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Comment by thot_experiment | Hacker News Reader

Someone who follows this stuff, how does this compare to the starship catching towers? Both in terms of complexity and cost. My gut says the starship towers are about as complicated (in an abstract "does a bunch of tricky things wrt spaceship support" even if they're different things way) and I'm betting it's 100x? 1000x cheaper? I don't know anything though so if someone is more knowledgeable I would love to learn more.

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SpaceX built (and rebuilt) a tower practically overnight. They are building two more. They are building huge construction bays overnight. Their contractors are literally working nights. There is probably no comparison on cost or speed.

ML-1 and ML-2 have been percolating along for over a decade. ML-1 is going to see just a few launches (3-4?). ML-2 is just 7 feet taller. Total between the two maybe $3.5 billion range?

This is just for the SLS tower. Actual SLS / Orion / sustainment costs at the NASA centers are absolutely mind boggling.

Then you compare that to what NASA gets with their contracts with SpaceX and the mind boggles.

> how does this compare to the starship catching towers?

These are mobile while Starship’s towers are fixed. That alone massively increases the MLs’ complexity.

Why are they mobile? I genuinely can’t tell beyond that’s how Apollo did it. A fixed tower with a moveable (or even temporary) structure built around it would have been simpler.

SpaceX doesn't tend to share that kind of information, so we may never know exactly. Plus, it's R&D they expect will amortize over the operational life of Starship rather than infrastructure being built for a narrow set of missions that I can't see resulting in much future reuse.

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