Starship was doomed from the beginning

Some interesting points, but it’s hard to get past the over the top ad hominem against Musk and generally emotionally charged feeling of the article.

"Doomed" is probably an overstatement. "Way more expensive than originally planned" will probably be closer to the truth.

> The January test had a dummy cargo equivalent to 10 Starlink V2 satellites, weighing only eight tonnes or 8% of its designed payload. Meanwhile, the most recent test had just half of this in a transparent attempt to reduce vibration by reducing the load to spare the obviously flawed fuel system, which obviously didn’t work.

Wouldn't more load act as a dampener, at least for the vehicle if not the fuel system itself?

Is fuel flow constant or variable? I would naively guess constant, more-or-less, in which case lessening the load merely means it reaches the target velocity sooner--same vibration magnitudes (or more if reduced dampening), just for a shorter amount of time.

I wonder by how much Musk and Bezos are driven by science fiction and how this materializes in the real world. Its okay to have dreams and goals. However, as soon as real resources (as in energy, materials, environmental impact) are spent, we better be sure that things are viable from a grounded scientific perspective.

For example, Musk's obsession with colonising on Mars is troubling when you hear what scientists have to say about it. Musk tends to talk about it as if Earth is already lost.

So, how many decisions by the wealthy and gullible (or downright stupid, orange) politicians are driven by science fiction and vibes?

SpaceX doesn't do scale model testing?

>Musk’s impotent attempts to get his giant shiny phallus to work are the perfect metaphor for the man.

Opening line of the post kind of sums up the bias in this.

Honestly don’t think someone with this amount of vitriol can come to any conclusions that don’t support his desire to see SpaceX fail.

> SpaceX could have easily done this. They already proved they could land a 1st stage/Booster with the Falcon 9, and Falcon 9’s Booster could launch a 1/10 scale Starship into orbit. Tests of such a scaled-down model would help SpaceX determine the best compromise for using the bellyflop manoeuvre and retro rockets to land. It would help them iteratively improve the design around such a compromise, especially as they will be far cheaper and quicker to redesign and build than the full-scale versions. Not only that, but these tests would highlight any of the design’s shortcomings, such as the rocket engines not having enough thrust-to-weight ratio to enable a high enough payload. This allows engineers to do crucial, complete redesigns before the large-scale version is even built.

> Well, developing a Starship like this would expose that making a fully reusable rocket with even a barely usable payload to space is impossible. Musk knows this: Falcon 9 was initially meant to be fully reusable until he discovered that the useful payload would be zero. That was his iterative design telling him Starship was impossible over a decade ago, as just making the rocket larger won’t solve this!

The author clearly isn't very knowledgeable about rocket design. Rockets do not scale linearly. While some lessons can be learned with scale models, other lessons simply have to be learned with a full scale test, which is why all rockets get full scale tests. This is also why small amateur rockets are incapable of achieving orbit, no matter how small the payload. Conversely, making rockets bigger does increase payload.

Further, Starship isn't simply a bigger Falcon 9, and Falcon 9 was not designed from the beginning to be fully reusable. Falcon 9, like Falcon 1, was designed to be fully expendable. SpaceX's original plan was to focus on low cost, mass producible rockets. When this didn't work out as planned, they pivoted to reusability. There was a concept video showing 100% reusability (as well as dragon capsule flyback and propulsive landing), but no serious effort at ever actually achieving that. The booster was the only thing they tried to make work, and they did several serious redesigns to first add landing legs and then optimize the booster for flyback.

Starship was from the ground up designed to be fully reusable, and its design is very different - it uses different, higher performance propellant, it uses larger engines with a different thermodynamic cycle, it is made from different structural materials, it lands by a different method. Of course lessons learned from Falcon 9 were incorporated, and you can clearly see some of that legacy for example in the control fins, but this includes learned lessons about the limitations of the Falcon 9's design that they needed to shed. The idea that Falcon 9 proves Starship can't work is asinine, by that logic why would we ever try to improve upon things if we couldn't achieve it with an earlier version that was never designed to do so?

> Simple. Musk isn’t an engineer and doesn’t understand iterative design, and now SpaceX and NASA are facing a sunk cost fallacy.

> You never achieve iterative design with a full-scale prototype. It is incredibly wasteful and can lead you down several problematic and dead-end solutions. I used to engineer high-speed boats — another weight- and safety-sensitive engineering field. We would always conduct scale model tests of every aspect of design, iteratively changing it as we went so that when we did build the full-scale version, we were solving the problems of scale, not design and scale simultaneously.

This isn't iterative design. This is waterfall. It's progressing linearly through stages without going back to incorporate lessons learned. Yes, it is cheaper to work out all the bugs on scale prototypes than full scale tests, just as it would be cheaper still to get it right the first time at the design stage, but that doesn't mean it's a good project management strategy. What SpaceX did quite successfully with its Falcon 9 development is iterative design.