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Well, I saw the link 
.
Surprisingly positive coverage from NBC. They seemed to acknowledge that this was still a test flight, and that the damage was not a big deal compared to them actually completing the flight with a precision landing.
Tanker trucks have been seen already refilling the propellant farm at Starbase. Looks like they aren’t going to wait too long for the next flight.
Possibly the engineers want to ensure that Starship won’t be catastrophically lost if a single g-d tile in exactly the wrong place gets lost?
“For the want of a nail the horse was lost…”
Looks to me as if the tricky bit may be the back fins: they seem to have sustained significant damage in every re-entry test so far. They don’t want to have to replace those on every flight if they are going to achieve rapid reusability.
I assume these are made of stainless steel… maybe they need to consider replacing at least part of them with something more heat-resistent. A rhenium alloy, perhaps?
But of course there are weight considerations…
The other option is just making them modular and easily swapped, and just replace them on every flight. The flap itself wouldn’t be very expensive or difficult to churn out on an assembly line. Obviously they want to minimize that sort of thing, but it is an option if they can’t sort out the fin damage.
I’d say there are two basic thresholds on the tile damage spectrum.
The first is: how much damage can the Ship withstand while surviving reentry? And the second is: how much damage precludes rapid reusability?
So far, we only have answers to the first question. And it already looks pretty good! Even with both intentional and “natural” damage, we’ve seen several successful reentries. In fact the Ship has always made it to the surface as long as it retained control authority in space. And three out of four have been controlled enough to land in front of a buoy.
The second threshold is uncertain. They haven’t actually caught the Ship to perform an inspection. And I think it’s clear that the Ship design needs a bit of iteration, though it’s possible that v2 would be enough if they did a non-experimental flight (no removed tiles, no aggressive reentry profile, etc.).
The first question is the more interesting for crew. If everything goes wrong, can the Ship still land? What we’ve seen so far is fairly confidence inspiring. But the second question is about the economics. We’ll just have to wait and see on that one.
Yeah, people comparing Starship to the Saturn V sometimes don’t take into account that the Saturn V only had to make it into orbit once. If it only just barely did that, good enough.
Looks like a Ship catch is still a ways away. V3 only, probably around Flight 13-15:
And V3 is only optimistically going to fly this year:
And the V2-V4 roadmap:
V3 is mostly a refined version of V2. V4 will be a significant stretch, though (also a couple years away). Also looks like V3 will be the first practical vehicle (V2 still has pretty bad mass to orbit compared to the goals).
There’s only one more V2 Ship left, so the most likely scenario is that we get just one more flight this year, with V3 coming next year. Maybe we get lucky and it slips in, but you know how these things go.
Were V1 and V2 never expected to have good payload fractions, or was that the result of weight gain in the projected dry mass of the upper stage? As I mentioned upthread, weight gain in dry mass has doomed many a proposed reusable spacecraft.
V1 expectations were never very high. Basically always a proof of concept. I’d thought that V2 was targeting ~100 t, but as you say, mass creep is a common problem. Hopefully the V3 and V4 predictions are better now that they have two vehicle designs under their belt. Plus the envelope stretching should help tell them where they can cut back.
I don’t know what fraction of their income is from government contracts and what is from investors, but both of those are made up of members of the public. It might not matter what the ordinary Joe on the street thinks of them, but there are people whose opinion matters very, very much to SpaceX.
SpaceX is private, so their investors are a very select group. Steve Jurvetson is one example; if you follow him at all, it’s clear he knows exactly how a test program like this should go (he’s also an avid collector of spaceflight artifacts). So I wouldn’t be concerned at all about that group.
NASA, etc. are influenced indirectly through Congress, but ultimately they don’t have infinite freedom. SpaceX is objectively the best provider in almost all cases, so if there were a clear bias they’d sue and probably win. The military is dependent on them at this point–there simply isn’t an alternative to Starshield/Starlink.
Starlink is a large source of revenue but the consumers buying the service probably aren’t too concerned about how the Starship test program is going. Most are probably barely aware that it’s the same company.
Ahh, here’s a better explanation. The current v2 is really more like v1.5. Here were their previous targets:
If you match the numbers up to the chart above, it’s a much better fit if you just assume that v2 got renamed to v3, v3 to v4, and then what’s called v2 would have been a v1.5. So the 35 t number isn’t a regression from the 100+ t. We just don’t have the full upgrade yet.
In his latest claim, Musk says he wants to be doing bursts of up to more than 24 Starship flights in 24 hours with a sustainable rate of 10 launches per day in 6 or 7 years.
Presumably that would be mostly tanker flights to send refueled Starships on their way.
Obviously they will need a lot of tanker flights.
Do we know if they have settled on a strategy for this yet: refuel the mission ship directly or have an intermediate ‘depot’ ship?
Just as my own guess I’d say they’ll use a depot. A depot can have more and heavier cooling measures (insulation, active refrigeration) than a Starship and it would minimize how long the final ship would spend docking and fueling. ETA: it would also increase scheduling flexibility.
ETA2: especially because for flights to Mars they would probably want to send the Starships in groups so that if anything went catastrophically wrong with one ship there would be at least a chance that the crew could be evac’d to other ships of their flotilla.
That does make sense. And of course they can dispense with a fair amount of weight on the depot since it never needs to re-enter. There’s a LOT of work to do before we get there, though.
As far as I know, SpaceX’s contract for HLS requires them to build a depot. I’d say the main argument against it is the extra development effort–but if it’s already done for HLS, why not reuse it for Mars?
It should have a recharging station for his car.