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Comment by danw1979 | Hacker News Reader

danw1979

Who else “played a role” in Falcon 9 reducing the cost of mass to orbit, exactly ? I guess some public money went their way ?

Also which jury is still out on starship ? I haven’t read any serious criticism that suggests there are insurmountable technical obstacles to it working. Timelines and the exact final cost-to-orbit are still debatable I guess ?

The achievements of the program so far and the infrastructure currently under construction in Starbase and the cape are seriously impressive. This is no speculative, skunkworks endeavour.

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I don't think anyone can say there are insurmountable obstacles, but it's still a hard problem they haven't solved yet. Bits of the rocket are still melting on reentry, and they have to fix that to achieve rapid reusability. Plus they haven't demonstrated a heavy payload yet. We can't be sure they'll actually achieve extreme low cost until they've done both of these things.

For anything beyond Earth orbit, they also need to demonstrate orbital refueling.

I've seen articles raising technical concerns about all of these, but I'm not enough of an expert myself to have an opinion.

Yes the jury is out on this:

> Also which jury is still out on starship ? I haven’t read any serious criticism that suggests there are insurmountable technical obstacles to it working. Timelines and the exact final cost-to-orbit are still debatable I guess ?

There are also other space companies outside of SpaceX who have innovated and reduced the cost of mass to orbit.

Just trying to add the perspective that while yes, SpaceX is impressive, there are also other companies and this hero-like worship of SpaceX (or any other company/person) is not great.

> There are also other space companies outside of SpaceX who have innovated and reduced the cost of mass to orbit.

They should be easy to name then. I can’t think of any. Can you?

So far everybody's playing catch-up, but there are some innovative rocket companies out there. Blue Origin is finally getting to orbit with partial reusability, Rocket Lab and Relativity Space are doing some cool stuff, and Stoke Space is working on full reusability, evaporative cooling for reentry (using hydrogen fuel for the second stage, which works much better for this than methane), can steer for landing without gimbaling the engines, and has a full flow staged combustion engine like Starship.

The problem with framing this as hero worship is you conflate SpaceX and Elon.

I hate the guy. I think spacex is revolutionary. Both can be true. It doesn’t mean I am hero worshipping anyone or any company.

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