Hacker News Reader

Comment by jkjkjjjkjkj | Hacker News Reader

Well, the second stage definitely needs to survive re-entry if it wants to carry passengers. But it seems to work as-is for orbital cargo.

View on HN

Passenger rating isn't even in the cards for Starship for a long time. You ride to LEO on a Falcon-9 with a proven track record for the foreseeable future.

"Foreseeable" is roughly "five years"? Starship HLS (Human Landing System) is currently planned to land on the Moon, with people, in 2026. It may very well slip a year, two or three - but landing on the Moon this decade still seems quite possible. Or you consider "passengers" different enough than "crew"?

Yes, landing on the Moon without an atmosphere is vastly different from orbital flight on earth and has an entirely different risk profile.

Interesting Asterix on that is the humans will only be on Starship from Lunar orbit down to the moon surface and then back to lunar orbit again.

No humans aboard during Starship launch, transit to and from the moon or re-entry.

(For completeness, humans will do all that other stuff aboard SLS and Orion. Starship literally only ferries them down the moon and back up again)

Yes, but HLS is just one example. In, say, ten years it may look very possible that Starships with people will fly on LEO. Is it beyond foreseeable future?.. I just don't understand why such a pessimistic estimate.

In my view, since I was the one that said it, anything more than 5 years away is perpetually 5 years away until it's been proven. Yes, eventually when Starship has enough launches and a track record it will get human rated by NASA to carry astronauts. This is the only actual certification for human space flight worth paying attention to right now. It's possible to get on a rocket otherwise, but the US government isn't going to pay for the ride. Getting flight certified by NASA is expensive and requires a level of experience with the vehicle that doesn't make sense for at least 5 years given we have a cheap and safe ride to LEO via Falcon / Dragon. Nobody is going to rush human flight on Starship, it's only going to have people on it once it's already in space.

I'll still take this as progress. With thermonuclear reactors it's perennial 20 years, similar for flying cars, in-house robots, manned flight to the Mars, so 5 years as a stand-in for "foreseeable future" sounds like a good step ahead.

I just looked it up.

The first Falcon 9 flight was June 2010.

The first Falcon 9 with astronauts was May 2020.

10 years to get human certified.

That was also with a rush order on it due to the Shuttle's retirement.

Good point.

In those 10 years Falcon 9 flew 84 times [1].

So I would think Starship needs to fly roughly a similar number of times before it will be human rated. Even if they launch one a month from now on, it will take ~7 years. So I think we're a while away from NASA certifying Starship for human flight, though I wonder in SpaceX would just put their own people on it regardless.

[1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/g32758515/fal...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com