason SpaceX has gone to orbit more times than the Shuttle has. Soon they will have launched more Starship prototypes than the shuttle ever did. And they will be safer, because SpaceX understands why their rockets fail.
Obviously this strategy does not work with humans in the loop. It might have been impossible to do what SpaceX is doing now in the 80s given the advancements in computer control and simulation that have happened since then.
I don't think so, for the same reason you identified: it only works when the risk isn't safety critical (ie when humans are in the loop). In other words, it's acceptable when risks are low. It's the same reason NASA is more risk-tolerant with non-human-rated missions. But keep in mind CCP is also meant to transport humans. The risk we'd want to bolster against is the human biases that lead us to get complacent. There are some instances that make me wonder about that with SpaceX, but I'm giving them the benefit to the doubt that they've learned from those.
1) The failures themselves aren't all too complex (relatively speaking), and by the time the design made it to a flight vehicle it has been vetted for all immediately knowable risks. The rest you discover during flight. And even then the actual nature of the problems rarely (if at all) are esoteric or present breakthrough scientific discoveries.
2) Failure in rocket launches are catastrophic leaving behind very little evidence. There could be a limit to how much you can learn. But...
3) ...SpaceX is a business serving customers, and if a pivot means going away from a complex cloud of possible failures (known and discovered) to more robust, more deterministic, more reliable, you should do it.
4) At what level do you stop and go "this is fundamental enough"?
>The failures themselves aren't all too complex
The COPV failure mechanisms may not be terribly complex (e.g., voids or delamination), but managing the processes to mitigate them isn't.
>by the time the design made it to a flight vehicle it has been vetted for all immediately knowable risks.
SpaceX has already shown some bad processes that disprove this statement. E.g., the strut failure was due to poor supplier quality control, which is a relatively mature process in the industry. I'd give them the benefit of the doubt and say they've gotten better as they've matured as a company.
Failure in rocket launches are catastrophic leaving behind very little evidence.
The difference, I think, is that you are constraining this to launch failures. I'm talking about knowledge and data about individual component failures, from which you can derive the overall reliability of the design.
if a pivot means going away from a complex cloud of possible failures (known and discovered) to more robust, more deterministic, more reliable, you should do it.
I don't disagree that more simple tends to be more reliable. However, the point was that iteration doesn't necessarily advance knowledge of failure. I think these two points are not mutually exclusive. A good business case doesn't mean it makes for good engineering or good science.
At what level do you stop and go "this is fundamental enough"?
It's a tough question. But if you can't characterize why a failure mode occurred reasonably well, that's probably not good enough. So if they say, "We know voids in the COPV manufacturing process contributed to the failure" they should probably make sure they have a good understanding of why they occurred. (And maybe they have at this point)
Each Starship has 30+ engines required per flight and tons of precision welding. All of it can now be made in a month. That means massive cost savings going forward, the faster each can be made
Rather than spend 10 years designing and building one telescope, they could spend 2-3 years and keep refining the hardware, with multiple types on the same platform
If this pace can continue unabated, maybe it’s not too unrealistic to hope that my grandkids’ generation in a few decades has astronaut as one of their most aspired careers much as was the case for the kids of the 70s, 80s, and 90s… except this time it’d be much more practically achievable since there’d be greatly increased demand for people with that skillset.
Last I checked asteroid mining was not super feasible, but maybe some like space based solar.
It doesn’t have to be cheap enough to make e.g. asteroid mining profitable on its own (which is an awfully high bar), just high enough to make construction of large, permanently spacebourne ships feasible.
Ships like that ease the bootstrapping problem and make it more feasible to mine asteroids in-place instead of having to move them to an orbit that’s not expensive to reach. Their flexible, multipurpose nature also helps pay for them over time; they can for example drop crew and cargo off at the moon and Mars en route to the asteroid belt.
There are things far closer to earth that are far easier to get to, and those things are also far smaller then Psyche and thus far easier to mine.
The most serious space mining company right now is targeting near earth asteroids for platinum group metals.
If you need 1 kg of something in space, the cost is {extraction} + {getting it there}.
For anything raw or low tech, it'd seem way easier not to have to bulk lift it off Earth.
That would mean huge savings to the military in naval fleet investment, overseas bases. The military would likely pay SpaceX ongoing contracts of tens of billion dollars per year for that exclusive nation-state capability.
The growing Starlink constellation will sustain huge business.
NASA would fund additional missions with the reduced launch costs.
Space tourism and fast global travel is worth another 10 billion dollars annually.
Then there's space telescopes and instrumentation.
Space industry is completely TBD. Here's a kooky idea: how much is antimatter harvested from the solar wind worth? Near earth asteroid capture and mining may be feasible. Moon mining may be on the table.
Militarization of space is an inevitability, and starship provides the payload to get equipment into space.
Starship might provide the launch ability to deal with space junk.
Anyway, you drop the cost of launch by 10x-100x, THINGS WILL BECOME POSSIBLE.
If I remember correctly, a starship can deliver 440+ starlink satellites compared to around 60 for falcon 9.
Between the construction pauses during testing/launch, and things they can't really speed up like concrete hardening times, I don't think they'll be able to both have 9 flights AND operationalize the second tower this year.
OTOH imagine if a reusable launch of this costs approximately the same as an expendable Atlas 5 in it's most performant configuration and reliability is proven - NASA could launch a Pluto probe like New Horizons, except it'd be able actually make orbit over there.
But for Starship, most people don't seem to realize what a potential game changer this is. The goal for Starship is to get costs down to about 15x less than Falcon Heavy. When you can start sending stuff to space for a few dollars per pound, we're not talking about just probes, but rather opening the door to the complete commercialization and exploitation of space.
Such an exponential jump (downward) in prices would also largely end the only-for-the-super-rich phase of space we're currently in. You could be doing a flyby around the Moon for what you might spend on a holiday to Asia, in the very foreseeable future. That's what makes Starship so tantalizing. If it succeeds - this is a revolutionary step forward for space. Of course, there's no guarantee that it will succeed, but it increasingly looks like it will!
Also, the issue of getting boosters to all of these destinations seems like a problem. Planes don't split in two and have half return to the launch site but Starships do. So you could land the upper stage in Tokyo, but then what? How do you get a booster there for the return journey?
Personally I doubt they'll even use these to bring people to orbit anytime soon. I think they're purpose built for launching massive LEO constellations.
>Also, the issue of getting boosters to all of these destinations seems like a problem
You launch them, presumably.
IIRC, the suborbital point-to-point transport use case doesn’t use the booster (SuperHeavy), just Starship.
The NFL wants to expand to Europe, Asia, South America badly. Problem is the logistics of Mach-1 air travel won't allow that. Same for the NBA, NHL, and MLB. A true world super league of futbol.
We're talking 10s of billions of dollars in new annual revenue for these sports leagues ... if they could transport a whole team anywhere in the world in 4-5 hours.
It costs a couple hundred thousand per flight for a team? Um, the Super Bowl brought in 600 million in ad revenue and probably another 50-200 million in ticket costs.
That said, having a sports team arrive in town by literally descending from the heavens on a burning rocket sounds badass. Unfortunately I can't really see it happening, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
The Miami Dolphins charter a private 747 with 143 business class seats, 36 economy seats, 26 upper deck business and 10 first class.
Not only do all 55 players need to travel but so do all the people accountable for electronics, medical, gear, coaches and staff, etc.
It's a lot to transport and a lot of risk on one vehicle.
Realistically, they'd be dropping into an allied base in-theatre with a pad able to support a Starship landing, and then taking conventional means the rest of the way. Of course, I suspect that when it comes to "drop operators from space" vs. "train extra operators who can be forward deployed," the latter is probably going to be way more cost efficient. Would make for a cool movie though.
I thought Concorde failed commercially because it couldn't get approval to fly over the US elsewhere over land because of sonic booms. I know reentering spacecraft cause sonic booms but thought that they occur high enough to not cause the same problems on the ground.
Or, if you're more cynical, because the US' own supersonic airliner failed and they wouldn't let those Euros show them up.
Also, Concorde wasn’t even the first supersonic airliner—that was the Tupolev Tu-144.
It's not that customers preferred slower and cheaper flights over Concorde—they didn't, Concorde had very healthy average occupancy rates and operating the flights was very profitable for BA and Air France (they got the planes for free, of course).
It's that you can't fly a 1960s plane forever and you also can't amortize the design and development cost of new models with the only addressable market being first class customers travelling between the East Coast and a couple of European capitals (and this was directly caused by the overland flight restrictions).
Flying Concorde is one of my fondest memories :/
The fundamental physics involved in suborbital flights mean that you are likely experiencing sustained acceleration of 3+ Gs minimum. That is a lot, something near the max g force of a roller coaster but lasting for minutes. Combine that with the launch/landing zones needing to be many miles from anything, and it isn't really ready for primetime. Just for reference 1.3 Gs is the max sustained load you will feel in a regular airliner, very rarely 1.5 Gs for terrain avoidance.
For cargo, maybe medical stuff like moving organ donations around, but largely I can't imagine a ton of use cases where getting something to an antipode in 3 or 4 hours is that much more valuable than getting it there in 19 hours.
Then again, maybe I lack imagination.
Forces that run out of ammo don't have access to cutting edge ICBMs is a rule that I would bet money on.
Like what if steel were cheaper than plastic? If there was enough of it around to build a bridge between New York and London? If you could build a ship the size of Manhattan and then a city on top of it to roam the oceans? If you could build entire cities in orbit or city-ships that slowly wandered the solar system.
Returning bulk products to earth might not be viable in the short term, but this could really bootstrap what we do off planet and I'm hopeful it might eventually make space elevators viable which would open a lot of options.
I hope to see in my lifetime a large asteroid brought to Earth orbit, for both mining and as a very large space station.
Think of all the science you could do with asteroids! Peer into the early history of the solar system . . . see what precursors to life existed before Earth was habitable. . . and all people think about is how fast they can strip-mine our extraterrestrial heritage. . . All that belongs in a museum!
/s
Here’s a great place to start: https://www.factoriesinspace.com/
That's about what it costs to fly freight across an ocean.
Fuel usage being the limiter of terminal economics once launch systems are commodified to the degree ships are.
As for the fuel itself, natural gas is much cheaper than jet fuel per unit of combustion energy.
It almost sounds too good to be true or something.
That's a greater than 40x reduction in costs, which sounds too good to be true - but the problem is that even at $700/lb, that's still far too expensive to do anything remotely interesting. But take that down again and suddenly everything changes and we, more or less instantly, enter into an entirely new stage in human development and history. It'll be akin to the automobile. Henry Ford didn't make the first automobile, but he did make the first commercially affordable one. And, in the blink of an eye, society permanently changed because of it.
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As a fun aside, when doing a web search to grab the numbers above somehow this [1] ended up in the search results. It's from 2012 and somebody pondering SpaceX's wild claims of being able to get costs below $1,100 per kg ($1,500 inflation adjusted).
Is that an apples-to-apples comparison? Each shuttle launch cost $1.5 billion when including development cost (that is, $200 billion in total spending on the STS program / 135 launches); as your link discusses, the incremental cost per launch was "merely" $450-500 million. The $0.1 billion figure per Falcon Heavy launch is only the incremental cost since we don't know how much Falcon Heavy cost to develop (And how to account for the Falcon 9 development costs that Heavy is heavily based on?). Obviously Falcon 9/Heavy has every potential for launching far more times than the shuttle, further reducing the development cost allocated to each launch (or at least, until Starship gets going I guess). But we ought to be as accurate as possible in comparing Falcon and STS.
SpaceX's 'real' (in the sense you're speaking of) per launch costs are going to be substantially lower than even $700/lb. In the case of Boeing/Lockeed/etc, they didn't have to pay for any of this - as it was all completely taxpayer funded. That should have enabled them to offer prices that would be unbeatable by any company paying for their own operations.
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To put this another way, imagine Boeing et al operated like SpaceX, or frankly most any "normal" company does. They would need to set their launch prices in a fashion such that they'd be able to recoup their tens of billions of dollars in development costs on the Space Shuttle, and then also add a profit margin on top. It's likely their charged cost per launch would have been even higher than $1.6 billion!
Good point. I agree that from the customer's perspective, the flyaway cost is what matters. That said, wouldn't that also mean that for Starlink launches, the development cost would still have to be amortized across them when they are not for other launches? That doesn't feel right to me; surely the flyaway/incremental cost is still what matters.
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Space Shuttle - $54,500/kg to orbit, $93,400/kg to the ISS
Falcon 9 - $2,720/kg to orbit, $23,300/kg to the ISS
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The Falcon Heavy is about $1500/kg to orbit. Note the units as we're swapping between kg and pounds in this thread pretty regularly.
Which is why the rocket has been discontinued.
This is also why Boeing Starliner is dead man walking. Starliner is only certified for Atlas 5, and there are enough spare boosters for the launches NASA contracted with Boeing for, no more. The consensus is that Boeing will fulfill the contract then that'll be the end of Starliner, which is great for Boeing in the sense that it'll finally close that money-leaking wound, but not great for NASA because the whole point of Starliner + Crew Dragon was to have two separate US-owned ways to send people into space.[1] Even if Starship passes every test going forward ahead of schedule and gets man-rated, NASA would prefer to not have one company provide both methods, but I don't know what would be a better alternative. Sierra finally gets that big contract to man-rate Dream Chaser? Blue Origin?
[1] Setting aside how everyone at the time believed that Starliner would be the first one into orbit
That said, right now it's kind of up in the air, since as it stands, Dragon's second crew contract and Starliner's existing contract are likely to cover all remaining ISS launches. So what's needed afterwards depends on the commercial space stations NASA is pushing for.
I'm not certain what is meant by "certified" because it still hasn't made a human flight test yet.
Notwithstanding the retirement of Atlas and Delta, Starliner was intended to be compatible with multiple launch vehicles, including the ULA Atlas V and Delta IV, and the SpaceX Falcon 9
Keep in mind we would have to compare it to the ~20M marginal cost of a F9 launch, not the $70M sticker price that a customer would pay.
Falcon9 is estimated to cost about $30M/launch. $20M to build the upper stage, and $10M to launch. Starship is estimated to cost about $100M to build both the booster and the second stage. Add $10M to launch.
So 17t/$30M vs 150t/$110M.