Days Since Starship Exploded counter made it to 48. It's back to zero again now | Hacker News Reader

Days Since Starship Exploded counter made it to 48. It's back to zero again now

theregister.com

19 pointsbeardyw28 comments

If we ignore the societal grudge held against its owner, this is not much out of the ordinary, right? SpaceX's usual experiments go along the lines of doing it once or twice in the right way, then pushing the limits as far as possible, to find what those are.

You might have a problem with this approach - the waste is large, the environmental impacts terrible. But they got to where they are exactly by this process. See articles such as SpaceX Launched Over 80% of All Orbital Payload Mass in Q1 2023 (https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/05/spacex-launched-over-8...)

Europe could stand to learn a thing or two. We still do our launches in secret, often not telling a public that there will be a launch until the satellites are already in space.

Not out of the ordinary at all. About two years ago, space.com published a summary of "Every SpaceX Starship explosion"[1] so far. There were quite a few even then.

But it's not really out of the ordinary for the media to talk about them either; even without politics, rocket explosions get views.

1: https://www.space.com/every-spacex-starship-explosion-lesson...

Then where does the Falcon 9 have only 4 total failures over the course of nearly 15 years figure come from?[0]

Last two previous launches were failures of the Raptor engine. Falcon 9 never seemed to have this many issues did it?

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...

That's ignoring the failures of the Falcon 1 rocket that used the same Merlin engine. Once they got the bugs worked out the Falcon rockets have been very reliable.

Falcon 9 was a more conservative rocket. The big new thing was recovering the booster, and there were lots of failures for that. The other big difference is that Falcon 9 uses the Merlin engine, which was developed on Falcon 1 rocket which had multiple failures.

Starship is trying something new, recovering the second stage that goes in orbit. Which means bigger rocket and more complicated second stage. They are also using new Raptor engines.

The last two failures have been new version of Starship, and they either broke something or haven't been able to fix problem.

Back in the day, falcon nine booster reusability would've been called a fine hack. It wasn't meant to do that. But, just barely, it could.

Starship is the cybertruck of spaceships. It's what happens when you stop listening to the people who could pull off a fine hack.

Love ruining the environment for garbage that only benefits the elite.

The schadenfreude is strong here but it’s hard to argue with results. By treating space launches as a process to refine through iteration (so the more the better) they’ve come to dominate the market. It’s also a process where others don’t gain the benefit of those iterations, there’s no new tech innovations to base your own launch vehicle on, just lots and lots of internal knowledge.

It’s worrying to have a capacity like this so concentrated in one company (whatever the leanings of the figurehead) but hard to see how that changes unless others start using the same methodology

> worrying to have a capacity like this so concentrated in one company

If it wasn't US spending their precious $$$$ on this (Elon says that in the end of they day these are ICBM's going to space), none of this would have happened.

I think that this deal "US gets super-duper ICBMs" and "Elon takes us to space" is a great deal.

I don't think any company's wallet can afford this, and Russia/China are decades away to do this on their own. Sharing technology is (so far) out of the questions because of the certain weapon-isation of the tech.

So for the next few decades it is Elon or nothing.

I think you're really discounting China. They have the resources, motivation, and the track record to fast track this. They've already landed rovers and have their own space station. They can fail faster than the US can succeed because of sheer size.

But ... Elon Musk has never once "come to dominate the market". He's always worked to figure out how to get government to give him ever larger amounts of money. He's built it up to the point where he gets close to 9 million USD per day from the US government (that's a stat only from his public companies. It doesn't include starlink military spending and the military part of SpaceX). Elon Musk's companies are something like Northrop Grumman/Lockheed Martin v2.0, not market-based enterprises, which they never were.

Tesla: cheating to make electric cars affordable, not by better engineering (in fact arguably way worse engineering), but by having the government pay (initially) 8000 out of a 45000 car, or close to 20%. Then continue by attempting, and failing spectacularly in an almost comical manner, to monopolize the battery market.

SpaceX: take a fundamentally bad business idea (there's plenty of private space launch attempts, but even the best go bankrupt), by ... getting the government to pay for space launches, in what is a very very bad deal (the government MUST have space launch capabilities. So it can never stop developing Boeing SLS. Therefore what is paid to SpaceX is paid ON TOP of what we pay to SLS, and is NOT a better alternative (as Musk screams), and so not any kind of saving. We don't have the numbers, because SpaceX is private, but all other companies trying it are 10x or 100x removed from profitability. Why would SpaceX, even if it has a 10x cost advantage, survive? And it is very hard to believe it's cost advantage is more than 2x or 3x if it exists at all)

Starlink: this has been tried, and tried and tried again. It just isn't profitable. SpaceX LEO satellites need to be replaced, 7000 satellites, every 5 years. That's 1400 satellites per year, or about 40 launches per year (you can only launch satellites together that go into the same orbit with very few exceptions), at a (subsidized by the government) cost of 70 million per launch. OPERATING (not building) SpaceX costs 2.1 billion dollars per year, not counting personnel, actual data transmission and uplinks, development of satellites and terminals. That's a minimum. The total market for internet in rural areas worldwide is ... about 300 million. The only real market for Starlink is military, and that means Europe, Russia, China, ... can never use Starlink. And even the US can't rely on it for several reasons (it's got a huge target painted over it's satellites and you can bet your firstborn Russia and China and Japan and ... have hundreds of experts working on destroying Starlink quickly. Hell, I bet the US has people working on that, even under Trump, just in case)

Explains a lot of why mr. Musk is so desperate to get a large amount of control over the government doesn't it?

Btw: does it really need to be stated that

1) every billionnaire is a financial engineer, finding holes in government tax policy, and if they don't admit this, they're lying.

2) mr. Musk's entire empire is utterly dependent on government spending. Totally. 100% (because all these companies would go bankrupt without government money, they wouldn't lose 10% of their income. They'd be gone). Therefore the idea that Musk wants to cut government spending is a bit ...

TBH if Musk is truely fixated with Mars then even 100 billion $$$ global commercial empire across multiple sectors wasn't going to finance it. The only play for trillions for Mars is to insinuate way into government largesse, and there's only one gov who can both afford to and willing (or dumb enough) to play. And even for US gov it's a squeeze... billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money... if Musk wants trillions no wonder he's wants to cut billions elsewhere.

>SpaceX: take a fundamentally bad business idea (there's plenty of private space launch attempts, but even the best go bankrupt), by ... getting the government to pay for space launches, in what is a very very bad deal (the government MUST have space launch capabilities. So it can never stop developing Boeing SLS. Therefore what is paid to SpaceX is paid ON TOP of what we pay to SLS, and is NOT a better alternative (as Musk screams), and so not any kind of saving.

Sorry to interrupt your nonsense, but Biden's NASA administrator Bill Nelson quoted a member of the Joint Chiefs as telling him that SpaceX had saved the US government $40 billion for just launching military payloads. <https://www.fool.com/investing/2022/06/05/did-spacex-really-...>.

On the civilian side, SpaceX saved NASA $2 billion for just one payload, Europa Clipper <https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/a-year-from-launch-the...>, so who knows how many billions more from other launches.

>Starlink: this has been tried, and tried and tried again. It just isn't profitable.

Two outside analysts estimate that Starlink became cash flow positive in 2024, with FCF hitting $2B in 2025. <https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/02/starlink-profit-growin...>

I explained why SpaceX is a bad deal for the US government. They have strategic reasons why they cannot be limited to SpaceX. Hence anything "saved" by a SpaceX launch is illusory: they can choose to pay for SLS ... or they can choose to pay for SLS AND for SpaceX.

Which number will be bigger? The price of SpaceX launches doesn't even matter. Or in economic lingo: SpaceX launches aren't that much cheaper to the marginal cost of SLS, which is what matters.

EVERY private space launch company beats SLS on price. Nothing special about SpaceX on that front. Who has the cheapest launch cost? This might be a surprise, but Russia does (about 50 million dollars). Yes Falcon can carry more and is more modern, but all rockets are different (and they do have big ones too), but you want cheapest? Russia is currently unbeatable, mostly because they do close to zero development at this point. Obviously, you can see the problem with using Russia too.

> They have strategic reasons why they cannot be limited to SpaceX. Hence anything "saved" by a SpaceX launch is illusory: they can choose to pay for SLS ... or they can choose to pay for SLS AND for SpaceX.

There are other options than SpaceX and SLS. And SLS is not designed or destined to launch the majority of US government payloads as an alternative to SLS.

SpaceX's primary market competitors are ULA and Blue Origin. The US govt can continue to fund competition even if the SLS program goes way.

Ok, I don't fully agree, but it's beside the point ... that makes all government money spent on SpaceX worthless (because it cannot replace money that has to be spent)

Think of it like buying a car ... after you've already signed the contract to buy a new car. The contract signing means that all money spent on cars afterwards is money wasted, because you will have to complete the contract regardless. Likewise, buying a rocket from SpaceX does not let the government avoid spending on SLS.

> that makes all government money spent on SpaceX worthless

I don't follow your logic. I think you're conflating two very different things, the US government launch market and the Artemis lunar program.

The US government previously paid ULA as the sole provider for many launch services. (Well, before that it was Boeing and Lockheed but they consolidated into ULA).

Since SpaceX became a competitive provider, the US government has had a choice on new contracts between ULA and SpaceX in competitive bids. SpaceX has won many contracts by being cheaper than ULA, and ULA has dropped their own prices to be more competitive to SpaceX.

That is real savings on US government launches through competition. There's no 20 year committed car loan on all future rocket launches that the US government is already paying for these services.

SLS isn't really part of the picture for the vast majority of these launches that SpaceX is winning contracts on. SLS is being built for upcoming lunar missions only at this point, as part of the Artemis program.

SpaceX's existing Artemis contract is to provide a lander to work alongside the SLS rocket and Orion, not as a replacement for SLS. Without SpaceX's lander there will be no way for astronauts to get from lunar orbit to the surface for the initial planned landing missions.

But treating SLS solely as money already committed to be spent is a sunk cost fallacy. The SLS continues to cost billions per launch even if you ignore all of the development costs up until this point. It can also only launch once every year or two.

A mission architecture based on competitive bids from multiple service providers (ULA, Blue Origin, and SpaceX) will almost certainly cost less going forward and allow an increased flight rate.

> the company Xeeted

This is what upset me the most in this article

Yes, the proper term is 'Xcreted'.

Xitted?

The issue, in my non-educated view, is that it's the same issue twice in a row. I'm all for innovation and have admired SpaceX since the Grasshopper prototype but they can't just keep having debris flying down the Bahamas every month. Maybe it does need a pause in the launches and re-think the whole upper stage.

What's the equivalent of Bioware for engineering companies? When the original talent leaves or existing talent can't put together a significantly more complex project than previous efforts. Not suggesting this is where SpaceX is at, too soon to tell, but curious of there's a term for that process.

I hear they are going to Mars real soon.

I started making videos about Starship because the project management approach to Starship is a crock of cheese.

Agile project management methods work well for software. When I teach how to use those methods I warn people that they are so attractive and so simple that it's tempting to use them everywhere. Agile can, and too often does, become a management fad. Which is a disaster.

So no surprise, when I heard all of the iterative development bullshit about Starship I thought this is a crock of cheese. I should talk about this being a huge blunder and warn all those people out there in the tech industry that knowledge of software development project management isn't going to translate to rockets, Or much else, besides software.

And so, it's no surprise that on the 9th test flight, it blew up again at roughly the same time and place as the 8th test flight. The iterative changes made between these two test flights didn't improve the outcome. This is a project where progress has stalled. If a software project was performing like this, it would be time to consider terminating the current project, and either starting over or abandoning the project goals on the basis that the technology and implementation choices that were made during the project aren't working.

Unlike most software projects, where you can "throw one away" and not take too bad a hit financially or schedule wise, Starship suffers both from sunk cost fallacies and a narcissistic project leader.

The current problems that have stalled Starship's progress are very likely not the most difficult problems that they will have to solve. They don't know in detail what those problems are going to be. Because of iterative development of a rocket. They can't see far ahead in their project. And that is going to lead to the failure of this project.

>I started making videos about Starship because the project management approach to Starship is a crock of cheese.

The same project management approach resulted in Falcon 9, by far the world's most successful, reliable, and least-expensive launcher, even aside from the fact that it is reusable.

Windows95 was pretty cool, too.

Several very talented rocket designers have since left SpaceX. They might have succeeded regardless (or despite) of the development methodology. It doesn’t mean the methodology was a good one. And even if it was, the level of Elon meddling in this project has gone up an order of magnitude. That’s a lot of stupid to have to work around.

I remember watching the "Space Shuttle Challenger" disaster (I was a little child back then) and I thought "wow!!!" and then my mother told me "there were 7 people in there that are dead and their kids will never see them again". And then I went outside and played football with my friends.

Every time I am remembering those moments (well.. now I do understand 'more' about life/death/the universe) I am thinking "f...ing hell, those people were incinerated in 1ms, their families got back a handful of nothing to bury". (imagine losing someone and getting an empty casket)

Every time I see a "test launch" going 'boom' I am 'happy' because I know that we don't lose 1-5-10-20 finest-speciment-people in that incident.

How many boats are in the bottom of the seas carrying explorers, traders, fishermen, voyagers? Hundreds? Thousands?

How many men are in the bottom of the seas that were those explorers, traders, fishermen, voyagers? Hundreds? Thousands?

Space exploration is HARD. Shitposting or writing thoughtful and critically-correct articles on the internet is EASY (relative to the space exploration thingie).

I do believe that from every failure we learn and we become better. So yeah, dear TheRegister keep a counter on your desks, while sitting on your chairs, in a warm office with hot coffee and cool water, while others work to make us interplanetary species. Do keep an eye on this for the following two reasons: 1) we need to know what's up and 2) we need to see the progress (and a secret 3) we laugh with you hypocrisy/negativity)

And a side-note about 'feelings'.. the thing is called (apologies for the upcoming caps) "starship"... FFS we are developing "STARSHIPS"!!!!!!! Do people realize that we are developing "STAR-SHIPS"???? Not "cross-the-lake-ships", or "cross-the-ocean-ships". We are developing machines that can/will carry living human beings across the Cosmos and on to other planets far-far-away!!!

I am a Trekkie and knowing that we are developing these and there is actual progress makes my heart beat faster!!!

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