But of course: which year? 
I would love to see a real space program, and starship seems to be the only current candidate.
SLS is an expensive joke, and Blue Origin is moving a the speed of a drugged slug despite the deep pocket behind it.
Though as Heinlein said: “we will have a future in space. But I am not sure that the working language will be English”.
China seems to be fairly serious about this…
I’m generally against “grand unified theories” for a bunch of seemingly unrelated failures, but I wonder if the new Ship 2.0 just shakes a lot more than anticipated. Somehow the engine vibrations are being coupled into the structure more and causing greater acoustic loads on the entire thing.
They all but said this after Flight 7, where the downcomers started leaking due to vibration. But it’s possibly also a cause of the leaks on Flight 8 (from the Raptors) and Flight 9 (from the main tank).
It may just be that a lot of parts are underdesigned for the acoustic loads they’re seeing, and they’re basically fixing them one by one. Might need a more fundamental fix.
At any rate, let’s not forget: SpaceX now has the first and second orbital rockets to reuse their boosters. Rocket Lab is the next closest, having recovered the booster in the ocean and reused one of the engines from it. Blue Origin is still far behind, not having even recovered a booster let alone reused one (understandable since they’ve only flown once). Almost no one else is even trying, except for a few startups and Chinese copycats (who will probably get there eventually, but not yet).
This is what the Falcon 9 rate looks like:
Went from a barely visible sliver in the early 2010s to nearly 150 per year. And about as clean an exponential increase as you could hope for in the real world.
I think that back in 2010, you’d be laughed out of the room if you claimed that SpaceX would be launching hundreds per year in less than 15 years. There are many rockets that don’t launch 100 times, ever.
Maybe, but Falcon 9 doesn’t have a reusable upper stage, and that’s what’s been bedeviling the Starship program from the beginning. As I said upthread they seem to have reusable boosters perfected but a reusable orbital stage is exponentially harder. If the orbiter can’t be made quickly and economically reusable, the whole Starship concept founders.
Reentry has been THE obstacle to economical reuse all the way back to the late 1950s. Ablative heat shields work exactly once. The X-20 Dyna-Soar underwent so much weight gain that it went from being planned to launch from a Titan II to a Titan III and that was IF nickel-steel could take the heat, which it notoriously did not on an X-15 high Mach flight. The Shuttle was the compromise design it was in large part due to the fact that any orbiter weight gain could easily drop the payload fraction to zero.
But the lack of a reusable upper stage is also why we probably won’t get to 1000 F9 flights per year. They haven’t sized the factory for it and don’t want to.
The Booster part looks easy now but it’s still by far the most powerful rocket ever made, the most massive flying object of any kind, the most engines ever harnessed into a single rocket, etc… that’s been caught perfectly a few times by Mechazilla arms and now actually reused. No one is even close to that. No one else even has something comparable on the drawing board!
The upper stage is indeed harder than even that, and they aren’t just trying to get anything to fly but already on the second major hardware revision, and I’d give odds that every flight has had enough changes that they’d be considered at least a new Block if they were any other company. But even if it takes another two years before they have something they’re really happy with, that’s still a very quick development campaign.
And in 10 years no one will remember the early hiccups at all except in fun video montages that SpaceX themselves will put out. Amara’s observation comes to mind:
We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
Starship Heavy Booster is a great achievement, absolutely no doubt about that. But if it can’t be paired with an orbital stage that meets the original goals for reusability, it will have no purpose. No one will want to pay what an only semi-reusable Starship would cost. For example Falcon Heavy is underutilized because for the basic Falcon architecture launch cost there are comparatively few users willing to pay the absolute higher launch price over Falcon 9 even if the per-kilo price is less. SpaceX itself sticks with the Falcon 9 for its Starlink launches. Starship needs to not only provide economy of scale but absolute economy– it has to cost less per flight than Falcon. That’s impossible without upper stage reusability.
I just don’t really see the reason for skepticism. They’ve demonstrated, one way or another, basically all of the major pieces. They just haven’t done all of them at the same time. It’s like a gymnast who has shown all of the individual elements but not reliably enough to combine them into a full routine. It just seems that it’s basically a matter of continuing to iterate.
They did say that tile losses were negligible on ascent, which is another solid achievement if you consider how bad things were on earlier flights (sometimes losing tiles even before liftoff). Attaching the tiles to the hull is a decidedly non-trivial problem, even if it might seem otherwise. Obviously, you can’t reuse a ship if it’s losing tiles left and right. They seem to have quietly solved that problem.
Get Ship 2.0 to have reliable orbital insertion. Fix the leaks. Fix the door. Make sure the new flap design does what it’s supposed to. Catch it. Reuse it after refurbishment. Finally, reuse after no refurbishment.
All of these things are hard but are things they’ve mostly achieved already or are comparable to similar examples that they’ve achieved.
I think, probably, they’re going to miss their Mars attempt next year, but it’s not yet impossible. Mars '28, though, seems very doable even if they don’t speed up their rate of improvement.
I certainly hope so, but dang I wanted some good news this flight and we didn’t get it.
I’m just an optimist at heart. Given the reused Booster, anything past not having a RUD before MECO is gravy.
Ship 36’s static fire test was…not a success.
Good thread here:
Oh dear. This isn’t looking good, is it?
As the saying goes: once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence… but the third time, it’s enemy action. Or in this case: perhaps some fundemental design problems with ship V2?
I fear we can forget about any projected timescale for real moon or mars missions for the moment.
This article has a good photo of damage at the test facility.
I think one of the interesting things in that pic is that those 4 white-painted tanks adjacent to the now-absent pad & gantry structure are intact. Scorched on the outside, but intact.
An obvious question is whether they took enough overpressures during the explosions to now be suspect. They’re not flight items, but it’s be a shame if they failed during prep for the next launch and damaged the vehicle.
In any complex facility that’s had a casualty, it’s probably serious engineering to decide what still looks good but might not still be good. Obvious wreckage needs to be removed as cleanly as possible. But how far back into apparently solid seemingly undamaged facilities does hidden damage exist? Every pipe, every wire, every valve, every flat surface, every tank, every well everything needs to be validated somehow.
Looks like yet another failure for Elmo.
Hopefully someday soon our government will realize what a waste of time and money this has all been and starts supporting and funding NASA at the level they always should have been.
I think you have a fundamental misconception about what NASA is and does. NASA doesn’t make rockets. NASA buys rockets and uses rockets. Right now, the best, most reliable supplier NASA has for rockets is SpaceX. Historically, it’s mostly been Boeing, but I’m really not sure I trust them right now.
Someone somewhere (I don’t recall where) said that the tanks would need to be replaced (if the decision was made by competent engineers) because the heating could alter the properties of the metal enough that they could no longer be guaranteed to meet the original design specifications. Seems like a reasonable observation.
I’m absolutely not a fan of Eloon, and think his ambitions for Starship are driven more by ego than rationality, but I’m not going to dismiss what SpaceX has done in terms of regular, dependable (by the standards of that science) lift capacity.
Do I want him removed from his various positions of influence? Sure do. Do I want his multiple, blatant efforts to cheat the law in so very many ways held against him with punishment? Sure do. But SpaceX (and here’s hoping they can get a new name once free of him) is valuable asset to the world, even if a lot of it’s funding has come from taxpayer dollars.
There’s certainly a lot of range in the middle between NASA’s efforts that take so long to develop that they’re obsolete before they fly (and that’s leaving out many, many government inefficiencies and demands) and the move fast and explode of Eloon. With him gone, SpaceX may find it.
More details on the test site damage
They might manage to clean it up once they stop RUDing cranes.
Hard to tell from this distance, but that looks like the crane fell over sideways. Someone forgot to deploy the bracing legs, maybe?