Watching pieces of the ship melt off, but then seeing it make a relatively controlled landing, is perversely confidence building. If it can survive that kind of damage on a control surface maybe it's a quite robust craft.
They're gathering a ton of data to make it robust! Many of these engineers built Falcon 9, and I have a pretty high degree of confidence they'll shake out the issues. SpaceX operates very differently from traditional aerospace, so we'll likely see many more issues come up before Starship is human rated.
Why? For NASA, human-rating - for either Earth launch or Earth re-entry - requires a very detailed engineering analysis of probability of loss-of-crew (LOC), and then NASA has some maximum LOC probability they allow (for NASA Commercial Crew, both launch and landing it is 1-in-500, which is 0.2%-for whole of mission it is 1-in-270). That analysis is based on engineering data, which can include simulations, data collected from actual flights, and data from ground-based testing. If SpaceX can demonstrate N successful uncrewed landings (with maximum G forces within acceptable limits for crew, etc), for sufficiently high N, logically the LOC probability will fall beneath NASA’s threshold, and then NASA will human-rate it. However, they don’t actually have to land it 500 times - all they need is an engineering analysis which calculates the LOC probability as being below threshold, and then NASA’s own engineers review it, and once NASA’s engineers are confident it is correct, the human-rating will be approved
Elon had that idea of using rockets for passenger transport so I’m sure it’s in the plan, but for astronauts I don’t see why you’d rush.
SpaceX wants NASA to human-rate Starship because their long-term plan is to retire Falcon 9 / Dragon.
How I expect it will happen: SpaceX will run their own internal analysis of loss-of-crew probability for launch and re-entry. No point going to NASA until they've convinced themselves they are going to meet the standards for human-rating. Once they believe they are, then they'll decide when is the right time to try to convince NASA of it too.
Obviously they are already doing this for lunar landing/launch. Some of that is going to be transferrable to Earth landing/launch. Other parts are unique – e.g. probability of surviving re-entry – but they need to estimate that anyway for non-crewed use cases.
That very analysis will include the fact that they have no launch abort system like normal capsule based systems and that the belly flop landing is much more dangerous than landing a capsule. Space Shuttle memories may come to mind. So the only realistic way to get the 1 in 500 confidence would probably be to really land hundreds of times for unmanned missions and not mess up even once. Granted, they may eventually get there, but I estimate this would take about two decades, if Falcon 9 is any indication.
You are talking about this as if it is based on feelings as opposed to probability calculations. SpaceX will present a probability calculation to NASA, who then either accepts it or disagrees with it on engineering grounds, not "memories". There is no formal requirement for a launch abort system in NASA's safety standards – just a requirement that the probability of death be below a certain threshold. A launch abort system is one way to get that probability below the threshold, but if you don't have one, that's okay so long as you have some other way of getting there.
> So the only realistic way to get the 1 in 500 confidence would probably be to really land hundreds of times for unmanned missions and not mess up even once.
What they do is list every possible failure mode, give it a probability of happening and probability of a lethal outcome if it happens, multiply those two probabilities together, and then add them all up. If the result is above the threshold, they will fail certification. If the result is below it, they then have to convince NASA engineers that (1) their probability estimates are accurate and have sufficient evidence to justify them (2) there are no failure modes they've omitted in the analysis. For (1), actual flight experience is a valid source of evidence, but there are others as well – such as simulations and on-the-ground testing of components. There is no minimum number of flights required to gather sufficient evidence, it all depends on how much non-flight evidence is available and how NASA engineering evaluates that non-flight evidence (which is going to depend on the component or failure mode we are talking about).
You are looking at this from a "big picture" perspective, whereas NASA will be looking at it scenario by scenario, component by component
My concern is that the flip maneuver is just too risky for landing with people on board even if Starship manages to do 200 perfect landings in a row (that would be a better record than the Shuttle).
Each lunar flight implies four launches and three landings on Earth, so the numbers should build up rather quickly.
In a lot of ways they will learn far more from the heat shield burn through around the flap(s) than they would have if they had been "lucky" and it had all gone perfectly.
You during testing you want things to fail, that is the point of testing. If it's all successful you only learn that under those conditions your design works, but if it fails, you learn another way to not do things.
When parts last longer than expected, it is considered something that needs "fixing". It is a signal that the part can be made cheaper, lighter, etc... If SpaceX had gone with heavy, thick tiles, and they did their job because they were overspecced, it is that much less payload capacity.
Even value engineering, which is often criticized when it comes to consumer products is a good thing. Yes, your new dishwasher is not as robust as the one made in the 50s, but it is also 10x cheaper (inflation-adjusted), and it can still wash dishes for maybe 10-15 years without repairs, at which point you may want a new one as technology has improved. Note that I am talking proper engineering, having a single point of failure that prompts a replacement is planned obsolescence and terrible engineering, there should be no single point of failure with good engineering.
What I mean by that is that we have it down well enough that the tech exceeds tolerances and can degrade gracefully.
You see this in some sci-fi where there are rust bucket old ships that work.
The sheer hostility of space kind of precludes the "she's a good ol' ship" trope. When your door doesn't shut on your pickup, you can bang on it a bit. When your door doesn't shut on your spacecraft, you've got a ship full of corpses that look like a blob fish brought up from the Marianas Trench.
The real problem are the storms, as a naked human you won't survive in an ocean storm any longer than in vacuum.
At least you are going to space in a sophisticated vessel full of redundant life support systems. People sailed the high seas in old, barely seaworthy wooden ships dangerously overloaded with cargo, which didn't even have a reliable way of determining where precisely they were, because no one could tell longitude at sea before the mid-1700s or so.
Until today, some jobs at sea are pretty dangerous. Being a fisherman in Alaskan waters is much more risky than being an (American, not Russian) soldier.
People still do it. Which convinces me that people will risk their lives going to Mars, and more than a few of them. Some people are just built that way.
Generations of explorers, many of whom lost their lives for no gain, indicate otherwise.
Let us make a thought experiment. Let's say that Musk, tomorrow, declares "we are now creating a list of future Mars colonists, reasonably healthy individuals under 70 can apply from anywhere in the world, please send us your resumes".
Would they get fewer than 10 million applicants? I'd rather guess 50 million or so. Of course, some of those are going to get cold feet the moment they receive their one-way flight ticket in mail, but quite a few won't.
By your hypothesis, there would be approximately zero applicants. I don't believe that.
Sure they do. There’s a queue at the top of Mount Everest despite regular deaths; a couple rich folk got squished to pulp in the Titanic submarine last year. The free solo guy climbs Yosemite for the fun of it.
Plenty of people still have that itch.
Now it’s a race every few years - Vendee Globe. Something like half do not finish.
Still remember that at one time moving faster than 15mph was considered insane and pushed the limits of materials and vehicle design. Same for high altitude flight, McMurdo station, deep ocean diving, etc.
In a lot of ways very deep ocean diving is harder than space. The pressure differentials are a lot worse.
The hard part about space is really launch and delta-V budgets.
The ISS leaks air on a daily basis.
A true space age will involve many ships that never enter atmosphere or land.
A scramjet power first stage for example could overcome the tyranny of the rocket equation (at least on earth).
The issue is orbital velocity is an absolutely bonkers high velocity. Nothing can even come close to that velocity in the atmosphere. The SR-71, fastest air-breathing aircraft ever flow topped out at around 1/9th of orbital velocity. Yes scramjets could certainly beat that speed, once they are developed but even if that doubles the speed of a SR-71 (which already was pushing the limits of heating) then you are still only doing 1/4th of the speed you need for orbit.
So you have a bit of a catch-22 situation - You can have plenty of oxygen for your engines all around you, or you can have the speed you need for orbit - But not both at the same time. Yes, a scramjet can reduce the amount of oxidizer required (by a lot) but to do this you need the extra weight of wings and everything else you need for proper aerodynamic flight.
Some of the newer missiles like the BrahMos are designed like this and have a ramjet powered second stage to save on oxidizer. It doesn't reach anywhere near orbital speed, but with this design, the shock cone takes the majority of the heating vs. the SR-71 where there were many exposed parts and materials.
Or even better - keep the current setup but have a ring of air breathing engines in the booster that work as long as they can.
There's a lot of stuff some extra engineering can do, given enough time and resources. For now, SpaceX is going for the biggest bang for the buck, and they have a very healthy aversion of complicated solutions. But in time, adding a few air breathing engines may become simple enough to be worth it.
At an abstract level, it's the same issue as with aerospikes, the idea has too many caveats, too much expense and not enough benefit to justify the relatively small improvements in efficiency.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6256/why-were-jet-...
The summary is that there isn't enough oxygen at the range of altitudes needed.
And Star Trek doesn't have "good old rust-bucket" ships in it, but the whole premise of it is that they found a way to move faster than the speed of light.
Here are a few likely use cases: * in-space science * in-space R&D * in-space industry * mining small rocks (asteroids) in space * space-based power * military applications
Long-term, we may see terraforming planets and minor planets.
If there's cabin decompression on a plane, you get an oxygen mask and land safely in the nearest airport. If there's cabin decompression on a spacecraft, you're dead. If there's a problem with engines on a plane, you can still glide and land somewhere. If there's a problem with engines on a rocket, guess what, you're dead.
There are rust buckets flying out there without any issue. There's a guy on tiktok that bought a literal $200 plane and is documenting his work on it - and he started test flying it almost immediately.
I don't have enough experience in the field to tell myself if aviation tech is mature enough to be considered "rusty truck level", but we definitely have the data to know it.
Yes it's different from a car's requirements, no the concept is not different, rusty pickup just means different things.