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Comment by holt62 | Hacker News Reader

What an incredible feat of engineering, even if it doesn't make orbit. Just getting that much mass off the pad is mind-boggling.

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It certainly is, but my mind is more boggled by the Saturn V that did it 60 years ago. Space launch technology feels like it had a 30 year gap, as in, nothing significant happened between the Space Shuttle and the Falcon 9. And now, we are just catching up. Not just SpaceX, there is also Blue Origin, Rocketlab,... and everything that's happening in China.

An by the way, the whole point of Starship is not just doing it, it is doing it cheaply (by space standards). The whole reusability thing is part of it, and so is the "assembly line" approach that lets SpaceX treat their experimental rockets like fireworks. If the goal was just to lift a lot of mass off the ground, it is not even a great design, reusability in particular is costly in terms of payload capacity.

It's incredible to witness what humanity is capable of when pushed to our limits and appropriately motivated. The space race was in many ways a civilizational and existential fight for the U.S. The innovations this spurred in a relatively short span of time (and the risks the astronauts took) are numerous and impressive. I sometimes wonder that if in the absence of adversity, humans tend towards comfort and security and stability. Maybe that's obvious. Maybe most people with full bellies, warm homes, and physical security just aren't motivated to work 16 hour days for years on end and risk lives.

I suppose we should be grateful that SpaceX has found and collected enough of these crazy people in one place on this mission.

Maybe that’s the Great Filter?

An interesting theory. Intelligence tends towards entropy in the absence of exciting stimuli. Maybe life on Earth has just been so besieged over the eons that it has forced us to progress to where we are. Once we reach [Wall-E levels of comfort and abundance,](https://corporalculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/walle...) we're doomed. Maybe we're already seeing this with the fertility crisis.

On a smaller scale, driving through the mountains and seeing the tunnels where we said "screw it, we're going through" is also pretty amazing.

One thing that made me realize the scale of the Apollo project was the "rubber room". This is a bunker connected by a slide to the launch pad. It was designed as an emergency escape in case of an imminent explosion.

At a normal scale, that would be a major construction project.

At Apollo scale, it is an anecdote. Its purpose is to maybe save a few people in the unlikely scenario where an explosion gives enough advance warning to be able to use the slide, but not enough to be able to just drive away. It also goes to show that the program was anything but reckless.

"nothing significant happened between the Space Shuttle and the Falcon 9"

well US government found new toys (proxy war) instead of space

I think the '90s was a missed opportunity. The U.S. was (mostly) at peace, had a lot of tax revenue flowing in, and should have built a safer replacement for the Space Shuttle.

Instead, we continued to rely on a flawed, expensive, and dangerous system to build and supply the ISS. Then, we tragically lost another Shuttle and crew in early 2000s.

The reusability is what made the rest of these investments possible. Musk is annoying, but you have to give him credit for it.

Could just give credit to the engineers working on it

Sure, but the engineers didn't decide on and fund that priority.

If you get the chance to see it in person, it's an experience. The best way I can describe it is that looking from Isla Blanca beach, it looks like a skyscraper sitting on the pad, and then, the impossible happens -- the skyscraper lifts off into the sky.

Well considering the point of it is the make orbit, it would be a bit useless if it didn't.

Would HN describe a huge program that didn't do the thing it was designed to do a "feat of engineering"?

Yes. The Starship program is pushing the limits of engineering, if it fails today it doesn't make it unimpressive

I'd also consider the attempts at fusion energy to be very impressive engineering projects even though none have them have yielded a stable source of fusion energy

Could someone give me a eli5 of what makes that launch impressive compared to other rocket launches?

It’s big.

36 full flow staged combustion engines all working is no easy feat

It’s the largest, heaviest rocket ever, with double the thrust of the last record holder, and it is the first one that is supposed to be reusable.

It’s a lot of records that just got broken.

Thanks for actually answering

I think for a sense of scale if this works as the SpaceX team wants, they will be able to launch more mass to orbit in a single day than all payloads ever before 2022 (rough math). And at a cost roughly 1/100th the prior average.

Also getting to "orbit" is a huge feat, because you need to be going over 17,500 mph (28,000 km/h), get into a designated orbit, and in this case, they're also deploying starlink satellites.

This rocket is the largest rocket ever made by humans, and the largest to even reach orbit, which is insane considering it's by a private company and not a national space program.

Full reuse. Both Superheavy (booster) and Starship (the spaceship). Especially Starship. It has never been been done (don't say Shuttle).

Falcon 9 achieved reusable 10 years ago. Other rockets have only started getting there recently. Starship is a big step forward.

Blowing something up so hard it almost gets into space is a feat of engineering, even if all it does is rain debris from ahigh.

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