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Comment by s08148692 | Hacker News Reader

If people didn't try things just because they were hard we'd all be ploughing fields right now

If people didn't recognize when projects became impossible to complete, Lotus Modern Jazz would've shipped in the last year.

For something impossible to complete, it sure seems to be deploying a lot of Starlink satellites.

Is deploying starlink satellites the end goal of Starship?

Putting Starlink sats in orbit is the economic engine that pays for Starship development and infrastructure build-out. You really think you get to skip straight to the end goal without establishing a way to fund it?

Deploying starlink satellites is the milestone that makes a viable project. Even if it fails on all remaining goals, it will continue flying regularly.

And it's amazing how much easier it is to test and iterate when you're making regular flights.

Uh huh.

Gentle reminder that Saturn 5 worked pretty much eprfectly on its maiden flight.

> Gentle reminder that Saturn 5 worked pretty much eprfectly on its maiden flight.

Yeah, except it costed 12x per-flight, ran at 30x/kg, and wasn't reusable. So not exactly the same thing.

Remind me again, how many orbital refuelings will it take to make starship reach the moon?

Saturn V was the culmination of a loooooong development history which included many rockets in the same family (hence the V), and some spectacular RUDs.

And it sent 3 people to the moon and brought them back with no refueling.

60 years ago.

Saturn V worked well, but we seem to be forgetting that Apollo 1 killed three astronauts on Earth and Apollo 13 almost killed another three in space.

I never forget either. Both were failures of the command/service module design, not the rocket.

True, but ultimately Saturn V + Apollo was a stack intended to fly together, much like Booster + Starship. Both have/had to be reliable as a whole, with disastrous consequences if not. We can praise Saturn's V reliability, but it is just a part of the entire project, and it makes sense to judge the entire project as well.

That's an incredible achievement. But you seem to be ignoring the goals of Starship program - to make economically viable and reusable means of space transportation.

It's like after Jobs unveils iPhone to the world you'd comment that, meh, we could make telephone calls more than 100 years ago?

This comparison would make sense if we'd been giving Elon 5% of the federal budget like we did to the Apollo mission.

Gentle reminder that the Apollo project was eating about 0.5 percent of the entire US GDP yearly. That buys a lot of engineers and other capacity.

An equivalent of this would be about 160 billion USD a year today, and Starship is definitely at least an order of magnitude, perhaps two, cheaper than that.

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