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.
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.
> 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.
So you're not even aware of how the shuttle was developed and are just making ill-informed assumptions. Got it.
We can trace them both down to liquid rocket propulsion, but one flew in 1980’s the other is still in R&D.
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.
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.
Yep, you’ve got nothing. Starship even borrows heavily from the shuttle program using a lifting body design etc.
At least have the dignity of walking away.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
The shuttle flew well over 100 successful mission including infrastructure that’s still in use ISS, Hubble.
Starship has 0 successful missions.
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.