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Comment by vFunct | Hacker News Reader

Seriously. NASA had a reusable orbital rocket 40 years ago. Space-X still only has reusable boosters.

I was mostly impressed by the materials science of the space shuttle tiles, even though they’re expensive.

The space shuttle was an awesome feat of engineering, but in practical terms, it cost a lot for every launch, so it really didn't deliver well on the most important piece of what reusability is supposed to get you.

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.

> Seriously. NASA had a reusable orbital rocket 40 years ago. Space-X still only has reusable boosters.

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.

Great. Glad we agree that the Space shuttle was a stellar achievement in reusable rockets and every andvancement afterward is marginal.

If you go buy actual objective measure of what people tried to achieve, Shuttle is a failure. They literally drop an architecture, Apollo, that was perfectly achieving what needed to be achieved, namely, facilitate humans to LEO, extreme large payload to LEO and large payload to LEO, very fast payloads for outside of LEO and single shot space stations. All of that existed and was able to be build of the shelf.

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.

The innovation is not making a reusable rocket, it's making a reusable rocket that is cheap and rapidly reusable.

The shuttle itself was reusable but the two solid rocket boosters and the external fuel tank were all disposable components.

The space shuttles boosters were reused. So, literally every engine in the shuttle was reused. Wild what NASA did 40 years ago…

> Wild what NASA did 40 years ago…

You can do that when you have $1b/flight to spend on refurbishing.

The parts were reused but they rebuilt the whole thing from the ground up, everytime. Reusability means something like a plane: refuel + safety checks and you’re good to go again

Yes the boosters were fully reused. Thanks.

That's kind of ridiculous and pedantic. In a solid fuel rocket, the solid fuel is most of the complexity and most of the cost. The rocket flys because of how the solid fuel is shaped and engineered.

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.

And all designed in the 1970s.

False, in fact most of the Artemis I booster segments were previously flown on one or more shuttle missions

https://cdn.northropgrumman.com/-/media/wp-content/uploads/a...

It was reusable, but way over promised.

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.

https://youtu.be/4kpDg7MjHps

SpaceX is doing stuff that's just beyond the scope of what's deemed conventionally realistic. That's achievable and pushes us forward.

Reusable first stage (which is the largest, most expensive part), expendable second stage (only one engine vs nine on the first stage), and reusable spacecraft. I'd be surprised if the Falcon second stage cost more than the Shuttle's external tank. (Though, to be fair, they are decades apart)

Sure, but it was burning congressional pork as fuel and cost only the occasional human sacrifice.

The only reason starship hasn't involved human sacrifice thus far is that they haven't put humans in it. It remains to be seen whether the engineers will manage to make something usable from musk's 'Cybertruck - space edition' fever dream.

True, but they're doing it on a far lower budget than the Space Shuttle.

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.”

I love this quote. mankind having been to space already, the rockets are the sideshow to the way they designed and grew an org that delivered them along with a great business, starting from an amount of capital loads of nobodies have had but failed to do anything interesting with.

I'm not sure why you would call Starship a "fever dream". The numbers work. It's in testing. I could see calling the Saudi "Line City" a fever dream, or California's HSR. But not Starship.

What numbers work specifically?

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.

Only because they haven't honestly tried (for reuse). We've seen Superheavy caught successfully with engines that could probably be reused, and we've seen Starships lightly splashdown with engines that could potentially be reused if they weren't filled with saltwater. I'd agree that they're way behind schedule and that recent launches have been disappointing but they've demonstrated their components. I believe reliability will come in time, the question is how much time.

By "numbers" I mean the rocket equation. There should be plenty of fuel to put Starship in orbit with a nontrivial payload and have it land again. Yes, the entire system doesn't work yet, but we're already into the refinement stage.

...Or full driverless mode in Tesla cars. That also works in theory - waymo is doing fine - but the Tesla execution has been hampered for years by musk's misguided idea that only camera should be necessary. Likewise, I only expect starship to successfully execute to the extent that musk can be kept out of the decision-making process.

I suspect that's the opposite of true. Musk was deeply involved in the most successful rocket program in history, and his involvement in Starship allows SpaceX, as an organization, to make decisions quickly.

And isn't that decision to leave humans behind on the ground an inspired piece of mission planning. It's wonderful that computers and telemetry has progressed so far.

Don’t forget the investigation documentation as an unexpected byproduct.

It was only reusable if you keep building new ones after they explode and kill everyone inside.

Did we all forget that the Space Shuttle is a failed program because it was unacceptably deadly due to a high failure rate?

It was only recently surpassed by Falcon 9 as the most reliable rocket program in human history with something like a 98% success rate.

All other rocket programs, including Starship are significantly worst in terms of failure rates than Shuttle.

There were 135 space shuttle missions over 30 years, with 2 failures resulting in 14 lives lost, giving a success rate of 98.5%. The second failure happened when the program was mature, which means that either NASA didn't analyze certain failure modes or they didn't take steps to address them. The Space Shuttle's design is inherently less safe than a normal capsule on top. With the orbiter on the side of the stack, any debris from other components is more likely to damage it. The orbiter also had no launch escape system or ability for crew to eject. Also, the solid boosters could not be throttled or shut down early if they malfunctioned. In contrast, capsules like Dragon and Soyuz are above the booster stages, reducing the chance of damage from any malfunctions in the stages, and allowing a launch escape system to get the crew away in the event of an emergency.

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.

Thanks for providing this to other users but my point was about other rocket programs beyond Falcon 9 and Space Shuttle such as Starship. Starship is behind where Falcon 9 was at this point. By the same timelines Apollo was sending people to the moon too.

It's not useful to compare timelines. Of course the Apollo program went fast. Adjusted for inflation, NASA's lunar program cost over $300 billion. It also killed three astronauts. And it didn't have the regulatory hurdles that exist today when trying to launch rockets.

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.

This is the 4th launch where they are effectively attempting the same thing they were going to do 8 months ago.

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?

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