For all the humanity's challenges and flaws, Starship is its most inspiring expression, in steel and fire.
Did you not see the booster catch work on the first try? The partially successful re-entry even with half the control surface melting away?
The hundreds at SpaceX are doing Apollo-level breakthrough work, and it should not in any way be minimized due to tangential Elon-hate.
You're right. It shouldn't be. And yet here we are wasting our digital breaths talking about the man. And there's really only one person responsible for that.
If you're wasting your breath talking about someone, it's not on them, it's on you. We live in a world where everyone should have realized by now that attention is the most valuable currency you have ... and yet people continue to use that currency on things they claim to dislike ... I have a hard time feeling bad for them.
"Grass-fed body mass is the most valuable currency", said the rancher to the fenced-in herd of beef-cows.
Nah, that's what someone with power says in order to distract you from realizing you don't actually have nearly as much. Attention has never been a good substitute for power, or thousands of years of human civilization would be very very different.
There's a fine line between stoicism and self-defeating tactics.
Don’t succumb to survivorship bias.
It’s exceptional that people centrally organized a huge amount of effort and resources towards something imagined by countless humans since prehistory, was far from being a sure thing, had no possibility of revenue and only indirect value, planned and executed a full decade toward a single objective, and succeeded in a single moment shared by almost everyone with a television.
Arpanet, the transcontinental railroad, the pyramids…amazing still but lacked the 0 to 1 all at once factor. Starship is inspiring and also not a moonshot.
How is that a greater achievement than Falcon 9 and reusable boosters, especially Falcon Heavy? Like sure if Starship lives up to its goals it will be a greater achievement. But how would an ambitious project that fails its most fundamental task (reaching orbit reliably) be a greater achievement than one that actually does meet its goals and was (and is) still incredibly revoluationary?
Starship is a HARD project, and even the components that they have completed are insane levels of engineering, far beyond even the whole F9 program.
It’s not just a “does the rocket work” thing. Every working part of Starship so far has been a monumental breakthrough of unprecedented scale. The fact that they built the largest ever orbital launch system (it’s currently not yet reusable but it can indeed put a ~hundred tons into orbit in a single 15 minutes) is enough to classify it as an unqualified success. Their stated goal just happens to be significantly greater than even that.
It has already surpassed the (non-reusable) Saturn V in price/perf as well as payload capacity (and development program total cost).
It's ok to not like the guy at the top, but still marvel at the achievements of the people he pays.
I appreciate their work however and it's a shame that Musk has tainted their efforts. He could be a decent man if he tried but he's clearly chosen a different path.
I agree that plenty of good has happened because of the profit motive but SpaceX is not patronizing the sciences, NASA is.
You see the same sort of thing in F1 drivers. Even in the most casual of driving competitions they are competetive to the point of pettiness. My theory is that's part of what makes them an F1 driver - the inability to lose. it can easily be turned to destructive purposes, see all the avoidable crashes but it gets harnessed and turned to useful purposes.
On a more loaded tangent, see Trump. His lifelong ambition was to be famous and become president and i thinkthat, more then his billions gave him the drive to run for office and get reelected (you can argue that it was to satisfy his overwhelming ego but that doesn't change my point). Even if you despise them and everything they stand for i think everyone can learn something from them in how to succeed in their goals. it's not being narcisstic and elbowing everyone out of the way, but it is about having goals, wanting them enough and a healthy dose of self belief.
And if you actually study SpaceX and Tesla, then you figure out that they are actually very smart with their capital investments, and therefore didn't need nearly as much funding as his competitors.
And not being able to do one thing, running twitter, doesn't mean magically that its the same at other companies. Morris Chang failed at running a consumer facing job at TI but do we therefore conclude that he is bad?
Still one of my favorite works of music and cinematography both; I just don’t agree at all with the implicit message. We are destined for the stars.
That end scene with the Atlas missile that you linked is def the best though (and Prophecies is the best song/track too).
I'm just a bit of a contrarian, and couldn't resist the appeal of that reply :@)
The stars suck, though. Even Mars is entirely awful.
Like, that's not very different from "we're destined for Hell". Not an inspiring sentiment, right? It's really bad.
How awful it is aside, it's also roughly as realistic as "we're destined for Tolkien's Middle Earth". Only marginally less fantastical.
That's what I mean about space being just the worst. Like, it's so bad. Even Mars, which is relatively decent by space standards, is complete shit. Complete shit that's also insanely expensive to reach.
Dominating the environment is what we do. for better or worse... its the one true value we can measure ourselves against.
Just fantastical thinking that we’ll make any headway on that trip in the next 50 years.
It’s only “entirely awful” if you want to do things like walk around outside and sit under trees. It has a lot of co2 and h2o around, and while the sunlight situation isn’t great, it isn’t dire either.
We could have been destined for the stars fifty years ago, but it turns out we're a stupid species with no planetary intelligence.
So we spend far too much energy finding clever ways to blow things up - cities, rockets, economies - and far too little on boring shit like keeping the climate stable and the lights on.
And even less on the breakthrough physics, psychology, politics, and ecology needed to make interstellar travel even remotely likely.
I think the global CO2 levels would disagree. Our oceans, and therefore most of the biosphere are quite literally out of (pH) balance due to rapid CO2 release.
> We are destined for the stars.
I doubt it. Don’t get me wrong I love the idea of it, but the reality is our physical form is so fragile and fleeting relative to the harsh vastness of the Universe.
We should protect this cradle of our genesis with everything we have. That we have not met other life should be taken as a warning of how difficult the road ahead.
I was mostly impressed by the materials science of the space shuttle tiles, even though they’re expensive.
A single RS-9 engine -- one of five used in the SLS -- costs more than an entire Falcon 9 launch with payload, taxes, and profit!
Starship is similarly frugal. Its construction is simpler, it is made of cheaper materials, it uses a cheaper fuel, etc, etc...
“Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.”
Because we haven’t seen a single re-use of a starship yet nor any significant payload brought to orbit, or the orbital refueling turn around and launch cadence necessary to even achieve 1/10th of what Musk suggests is “possible on paper”.
Super-heavy is being wasted on a potential dead end 2nd stage in my opinion.
You can do that when you have $1b/flight to spend on refurbishing.
Reflying the booster cases doesn't change the fact that an essentially new solid booster has to be manufactured.
In fact it didn't even financially make sense to reuse the boosters, so it was actually worse then not being reusable at all.
As with everything with Shuttle, it all sounds cool when you imagine it, but then if you look at the actual program its basically a 40 shit-show that started very badly and basically never got better. In actual fact, it failed completely as an industrial program for the US.
https://cdn.northropgrumman.com/-/media/wp-content/uploads/a...
The tiles themselves were apparently a big source of the problems on the shuttle too. If they can figure out reusable tiles with starship, with quick turnaround and low-cost for maintenance, that'd be a huge engineering accomplishment.
They've gotta consistently re-enter it first though.
Reusable but had to spend 2 months after use being repaired/having parts replaced, meanwhile Falcon 9 has turn around times in days and Starship is aiming for hours.
Whilst the the achievements and technological marvels by NASA should never be understated, Starship is aiming for a target significantly more difficult than the space shuttle.
Shuttle then took all that money, in turn losing the US the capability to do all this amazing stuff. With the promise that it could then do all those things again but actually do it cheaper.
In that aspect, Shuttle completely failed. Not only did the US lose most of its capability for the next 40 years, some we still have not gotten back. And it did that while costing absurd amounts to develop and then a huge amount to operate, so much that NASA barely had a budget to actually do anything useful with Shuttle. And of course it also took so much time to develop that a whole space station had to be scarified for it.
So really the whole Shuttle program is an anti-achievement, it literally directly reduced the technical capability of a nation and turned it from the best space nation in the world into the second best to arguable being second best.
Technical complexity by itself is not a mark of great engineering, and that's all Shuttle was. In terms of actual objective measure, Shuttle is a failure pretty much every way you look at it. Failure on cost, failure on safety, failure on ecosystem, failure of evolution, failure operational reliability and so on.
Soviets could launch payload and human cheaper to LEO for the next 40 years and only SpaceX brought this back to the US.
Did we all forget that the Space Shuttle is a failed program because it was unacceptably deadly due to a high failure rate?
All other rocket programs, including Starship are significantly worst in terms of failure rates than Shuttle.
Falcon 9 has had 531 launches over 15 years (394 of them have happened since January of 2022), with 3 failures (one on the pad before launch, two during launch), for a success rate of 99.4%. Had these failures occurred during manned missions, the Dragon capsule's launch escape system would have likely saved the crew.
The mature version of Falcon 9 (block 5) has had 466 successful landings out of 472 attempts, giving it a success rate of 98.7%. This likely means that riding on a Falcon 9 first stage with no additional safety devices (such as a parachute or a launch escape system) is safer than riding in the Shuttle.
Starship's budget is 2-3% of the Apollo program, and its goal is to become profitable long term. I would assume that given a sliver of the same budget, and a much harder problem (fully reusable super heavy lift vehicle), and more regulations than the 1960s, it would take significantly longer.
It's also not useful to compare failure rates yet, because Starship is currently a test program. SpaceX believes that it's cheaper to build, test, and revise rather than to try getting it right the first time. They know Starship is not reliable, which is why they don't have real payloads in their test flights. Contrast this to the Space Shuttle, which NASA thought was so safe that they put a schoolteacher on it and broadcast the launch to children across the country.
Musk himself has a deadline of December 2026 for Mars, ignoring Artemis. How many more launches do they need to work out orbital refueling to make that deadline if they don’t test actually sending a real payload into space?
Don't take my word for it. Richard Feynman served on the Challenger commission and very nicely summarizes the difference between Apollo and Space Shuttle.
SpaceX is doing stuff that's just beyond the scope of what's deemed conventionally realistic. That's achievable and pushes us forward.
Cost to launch on falcon per kg: $2-3k. Wait, that's price. SpaceX is profitable. It's roughly 100x cheaper.
A fully loaded falcon costs less than $500k to launch?
Maths checks out, whether the cost per launch is really that low is another thing.
And that wouldn’t be a profit margin of 99%, it would be a profit margin around 10000%
$350,000 at the lower end where he said $20.
I don't think the expendable upper stage on its own is $350,000-$500,000. I think the fairing is probably more than that.
xoxo <3
Humanity
SpaceX is just the commercialization of stuff that was invented by our parents and grandparents in the 60s, 70s and 80s.