SpaceX launches Starship megarocket on 11th test flight
cnn.com
cnn.com
Perhaps kids of my kids would be able to travel to the moon.
It’s so refreshing in a glossy PR-coated world.
Despite it's iterative approach (and benefit of decades of space technology and learnings) it has been slower than both Apollo and Shuttle.
Keep in mind Starship hasn't even achieved orbit yet.
It's making the 2027 Artimis III moon landing increasingly unrealistic.
How much was spent on development of SLS, Shuttle and Apollo?
Why do you think the other competitors thought it would cost $10 billion for a HLS?
Did NASA have $10 billion for HLS?
Where are the suits?
Where did you get this nonsense about orbit? Is the vehicle incapable?
SLS can reach the moon from the earth, Starship can't reach the moon on a signel flight and requires 10-40+ tanker flights to fuel one lunar mission. That's a lot of chances for failure.
Even after Starship finally achieve orbit, it's still years away from being able to attempt what SLS did on day one.
The claim is that Starship will eventually be cheaper because of it's re-usability because they target $10M per flight you are talking about $400M for a lunar mission. But $10M per flight is insanely unrealistic. Consider that the Falcon Heavy, which is much, much simpler than Starship, costs around $90-$150M per launch. If we generously assume $50M per launch and 15-20 tanker flights that's around $750M - $1B which is suddenly comparable or could be more expensive than SLS.
Considering that SpaceX does not currently have a fully reusable rocker and if they manage to make Starship fully re-usable each one would need to be spread out a huge amount of flights to start becoming economical.
What's obvious to me, and maybe not everyone here, is the design of Starship is optimized for LEO, not deep space missions. The re-usability features are earth-specific (heat shield tiles, flaps for atmospheric control, landing legs designed for earth gravity). All of this mass is dead weight for a deep space mission.
Notice the HLS variant of Starship depot ships don't re-enter the earth and don't have all this re-usability stuff.
The refueling requirement is a consequence of the design. Starship is too heavy to reach the moon on one launch. It's massive dry mass prevents it from leaving LEO without refueling.
It's design is also not optimized for Mars either. It's optimized for earth operations. Mars has only 1% of the earth's atmosphere requiring completely different aerodynamics. You still need orbital refueling to get there and also back. It needs in-situ propellant production on Mars just to return to earth.
All of this is enormous complexity that hasn't been even close to being demonstrated (remember, Starship still hasn't achieved orbit).
What they are doing is building a ship to deploy Starlink, and wasting NASA funding to do it.
You'll note SpaceX has spent more than NASA on this vehicle.
I'm sure they can have their money back if they want. (Oh no they can't. SpaceX has hit all the milestones and got milestone payments)
>The refueling requirement is a consequence of the design
Seems you don't know this is true for Blue Origins Blue Moon too. The other moon lander
>SLS can reach the moon from the earth
Wrong wrong wrong. TLI
>Starship can't reach the moon on a signel flight
Starship can reach anywhere SLS can if you treat it like SLS
>$29 billion
SpaceX got about $2 billion or so. When do they get the remaining $27 billion?
>still hasn't achieved orbit
This is nonsense. SpaceX has hit orbital velocity.
>What's obvious to me, and maybe not everyone here, is the design of Starship is optimized for LEO, not deep space missions.
If you look well, you'll see the vehicle can be configured for different missions.
I don't know how many times I'll have to tell people the NASA contract is for HLS, not Starship. i.e you haven't seen the lunar vehicle launch once.
>more expensive than SLS
Can't happen either operationally or lifetimewise
And In fairness to NASA....and I may not have all of these details correct, but they didnt have many choices. the NASA Reauthorization Act required them to select two different landers for HLS, but the budget only funded one and under funded them at that. Starship was all that they could afford. Congress has since gone back and funded a second one.
The public watches cropped launch videos and then scrolls on to the next issue. Most Americans probably couldn’t say what Starship is.
> it has been slower than both Apollo and Shuttle
For a fraction of the cost.
> It's making the 2027 Artimis III moon landing increasingly unrealistic
The entire Artemis programme has been a boondoggle. But while SpaceX is building a new launch vehicle and tackling propellant transfer, Lockheed can’t stop fucking up a legacy heat shield.
(I’m still like 4:1 on Orion, not HLS, being the reason Artemis 3 is delayed [1].)
> Keep in mind Starship hasn't even achieved orbit yet
It’s in development for reuse at a scale of rocketry we’ve never done before. It’s weird to hold a literal moonshot R&D project to consumer timelines like this.
After this (11) test, if Block 3 and Pad 2 validate (12), we could see an orbital attempt in Q1 ‘26 (13). I’d be shocked if orbital insertion is not succeeded in 2026; the big question is how much refurbishment will be required. (Given SpaceX is basically the only group in the world to have solved this problem, I wouldn’t hold my breath.)
Beyond Artemis, it looks more likely than not that Starship will be delivering cargo to LEO by the end of 2027. This not only represents a major leap in capacity and cost advantage, it obsoletes several rockets on the books in Europe and Asia through the late 2030s.
[1] https://www.space.com/space-exploration/artemis/nasa-delays-...
Apollo is not reusable.
It seems to me you compare apples to oranges. SpaceX solves a problem no one have ever solved before. Obviously they going to have set backs and missed deadlines.
If anything, I would still count this one in the "refreshing" column.
SpaceX has been having difficulties with several launches and with permitting - and yet, construction continues; Launches continue at as high a pace as they can get away with; make do with their earlier rockets in the meantime (cranking out starlinks launches at an insane pace). They have been more cautious but there is still visible progress. As opposed to others which might have disappeared for a few years, or folded altogether.
This comparison is very unfair. Nine years ago the big rocket was a dream, not even Starship at the time.
> During his presentation, Musk joked that his strategy for raising money might be to “steal underpants,” do a Kickstarter campaign … and profit.
Contra Saturn V, which had strong funding out the gate.
They're clearly almost ready to scale this thing, if the next block version doesn't add a ton of problems back on. I'm not sure they're quite at the point of rapid reuse looking feasible, since tiles did come loose near the end of flight; not a problem for stage return, but definitely bad enough to warrant a meaningful correction before a (counterfactual) reflight.
Overall they've clearly proven the recipe works.
I can see room for skepticism on their rapid reuse plans, but skepticism on practicable reuse alone just seems discordant with the demonstrated success.
For the second time.
Somehow steel, high temps and ceramics reminds me apple crumble, not re-useable spaceship, but I wouldn’t bet against Elon here.
https://bsky.app/profile/dutchspace.bsky.social/post/3m37ofb...
The damage I'd noticed before today was all correlated with where tiles were removed, but the top half of this flap had all its tiles at flight start and still ended up a mess.
I don’t trust “agents” to do things on their own.
(Liftoff is around 33 mins in)
Just incredible overall to watch and very inspiring. Few things give me hope for the future like these videos do.
For ages people took it for granted Starship will succeed - even quoted cost per kg to orbit! Any comment saying it might still fail would be usually ridiculed and downvoted.
Then Starship hit a few failures and the sentiment flipped completely - megalomaniac Musk had his hubris catch up with him.
Now two successful launches later it's all gung ho again and great success.
What I would like to say is that each success increases the overall chance of final success but there's still non trivial hurdles to overcome:
- how well can they reuse the Starship
- how much is the turnaround cost
- how reliable they end up being after N launches
- is the marginal return on building a new Starship positive
A380 for example is a marvel of engineering and a technical success, but overall a commercial failure. I love flying on it, but they're not building them anymore. Similar case for the Concorde.
I wish SpaceX well, I'd wish them even better if Musk wasn't a part of it, and let's see if they can cover the last 20% on this project. It's not a given to me that they will.
Well done, of course, props and snaps. But I'm looking forward to it getting up to full speed, and being able to get down from that.
Correction: the trajectory only intersects with the planet prior to engine relight testing. After that it's at ~50km [1] (though to be fair, if they make it safely through the relight, all testing so far shows they're likely to make it through most of reentry)
> Around three minutes later, Ship 33 exploded over the Turks and Caicos Islands, causing debris to litter the Caribbean islands, Puerto Rico and the British Virgin Islands. While no injuries were reported, the debris caused minimal damage to infrastructure in Puerto Rico and the British Virgin Islands, and prompted airspace closures in the region for over an hour. The FAA ordered SpaceX to perform a mishap investigation into the breakup, grounding Starship until the inquiry was complete.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_flight_test_7#Mission...
Right now they're in a comfortable testing regime, getting up to near-orbital speed to be able to verify reentry in realistic conditions, while having the freedom to test dummy payload deployments and freedom to risk losing tiles since they will all definitely burn up or splash down within minutes of the ship reentry rather than floating around in orbit for some time.
If they go orbital, they had better be sure they won't leave a ton of tiles behind, and that they will be able to perform a controlled deorbit.
If they can make it so they only lose tiles when in a suborbital trajectory, they may be safe to begin deploying real Starlinks as soon as V3 has proven engine relight.
All I'm saying is that that's one more factor besides relight that I think will need to be sorted (it might already be sorted, I wouldn't know) before orbit.
They’re still re-flying Block 2 boosters. Hence intentionally leaving off heat tiles (and re-flying engines). Burning for orbit wouldn’t make sense on an, essentially, already-obsolete vehicle.
Block 3 launches on Flight 12. (It also validates a new pad.) Once that is debugged, SpaceX would be ready for an orbital attempt.
The crazy thing is right after orbital they go for propellant transfer. This is something our species has never done, and it’s ridiculously capability enabling if we can get it even within an order of magnitude of cost expectations.
Think more along the lines of communications satellites and humans on other planetary bodies.
People have been posting on chat / message boards for a few decades now. This is not novel. Not sure the quality of discussion has improved since the modem days (14.4k was my first).
> or drive home from work (GPS)
Tens of millions of us learned how to read maps and road signs once upon a time. You can actually fit several states' worth of maps into most car glove compartments, it is quite wild.
> or cure cancer (various ISS research)
There has been lots of cheering of all the cuts that DOGE made, including cancer and other disease related research and prevention, so this seems a rather moot point.
> survive as a species
Oh yes! First crewed mission to mars according to Musk is just what, 3 years away now?
First, we don't really know what's there. Because the entirety of the rest of the world is there, and that's a lot!
Second, it's also a bit of a cold war-like thing. A kind of power can be asserted from space. This power can be used for military purposes (just like any other power), and the possibility of this power is real, so, existing, capable powers must ensure that they don't lose their power to the power coming from this new territory. So basically, defense is another purpose.
Third, research doesn't often have an immediate commercial or welfare goal attached to it. Simply because we don't know what we'll find, and how that'll be useful. In this way, one could argue that research is pointless, but I think that would lead to the pointlessness of life itself, philosophically.
Fourth, successful space missions elevate morale, by providing inspiration. It's also a tool for diplomacy, a way to connect nations via a joint effort.