Whatever happens with SpaceX in the long run, they’ve thankfully already provided the existence proof that the cost of spaceflight can be drastically reduced. It’s taking longer than I’d have liked for their competitors to catch on, but everybody can now look at Falcon 9 and see an example of how to do things. It may not be the optimal way, but it’s so much better than the alternatives that simply copying it will give you a very good start (the Chinese seem to be taking this approach).
And I expect the same to be true of Starship, despite the denialism for the usual places. There may be better ways of achieving full reusability–but this will be one of the possible ways.
Even if SpaceX somehow collapsed tomorrow, the history of the F9 would still serve as the minimum level of cost and performance that a future rocket design should achieve. No one will ever have the excuse that it isn’t possible or practical.
I’d guess the Raptor team is pretty large. It’s hard for me to imagine how cohesive they would have to be to design and build something like this. Getting the mechanical, propellant and avionics stakeholders to work together and have this output is somewhat of a miracle.
Agreed. I think anyone who’s worked in a large org knows how difficult it is to make even simple changes across a team boundary. My direct experience is software but the same must be true of hardware.
There’s also the problem that groups tend to fight for their own survival. There’s probably some 5-person team that built some controller or other in the Raptor 2–which actually didn’t need to exist at all because it could be merged into some other controller. How do you convince them to fight for their own deletion? Maybe the engineers can move to elsewhere in the org but the manager is out a job. And yet SpaceX seems to accomplish this.
I assume without Musk’s everyday hands-on expertise the whole operation would collapse. When Musk is gone the new space age is probably done, he’s a once in a millennium aerospace talent.
You were told previously not to threadshit. Since the previous mod note was several hundred posts and several months ago, I am going to give you a mod note instead of a warning.
Since your only recent participation in this thread is to drop in snarky anti-Musk comments, with no discussion whatsoever of the actual topic of this thread (Starship, not Musk himself), you are hereby banned from this thread.
Do not participate in this thread any further.
Do not drop snarky anti-Musk comments in other threads either, unless such snark is directly applicable to the topic being discussed. In other words, it’s perfectly fine in a discussion about Musk himself, but off-topic in a thread about SpaceX or Tesla, unless Musk is specifically being discussed in those threads.
They’ve been pretty good about the short-term estimates lately. And the FAA hasn’t been too bad, either. I think it’s very likely they’ll fly before the end of the month. And if we’re lucky, within a couple of weeks.
The big improvements here are:
Beefed up thermal protection for the control surfaces, hopefully making for a less spicy landing attempt.
Attempting to catch the booster with the chopsticks. I anticipate that there will be a lot of things during the flight that could “veto” the attempt, after which it’ll crash into the ocean. So I think the odds of it happening at all are <50%, but the odds of success given the attempt are pretty high, maybe 80%.
What’s not happening:
The all new flap design (smaller flaps moved leeward). That’s for a later test.
Stretching the booster or using the new Raptor 3s. Not sure when that’s happening either.
Tory Bruno is the CEO of ULA, one of SpaceX’s competitors. He’s not a bad guy but he’s definitely old space and some of his skeptical takes (on reusability and otherwise) have not aged so well. There was this statement about the new, clean-looking Raptor 3 design:
Gwynne Shotwell (president of SpaceX) just posted this:
Heh. To be fair, Bruno wasn’t entirely wrong in that the engines did not have TVC or all the fluid management stuff installed. However:
The other engines didn’t have that either, so it was a valid comparison
The TVC (thrust vector control: basically the linear actuators that pivot the engine) hardly change the look of the engine
Not all of the engines need TVC anyway
And the fluid management amounts to a clean-looking single-piece manifold with a few braided hoses and other stuff going into it. So it also hardly changes the clean look.
I really wish we had a solid competitor to SpaceX.
I honestly thought Bezos would do it. Super smart, super rich founder/CEO - check. Crazy about space travel - check. Used to disrupting existing business models - check.
That’s good and I love that they are looking at reusability. But they really need to work on iterative cadence. They’re doing the right things under the wrong development methodology.
New Glenn should have 1 or 2 catastrophic failures and a partial success or two under its belt by now. Part of SpaceX’s genius is its willingness to break shit in the name of progress. “Hey, sure the rocket blew up, but we met 3 of 5 success criteria! We’ll look at it and the launch next month will do better!” They’ve pulled rocketry into an Agile/Sprint methodology. And it turns out that works!
Case in point, the contracts for Crew Dragon and Starliner were awarded AT THE SAME TIME. SpaceX got 61% of the funding that Boeing got (4.2B vs. 2.6B). SpaceX has been flying certified flights since 2020 (including private flights not funded by NASA). Starliner has…stranded two astronauts on the ISS.
SpaceX is not perfect, but they are so far ahead of the rest of the field that it is just silly no one else has adopted the mindset (and raided SpaceX for talent).
Agreed, but their prior CEO (Bob Smith) was as old-space as you could get, and undoubtedly ran the company that way for several years. Dave Limp is one of Bezos’ favorites from Amazon, but became CEO less than a year ago. Takes a while to turn that oil tanker around… or rather, dismantle the tanker as you change direction. They absolutely need to increase their cadence, but they do at least seem to be moving in the right direction.
That was Orion, not Starliner. Easy mistake–there are a lot of capsules to keep track of. Starliner had some nasty software bugs that caused too much propellant use and a potential bad jettison of the service module, and also some other issues with the thrusters.
CNBC is a strange media outlet. On one hand, they employ Michael Sheetz, who is a capable writer on the space industry and has covered SpaceX a number of times. On the other hand, they also employ Lora Kolodny, who is an imbecile who will write hitpiece after hitpiece on SpaceX, without letting anything resembling facts stand in her way. Her latest:
It contains numerous errors, but perhaps the most egregious is this:
SpaceX said in its response on X that there were “no detectable levels of mercury” found in its samples. But SpaceX wrote in its July permit application — under the header Specific Testing Requirements - Table 2 for Outfall: 001 — that its mercury concentration at one outfall location was 113 micrograms per liter. Water quality criteria in the state calls for levels no higher than 2.1 micrograms per liter for acute aquatic toxicity and much lower levels for human health
The report in question:
And the figure:
It does say 113 ug/L. Vindication? No. Because even someone with the astuteness of a dead sloth might notice the discrepancy with the figure next to it, which is 0.139 ug/L. Curious that two samples from similar places would have nearly a factor of a thousand difference in mercury, eh?
But in that very same report is the actual source data. Which says:
Oh. So it is 0.113 ug/L. Or actually less than that. But either way is rather less than the 2.1 ug/L limit for drinking water.
10 seconds of searching the same document would have revealed this to her. But that would have been devastating to her case.
The story does mention a SpaceX response about a typo, but it does not retract the obviously false statement about mercury.
I read people who hate Elon Musk so much that apparently they want Starship to fail just because it was Musk’s idea. Or that they loathe “capitalists in space” and think humanity shouldn’t go into space at all unless it’s a government-administered effort.
I’d prefer to keep the thread as independent of that guy as possible, given the constraints.
Really, SpaceX alone has enough competitors and other enemies to explain what we see. It’s totally transparent in some cases like with the FCC, where every filing is on the public record, and we can easily see which of their competitors are trying to throw up roadblocks (and to be fair, SpaceX does this too). Same thing with the FAA. Every dubious objection by ULA or Blue Origin is public info.
The connections are less obvious with the media. But I think it has a simple explanation: reporters are desperate for click-worthy stories, and “SpaceX dumping mercury into the groundwater” certainly sounds click-worthy. It’s easy for competitors, not to mention indirect enemies like trade unions, to feed compliant reporters stories. Doesn’t matter if they’re accurate; hardly anyone verifies the accuracy later, and even when they do the blame falls on the publication or reporter, not the competitor. Takes no effort at all for a PR team to pump reporters with dubious “leads” on the competition.
Even when they’re accurate, they often give the story a level of importance out of whack with the actual importance. Things can be true and yet not an actual big deal in the grand scheme of things. And selective reporting is real.
None of these parties are going to stop Starship, but they might be able to slow it down a bit. That has obvious benefits if it means a slightly higher chance at winning a contract or even just taking some of the heat off their own failures. Lame, but that’s the way things work.
When I was in grad school, some of my classmates (but mostly undergrads) were involved in a satellite project. Their primary goal was education, and they decided right from the start that if they successfully delivered the finished satellite to the launch contractor on schedule and it blew up on launch, that would count as a 90% success.
I’m sure you can guess what happened. The first time, at least. They eventually make another and get it to fly. And many of the students involved ended up getting hired by aerospace companies.
In short, the FAA has delayed the next Starship launch permit until November.
The primary reason seems to again relate to the water deluge system. Which–as noted earlier in the thread–emits only pure water that meets drinking water standards. One could perhaps still imagine a problem if this were a desert. But this is a location where rainfall regularly dumps thousands of times as much water on the area. And despite already having permits and evaluations from existing agencies, the FAA is demanding another permit.
And then there is the case of the hot-stage ring. It falls into the ocean. SpaceX already demonstrated that the odds of it landing on a whale are too small to be worth considering (in case it wasn’t obvious already). But the FAA is demanding a reset and reevaluation of the impact. Never mind that literally every other rocket in existence dumps far heavier (and more toxic) stages into the ocean every single time they launch.
There’s more, but those are the big items. There’s a bigger rant here, but it’s not really the thread to get political. Nevertheless, unless someone in charge puts the FAA in the hotseat, it’s gonna be a while before we get another launch.
It is an interesting contrast to, say, SpaceX’s recent return to flight after the booster landing failure. The FAA approved that in less than two days. I thought maybe the FAA had fixed some internal processes. Maybe the division that handles new launch permits is different than the one that rubber stamps existing permits.
Gotta say, I care more about annoying and distressing the gross loser Bond supervillain whenever possible than I care about the success of his company.
I don’t care about the man or his company, but I would really like to see a viable space program in my lifetime. And he seems to be the only one approaching this. Though he seems to have lost focus lately with the twitter nonsense etc?
Bezos also has the money to do it but doesn’t really seem to be taking it seriously?
