It surely is not. And that’s wonderful good news. But they might be stuck.
Historically, pioneers who get stuck don’t usually unstick themselves. Instead somebody else takes the lessons learned, chooses a different path, and passes them by.
Samuel Langley was an American aviation pioneer who was rather aways ahead of the Wright brothers. Until he got stuck where further refinement of his chosen design paradigm could not be made to work well enough to really be a man-carrying man-controlled flying machine. The Wrights’ approach wasn’t that different. But was different enough that they passed Langley and never looked back.
This parallel only goes so far. I’m not suggesting there’s some other competitor to SpaceX about to pass them in re-usable heavy lift. There isn’t. But they may, for whatever combo of reasons, have gotten stuck. And it may be very difficult for them to unstick themselves, for reasons of cost, institutional inertia, and muskly irrationality.
2026 musk is not a man who thinks like 2016 or 2006 musk did. That’s an uncontrolled risk that most other pioneering orgs didn’t / don’t have to deal with. Late stage Hughes Aircraft might be a decent parallel. It does not matter how much pioneering genius work you have on your resume; once you’re old, or nutty, or drug-addled, your past performance no longer usefully predicts your future outcomes.
I have to vehemently disagree with you on this. Langley wasn’t remotely ahead of the Wright Brothers. He relied on lift tables from Lilienthal as opposed to the Wright Brothers who discovered the tables were wrong and created their own system to measure lift and correct the data. Everything the WB did was based on hard science. Langley stuck an engine on a glorified Lilienthal-esc contraption. years later Glenn Curtis put one of his engines on it along with some modifications trying to prove it could fly as a legal way around the Wright Brother’s patents. It wasn’t capable of sustained flight and was never capable of 3 axis controlled flight.
He was well ahead of the WB in the early years when they were just getting going. And kept pounding his head against his mistakes. Which left him stuck while the WB built on that and passed him by.
You’re accurately describing that later process by which the WB passed him. As you say, Curtiss later proved Langley’s machine could never have worked even with much better engines than could be had at the time.
I was talking about the earlier times and the dangers of getting captured by your early erronneous ideas.
For those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years. The mission of SpaceX remains the same: extend consciousness and life as we know it to the stars.
It is only possible to travel to Mars when the planets align every 26 months (six month trip time), whereas we can launch to the Moon every 10 days (2 day trip time). This means we can iterate much faster to complete a Moon city than a Mars city.
That said, SpaceX will also strive to build a Mars city and begin doing so in about 5 to 7 years, but the overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster.
After years of delays and no full-orbit flight, orbiter reuse, or demonstration of refueling, this looks worryingly like a tacit admission that the original goals of the Starship program are now considered unachievable; or at a minimum, that Starship will have to be operated in expendable or semi-expendable mode for an unknown number of years while the engineers try to work out the problems.
Dammit, dammit, dammit. We know from the Shuttle program that ceramic tiles CAN protect an orbiter; if they can then just be made durable or easily refurbishable enough. It looked like the Raptor engines were going meet their endurance and reliability requirements. Tankage and plumbing should be a basic solved problem by now. Why the heck can’t we achieve the cost-effective reusable spacecraft we’ve been anticipating since the 1960s? Whatever you think of Musk he was willing to try, to the tune of billions of dollars of private investment. But it looks like for now we’re back to quarter-billion dollar price tags per launch.
This isn’t the thread for an Elon debate, but I don’t see Musk deciding on his own how to allocate dollars for space missions as a virtue. NASA et al have seen the cost/benefit of drone/rover missions instead, and that’s how the science is advancing. If Musk had just donated his billions to science, we’d have been better off.
Agreed that this thread shouldn’t be about what an incredibly giant asshole Musk is.
However, claiming that space access\science would have been better off if Musk would have donated his billions to NASA instead displays such incredible ignorance I have to ask if you know anything about space access at all. NASA has been an one abject failure after another at creating affordable designs for space access. There is a reason that Obama tried to switch to private companies for space access and that Musk has essential completely cornered the market on cheaper access to space. Don’t get me wrong there have been things that NASA is good at but keeping cost under control is something they are pretty much uniformly awful at.
I’ll note that I suggested Musk donate his money to science in general, not to NASA specifically. The JPL is part of NASA but doesn’t have the same reputation for abject failure, and most of the science itself is done by various universities which could use the research funding. Chucking stuff into space is necessary, of course, but Musk has been on a singular mission of manned Mars exploration that doesn’t seem cost effective.
SpaceX has made a lot of science more affordable, so I’ll give them credit for that. But Starship just reeks of billionaire dick swinging.
AFAIK, everything so far was spent on developing Starship (the complaint voiced in the Musk/Twitter thread). The goal was to make robust payloads at something less than thousands of dollar per kilo possible. That’s an extremely worthwhile goal in itself regardless of whether it was ever going to be used for manned voyages to Mars or not. Imagine the science that could be done if you could launch a 100-tonne science package and transtage for a launch cost of only ten or twenty million dollars.
If you want an out you can say that Starship still doesn’t work and it is starting to look like some of the capabilities that Musk wants are not achievable with our current technology.
However, as Dr Strangelove and others keep reminding us. Rocket science is really really hard. Almost every new rocket design has many failures before they hopefully work the kinks out and get a useable design.
The Falcon 9 rocket on the other hand is easily the greatest achievement in space of the last 50 years. Payloads on the Falcon 9 cost 10 to 20 times less than they would on the Space Shuttle. Well over half of all of the entire world’s rocket launches in 2025 were by Space-X because of how much cheaper their launch costs are.
So let’s say that Starship 12 launches this month early March; all goes as planned. Yet another splashdown of both booster and orbiter, no attempt at recovery. Maybe the next launch is tentatively planned for two or three months after that. No announcement of when they’re going to even attempt anything more ambitious. What then?
