Hacker News Reader

Saturn V development started in January 1962. Starship development started sometime before 2018. Generously, we can say SpaceX has been developing it for at least 6 years at this point. By the same point, January 1968, the Saturn V had launched, orbited the Earth, and simulated a trans-lunar injection. In December 1968 the Saturn V launched astronauts onboard Apollo 8 to fly around the Moon.

So it is getting tough to say that Starship development is proceeding fast compared to other projects.

Is it SpaceX philosophy or specifically Starship development philosophy? Because the development of the Falcon seemed to follow a pretty standard path. First they had three failures and two successes with the Falcon 1, and then they scaled up to Falcon 9, which worked on the first attempt.

The work towards booster landing and reuse was more iterative, but it was a special case. They had to be careful with the changes, because they were testing in production. The first priority was always delivering the payload. But once the booster had done its job, it was available for experiments.

Elon's spoken at length about the choice between design philosophies since the early days of Falcon. I'd submit that trashing Falcon 1 after the first successful flight to build Falcon 9 is an example of exactly that. Part of Falcon's success so early on was due to the choice of intentionally simple systems - a single pintle injector in the Merlin engine, RP1 propellant which is well understood, lots of relatively safe choices. And lots of work with the grasshopper test vehicles. But on flight 1 of Falcon 9 they flew Dragon. Flight 6 used hardware revision 1.1 and was the first to attempt a propulsive return. Flight 9 added landing legs. They made changes to basically every flight until Block 5 with flight 54.

>but it was a special case

Starship is the biggest rocket ever attempted, with uncommon propellant, most advanced engine cycle and it is designed to be fully reusable. Falcon was safe retreading of known ground comparatively.

> Russia followed the former, much like SpaceX, and Soyuz is second only to Falcon 9 in number of launches.

Yeah, but it failed with more complex rockets (the soviet N1), where it just kept blowing up.

N1 would have worked eventually with enough effort. The larger problem is that Korolev died and his deputy was far less politically capable.

Its questionable if it would have ever worked

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/apollo-moon-khrus...

> Korolev was not a scientist, not a designer: he was a brilliant manager. Korolev's problem was his mentality. His intent was to somehow use the launcher he had. [The launcher was called N1]. It was designed in 1958 for a different purpose and with a limited payload of about 70 tons.] His philosophy was, let's not work by stages [as is usual in spacecraft design], but let's assemble everything and then try it. And at last it will work. There were several attempts and failures with Lunnik [a series of unmanned Soviet moon probes]. Sending man to the moon is too complicated, too complex for such an approach. I think it was doomed from the very beginning.

> The speed of development is frankly mind blowing considering it’s scale

It’s been in some level of development for well over a decade. Back in 2018 they changed the idea from using carbon composites to stainless steel and renamed the project Starship but in no way can you call it a fast process.

> hardware-rich development philosophy

If it was actually working it’s a perfectly viable strategy, but it seems to be slowing things down.

> It’s been in some level of development for well over a decade. Back in 2018 they changed the idea from using carbon composites to stainless steel and renamed the project Starship but in no way can you call it a fast process.

How long did the last fully reusable superheavy lift rocket take to develop? There's never been one you say? Right. So you have no metric for measurement. The closest equivalent: SLS is flying hardware who's design originated in the 60s, and Blue Origin began development 24 years ago.

Starship is developing at light speed by comparison to anything approaching it's size.

Still think it's happening slowly? Feel free to build one yourself in less time. I'll wait.

They’ve taken longer to develop Starship than NASA did with the Space Shuttle.

Space shuttle development can be traced to the Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-20_Dyna-Soar ) which began in 1957, the MiG-105 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-105 ) from 1965, and the Silbervogel project ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbervogel ) from 1941. The space shuttle didn't fly until 1981. Try again.

I’m not sure you’ve really thought that argument through to it’s conclusion.

> the MiG-105 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-105 ) from 1965, and the Silbervogel project ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbervogel ) from 1941.

Starship can trace its development back to the 1920’s seeing as the team leveraged that research, if you’re going to use such a meaningless definition including USSR projects as a legacy here Starship loses simply because of the much later launch date.

> if you’re going to use such a meaningless definition including USSR projects as a legacy here

So you're not even aware of how the shuttle was developed and are just making ill-informed assumptions. Got it.

I’m well aware of the link, but again Starship shares similar links with much older projects.

We can trace them both down to liquid rocket propulsion, but one flew in 1980’s the other is still in R&D.

> I’m well aware of the link

Then why don't you tell us about it?

> Then why don't you tell us about it?

Because you’re obviously trying to deflect from a lost argument. Starship has clearly been mismanaged and nothing you’ve suggested has actually countered that core issue.

Well, I've provided plenty of links and facts. You've provided your unique opinions, little else, and seem wholly unaware of the development history of these vehicles you claim to know better than rocket engineers about.

Even if I use your example and timeline:

Shuttle: 1968 (project announced) - 1981 (first launch): 13 years

Starship: 2012 (project announced) - 2022 (first launch): 10 years

Starship's several years ahead of Shuttle development.

Hilarious conversation. Thanks for providing laughs for the evening.

golf clap

Yep, you’ve got nothing. Starship even borrows heavily from the shuttle program using a lifting body design etc.

One last link for ya: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection

I’d rather have a coherent debate, but I’ll take a laugh instead.

At least have the dignity of walking away.

I guess we're both laughing then! lol

The difference here is that STS-1 achieved orbit and flew 37 times around the earth, while Starship flight 1 didn't even explode correctly after failing to keep its designated path. Starship has yet to achieve orbit, in fact, in 2025 - passing the 13 year mark of STS-1.

And note that the actual shuttle that was launched in 1981, the Columbia, went on to conduct 27 more successful missions (until its tragic end many years later). So it was already successfully reusable from its first test flight (with the known caveats around cost of refurbishment).

> with the known caveats around cost of refurbishment

Only the orbiter was refurbishable (not fully and rapidly reusable like Starship - booster reuse was demonstrated today), which took 6 months, and cost $2 Billion per launch.

The whole Starship development program is slated to cost about as much as 5 Shuttle launches.

Nearly 50 year old technology is generally inferior to modern equivalents, that hardly an argument that Starship’s R&D process is going well.

Again, feel free to point to any rocket of the size and reusability of Starship which is further along in development or has developed faster. None exist.

> Nearly 50 year old technology is generally inferior to modern equivalents <

Feel free to counter the points being addressed rather than attack a straw man. Obviously if Starship was strictly worse there’d be no point in trying to develop it.

Suggesting a modern preproduction car is better than a Fiat Argenta from the early 80’s isn’t a recommendation, same deal with Starship.

that first launch included a crew, it's 2025 and starship is nowhere near that

Yeah, well, apparently neither was Shuttle. RIP Challenger and Columbia and crews.

No fatalities with Dragon yet, thankfully. It seems to me that Dragon and Shuttle are much more directly comparable. Falcon 9 throws away it's second stage, which is still less than Shuttle did. And Dragon requires a similar level of refurbishment to Shuttle. Shuttle could carry 27,000kg to LEO whereas Falcon 9 can carry 22,800kg to LEO.

Starship is slated for 200,000kg to LEO. It's in an entirely different class.

The aspect of Starship I find craziest - it's lack of launch abort system at this stage of development - was a problem Shuttle suffered it's whole life. And Shuttle didn't have the engine redundancy of Starship or Falcon 9.

Comparing a project by a private company to the most powerful government in world history is a little disingenuous

If we were comparing two projects in 2025 I would absolutely agree.

Except SpaceX is spending ~2 billion dollars per year which on the surface is well below the space shuttle (though not that far), but modern aerospace projects have massive advantages over these early programs so simple inflation calculators don’t really capture the cost changes well.

They are getting way more value than the space shuttle which wasn't very useful by comparison. Apples to oranges

How are defining value here?

The shuttle flew well over 100 successful mission including infrastructure that’s still in use ISS, Hubble.

Starship has 0 successful missions.

> It’s been in some level of development for well over a decade. Back in 2018 they changed the idea from using carbon composites to stainless steel and renamed the project Starship but in no way can you call it a fast process.

Relative to the less ambitious Space Shuttle and New Glenn projects, it seems to be progressing at good pace. They already demonstrated landing and reflight of the lower stage, and it does seem likely that they will land the upper stage this year.