Starship: Dead End?

The booster failure was just a result of intentionally pushing to the limit. Doesn't say anything about the broader program. The ship failures are concerning, but SpaceX can afford the retries given the runaway revenue of Starlink. The failures have different root causes, so progress is being made.

My biggest problem with the Starship program is the heat shield. It isn't proven that a fully reusable heat shield is feasible without refurbishment after each flight, and they have barely been able to test it at all thus far. These ship failures are temporary (albeit very expensive) setbacks and will be worked through, but heat shield issues are what could cause the whole program to miss its performance targets.

> Nearly all of Starship’s paid contracts are for human spaceflight

This is misleading, because Starship neither launches nor lands humans on Earth for Artemis. Starship can fulfill the Artemis contract even if it is not safe enough to put humans on during Earth launch or reentry. And Dear Moon was canceled, so I don't think there's any human spaceflight planning to launch from Earth on Starship right now besides Elon's Mars aspirations. Starlink is the customer that will actually fund Starship. SpaceX becoming their own customer was brilliant.

The Falcon architecture is objectively the best rocket that has been designed and flown (most launches, most successes, cheapest). Either that is roughly most the optimal rocket architecture that is possible within known physics, materials, and Earth gravity, or there is something better. Those are the only two options.

Starship is SpaceX's bid for the next best thing to obsolete Falcon. It might not succeed, but the alternative is what? SpaceX just sits around, mirco-optimizes Falcon forever? At least they are trying. The potential is there, and the iteration is what smokes out issues in complex systems much better than analysis paralysis.

Let's check back in on this take in 10 years.

Dead end, I don't think so, but certainly it's playing on hard mode.

I don't know what went wrong on the latest Starship launch, so I won't comment on that.

What I am going to say is that if each rocket engine has 0.001 chance of blowing up, putting 33 engines on your rocket means you have a 3.2% chance your rocket will blow up. If you add another 9 on your second stage you have a 4.1% chance of "rapidly disassembling".

We have seen this play before, the soviets were blowing up rocket after rocket on launchpads while NASA went to the moon and back.

It's frustrating seeing Block 2 go through pain we thought we were past, but we're talking about flights this year January, March, and May. The last Block 1 flights were on the cusp of success, so we know if the tiles can get a bit more robust then the mission design works. We've seen Super Heavy do a successful booster catch. We've seen Starship do an orbital reentry all the way down to a soft landing.

Execution matters and this last half a year hasn't been it, but the evidence seems to me to show the theory can work, and that SpaceX isn't running out of capital or conviction.

No. It seems much too early to draw this conclusion. SpaceX’s Falcon program also looked like a guaranteed fail. But it has been the most astonishing success in affordable orbital launch tech in human history.

The essay’s comparison to the deliberately disposable throwaway Saturn V (which had massive additional costs being buried in various agency budgets for congressional pork games and international prestige) - this sounds like a very weak argument.

(Edit - Nobody can deny that Saturn V/IVb and Apollo were heroic achievements in their time, and that SpaceX succeeds because it stands on the shoulders of giants, but we have moved on).

>“weight. Starship weighs far too much”

Now, that is a pertinent observation. The crazy number of missions that are needed just to refuel the most basic mission out of GEO orbit with Starship! But the SpaceX excuse for that would be that their launch cadence and cost is designed to make this manageable and economical. (But not yet, obviously).

Let’s talk again after 20 more failed Starship tests. Then this essay could have greater credence.

(Edited)

I wonder if it would have been safer for SpaceX to just keep building on the Falcon technology? Instead of being mad ambitious with Starship.

>Yet, the Saturn V launched 50 tonnes to the Moon for only $1.8 billion in today’s dollars

According to Wikipedia the Apollo program cost $257 billion in 2020 dollars which given ~20% inflation since is a little over $300bn. The $10bn on Starship so far is quite modest in comparison. The article seems a bit biased against it. I mean:

>Is this progress? If we are being pedantic, sure. Reusing a Super Heavy Booster and reaching orbital speeds without exploding are both steps forward. But in all actuality, this was a lateral move.

Getting to orbit when you haven't before isn't progress? C'mon.

Musk did a presentation on how it's going a couple of days ago http://x.com/SpaceX/status/1928185351933239641 It's quite interesting. Some seems like usual Musk overoptimtic projections but they've made a lot of progress on the raptor 3 engine which is a real thing that's working.

It's a shame posts like this get a negative reception here because there's a valid case to be made that Starship is in the very least troubled or possibly even a doomed boondoggle.

We've had 9 flights and are still pretty far from entering commercial usage. This is expensive too. I've seen estimates that each launch is costing ~$500 million.

One can make the case that Starship is a classic second system effect [1]. Just like IPv6, which decided it was making breaking changes anyway so why not break all the things (all while not solving the one real problem but that's another story). We see this all the time.

The question is: what problem is Starship solving? Yes it has a larger LEO and geostationary payload but this seems to be a pretty limited market thus far as demonstrated by there only being 11 Falcon Heavy launches total thus far. Launching multiple satellites at once only works for launching on the same or very similar orbit for the same constellation like Starlink. As soon as you drastically change the required orbit, you're talking about a separate launch.

Is it to go to the Moon or Mars? Notably, Elon called the Moon "a distraction" [2]. That doesn't bode well. After all, if your launch system was suited for that, wouldn't you want NASA to pay for it to prove it, basically? Fundamentally, it doesn't make sense to have a vehicle like this to land on the Moon (or Mars) and have your astronauts be 40 meters in the air, having to get down and back up.

And going to Mars I don't htink will happen for decades, if ever commercially. With the right political circumstances we may get Apollo like flights to demonstrate superiority but I think colonization is a joke. Mars is actually a terrible place to colonize. It's like the moon but worse in every single way.

And to even get there SpaceX needs to perfect in-orbit refueling, which is technically challenging and not something they've even started yet since they haven't even got to stable orbit yet.

Oh I disagree with the author about NASA doing this earlier, talking about Saturn rockets. Saturn was an expensive low-yield bespoke rocket not suited for mass production. Every Saturn V was essentially a one-off.

The industry workhorse here is the Falcon 9. It's reliable and high volume (>100 launches a year). Starship may yet sink SpaceX.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

[2]: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1875023335891026324

Is this guy actually a fan of disposable rockets? Because that sounds like what he’s hinting. People still think that?

That doesn’t mean there’s no issues with the Starship design. I am still scratching my head a little about stainless steel, which is heavy, and given that the supposed advantage of not needing heat tiles seems to have been proven a mirage so far.

I am also skeptical that they’ll make second stage reusability work. First stage, sure. They are almost there. Just like F9 the math works fine, and reusing that is a big win. Second stage reuse is so much harder.

What I would do is scrap it in favor of a whole different way of looking at Starship.

The upper stage is a spaceship. It belongs in space. It’s never coming home.

That would let you drop so much complexity, structural mass, heat tiles, etc.

It could probably land and take off from the Moon or Mars, maybe with a much smaller booster for the latter, since those bodies have a lot less gravity. Or maybe it lands on the Moon or Mars and never leaves, becoming habitat and being stripped for materials. I could see that for the first dozen or two.

A reusable fuel tanker version that is literally nothing but a cone shaped fuel can with a rocket on it is possibly doable, so maybe there’s that. At least until we can make methane and liquid oxygen on the Moon.

The most logical way forward to get to multi planetary civilization is to build a moon base. Then use that as a factory and staging ground to build and launch huge spacecraft for Mars. In 1/6 gravity and no atmosphere you could manufacture and launch things way larger than anything that could be sent up from Earth without nuclear rockets.

You could also launch nuclear rockets from the Moon, come to think of it, since the Moon has no biosphere and its surface is already bathed in radiation. Even something like Orion (a.k.a. the devil’s pogo stick) could go up from there, though from the far side to avoid EMPing satellites in the Earth-Moon system.

With a Moon first plan the upper stage could become a Moon ship made to fly to the Moon, land, and be habitat or materials. Mars stuff gets built on the Moon where you get to play with big boy toys like LANTR or Orion, which lets you launch the kinds of spacecraft you’d actually want to take to Mars.

Lots of ways to get around full second stage reusability without throwing away the second stage if your goal is a real human presence in space.