The wet (loaded with propellant) to dry (empty of propellant) mass ratio is determined via the rocket equation to be the exponential of delta V divided by exhaust velocity.
Certain parts of the rocket, such as the external tank structure, scale sub-cubically with the rocket's dimension, as do aerodynamic forces; whereas payload and propellant mass scale cubically.
Hence if the rocket is smaller than a critical threshold size, the requisite vehicle structures are too large relative to its propellant capacity to permit the required wet:dry mass ratio to achieve the delta V for orbit.
At exactly this size, the rocket can reach orbit with zero payload.
As the rocket increases in size beyond this threshold, it is able to carry a payload which is increasingly large relative to the rocket's total mass.
(There's a large difference between staged combustion generally and gas-generator engines, which throw away performance by dumping fuel out of the turbine exhaust).
We might imagine a conservative FFSC design which accepts very low temperatures in exchange for making it easy (low R&D cost) to reach high longevity. Raptor is not a conservative design, so it requires more R&D to achieve that longevity.
I understand vaguely that those operate and scale based on the area (a square function of their length) of their lifting surfaces, and are pulled down by their mass (a cube function of their length).
A little Estes toy rocket lifts off the pad much more aggressively (in the blink of an eye!) than a full size rocket...
However, even if you're taking off of a planet with no atmosphere, you still have a huge force to deal with - you need to maintain an acceleration to exit the gravity well of the planet, and you need to burn fuel for that. But you also have to carry the fuel you'll burn with you, so the more fuel you have, the more fuel you'll need - this is what the rocket equation codifies.
Isn't this the entire point of using methane as fuel so that they can build a gas station once they get there so that return fuel is not required to be considered in this equation?
If you really want to, you can reach Mach 10 (~3300 m/s) with a 8 meter long 3500 kg missile in 5 seconds:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile)
All of that in the lower atmosphere with the missile heat shield glowing white hot. :)
An orbital class rocket--taking that kind of g load is going to break it (just look at the payload specs for the Falcon Heavy--its maximum permitted payload is well below it's performance to low orbit. You load it up to what the engines can do, it breaks. The only use case is when it's going farther than low orbit.) And an orbital class rocket has active steering rather than fins, it doesn't need to be booking it to be stable.
> Our satellite launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California (USA) on Jan 14, 2025. The rocket mission is a Transporter, and SAT GUS was dropped off in low-Earth orbit at about 375 miles above the surface of our pale blue dot.
So there's some sort of curve, zero at both ends, between overall rocket size and the payload to orbit. The question is where Starship sits on that curve, and to your point it seems likely that it's looking good on that metric alone.
But then you have another curve that I think starts small and increases near-monotonically, which is the complexity/likelihood-to-fail factor to the size of the rocket. It's (relatively) easy to launch a toy rocket, (fairly) simple to build a missile-sized sub-orbital rocket, difficult to build a small-to-medium orbital rocket, and apparently very difficult to build a Saturn/N-1/Starship-sized rocket. More props to the crazy '60s team that pulled it off.
This doesn't follow. Engineering complexity is not a limit on payload to orbit, it is a fundamentally different parameter. Yeah building a mile tall rocket would be hard, but it would get a shit ton of payload to orbit. There is no maximum beyond which making a bigger rocket starts to reduce your payload to orbit.
> But then you have another curve that I think starts small and increases near-monotonically, which is the complexity/likelihood-to-fail factor to the size of the rocket. It's (relatively) easy to launch a toy rocket, (fairly) simple to build a missile-sized sub-orbital rocket, difficult to build a small-to-medium orbital rocket, and apparently very difficult to build a Saturn/N-1/Starship-sized rocket.
Complexity does not increase with size, people just become more risk averse with size. Toy rockets fail all the time, just nobody really cares. No one would bet the lives of multiple people and hundreds of millions of dollars on a successful toy rocket launch. If complexity increases, it is with capability. If you want to land on the moon, you need something a bit more advanced than a hobby rocket. There is no reason to believe a floatilla of physically smaller rockets capable of achieving any given mission will be less complex in aggregate than a single physically larger rocket.
> This doesn't follow. Engineering complexity is not a limit on payload to orbit
At this point I'm merely talking about size (which I think is clear from the words I use. I don't think "building a mile tall rocket would be hard" adequately describes the difficulty when we haven't even built a mile tall building.
Sea Dragon[1] was only envisioned as 490 feet tall, and as near as I can tell even the Super Orion[2] would only have been 400-600 meters tall. And of course, neither of those was even close to implementation. Therefore I stand by my statement that a mile tall rocket is, for all practical purposes, impossible, and thus has a payload to orbit of zero. If you disagree then add a zero -- surely you agree we can't build a ten-mile-tall rocket?
As far as complexity, I'm not sure what to say. Toy rockets might fail all the time, but the point was complexity, and a toy rocket can be constructed from under a dozen parts. Even larger model rockets have at most a few dozen to a few hundred parts. The part count of the Falcon 9 has to number in the thousands, if not tens of thousands (9 merlin engines with at least several hundred parts each?).
To be clear, I agree with you that complexity increases with capability.
But also, to push back a bit, I don't think complexity aggregates the way you're saying it does. A box of hammers is not more complex than a nailgun, even if it has more parts in total.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_(rocket)
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)I was assuming you were using a comical example to illustrate a "nightmare to engineer." The comparison to a building doesn't actually work at all. The practical limitation on how high we can build buildings is how fast we can make elevators. Just making something tall is not a problem.
> Sea Dragon[1] was only envisioned as 490 feet tall, and as near as I can tell even the Super Orion[2] would only have been 400-600 meters tall. And of course, neither of those was even close to implementation. Therefore I stand by my statement that a mile tall rocket is, for all practical purposes, impossible
First, the optimal design for a rocket is not to just keep making it taller, and second, size was not the obstacle to either of these projects not being built. That does not at all prove that it is impossible. What kind of world would we be living in we presumed anything that hadn't already been actively pursued was impossible?
> and thus has a payload to orbit of zero.
My point was that this does not equate to a payload of zero. Surely you wouldn't argue that the weight of this mile high rocket is zero, and therefore that there is some curve for the weight of rockets where making the rockets larger starts to make them lighter. Just as we can calculate the weight for something without actually building it, so too can we calculate the payload, and it can increase far beyond anything we can actually implement.
> If you disagree then add a zero -- surely you agree we can't build a ten-mile-tall rocket?
I agree it would be impractical, but not that it would be so non-physical that we couldn't calculate what its payload capacity would be were it to be built.
> Toy rockets might fail all the time, but the point was complexity, and a toy rocket can be constructed from under a dozen parts. Even larger model rockets have at most a few dozen to a few hundred parts. The part count of the Falcon 9 has to number in the thousands, if not tens of thousands (9 merlin engines with at least several hundred parts each?).
Falcon 9 is a liquid rocket designed to take people into space. That is the source of its part count. You could scale up a solid rocket motor to an arbitrarily large size while keeping the parts count exactly the same. It's probably not the optimal way to make a solid rocket of that size, and you'd be missing out on a lot of capabilities that are important for a real rocket, but if you just wanted a toy no more capable than what you buy in a hobby store it would be no more complicated. Conversely, try to make a fully functional falcon 9 complete with 9 working liquid rocket engines small enough to hoverslam on your desk and you have an immense engineering challenge on your hands.
> But also, to push back a bit, I don't think complexity aggregates the way you're saying it does. A box of hammers is not more complex than a nailgun, even if it has more parts in total.
I concur that part count is not the same as complexity, but that point is in my favor. Making something bigger is like adding hammers to a box of hammers. The quantity goes up, and at some point you're going to need to make some improvements to the box if you want to keep adding more hammers, but conceptually it is simple. Making something more capable, like a nail-gun, is much harder.
for up to 0.8% US GDP per year. Today that would be $200B/year, pure spent. Where is Space X today is making, ie. it has a revenue, $15B/year.
>Perhaps web development is not the only thing that is susceptible to bloat.
similarly - web dev today can be done on $300 laptop by any schmuck. Even simple programming back then required a computer which cost a lot, and it was an almost academic activity.
The value added is interesting. For example, both the Merlin and the Raptor family of engines. These are some fine engines, and they are remarkably cheap and reusable.
The likes of SpaceX are reporting costs in the range of $15B/year because NASA front loaded the cost of trailblazing launch technology half a century ago, with the technology available half a century ago.
Let's not fool ourselves into believing the likes of SpaceX are reinventing the wheel.
Also, those $15B are buying a fraction of the capabilities of SaturnV, and while SaturnV was proven effective and reliable 50 years ago, here we are discussing yet another "anomaly". Perhaps half these "anomalies" wouldn't exist if they weren't lean'ed into existence?
Not even just NASA. SpaceX are building on technologies that originated from both sides of the iron curtain (and beyond)
How far back is the "start" of history in this telling, and (more importantly) why?
The grandparent comment was pointing out that it cost NASA 200bn, and spaceX 15bn.
The parent comment pointed out that spaceX are actually saving money because they already got what nasa spent 200bn on.
My comment pointed out that they aren't just saving money by using NASAs tech, but tech from the Soviet Union as well - suggesting that their savings are far beyond just 200bn R&D
How many billions was that?
This sort of "they're just building on" talk is weird to me, and not really relevant.
What SpaceX has accomplished is astonishing, and no belittling of their accomplishments should be tolerated.
Not really. You're not talking about technology. You're debating the economics behind it. You're seeing naive fanboys praising SpaceX's costs for the likes of Starship by comparing them to the cost of the SaturnV project, arriving at the simplistic conclusion that Starship is cheaper. This is like comparing your cheap Android phone as being far cheaper than a 1950s UNIVAC. And when the silliness of this specious reasoning is called out, your reaction is to downplay it as "not really relevant"?
That said, you're upset that I said comparing costs isn't relevant? Isn't that the case you're making right now, that the costs cannot be compared, therefore aren't relevant in this discussion?
My tact on non-relevance, is that saying "it was built on another program's tech!" is not relevant, because everything meets that criterion. For example, as I said, the Saturn was built on decades of German research, including war time research during WWII, into rockets. Saturn's US development costs were a fraction of overall rocket research done by the Germans!
So if upthread is going to argue "but it's all built on the Saturn, and free knowledge!", then the same argument can be carried further back, thus negating this argument. Why?
Because it makes the Saturn cost trillions.
Thats the whole point for this entire thread. Pointing out that you CANT compare the costs of spaceX with NASA because spaceX is building on NASAs (and others) achievements.
Maybe you need to go back and reread this entire thread rather than suggesting others do so.
Simultaneously, I am also using my same logic to argue that you cannot compare costs due to my reasoning.
I agreeing with the point (you can't compare costs) while disagreeing as to why.
Instead, I said it is an impossible thing to compare, for everything is built upon another. In fact, everything is built upon a myriad of other things.
Really, both the Heavy and the Saturn cost about the same. That's because they both depend upon the entire sum of human knowledge and research, to be built.
A billion trillion trillion trillion in today's dollars of knowledge gained and experience honed, over millions of years. So what if one cost a billion trillion trillion trillion, and another cost a billion trillion trillion trillion + a few billion more. The difference is meaningless, and not even worth considering.
And then there's the whole "how much is new" argument, and there's new knowledge aplenty thanks to SpaceX.
I really don't get these arguments. People seem to really love to denigrate the effort, the excellent results. It's beyond bizarre. And worse, mock because test flights, expected to possibly go sideways, do?
So weird.
"Hi, I'm going to see if this will work. It'll probably explode. But if it does, I'll learn something"
<boom>
hahaha it exploded you suck
I don't get it.
Its unfair to say spaceX did what NASA did on a smaller budget (which is what the comment that kicked off this thread implied) because they DIDNT do what NASA did, and instead got "the stuff that came before" + "the stuff that NASA spent 200b on" + "the stuff from other sources that also cost billions" + the 15b that they actually spent to get where they are.
How can you disagree with that? You may think this discussion is silly - but its DIRECTLY as a response to someone implying that spaceX are achieving what NASA did with less money: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44316227
I wonder what "tons of payload to orbit" vs "dollars budget" would look like for Saturn era NASA vs Current SpaceX.
No doubt they're standing on the shoulders of giants, but let's not forget that they've helped transform the "go to space"-business.
That's like comparing how many containers Maersk moves today with how much sea cargo was moved back in the age of discovery.
Also, Saturn V worked and fulfilled it's mission, whereas Starship blows up.
I'd expect SpaceX to do much more now than NASA in the 60s if granted USD 200B/year, considering they are already standing on the shoulders of giants.
Then you will agree that comparing an unproven launcher which seems to be far far away from being able to fulfill a similar role is a very silly endeavour, let alone talk about it as a vast improvement which just so happens to blow up.
Its impressive how ignorant HN is about how many failures the S5 had during testing, falling for cold war propoganda at full speed
But we're comparing to SpaceX launches. Plenty of Raptor engines have blown up on the ground too.
There were 13 Saturn V's launched and all of them basically performed their mission (Apollo 6 being a bit of an exception) with 0 rapid unplanned disassemblies...
Total lunar effort from 1960-1973, adjusted for 2024 USD: $326 billion
Launch vehicle costs (Saturn V): $113 billion
I think this is what should be compared against the total Starship program cost starting from 2020 until such time it completes 6 lunar landings (not counting SLS or other costs).
Or, for the year that Starship actually lands on the moon, compare against the Saturn V launch vehicle costs for 1969, inflation adjusted: $5.9 billion. See: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTKMekJW9F8Z...
Source: https://youtu.be/Dar8P3r7GYA?si=RHZ8lWFYKrd7qQhy&t=321
0.8% US GDP in 1969 would be about 8B/yr today. Very different answer
Do you know the McMurdo permanent Antarctica base is costing us far more than the dogs, sleds, and tents of Admundsen and Shackleton? Incredible, isn't it?
Starship is “the program to build a permanent base in the moon”. It’s not even the only vehicle involved in the moon program. It’s a rocket designed to take astronauts from moon orbit to the moon’s surface. The astronauts will actually fly to the moon in SLS.
So far it’s proved incapable of being launched, attaining orbit, and returning to earth as designed. That’s without a payload.
It has no life support system built and is literally years behind schedule.
Rather than making progress it is being redesigned on the fly to mitigate fundamental problems with its capability which Musk laughs off as “moving fast and breaking things”.
The problem is we aren’t moving fast at all.
The rocket is a disaster. Saturn V was better by an order of magnitude and likely cheaper if you consider how much fundamental work went into creating it which is now easy to buy off the shelf.
Comparing the programs while ignoring the fact that hobbiest regularly reach the Karman line is deceitful.
Starship is doing this on easy mode and it’s failing.
But this 'easy mode' is still so incredibly hard that nobody else will even attempt it.
I'd love to see some serious competition emerge in the reusable rocket space, but SpaceX is far, far ahead with Falcon 9 being an incredible success, even if the Starship project may be headed for failure. Nobody reports on 100+ successful Falcon 9 launches/landings in a year, those are now mundane. But a small number of Starship failures - test flights of an experimental vehicle - become big news, mostly because they involve spectacular explosions.
It seems that Starship may be too big to 'fail fast', mostly because of the visual spectacle of those failures.
But yeah, I tend to agree that whether it ultimately succeeds or not, blowing Starship up is a "fail fast" strategy because they have the money (and the reputational capital from successful Falcon 9 launches) to learn from their mistakes that way, and not many others do. Much as the waterfall approach of big space projects gets derided, there's a reason entities that can't take the reputational hit of visibly blowing stuff up on a regular basis do it that way...
The program that was paused pending new NASA director, and has burned more money than SpaceX without a single (usable) launch?
I’m making things up out of memory here, but suffice to say SLS does not have my confidence.
How are the astronauts supposed to get on lunar soil on SLS?
One year of Saturn V development cost the same as the entire Starship program so far. One launch cost 20-30x more than the projected cost of a Starship launch.
It is also said that it’s simply impossible to rebuild a Saturn rocket. Not only you can’t “buy components off the shelf” because they simply don’t exist anymore, even if you had all the component blueprints (which we don’t, they were lost to time), the manufacturing know-how is long gone.
Starship was developed from scratch. SpaceX developed their own engines, their flight control surfaces are novel, the rocket structure and materials are novel, the entire approach is different. Yes, our modern electronics industry makes it “easier” but this is like saying Porsche is playing in easy mode because of the Ford Model T.
I propose my own imaginary rocket. It costs $0 but it doesn't exist. Totally beats the Saturn V on cost!
I have much respect to this guys that works in here that really pushing the innovation beyond the limit
reusable rocket is the future if you want permanent present in space, there is no way you throw rocket for only 1 launch
No, OP is comparing a launcher that worked reliably (it's in the history books) with a launcher which never performed a mission and is reporting "anomalies".
Was it required to launch more?
How many moon missions did Starship fulfilled? It seems 50 years ago SaturnV launched 12 times more than Starship.
That's complete nonsense. 10-15 Starship launches would land a lander that can carry like 100tons of payload orbit.
Saturn V landed 15000kg on the moon, but most of that isn't payload.
But of course with Saturn V you are throwing away a rocket that cost 1 billion $ or more per launch.
You are comparing 'thing lands on moon' to 'things lands on moon' without any nuance.
But you are right Apollo was insane in how fast it was done.
So yes, I suppose that is more inefficient, in a way.
Second, SpaceX has consistently shown lower development cost then anybody else. Starship is expensive its likely cheaper then New Glenn.
Remember, Ariane 6, a marginal upgrade over Ariane 5 with only a new upper stage engine cost 6 billion $.
And SpaceX is already at much higher launch rates and manufacturing rates for thing like engines. SpaceX is investing into mass production already.
Which as the person you're replying to is point out isn't really a fair comparison because Starship and Saturn V deliver vastly different amounts of mass to and from the moon despite the mission being only to ferry some people there for a few days.
If Starship ends up flying to the moon it effectively enables the landing of a lunar base that could be occupied for years at a time with sufficient resupply of food and the right equipment for extraction of water/oxygen from the moon.
The Saturn V as amazing as it was could never have brought that much equipment to the moon in a cost effective manner.
also military (space force)
The burning question that I have now is whether a Starship explosion during lunar testing will be visible from Earth. I sure hope they would do it during a new moon too for maximum effect.
The Apollo Program cost a total of $183 billion, inflation adjusted, over 12 years. That's about $15 billion a year. NASA's budget has been for the past 40 years has been $20-$30 billion a year. Even the 'burst funding' wasn't particularly extreme relative to what they now regularly receive. The highest their budget ever was was in 1966 in $57 billion (inflation adjusted) dollars.
To visualize the absurdity of this argument imagine somebody claiming that Uganda funding a space program for $5 billion is receiving some serious financial capital, because that happens to be 10% of their GDP. $5 billion is $5 billion, regardless of your GDP. Ok technically there's PPP calculations, but that doesn't apply to the discussion here.
Obviously percentage of GDP isn't an ideal multiplier for reasons you've mentioned, but then inflation indexed mainly to mass produced common consumer goods tends to significantly underestimate the increase in cost over time of running complex operations involving the world's smartest and most on-demand minds and an almost unfathomably large number of subcontractors. Either way, NASA's overall budget is half that of the 1960s in regular inflation adjusted dollars, and whilst its current research and satellite/ISS maintenance maybe aren't as exciting as the first lunar landing, they're not obviously dramatically lower cost (the %GDP argument gets brought up nearly as often to suggest the Apollo programme wasn't worth it...)
Sat in a lecture theatre with NASA's last chief economist using both metrics earlier this week. Although those slides were looking at cumulative funds spent on Robert Goddard's programme, which was about the size of a largish Series A using the inflation metric or Series B using the GDP adjustment. Whether that's value for money or not depends on whether you're considering being the father of modern rocketry more impressive than sending a handful of moderately complex 16U Cubesats or rideshares or note that the actual rockets were no more sophisticated than some student projects, I guess...
Yet NASA continues to cheerlead for these things. I briefly thought NASA might right their heading under Bridenstine but then at some point he suddenly just did a hard 180. It seems every man has his price. He eventually just turned into another Boeing cheerleader (and his new found rubber stampage is a big part of why that Boeing monstrosity left astronauts stranded on the ISS) and went straight from out of office to a high level advisory gig for some MIC company which is almost certainly just a laundered paycheck.
Also I can assure you no-one at Cariad had to write an MP3 decoder. And speaking of sensor control, my car (on its 4th year now) still fails to unfold the mirrors once in a while.
We also have huge, orders of magnitude advances in tooling and process since mid-1960s. For starters you don't have to weave your program into magnetic core fabric by hand.
(edits:) It's clearly not ideal for a short lunar landing, considered in isolation. But: what else would you do? Whatever you build, it would land on the moon perhaps once, and never again. Would you, being in charge, design a one-off vehicle for one or two moon landings—spend that R&D budget, in that way? That's not cheaper than 15 Starship launches; it's considerably costlier. (But the Apollo engineers didn't need to worry about this; it's was their express remit to spend $200 billion on one-off designs that would never be used again).
And: I hope no one suggests the "just make a unique lunar Starship variant that's simply a bit smaller". There's no "simply" resizing things in engineering. Recall that the last time Starship's length was altered by 2 meters, new mechanical resonances appeared, and it blew up three times in a row. Any "one-off" change for lunar landings is a less-tested, less-understood machine you'd be putting human lives on.
But it would also never land on Mars, so it would be a waste to build it for that. Build it for what it will actually spend its life doing.
Not saying SpaceX won't go to Mars, but if/when they do it will likely be several rocket generations later and possibly with specialized rockets, with a significant portion of it being one-time-use as you ain't returning.
Winching stuff out of said open door seems like a much, much easier task.
The outside door needn't be part of the airlock. It's certainly big enough to have an internal airlock leading to depressurized internal space.
The things that make a door that tests fine on Earth break in orbit are likely to be things that need fixing for a similar door on Mars. They won't be all the same challenges, but some will absolutely be shared.
A hatch with a winch (or two!) seems likely to be one of the smaller ones.
Wouldn't that make the mission unfeasible because it requires ISRU of return fuel?
https://newspaceeconomy.ca/2022/05/27/how-will-spacex-make-r...
That's what happens with most domains. At first people don't know the dangers and can go fast and loose: surgery, radioactive material, planes, cars, trains, rockets. Then people start losing their lives or part of their bodies to "easily preventable accidents". So some rules are enacted. Decade after decade, accident after accident, more rules, more red tape: things cost more, take more time. But you get a lot less victims.
So yeah, with a good budget and in a less strict country you could get something to the moon in no time. And potentially many people' parts all over your launchpads too.
Gas pipework: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR486zloao0
The shuttle was a deathtrap. It had inadequate abort modes and a launch process that practically guaranteed minor (until it wasn't) damage to the heat shield during launch.
Classic example of https://danluu.com/wat/ --- the normalization of deviance.
STS crews were lucky that only two of the things got violenly disassembled.
I think the only reasonable comparison would be after cost equivalency. The Starship has a long way to go, to catch up.
Of course commercial rockets are always going to be as shoddy as they can get away with rather than as good as possible, but if it still takes SpaceX or Boeing as much money to build a rocket as it did back in the Saturn V days, they're doing something wrong.
Your arguments are strange, a mirage concocted to fit a narrative of denigration and darkness. You mock with zeal, yet have no point to the mocking.
Always with the mocking, you cause an ache which cannot be balmed. Cease, I pray you. Stop these machinations, this mad canter.
Falcon was built the same way. It blew up many times too, explosions aplenty. Now it is the most successful lift on the planet.
No one has ever built a plane, or even a car without breakage during testing. The very idea is absurd. There's a whole profession called "test pilot".
I don't know why anyone would suggest otherwise.
I'm sure there are links aplenty, but the absurd suggestion here would be building a rocket and having zero incidents of failure. That beyond weird. That's what needs a "do you have a link" question.
You're recalling wrong, or you were reading nonsense. Lots of engines were destroyed in testing (particularly before computer modelling, this was basically how rocket engines were _developed_), but no, no Saturn V ever exploded on the pad. Prior to this incident, the most-impressive on-pad boom was one of the N1s.
No fully assembled Saturn V ever failed, though a few of them had near-misses.
It's a weird debarc point to discuss non testing craft vs testing. And "fully assembled", when spacex is flying non-final builds on purpose, using a different test methodology.
Yes! I am sure! That did not happen!
Early development of Saturn V rocket engines involved destructive testing, but a whole rocket would not have been involved at that point.
Here's some later ground testing of final engines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rP6k18DVdg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-II
"First all-up S-II stage, assembled between 1963 and 1965. Completed several engine tests at the Mississippi Test Facility (now the Stennis Space Center). Destroyed by accidental LH2 tank overpressurization during pressure testing May 28, 1966[7][6]"
and
"Destroyed in test stand September 29, 1965"
Also described here: http://heroicrelics.org/ussrc/s-ii/index.html
"The S-II program was beset with problems and delays. NASA had planned on North American making an S-II stage, S-II-D, for dynamic testing but the order for that stage was cancelled in early 1965 in favor of using the structural static test stage, S-II-S, as a combined static/dynamic test stage; that stage was renamed to S-II-S/D. Unfortunately, the S-II-S/D stage was destroyed during testing, leaving S-II-F to take on the added role of dynamic testing and being redesignated as S-II-F/D."
I though all of the Saturn V stages were destroyed during testing at least once but it looks like I remembered it wrong. :)
And Saturn V never had a military mission, neither had Shuttle.
That sounds military enough for me.
Does Starship have launch abort boosters? Seems infeasible with the amount of fuel and mass on it since it also serves as a second stage, but maybe they solved that somehow?
Operations cost. They are sublinear on payload/size. At least this is what Space X/Musk seem to go for.
There's also many advantages to being able to lift something large/heavy in one go, rather than smaller payloads that need to be unfolded (like JWST) or assembled in space, which can drastically increase the development costs.
So far in history, we didn't have enough to launch. If the volume we launch increases then a larger rocket flying often is helpful.
We are at the peak of what a rocket the size of Falcon 9 can do. If you want full re-usability, the size helps you out quite a bit.
And hauling the 'orbiter' into 'orbit' is only wasteful if you can't reuse it. I would argue what's actually wasteful is throwing the second stage in the ocean, even when it costs minimum 10million $, and likely more.
I want to do Apollo again.[0]
Disagree. The overall Starship system's problems are obviously in Starship, not in the Super Heavy booster. The latter is far heavier. But it only has to do 2 things well - sub-orbital launch, and sub-orbital precision return. And the launch tower's chopsticks give it a lot of help with the latter.
Vs. the Starship has to do far more things - all of them mission-critical - while being ruthlessly optimized for weight.