The highs and lows of SpaceX have been interesting to watch. I have to wonder though if, at least partially, some of their recent troubles are partially because people are loosing passion for their mission. You can definitely see it in the reporting, and some of the comments here, that there is less willingness to give them the benefit of the doubt and while that is far from a technical measure, passion is a big part of what makes a team get through things and continue to make progress. I know for my own part there was a time where I was looking for positions at SpaceX purely because I wanted to be apart of what was going on but now you couldn't pay be enough to join them. If your key people start thinking of things as just a job instead of a world changing opportunity then your rapid iteration cycle can go from 'this is brilliant and gets things done fast so I better try harder' to 'this is stupid and I am putting in my minimum hours to get paid'.
csours
> because people are losing passion for their mission.
Or perhaps they are losing people with the passion for the mission.
MegaDeKay
I think more likely is that the bones of the people working there are being ground to dust as Musk demands more and more from them faster and faster. You can only do so much so fast before things start going south hard.
ethbr1
It's amazing how underappreciated or cared about morale is in the corporate world.
"How happy are people at this company?" is a non-negligible performance differentiator.
Yet somehow CEOs seem blindsided when everyone at a company hates it and is mailing it in. (Probably because they're only listening to the management chain, which is concealing the problem)
aeternum
Is this actually true?
Amazon was pretty notorious for poor culture and high employee turnover yet the company performance has been stellar. Covid-era twitter clearly cared a ton about employee morale but the product stagnated.
I find it's often the opposite causality, IE the success/trajectory of the company is the primary component that determines morale. An increasing stock price makes employees happy.
rozap
Amazon's stock price is great, sure. But I don't think their products are particularly inspired. There's a huge disconnect between how good a product is and how much money it prints. On the far end of the spectrum you have products like Oracle, SAP, IBM, etc which, despite being objectively shit, still somehow print. And then on the other side you have truly inspired stuff that is built by people who care, like (early) SpaceX, Anthropic, (early) Apple, etc. It's kind of hard (imo) to not see the difference between these two ends of the spectrum.
I think that product quality and money printing ability do eventually converge, but it can take decades to get there. The slow trickle of talent leaving the company causes the product decay over time, but there's a ton of inertia in the meantime.
TheOtherHobbes
Perhaps it would have been even more stellar with happier people.
There is a very bizarre and persistent belief that you can't be successful without grinding, being miserable, and abusing both employees and customers.
What if that's not true?
serf
it's obvious to anyone watching Amazon from birth until now that an underlying theme for the way their business is ran is by conjuring profitability by taking advantage -- they're good at that.
To me, the belief that Amazon would stand a chance at being as big as they are without taking advantage of people/culture/society is bizarre.
To be frank : if it were true we'd see more competition from groups that don't grind their assets to dust.. and we don't. Amazon is at the top of the game, and they grind things into dust while lobbying for further ability to do so in the future.
In other words : how many more precedents need to be set before we can tell beyond a reasonable doubt that full-bore-capitalism leads to disempowerment of the individual at the behest of corporations, and that it's rigged to do exactly that?
marcusverus
I would never want to work for an Elon, but I understand the allure. Like most of us, I'm giving a solid ~75% effort most days, just punching the clock. My work life balances is fine. I have time for my family and hobbies, etc. It's a nice, steady way to live. But every once in awhile, circumstances will conspire to provide me with hard work with an aggressive, drop-dead delivery date. It makes me mad at first--there are things I'd rather do than work, after all--but there is something to be said for letting go and locking the fuck in for a week of 14 hour a days. It feels good. It doesn't feel like work. It's a drug. It keeps me high until midnight, but makes me sleep like a rock. It makes me sleep like a rock, but has me springing out of bed 5 hours later! I feel like I'm the master of the universe. I'm impervious to stress. Even that's not quite right. It's not just that I'm immune to stress, it's that I start to feed off of it. I welcome it.
And then d-day comes and it's over. The impetus is gone. And every single time, I try to hang on to it. I give myself new projects and fake deadlines. I force myself to get up early and stay up late, but the moment that magic is gone, those things become... work. And like I said, there are things I would rather do than work.
I think a lot of Elon's success stems from his mastery of this "lock in" phenomenon. He is (or at least was) able to induce it in himself to drive himself harder than normal people do. He is able to induce the same state in his workforce as by setting bold and inspiring goals and setting absurd deadlines.
This is not a secret, btw. Nobody goes to SpaceX without understanding that they're signing up to work double the hours for way less than double the pay. For many, this sounds like a nightmare. If you're a young single guy looking to lock the fuck in, to take on huge responsibilities and grow in the company of some of the smartest, hardest working people on earth, it sounds positively amazing.
An increasing stock price makes employees with stock happy.
Generally, morale is a variable but the coefficient to apply to it is also different from company to company.
rich_sasha
I think they're also doing things that are very, very hard, but they set the expectations very, very high.
Hard things fail from time to time. When you aim for something really at the edge of human enginuity, it might work or it might not, and if it works, it will probably still be a close call.
But somehow years ago already SpaceX and it's followers convinced everyone that Starship will definitely happen. And it still might, but if it does, I still think it will be a rocky road.
I would say SpaceX has been extraordinarily lucky for years (not in the sense that they fluked it, but rather that they achieved so much and made it look easy), and this is just reversion to the mean.
GolfPopper
Not just hard things, but much harder than they've done before.
Note that Booster appears to be coming along pretty well. But Ship, which has a much, much more difficult mission profile than Falcon 9, is really struggling, because going to orbit and back is far more difficult than going most of the way to orbit and back. (Please forgive the abstraction - I don't have the relative numbers at hand.)
apples_oranges
There are still people who have basic professionalism and desire to improve their skills, regardless of the vision they buy into or don't buy into. Motivation only goes so far, and in my humble opinion, unless Space X hiring was special in some way, the people who build space rockets are not the kind of people who underperform because they no longer buy the story. They just quit and excel elsewhere.
vjvjvjvjghv
I could imagine that Musk's political escapades have driven away a lot of people.
SpaceX may also have lost Musk as the referee who makes quick decisions and keeps things moving forward. I think people like Thorvalds, Gates, Jobs and Musk are a superpower for organizations. Their decisions may not always be perfect but at least a decision is made so people can proceed. Otherwise you end up with the usual committee decisions that take forever and are mostly driven by internal politics and not about the product.
more_corn
Not just that but he aggressively fires people for little or nothing, spontaneously rescinds outstanding offers, fires contractors, initiates hiring freezes, cancels bonuses and throws up Nazi salutes on national television.
So I’ve heard working for him can present challenges.
numpad0
I guess the moral of the story is, dice rolls can be surprisingly useful, but when the dice stops being a dice and becomes its own reactionary camp inside the committee, the optics can get surprisingly di...
No, I'll show myself out.
lukeschlather
That isn't an instant process. Someone who has been working at SpaceX for 5 years and is excited about Starship might have reached a tipping point where they can no longer ignore their boss's behavior, but also they are conflicted about abandoning Starship.
fisherjeff
Well, equity vesting can be one reason to stick around and underperform
jordanb
Yeah I'm sure they could walk out the door and get a job at the other rocket company across the street.
hiddencost
This is what happened to Google.
mempko
I don't know, but if I saw my boss do a Nazi Salute, I would definitely lose passion.
leoc
Indeed, though rocket engineers have historically not been particular sticklers on that score.
LarsDu88
Von Braun went from burning through Jewish slave labor to build super weapons to Hitler to hosting TV specials on space travel with Walt Disney in Orlando Florida. Are we going to see the reverse progression with Elon?
CamperBob2
Von Braun was just a geek who passionately wanted to work on rockets. He didn't worry much about what payloads they would carry or whom they would land on, just as people working at Meta or Palantir don't sweat those sorts of details. He wasn't so much immoral as amoral.
As it happened, the only people willing to pay von Braun to build rockets were Nazis, so (shrug) Nazis it was. If the Americans had recruited him in the 1930s, he would have become a loyal American and a credit to his adopted country, just as he ended up doing after the war. If Stalin had been willing to sponsor him, well, he'd have raised the red banner and become a loyal Communist.
There was never any point in prosecuting von Braun as a Nazi, or even thinking of him as one. Treating him as a war criminal, even though he technically was one, would have been a pointless, performative waste of badly-needed talent, like destroying captured V2s instead of studying them.
Elon Musk? He has no such excuse. Musk can be anything, do anything, say anything. He came to America early and made his fortune doing things that a lot of us respected and even envied him for. Then he chose to attach his name to far-right causes, throw Nazi salutes, and do the Kraft durch Freude dance at Trump rallies. Turned out Musk didn't care about building rockets or going to Mars quite so much as he cared about being an immature asshole. In that sense he took a path diametrically opposite that of Wernher von Braun.
So, yeah, if I worked for SpaceX, I wouldn't exactly bust my ass to make the leader's vision happen after losing trust in the integrity of said leader. I'd simply leave and find employment elsewhere, leaving behind people with fewer options.
Turns out skillset usually trumps justice, as long as you're willing to make the right post-hoc mea culpas.
csours
Yup. I have not experienced anything nearly this serious with a CEO, but I have had company leadership say and do very stupid things that reduced my focus on the corporate mission. Fortunately, they do still occasionally provide me with interesting puzzles (and they still pay me).
have-a-break
Problem is with the numbers 36. Everytime i see those related to cars or "random passwords" I know somethings going to happen.
As a developer I'll manually change those numbers if and when they appear.
shthed
I used to be a huge elon fan, watched spacex rocket development daily, livestream all of the launches, watched many of his interviews, very impressed by tesla, selfdriving, starlink, optimus, neuralink.. he came off as a very skilled engineer.
however..
when he started spamming political misinformation on twitter i had to block him. very concerned he was burnt out and brainwashed into into politics. the nazi salute, then making nazi jokes about it, was just insane.
doge is a joke, he lost the plot.
now i barely check updates on whats happening at starbase, cheer on when the rockets explode, couldn't care less about tesla.. it's a real shame. all that great work by thousands of talented people in his companies..
he needs to resign from everything and go hide under a rock for a few years until he finally gets into orbit and burns up on rentry.
TheOtherHobbes
DOGE is not a joke. DOGE is the modern equivalent of an enclosure act - privatisation of state data for private profit and political leverage, some of which will be wielded by hostile countries.
And Musk was personally responsible - not just for that atrocity, but for poisoning the world's leading progressive social media site, for being complicit in the neutering of countless world-leading science projects, for defunding basic research at NASA and firing hundreds of employees with solid achievements and genuine passion for space science, for gutting the FAA, and so on.
I cannot say enough unkind things about the man. The fact that he has any kind of following at all after the last year is both shocking and disappointing.
haspok
> he came off as a very skilled engineer.
No, he did not. I still can't believe people bought his BS so easily - "it must be true, because he said it!" No, it isn't, never was, never will be. And I don't even care about that salute - Musk lost all his credibility around 2015 when he promised self-driving cars (coming next year! for the past 10 years, and counting), then by lying about the Solarcity roof tiles (and basically committed fraud for which he didn't go to prison - go figure).
It is also quite dehonestating to those _real_ engineers working for Tesla or Spacex, who actually know their stuff. It was them who made Musk possible, not the other way around.
> all that great work by thousands of talented people in his companies..
Exactly.
CamperBob2
If you use a combination of math, science, and available resources to create something that didn't exist before, and were paid to do it, then you are doing engineering work. Every other take on the profession is just pointless gatekeeping from the bleachers.
Engineering great organizations is still engineering (a fact that I personally wish I'd appreciated at a much younger age.)
And yes, speaking of engineering: FEM.
vjvjvjvjghv
Same happened for me. It started with the Thai cave rescue and his submarine where it showed that he is a big attention whore. From then on he seemed to lose his mind.
I still have to respect Starlink, accelerating adoption of EVs and the work SpaceX does. His businesses have reshaped several industries big time. It takes a lot of courage and insight to pull this off.
more_corn
That’s when I burned my Elon fan club card.
When he baselessly accused a hero rescue driver of a terrible crime and then refused to back down (if it’s not true sue me for defamation) then hid behind a technicality… yeah that’s the end.
That’s the behavior of a childish bully shithead not a leader. I can’t believe people still think he’s the man to lead the companies he runs.
noworriesnate
Children need heroes to look up to, I’m glad that children of right wingers can look up to him but who do children of left wingers have to look up to? Jeff Bezos is hardly inspiring.
bayarearefugee
You think Jeff "All WaPo opinion articles must focus on personal liberties and free markets" Bezos is a left-winger? lol.
You must have missed the part where he got divorced and then predictably shifted hard right.
(Being credibly accused of being a sex pest is the only thing more powerful than divorce when it comes to putting men on the right-wing-shift pipeline).
vjvjvjvjghv
Not too long ago the left wingers had Musk to look up to.
saalweachter
I mean, in general, idolizing billionaires isn't really the "left wing" thing to do.
helge9210
The pattern "I used to be [...] fan, but|however|... because of [...] I'm not anymore" is like em dash in the world of propaganda.
EdwardDiego
Or, wild idea, people change their opinions based on new information. The propagandist monsters!
helge9210
Expressing new opinion is OK. Expressing a change of opinion in the format "Before ..., but now opposite after ..." smells like propaganda.
vjvjvjvjghv
Or, more generally, if your boss's post on X make him sound like an insufferable asshole that has no self control.
ethbr1
One benefit of being quiet is that people may assume you're more competent than you are.
If you're loud, that collapses into a more realistic appraisal.
EdwardDiego
> Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.
-- Most likely not Abraham Lincoln.
pantalaimon
Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.
numpad0
Pathetic one while at it. He didn't start it from "attention" posture, and the jacket wasn't the kind designed for a salute(of that kind or not). Not to be a Nazi, but I bet that doing would have made even lots of them walk away.
cyberlimerence
Apollo worked out fine, so might not be much of a problem. /s
Gothmog69(dead)
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herval
Please get out of your bubble. It’s affecting your perception of reality. I recommend reading the book “they thought they were free” - before it’s too late (for those around you)
An alternative explanation is that they are trying to push the design of Starship to its limits.
All the failures have happened with Starship v2, where the ambition is to put 100 tons to Low Earth Orbit. The previous design, Starship v1, was only (theoretically) capable of lifting 80 tons.
20 tons is a huge difference, basically what Falcon 9 can lift when launched in expendable mode.
LorenPechtel
But this was an explosion on the pad. Something leaked or something broke while not under flight stress.
We also have that Falcon 9 that blew in space due to a leak.
With this one, given the seething hatred for Musk these days, I wouldn't rule out sabotage.
It's not the most likely cause, but in a world where people have been torching Tesla dealerships, I'm sure there's a lot of people now who really want to see Starship fail.
FireBeyond
I think you're drawing a VERY long bow here. That's a long hustle, to work in a field where you'd get to be an intimate part of the launch control process at a company that is going to be very selective on who it hires because it can be, security clearances, and then be able to do this.
No, it's rocketry. Sometimes things go boom when they're that volatile to begin with.
EdwardDiego
Sabotage of a SpaceX rocket, on their own pad?
Long bow bro.
TowerTall
I think what SpaceX has accomplished is awesome and extremely impressive, but because of Elon Musk, I hope that some other company will one day leapfrog them and push SpaceX into oblivion.
freejazz
I guess Elon isn't inspiring quite like he used to.
Zardoz84
Working for a nazi, isn't very inspiring
StopDisinfo910
Well, it does have a proven track record in the American space industry.
Somehow I missed that one, and the alt text was an amazing 2000s reference.
markus_zhang
NASA teams under a nazi were pretty performant, just for saying.
jordanb
Nah he was apolitical. His job was to make the rockets go up. Where they come down was some other guy's problem.
rurban
It wasn't under a Nazi, it was Nazis only. Until Lyndon Johnson destroyed it, there was only them. But they were no immature manchilds as Elon, they were known to be excellent engineers and managers.
pxmpxm(dead)
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kanbara
this is a pretty bad take. if you don't think that elon's antics don't colour the decisions of his employees or companies that could sign deals with his companies then you're really quite oblivious.
few people want a loud, extremist man, in bed with one of the most polarising figures of our time who seems quite unstable ranting at all hours of the night, especially when his company isn't delivering. politics is everything, you cannot divest from it.
pxmpxm
He's done the same asinine antics his entire career - friends at early-days at Tesla corroborate the identical on the spectrum nonsense that conveniently is now all over mass media. The only difference is back then he was saying batshit things that were on-canon for feel good progressives.
This is the same thing as twitter folding in like 3 days when he did those grand layoffs; arguments entirely grounded in feels of the aformentioned group.
culebron21
The program looks similar to the Soviet N1 program, in scale, testing and failures. Korolyov was in hurry to get to the moon, and tried to assemble everything and test in actual flight. After 4 failed test flights, the program was scrapped.
This approach had worked with the R7 rocket (the Sputnik and Gagarin's booster, predecessor of Soyuz). But at this larger scale, it seems things break apart much easier if not properly tested in parts.
m4rtink
There are definitely some parallels, but it is not the same in many regards. For example the N1 was severely hampered by engine availability - Glushko wanted to push his hypergolic rockets and engines and refused to build an engine like he did for the R7. So they had to pick something else & ended up with far too many (for that time) not very reliable NK-15 engines.
Also compared to Super Heavy & Starship, they had more stages (4 vs 2) and most importantly, were not able to test the stages separately - which was possible for the Saturn V & IIRC all its stages exploded on the test stand at least once.
Both Super Heavy and Starship can be tested separately & Starship exploded during such testing, without taking the rest of the rocket with it, like N1 regularly did - including demolishing the super expensive launch pad during at least one occasion.
slenk
Starship seems to explode much more taking everything with it - not just parts on a launch stand
> So they had to pick something else & ended up with far too many (for that time) not very reliable NK-15 engines.
I mean, I would note that the first stage of this has 33 engines (N1 had 30, Saturn V had 5).
m4rtink
Sure, even with Falcon 9 many found it iffy to have so many engines - but it turned out fine. Hopefully modern control hardware and QA can handle also 30+. :)
londons_explore
Due to the scaling laws of rocketry, it should be easier to make a huge rocket. You can afford to have proportionally bigger safety margins on everything.
I suspect that Musks desire to have everything reusable has severely eaten into those margins though. I personally think he'd have been better off making only the first stage ('booster') reusable for the first few years, which then lets you develop more things in parallel later (the first landers can be on mars whilst you're still figuring out second stage reusability)
rsynnott
Historically this hasn't _really_ been the case; the N1, of course, was a bit of a disaster, this one seems to be similar. Saturn V worked, but had a number of near-misses over a small number of launches. Beyond those, nothing in the super-heavy category has enough launches to draw conclusions.
Retric
There’s little need for big rockets, falcon heavy has flown 11 times including the initial test flight Feb 2018.
Going fully reusable may change that equation, but first stage reuse probably isn’t enough to make the program even close to worthwhile.
HPsquared
Full reusability would totally change the game. It'd be an order-of-magnitude cost reduction. Maybe even 2 orders of magnitude (cost per kg to orbit)
Retric
Full reuse can be anywhere from more expensive to multiple orders of magnitude cheaper, thus could rather than would.
Questions like rate of successful launches, amount of payload sacrificed, etc really change the economics of the whole process. If the total payload is worth 1 billion a moderately more expense launch with higher success rate can be cheaper.
floatrock
you still thinking the mars line is anything more than musk's latest FSD or hyperloop distraction/hype story?
londons_explore
If you didn't want to go to mars, you wouldn't be making starship at all.
It's pretty clear there is barely enough commercial launch demand for falcon 9 (it already has ~100% of the non-foreign launch market, and there isn't a huge amount of price elasticity), so no reason at all to develop starship, apart from humans in space.
simiones
The first goals of Starship are putting a human on the Moon (this is what the US government is paying SpaceX for) and decreasing cost-to-orbit (primarily for SpaceX's own use with Starlink). Falcon 9 simply can't fly to the moon, it doesn't have the power. Also, both Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are still too expensive for Starlink to make a good profit.
Mars is at best a long term goal for Starship, and far more likely to be just a nice story that Musk uses to motivate his engineers and investors.
If Starship is basically fully reusable (he's insisting on absolutely no refurbishment, that could be relaxed a bit) then the cost per flight for Starship would be well below the cost per flight for Falcon 9. As you say, there's little price elasticity, the cost savings would go in his pocket.
s1artibartfast
There are other scaling laws at play as well. Defects that are not addressed by design safety margins.
inglor_cz
I don't think so. For starters, they test a lot in SpaceX. N1 had ablative engines, which could not be test-fired on Earth. They could only test them by launching the entire stack and hoping that it would go into the orbit.
The current wave of problems is likely caused by optimizations in the v2 of the rocket. Starship v1 was very conservatively built and mostly worked. They are trying to squeeze extra 25 per cent of payload capacity from v2 (from 80 to 100 tons on LEO), and they are running into the edges of multiple envelopes.
Raptor v2 BTW seems fine, the main issues are around the plumbing that feeds propellant into the engines.
tedmcory77
Thats enough to put a fully loaded Abrahams tank (with crew) into orbit…
inglor_cz
Being a fan of railways, I tend to compare to electric locomotives. The heaviest Vectrons are about 90 tons, and they would fit into the payload bay:
To be fair, there is now a thorough understanding and computing capability for doing statistical failure analysis. They are not doing this at random. And SpaceX is NOT testing everything in actual flight. See engine testing, pressure testing, static fires, massive instrumentation (tests including flights with gathering data as the primary objective) - all as evidence of that. And they have commented on the wide availability of hardware - currently arriving faster than the capability to try and launch it. So, no, not similar.
jmaestrooper
Aside from the fact that both were the largest rockets in their time there's literally NOTHING in common between these 2 programs.
Government-run vs private-run (partially govt-bankrolled). Single use vs fully reusable. Moon vs Mars. Traditional development vs iterative ("hardware heavy") development. There's just no parallels whatsoever.
Will the result be the same? We'll see. But the history says don't bet against Elon.
Btw N1 was a failure arguably due to Korolev's death, not his ineptness.
mlindner
N1 was much simpler in a lot of ways though than what Starship is trying to do. There also aren't engine problems like the N1 had.
I don't think the comparisons are very apt.
The parts are not what are failing. It's the overall system.
rsynnott
At least the first, second, eighth and ninth launch attempts of this one failed in whole or in part due to engine failure.
mlindner
Those first two with engine failures you mentioned were caused by contamination issues inside the vehicle, solved by adding filtration systems. Those last two were on the second stage so no comparison to the N1 with its massive numbers of engines and the ninth flight you mentioned wasn't even an engine failure.
rtkwe
I think you can see the cracks opening, for example unless I've missed it they haven't managed to open the little satellite door successfully on any of these flights.
numpad0
N1's problem was having that many engines at all. R7 is a "Heavy" design and doesn't cross feed everything like N1 or SH do while also having fewer engines. Those are probably big differences.
That makes it look pretty clearly like one of the fuel vessels overpressured and ruptured.
imglorp
Scott Manley observes the breach was in the cargo section, and not at the PEZ dispenser door. It appeared to split longitudinally. There are header tank downcomer lines that might fit that bill.
The part that I found interesting was ~"Anyone can build a bridge, but it takes an engineer to just barely build a bridge. That's what Starship V2 is, a mass and complexity reduction. Maybe they took away too much."
gcanyon
I'll defer to Scott Manley any day -- this seems like a refinement of what I said.
93po
id be curious what causes the ignition of all the fuel in a breach like this.
Pro-tip: On YouTube the [.] and [,] keys step individual frames on paused video.
fsh
The problems with Starship make the Saturn V and STS programs even more impressive. However, I still don't get the rationale of building a rocket with such a large payload. The rocket equation will always force you to build an absolute monster compared to a series of smaller rockets. Even worse if you have to haul up a massive orbiter each time. No wonder that small/medium sized rockets (Soyuz, Atlas, Ariane, Falcon 9,...) have always been the most successful.
DavidSJ
A larger rocket mitigates the effects of the rocket equation.
The wet (loaded with propellant) to dry (empty of propellant) mass ratio is determined via the rocket equation to be the exponential of delta V divided by exhaust velocity.
Certain parts of the rocket, such as the external tank structure, scale sub-cubically with the rocket's dimension, as do aerodynamic forces; whereas payload and propellant mass scale cubically.
Hence if the rocket is smaller than a critical threshold size, the requisite vehicle structures are too large relative to its propellant capacity to permit the required wet:dry mass ratio to achieve the delta V for orbit.
At exactly this size, the rocket can reach orbit with zero payload.
As the rocket increases in size beyond this threshold, it is able to carry a payload which is increasingly large relative to the rocket's total mass.
londons_explore
This is also why no hobby rockets get to orbit. Even a 1 gram payload to low earth orbit is beyond what a human-sized rocket can manage due to the way rockets don't scale downwards well.
numpad0
Smallest orbital anything so far is 31ft(9.54m) long, 20in(54cm) wide, 2.9t/2.6t(2600kg?), does 9lbs(4kg) to random-ish LEO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS-520
LeifCarrotson
How does this compare to the cube-square law scaling effects applied to propeller- and wing-lifted vehicles like quadcopters/helicopters and RC aircraft/jumbo jets? Or even the squat shape of a housefly that zigs and zags through the air like an acrobat compared to the ponderous lift-off of a large goose?
I understand vaguely that those operate and scale based on the area (a square function of their length) of their lifting surfaces, and are pulled down by their mass (a cube function of their length).
A little Estes toy rocket lifts off the pad much more aggressively (in the blink of an eye!) than a full size rocket...
m4rtink
>A little Estes toy rocket lifts off the pad much more aggressively (in the blink of an eye!) than a full size rocket...
If you really want to, you can reach Mach 10 (~3300 m/s) with a 8 meter long 3500 kg missile in 5 seconds:
All of that in the lower atmosphere with the missile heat shield glowing white hot. :)
simiones
They are almost entirely unrelated. When trying to leave the gravity well of a planet, the atmosphere is only a dragging force acting to reduce your thrust. It might be proportional to the surface area of the vehicle, but likely not - I think it's only proportional to the surface area of the "nose" of the rocket. But what's certain is that it's strictly a force that hinders you - in a rocket, all of your thrust comes from the engines, you don't get any boost from the air.
However, even if you're taking off of a planet with no atmosphere, you still have a huge force to deal with - you need to maintain an acceleration to exit the gravity well of the planet, and you need to burn fuel for that. But you also have to carry the fuel you'll burn with you, so the more fuel you have, the more fuel you'll need - this is what the rocket equation codifies.
The toys have to be aggressive. You have less than three feet worth of launch rail--by the time the rocket clears the rail it must be going fast enough that the fins make it stable. Meanwhile, it's light, overengineering the body to take a high g load is trivial.
An orbital class rocket--taking that kind of g load is going to break it (just look at the payload specs for the Falcon Heavy--its maximum permitted payload is well below it's performance to low orbit. You load it up to what the engines can do, it breaks. The only use case is when it's going farther than low orbit.) And an orbital class rocket has active steering rather than fins, it doesn't need to be booking it to be stable.
chipsa
Most of the aggressiveness of a toy rocket is the smaller length. Orbital class rockets are literally the size of skyscrapers.
stronglikedan
I'd posit that Mark Rober just used a hobby rocket to put that selfie satellite into orbit. Perhaps he's the first?
itishappy
He used a commercial rideshare program.
> Our satellite launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California (USA) on Jan 14, 2025. The rocket mission is a Transporter, and SAT GUS was dropped off in low-Earth orbit at about 375 miles above the surface of our pale blue dot.
Can you identify the rocket he used? Because from what I saw, I’m pretty sure it was a F9.
trklausss
Added to that, Full-flow stage combustion engines are bigger, heavier, and more expensive, but are way more efficient. So a bigger rocket is the only option to get one of those onboard, and helps with taking more mass to orbit because they are more efficient than other options.
perihelions
I don't believe there's any performance advantage for full-flow, which SpaceX alone is attempting. The only point is to lower the combustion temperature inside the turbines, at the expense of (much) higher flow rates through those turbines, in order to increase their lifespan.
(There's a large difference between staged combustion generally and gas-generator engines, which throw away performance by dumping fuel out of the turbine exhaust).
schiffern
Since the temperature limit of available materials is the fundamental limitation (even after making custom high-temp alloys), this allows them to maximize mechanical power from the turbopumps, which raises performance.
We might imagine a conservative FFSC design which accepts very low temperatures in exchange for making it easy (low R&D cost) to reach high longevity. Raptor is not a conservative design, so it requires more R&D to achieve that longevity.
But you also have a limit on the other side: going extreme to make the point, we haven't managed to build a mile-tall building yet, and a rocket that size would be a nightmare to engineer (while perhaps technically possible -- you might have to scale up another 10x or 20x to make it physically impossible).
So there's some sort of curve, zero at both ends, between overall rocket size and the payload to orbit. The question is where Starship sits on that curve, and to your point it seems likely that it's looking good on that metric alone.
But then you have another curve that I think starts small and increases near-monotonically, which is the complexity/likelihood-to-fail factor to the size of the rocket. It's (relatively) easy to launch a toy rocket, (fairly) simple to build a missile-sized sub-orbital rocket, difficult to build a small-to-medium orbital rocket, and apparently very difficult to build a Saturn/N-1/Starship-sized rocket. More props to the crazy '60s team that pulled it off.
jjk166
> So there's some sort of curve, zero at both ends, between overall rocket size and the payload to orbit.
This doesn't follow. Engineering complexity is not a limit on payload to orbit, it is a fundamentally different parameter. Yeah building a mile tall rocket would be hard, but it would get a shit ton of payload to orbit. There is no maximum beyond which making a bigger rocket starts to reduce your payload to orbit.
> But then you have another curve that I think starts small and increases near-monotonically, which is the complexity/likelihood-to-fail factor to the size of the rocket. It's (relatively) easy to launch a toy rocket, (fairly) simple to build a missile-sized sub-orbital rocket, difficult to build a small-to-medium orbital rocket, and apparently very difficult to build a Saturn/N-1/Starship-sized rocket.
Complexity does not increase with size, people just become more risk averse with size. Toy rockets fail all the time, just nobody really cares. No one would bet the lives of multiple people and hundreds of millions of dollars on a successful toy rocket launch. If complexity increases, it is with capability. If you want to land on the moon, you need something a bit more advanced than a hobby rocket. There is no reason to believe a floatilla of physically smaller rockets capable of achieving any given mission will be less complex in aggregate than a single physically larger rocket.
gcanyon
>> So there's some sort of curve, zero at both ends, between overall rocket size and the payload to orbit.
> This doesn't follow. Engineering complexity is not a limit on payload to orbit
At this point I'm merely talking about size (which I think is clear from the words I use. I don't think "building a mile tall rocket would be hard" adequately describes the difficulty when we haven't even built a mile tall building.
Sea Dragon[1] was only envisioned as 490 feet tall, and as near as I can tell even the Super Orion[2] would only have been 400-600 meters tall. And of course, neither of those was even close to implementation. Therefore I stand by my statement that a mile tall rocket is, for all practical purposes, impossible, and thus has a payload to orbit of zero. If you disagree then add a zero -- surely you agree we can't build a ten-mile-tall rocket?
As far as complexity, I'm not sure what to say. Toy rockets might fail all the time, but the point was complexity, and a toy rocket can be constructed from under a dozen parts. Even larger model rockets have at most a few dozen to a few hundred parts. The part count of the Falcon 9 has to number in the thousands, if not tens of thousands (9 merlin engines with at least several hundred parts each?).
To be clear, I agree with you that complexity increases with capability.
But also, to push back a bit, I don't think complexity aggregates the way you're saying it does. A box of hammers is not more complex than a nailgun, even if it has more parts in total.
> At this point I'm merely talking about size (which I think is clear from the words I use. I don't think "building a mile tall rocket would be hard" adequately describes the difficulty when we haven't even built a mile tall building.
I was assuming you were using a comical example to illustrate a "nightmare to engineer." The comparison to a building doesn't actually work at all. The practical limitation on how high we can build buildings is how fast we can make elevators. Just making something tall is not a problem.
> Sea Dragon[1] was only envisioned as 490 feet tall, and as near as I can tell even the Super Orion[2] would only have been 400-600 meters tall. And of course, neither of those was even close to implementation. Therefore I stand by my statement that a mile tall rocket is, for all practical purposes, impossible
First, the optimal design for a rocket is not to just keep making it taller, and second, size was not the obstacle to either of these projects not being built. That does not at all prove that it is impossible. What kind of world would we be living in we presumed anything that hadn't already been actively pursued was impossible?
> and thus has a payload to orbit of zero.
My point was that this does not equate to a payload of zero. Surely you wouldn't argue that the weight of this mile high rocket is zero, and therefore that there is some curve for the weight of rockets where making the rockets larger starts to make them lighter. Just as we can calculate the weight for something without actually building it, so too can we calculate the payload, and it can increase far beyond anything we can actually implement.
> If you disagree then add a zero -- surely you agree we can't build a ten-mile-tall rocket?
I agree it would be impractical, but not that it would be so non-physical that we couldn't calculate what its payload capacity would be were it to be built.
> Toy rockets might fail all the time, but the point was complexity, and a toy rocket can be constructed from under a dozen parts. Even larger model rockets have at most a few dozen to a few hundred parts. The part count of the Falcon 9 has to number in the thousands, if not tens of thousands (9 merlin engines with at least several hundred parts each?).
Falcon 9 is a liquid rocket designed to take people into space. That is the source of its part count. You could scale up a solid rocket motor to an arbitrarily large size while keeping the parts count exactly the same. It's probably not the optimal way to make a solid rocket of that size, and you'd be missing out on a lot of capabilities that are important for a real rocket, but if you just wanted a toy no more capable than what you buy in a hobby store it would be no more complicated. Conversely, try to make a fully functional falcon 9 complete with 9 working liquid rocket engines small enough to hoverslam on your desk and you have an immense engineering challenge on your hands.
> But also, to push back a bit, I don't think complexity aggregates the way you're saying it does. A box of hammers is not more complex than a nailgun, even if it has more parts in total.
I concur that part count is not the same as complexity, but that point is in my favor. Making something bigger is like adding hammers to a box of hammers. The quantity goes up, and at some point you're going to need to make some improvements to the box if you want to keep adding more hammers, but conceptually it is simple. Making something more capable, like a nail-gun, is much harder.
NoMoreNicksLeft
The failure modes of a mile-tall rocket would be spectacular. The sort of spectacular you want to be several hundred miles away from.
hliyan
Even more impressive to me is the fact that Saturn V did in a single launch with 1969 technology, what we're now proposing to do with 10-15 Starship launches (each as large as a Saturn V) and an additional SLS launch for Orion return capsule. What's more, the US had orbital launch expereince of just 3 years (Explorer 1 in 1958) when the Apollo program began, and 8 years later they were on the moon. Perhaps web development is not the only thing that is susceptible to bloat.
perihelions
Starship was designed from the very beginning to land humans on Mars and it is correctly sized for that. It's apples-and-oranges to compare its design to Apollo.
(edits:) It's clearly not ideal for a short lunar landing, considered in isolation. But: what else would you do? Whatever you build, it would land on the moon perhaps once, and never again. Would you, being in charge, design a one-off vehicle for one or two moon landings—spend that R&D budget, in that way? That's not cheaper than 15 Starship launches; it's considerably costlier. (But the Apollo engineers didn't need to worry about this; it's was their express remit to spend $200 billion on one-off designs that would never be used again).
And: I hope no one suggests the "just make a unique lunar Starship variant that's simply a bit smaller". There's no "simply" resizing things in engineering. Recall that the last time Starship's length was altered by 2 meters, new mechanical resonances appeared, and it blew up three times in a row. Any "one-off" change for lunar landings is a less-tested, less-understood machine you'd be putting human lives on.
arghwhat
> Whatever you build, it would land on the moon perhaps once, and never again.
But it would also never land on Mars, so it would be a waste to build it for that. Build it for what it will actually spend its life doing.
Not saying SpaceX won't go to Mars, but if/when they do it will likely be several rocket generations later and possibly with specialized rockets, with a significant portion of it being one-time-use as you ain't returning.
hliyan
I completely forgot about this. Current aerodynamics and heat shielding are optimized for Earth reentry. They may have to significantly rethink the design for Mars. What they land on Mars will likely be very different from what we see today.
rtkwe
Even if it does go to Mars there are some major warts on the design. When you land you're 35-40 meters or so up in the air so there's a whole other elevator assembly needed just to get people out of the rocket to the ground.
>Saturn V did in a single launch with 1969 technology,
for up to 0.8% US GDP per year. Today that would be $200B/year, pure spent. Where is Space X today is making, ie. it has a revenue, $15B/year.
>Perhaps web development is not the only thing that is susceptible to bloat.
similarly - web dev today can be done on $300 laptop by any schmuck. Even simple programming back then required a computer which cost a lot, and it was an almost academic activity.
Total lunar effort from 1960-1973, adjusted for 2024 USD: $326 billion
Launch vehicle costs (Saturn V): $113 billion
I think this is what should be compared against the total Starship program cost starting from 2020 until such time it completes 6 lunar landings (not counting SLS or other costs).
Single Starship stack is <$100m so they are less than 1% in.
supermatt
Sure, but spacex are building on the shoulders of what came before. Easy to save 200bn on research and development if someone else has already paid for it and shares the results for free.
inglor_cz
This is true, but also a bit trivial to observe. Even the Primitive Technology channel, which usually starts with mud and clay, builds on knowledge of other people.
The value added is interesting. For example, both the Merlin and the Raptor family of engines. These are some fine engines, and they are remarkably cheap and reusable.
supermatt
oh sure, no doubt - and the universe before that, etc. but here the baseline set by the comment i responded to was "whatever nasa spent 200b on".
jve
I love this quote from Gwynne Shotwell when asked how they achieved that no government has: "The first is that we're kind of standing on the shoulders of giants."
0.8% US GDP in 1969 would be about 8B/yr today. Very different answer
trhway
US GDP 2024 is $29T. Thus 0.8% is $230B.
s1artibartfast
Expense scales with inflation, not GDP, which is the point.
motorest
> for up to 0.8% US GDP per year. Today that would be $200B/year, pure spent. Where is Space X today is making, ie. it has a revenue, $15B/year.
The likes of SpaceX are reporting costs in the range of $15B/year because NASA front loaded the cost of trailblazing launch technology half a century ago, with the technology available half a century ago.
Let's not fool ourselves into believing the likes of SpaceX are reinventing the wheel.
Also, those $15B are buying a fraction of the capabilities of SaturnV, and while SaturnV was proven effective and reliable 50 years ago, here we are discussing yet another "anomaly". Perhaps half these "anomalies" wouldn't exist if they weren't lean'ed into existence?
Zobat
To be fair, they're also doing launches at a pace NASA could only have dreamed of back then. In 2024 SpaceX had 134 launches, we're far into the Space Shuttle program before Nasa had made that in total.
I wonder what "tons of payload to orbit" vs "dollars budget" would look like for Saturn era NASA vs Current SpaceX.
No doubt they're standing on the shoulders of giants, but let's not forget that they've helped transform the "go to space"-business.
What a ridiculous point of view.Do you know how many anamolies nasa had on the way to make the Saturn 5? Orders of magnitudes more blow ups than Space x has ever had
m4rtink
Not to mention the comparable Soviet N1 rocket never launching successfully before being canceled.
varjag
Whenever my Volkswagen car software glitches I can't help but to observe it was done by a 6000 people strong development team vs 600 in Apollo programme within similar timeframe. The latter had vastly more primitive hardware, tools and younger programming culture available too.
HPsquared
The Apollo programme had some serious human capital. The best minds aren't working on infotainment. (EDIT: not car infotainment, anyway...)
notahacker
And some serious financial capital working on enabling technologies. NASA funding peaked at 4.4% of US GDP. Even considering that this was 1960s GDP and they weren't standing on the shoulders of 100 years of automobile development or decades of previous launches, NASA got (and needed) a lot more resources than car manufacturers or newspace companies
Car software is, perhaps counterintuitively, doing a lot more than the Apollo software did. Just think about the computers available at the time and how much memory they didn't have.
varjag
Apollo project software was controlling the stages of Saturn V flight vehicle, orbital and lander modules, and ground systems. So no, it was not doing less than a family SUV Javacsript blob; certainly not 10x less. And most of the things it did were mission critical.
You know the saying about OSHA rules "they're written in blood"?
That's what happens with most domains. At first people don't know the dangers and can go fast and loose: surgery, radioactive material, planes, cars, trains, rockets. Then people start losing their lives or part of their bodies to "easily preventable accidents". So some rules are enacted. Decade after decade, accident after accident, more rules, more red tape: things cost more, take more time. But you get a lot less victims.
So yeah, with a good budget and in a less strict country you could get something to the moon in no time. And potentially many people' parts all over your launchpads too.
aaronmdjones
> At first people don't know the dangers and can go fast and loose: surgery, radioactive material, planes, cars, trains, rockets
Not to mention that before natural gas people used to light and heat their homes with coal gas/town gas, which was basically carbon monoxide. Yes, that highly poisonous thing that binds better to hemoglobin than oxygen molecules. So you could get poisoned and then still explode.
aredox
You are comparing "sending a small crew for a few days on the Moon ASAP for propaganda purposes" with "setting up a permanent outpost on the Moon".
Do you know the McMurdo permanent Antarctica base is costing us far more than the dogs, sleds, and tents of Admundsen and Shackleton? Incredible, isn't it?
MrSkelter
This is an inane comparison.
Starship is “the program to build a permanent base in the moon”. It’s not even the only vehicle involved in the moon program. It’s a rocket designed to take astronauts from moon orbit to the moon’s surface. The astronauts will actually fly to the moon in SLS.
So far it’s proved incapable of being launched, attaining orbit, and returning to earth as designed. That’s without a payload.
It has no life support system built and is literally years behind schedule.
Rather than making progress it is being redesigned on the fly to mitigate fundamental problems with its capability which Musk laughs off as “moving fast and breaking things”.
The problem is we aren’t moving fast at all.
The rocket is a disaster. Saturn V was better by an order of magnitude and likely cheaper if you consider how much fundamental work went into creating it which is now easy to buy off the shelf.
Comparing the programs while ignoring the fact that hobbiest regularly reach the Karman line is deceitful.
Starship is doing this on easy mode and it’s failing.
bluescrn
> Starship is doing this on easy mode and it’s failing.
But this 'easy mode' is still so incredibly hard that nobody else will even attempt it.
I'd love to see some serious competition emerge in the reusable rocket space, but SpaceX is far, far ahead with Falcon 9 being an incredible success, even if the Starship project may be headed for failure. Nobody reports on 100+ successful Falcon 9 launches/landings in a year, those are now mundane. But a small number of Starship failures - test flights of an experimental vehicle - become big news, mostly because they involve spectacular explosions.
It seems that Starship may be too big to 'fail fast', mostly because of the visual spectacle of those failures.
notahacker
The 'easy mode' is incredibly hard at least partly in terms of nobody else having the capability to finance it (with the possible exception of two superpowers and Jeff Bezos)
But yeah, I tend to agree that whether it ultimately succeeds or not, blowing Starship up is a "fail fast" strategy because they have the money (and the reputational capital from successful Falcon 9 launches) to learn from their mistakes that way, and not many others do. Much as the waterfall approach of big space projects gets derided, there's a reason entities that can't take the reputational hit of visibly blowing stuff up on a regular basis do it that way...
Aeolun
> The astronauts will actually fly to the moon in SLS
The program that was paused pending new NASA director, and has burned more money than SpaceX without a single (usable) launch?
I’m making things up out of memory here, but suffice to say SLS does not have my confidence.
ghxst
IMO calling it "easy mode" really misses the mark. If you ever get the chance to hear directly from the engineers working on Starship, I think you’d come away with a deeper appreciation for the scale and complexity of what they’re building. The solutions they work on go far beyond "just" launching a rocket.
tonyhart7
I know right, I think people just spitting on bullshit
I have much respect to this guys that works in here that really pushing the innovation beyond the limit
reusable rocket is the future if you want permanent present in space, there is no way you throw rocket for only 1 launch
ricardobeat
> Saturn V was better by an order of magnitude and likely cheaper if you consider how much fundamental work went into creating it which is now easy to buy off the shelf.
One year of Saturn V development cost the same as the entire Starship program so far. One launch cost 20-30x more than the projected cost of a Starship launch.
It is also said that it’s simply impossible to rebuild a Saturn rocket. Not only you can’t “buy components off the shelf” because they simply don’t exist anymore, even if you had all the component blueprints (which we don’t, they were lost to time), the manufacturing know-how is long gone.
Starship was developed from scratch. SpaceX developed their own engines, their flight control surfaces are novel, the rocket structure and materials are novel, the entire approach is different. Yes, our modern electronics industry makes it “easier” but this is like saying Porsche is playing in easy mode because of the Ford Model T.
2OEH8eoCRo0
It's hard to compare costs when one rocket works and the other doesn't. If Starship never works then the cost is a bit irrelevant.
I propose my own imaginary rocket. It costs $0 but it doesn't exist. Totally beats the Saturn V on cost!
panick21_(dead)
[flagged]
throwawaymaths
have no idea why the replacement plan isn't launching orion on falcon 9 heavy and rendezvousing with orion on dragon
madaxe_again
Nice one. Now do SLS.
tekla
I'm going to guess you don't actually know anything about SLS or rockets at all.
How are the astronauts supposed to get on lunar soil on SLS?
motorest
> You are comparing "sending a small crew for a few days on the Moon ASAP for propaganda purposes" with "setting up a permanent outpost on the Moon".
No, OP is comparing a launcher that worked reliably (it's in the history books) with a launcher which never performed a mission and is reporting "anomalies".
m4rtink
Many Saturn V stages blew up on test stands as well (its also in the history books) and some flight were very much on the edge of success. It was also not trying to make the whole system reusable and economicaly sustainable (just check when the last Saturn V flight was - if it was sustainable it would be still flying, right ?).
> what we're now proposing to do with 10-15 Starship launches
That's complete nonsense. 10-15 Starship launches would land a lander that can carry like 100tons of payload orbit.
Saturn V landed 15000kg on the moon, but most of that isn't payload.
But of course with Saturn V you are throwing away a rocket that cost 1 billion $ or more per launch.
You are comparing 'thing lands on moon' to 'things lands on moon' without any nuance.
But you are right Apollo was insane in how fast it was done.
mcv
I don't think GP meant 10-15 Starships missions needed to carry the same payload, but 10-15 test launches necessary before it's ready for real. I think the Saturn V had only two test flights before it took people around the moon.
Teever
No, GP is referring to the refuelling missions that will be required to put Starship on the moon and bring it back.
Which as the person you're replying to is point out isn't really a fair comparison because Starship and Saturn V deliver vastly different amounts of mass to and from the moon despite the mission being only to ferry some people there for a few days.
If Starship ends up flying to the moon it effectively enables the landing of a lunar base that could be occupied for years at a time with sufficient resupply of food and the right equipment for extraction of water/oxygen from the moon.
The Saturn V as amazing as it was could never have brought that much equipment to the moon in a cost effective manner.
tonyhart7
refuelling makes a lot of sense in the long terms
also military (space force)
Polizeiposaune
Significant parts of the Saturn V (including the S-IVB 3rd stage, and the instrument unit which controlled the entire stack) were previously flight tested in Saturn IB launches.
xattt
> That's complete nonsense. 10-15 Starship launches would land a lander that can carry like 100tons of payload orbit.
The burning question that I have now is whether a Starship explosion during lunar testing will be visible from Earth. I sure hope they would do it during a new moon too for maximum effect.
TheOtherHobbes
SpaceX is currently spending around $100m per launch for 'things that don't get into orbit', never mind land on the moon.
So yes, I suppose that is more inefficient, in a way.
panick21_
First, you don't have any idea what those numbers actually are.
Second, SpaceX has consistently shown lower development cost then anybody else. Starship is expensive its likely cheaper then New Glenn.
Remember, Ariane 6, a marginal upgrade over Ariane 5 with only a new upper stage engine cost 6 billion $.
And SpaceX is already at much higher launch rates and manufacturing rates for thing like engines. SpaceX is investing into mass production already.
philistine
Remind me exactly how the Saturn V rocket returned to its launch pad?
quotemstr
> STS programs
The shuttle was a deathtrap. It had inadequate abort modes and a launch process that practically guaranteed minor (until it wasn't) damage to the heat shield during launch.
STS crews were lucky that only two of the things got violenly disassembled.
cma
> It had inadequate abort modes
Does Starship have launch abort boosters? Seems infeasible with the amount of fuel and mass on it since it also serves as a second stage, but maybe they solved that somehow?
MPSimmons
Starship doesn't currently have launch abort modes
mjevans
Nor does it have any crew / passenger cargo.
cma
DearMoon was supposed to launch 2022, passenger space service between LA and Ridhya by 2028 (announced in 2018 and they said it was on track for 2028 still several years later). They said it would be around the price of business class air travel and be in full commercial operation by then. That might have been after they started adding "aspirationally" to most Musk company statements following some lawsuits.
fsh
Sure, the Saturn V and STS were much less safe than smaller rockets. Still, they blew up an awful lot less than other rockets of their size like N1 or Starship.
bbarnett
Many Saturns blew up during testing. Starship is still in testing.
Your arguments are strange, a mirage concocted to fit a narrative of denigration and darkness. You mock with zeal, yet have no point to the mocking.
Always with the mocking, you cause an ache which cannot be balmed. Cease, I pray you. Stop these machinations, this mad canter.
Falcon was built the same way. It blew up many times too, explosions aplenty. Now it is the most successful lift on the planet.
ubercore
Would love to read about Saturn V explosions during testing. Have a link?
> Still, they blew up an awful lot less than other rockets of their size like N1 or Starship.
I think the only reasonable comparison would be after cost equivalency. The Starship has a long way to go, to catch up.
jeroenhd
Cost equivalency ignores the R&D and decades of scientific progress and advancements in tooling capability. The prices of materials have shifted, but designing and manufacturing a precise propulsion system with modern CAD and simulation tools is a lot cheaper than the hand work hundreds of people used to be doing to verify much simpler engine designs. Precision machining and tools to inspect metal fatigue and imperfections have also come a long way.
Of course commercial rockets are always going to be as shoddy as they can get away with rather than as good as possible, but if it still takes SpaceX or Boeing as much money to build a rocket as it did back in the Saturn V days, they're doing something wrong.
Aeolun
If you use that as an argument any comparison becomes meaningless by default.
aredox
Also, both Saturn V and the Space Shuttle were dual-purpose programs - they had military goals on top of the scientific ones.
blkhawk
Well the military purpose was why the Shuttle was so crappy. The original design was smaller and meant to sit on top of its rocket. This would have probably prevented loss of crew in both of the instances where shuttle failed.
panick21_
Eventually Starship will also be bid for military programs.
And Saturn V never had a military mission, neither had Shuttle.
m4rtink
Shuttle regularly launched spy sats and was designed to grab an enemy one in a single orbit mission. Also Soviets believed it would nuke Moscow by sudden plane change via its wings & build their own version as a result.
The Space Shuttle never had a combat mission, in the sense that it was never used to drop bombs via polar orbit over the Soviet Union. But of course it had tens of military missions, the Shuttle launched many department of defense satellites.
There's also many advantages to being able to lift something large/heavy in one go, rather than smaller payloads that need to be unfolded (like JWST) or assembled in space, which can drastically increase the development costs.
panick21_
Falcon 9 is by no means small or even medium. In the history of rockets its quite a large and powerful rocket. And so is Ariane 5. Not sure what you are referencing with Ariane, I guess Ariane 1-4 were small.
So far in history, we didn't have enough to launch. If the volume we launch increases then a larger rocket flying often is helpful.
We are at the peak of what a rocket the size of Falcon 9 can do. If you want full re-usability, the size helps you out quite a bit.
And hauling the 'orbiter' into 'orbit' is only wasteful if you can't reuse it. I would argue what's actually wasteful is throwing the second stage in the ocean, even when it costs minimum 10million $, and likely more.
imtringued
I suggest you read up on the rocket equation again. There is a massive difference between payload mass fraction and payload. The latter scales linearly with respect to the total mass.
fsh
That's the problem. Building a heavier rocket is much harder than building a lighter one (see explosion above). So why not send a few lighter ones instead of a heavy one? This is what the launch market has concluded for a long time.
Destin’s arguments make sense if we want to redo Apollo. They break down if we’re trying to make repeated missions into deep space more economical.
bell-cot
> Building a heavier rocket is much harder ...
Disagree. The overall Starship system's problems are obviously in Starship, not in the Super Heavy booster. The latter is far heavier. But it only has to do 2 things well - sub-orbital launch, and sub-orbital precision return. And the launch tower's chopsticks give it a lot of help with the latter.
Vs. the Starship has to do far more things - all of them mission-critical - while being ruthlessly optimized for weight.
ThrowMeAway1618
>So why not send a few lighter ones instead of a heavy one? This is what the launch market has concluded for a long time.
Let’s assume starship works out and they come up with a nifty wide-opening payload door solution, one of the advantages will be payload volume as well as mass - the JWST’s main mirror would have fit inside without being folded (although the heat shield would not have).
What Saturn V and the Shuttle were trying to do pales in comparison to what the design goals of Starship are. If you were trying to repeat what those vehicles were doing you would've designed the launch vehicle significantly different.
inglor_cz
Compared to Starship, Falcon 9 may look like a medium rocket, but it is actually quite big, and Falcon Heavy is bona fide a heavy launcher, not just a hype-name.
Robotbeat
Note that Saturn several stages on the test stand like this.
StopDisinfo910
I think it’s interesting that SpaceX is struggling so much with the shift to a full flow staged combustion engine using liquid methane.
We knew from the Soviet that it was going to be really hard but after the successful flights I thought they had it in the bag.
We might be touching on the limits of SpaceX constant tweaking fail fast approach.
joha4270
I think its premature to blame this on Raptor. At least, I couldn't see anything suggesting the static fire was imminent, so my money would be on "anything but the engines" over "the engines". At least with what we know so far.
But SpaceX's brand of rocket development is certainly exciting
goku12
That's what it seems like to me too. From the slo-mo video, it looks like one of the propellant tanks (likely the methane tank on the top) burst open, spilled a lot of the propellant and then caught fire. Engines are unlikely to be the culprit here. Interestingly, there seems to be a crack or a gap already on the surface, along which the tank bursts open when the accident occurs.
jmaestrooper
So that's 3 issues in the last 2 flights and one static fire, all different, all with different root causes, all catastrophic. Block 3 will be a different vehicle, should they just skip Block 2 (scrap however many they already built) and move on to Block 3?
m4rtink
I think they requires Raptor 3 engines & they are apparently still finishing their development.
So might as well use up the remaining Starship 2 & Raptor 2 inventory in destructive testing (both intentional and emergent).
FiberBundle
In the spacex subreddit there are comments claiming that key engineers have left the company because of differences with leadership/culture. Not sure how credible those are, but spacex has had suspiciously many failures recently.
Waterluvian
It’s not even just a binary state of an engineer being there or not. The morale and general attitude of the environment can cause engineers still there to just not have their hearts in it.
I think about the countless engineering success stories I’ve read where you can tell the people involved were just living and breathing the problem.
Gareth321
It's hard to tell whether key engineers were the differences between success and failure but Comparably lists SpaceX’s Retention Score as an A– grade, placing it in the top 15% of similarly sized companies based on employee feedback. Additionally, SpaceX boasts an Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) of +25, placing it in the top 25% among peer companies
comparably.com.
U.S. tech companies are notorious for high turnover and SpaceX doesn't seem particularly bad.
floatrock
Sounds impressive, sure. Question is how much weight do you put into survey stats like those given Musk's extensive history of things like buying the influence he wants, putting his thumbs on the scales of his truth-bot, getting generous valuations based on hype and stories, knowing about "those vote counting computers" (Trump's own words), ruthlessly firing anyone who disagrees with him, etc etc etc.
Then again, they are launching tons of rockets, and any cult leader has his followers, so what do I know...
bell-cot
Not to say that Musk's been particularly endearing lately - but what would the normal turnover in an engineering-centric company the size of SpaceX be?
Especially with how hot the field is these days. I suspect "key" SpaceX engineers do not lack for lucrative offers.
marvin
There was a seriously sour grapes quality to that comment thread. I wouldn't give it too much weight without hearing from actual SpaceX employees.
jlmorton
There's a high quality slow motion video available [1] that shows the problem was almost certainly a failed pressure tank, not the engines.
Well that video makes it very clear: the problem is the front fell off, and a bit too enthusiastically.
amoss
Is the front supposed to fall off?
Paradigma11
Did they use cardboard derivatives?
dfedbeef
Let's wait for the engineers to confirm that isn't supposed to happen.
aaronmdjones
Maybe they should engineer them so that the front doesn't fall off
nomel
Unfortunately, that neccesarily increases the risk that the back falls off.
inasio
There's something strangely beautiful about this video, similar to the Hindenburg video perhaps, so much detail everywhere
fabian2k
The earlier Starship tests looked more promising. But when it looked like they were making real progress it got much worse again with Starship V2.
I like the idea of hardware-rich development, but it seems they might have fiddled too much here or maybe just tried to go too fast.
panick21_
I don't necessary think its a problem with the engine as such. The problem seems much more to get the fuel to the right place in the right pressure at all parts of flight.
If an engine blows up, because its pulling in bubbles, its not the engines fault.
I think Raptor 2 has a few issues still but as we can see on the booster, the can perform fine for what most rocket engines have to do.
Symmetry
We haven't really seen any problems with the engines themselves, so much as the plumbing that has try to keep them fed through radical changes in the rocket's orientation.
pantalaimon
v1 Starships were working just fine and even managed to make a soft splashdown.
The problems all started with v2.
m4rtink
Sure, but AFAIK the V1 design just wasn't mass effective for the goals of the program - eq. lifting usable payload & being fully reusable.
Still in hindsight, a couple more flights to test the improved heat shield could help move that are forward & reduce some of the unknowns.
dfedbeef
Too many Vs
tonyhart7
so whats the differences
rapsey
If the task is difficult, what other approach is there?
beaned
There are rovers on Mars already that landed on the first try. The approach was rigorous planning and study with the highest standards.
It doesn't mean the approach SpaceX is taking isn't valuable in some contexts, but it's certainly not the only method.
Teever
That seems like a poor example given how many failed attempts to land something on Mars that took place before they got to designs that would get it right in the first go.
yborg
The Viking landers were the first attempt by the US to land on Mars. The Soviets actually soft-landed first on their second try but the lander failed after transmitting one corrupted image. There were certainly many failed Mars missions by various countries, but the Vikings at least got it right on the first go.
mulmen
NASA’s first attempt to land on Mars was successful. I count 11 total attempts with one failure.
Yeah, this is a remarkably good score - for comparison Europe is at 0 out of 2. :P
The first one [1] actually landed but failed to send back any data (kinda like the soviet example) due to deployment failure.
But the second one will at least have an impact on future generations, with people being confused why there are two Shiaparelli[2] craters on Mars. ;-)
The rocket booster landing of mars rover also hasn’t been tried before.
beAbU
Infinitely more fun to witness though.
aqme28
Important to note that it exploded "prior" to the planned test. That seems really really bad to me, and potentially even dangerous. It's one thing if a test fails -- tests are somewhat expected to fail occasionally. It's very very bad if it catastrophically fails before the test even starts.
tlb
The whole thing is a test. The risk of huge explosions starts when they load it with fuel, not when they fire the engines. There are risks even before that, like electrical fires or structural failures.
aqme28
[flagged]
tlb
It's easy to make structures that don't fail: just make them 5x stronger than anticipated max loads.
Sadly, this would make a rocket too heavy to reach orbit. So they end up being 1.1x stronger than anticipated loads. And it's hard to exactly anticipate loads. Vibration can add to a peak load, and it's notoriously hard to model how much vibration might happen. SpaceX rockets are filled with cryogenic methane at -160C, which causes everything it touches to shrink which creates forces between the parts that get cold and the parts that don't. A rocket-sized tank contracts by inches, but has to be supported by the structure around it. A single support member that doesn't move the right way can cause a fracture. So it's actually a hard problem.
m4rtink
There are is a way[1] how to gate a spacecraft 5x stronger (basically on the level of battleship style steel plate) to orbit - and then to Titan and back. The propulsion method just has some unfortunate side effect when launching from earths surface. Still it should work just fine & might come in as a handy option handy in an emergency.
It's clearly not the only way they know how to conduct tests, or none of their rockets would have ever left the pad.
nialv7
Something like this has also happened to Falcon 9 before.
nomilk
This was a entire ship (not just an engine), and nobody was hurt or killed. Is this a major or minor setback for SpaceX? Rapid unscheduled disassemblies may look spectacularly bad but may be par for the course during testing (in order to push things to their limits to learn where they break) - curious to learn how bad this one is.
Ekaros
In normally run project, it would be pretty big. As you would need to do proper analysis just what failed and how. And then decide, design and implement needed fixes. With SpaceX engineering culture who knows...
m4rtink
In "normal" project a serious misshap of this kind often ends the project - see how the DC-X VTVL rocket testbed fell over due to one landing leg not extending, ending the whole project. Nothing related to what was being tested or developed and it ended the whole project.
As a result we got booster landings delayed by 20 years - and SpaceX would also not get there with Falcon 9 if they would call it quit after spcetacular failures (see Falcon 9R test bed).
peterfirefly
They were incredibly crazy to use the RL-10 hydrogen engine for the supposedly cheap prototype flights.
m4rtink
I think those were available off the shelf at thet time ? Not sure what else would be suitable in early 90s, provided you did not build your own like basically all modern rocket companies since then.
It's a gigantic setback. Most directly, it will delay their launches for a good time while they repair and rebuild the site. But it also shows some kind of severe design flaws if this can happen even with no engines running.
riffraff
I think you're extrapolating too much.
This could be a "simple" production error (think "cracked pipe") which can be fixed with more effective monitoring of the construction, and not a major design flaw.
It might be someone forgot a wrench somewhere for what we know.
fabian2k
A simple error like that should be caught before you fill the rocket with methane and liquid oxygen. If a simple error gets through to this point your procedures are bad, which is a big problem for a complex rocket with many parts that could have simple errors.
riffraff
that's why I put "simple" in quotes.
Obviously it's not trivial, since they already flew a few spaceships and rockets, but it could be an edge case not considered until now which can still be fixed, rather than a "well, it turned out to be impossible to fly a rocket with this design".
radu_floricica
The error itself is probably easily fixed. Usually the bigger the effects, easier to fix.
The real problem is the damaged infrastructure. They don't have several launch towers in the pipeline like they have Starships. This is a "pause and rebuild" scenario, with the wait time much harder to parallelize with something else. Whatever time they spend until they have the second launch tower functional, I'd bet about half of it will be an overall addition to the whole project.
peterfirefly
> They don't have several launch towers in the pipeline like they have Starships.
They didn't lose a launch tower. It happened at a site only used for static fire tests.
(And they kinda do have several launch towers in the pipeline...)
jmaestrooper
The test site is severely damaged, and they don't have another one. It took what ,6 months to rebuild the launch tower after IFT-1? And it wasn't destroyed, just damaged, on the test site the tanks and pipes and all the rest are right near the vehicle so I see a lot of destruction.
So what, 6 to 9 months while they repair/build new test site(s)?
Might as well cut the losses and scrap Block 2 altogether, and move on to Block 3.
sam_bristow
Beyond whatever design or production issues caused this particular anomaly there will also be the delays due to the fact they just blew up a lot of ground support equipment.
XorNot
I worry that the current "favorable" FAA environment is leading to a regression in their engineering quality honestly.
There's a simple fault, and then there's the question of why did it happen anyway?
KaiserPro
> This could be a "simple" production error (think "cracked pipe") which can be fixed with more effective monitoring of the construction, and not a major design flaw.
Good luck trying to get launch insurance for that without a full root cause and proof in double triplicate that this has been fixed.
Are you going to put you payload on one of those, a payload that will take 3 years to rebuild, and might end the company?
mr_toad
Starship has never carried a real payload, so insurance is irrelevant. Nobody will be putting billion dollar satellites on it until (if) it has been flight proven.
aredox
If your space program has "simple" errors, then you are incompetent. These have to be stomped out beforehand. Is this amateur hour?
mulmen
Starship is not yet operational. It is in development. This is “before hand”.
Might actually not be a design flaw, just a leak due to rushed production. But these should be caught BEFORE the thing blows up and causes X million worth of damage.
somenameforme
It's going to be a relatively minor setback. Biggest issue will be pad repair time. Starships is still in development and has been going boom pretty regularly, though not before launch usually! The investigation of the cause will be interesting. Given the current political context it's probably going to be AMOS-6 ramped up exponentially.
AMOS-6 was a pretty similar situation where a rocket exploded prior to a static-fire, and in fact is the reason that static fires are done without payloads, though Starship would not yet have a payload. The difficult to explain nature of the explosion, alongside some quite compelling circumstantial evidence, caused a theory of sabotage (sniping an exact segment of the rocket) to become widespread. Of course the cause here could be more straight forward to pin down - we'll know a lot more in a few days!
perihelions
> "is the reason that static fires are done without payloads"
And also (IIRC) the reason Starship abandoned helium COPV tanks and switched to autogenous pressurization.
In terms of losing a ship, probably not too bad. The ground equipment might take a bit longer to replace, and they will probably want to understand what happened here before continuing.
Or, as you suggest, this was a more stressing test than usual, but I doubt they'd do that with a complete ship like this.
aqme28
The fact that they didn't even make it to the test seems really bad. It's one thing for a test to fail. It seems downright dangerous if it fails before the test even started.
af78
Plus the rocket is reusable, right? No reason to freak out. /s
Out_of_Characte
What's really vexing to me is how spacex refuses to build a triple stage rocket. Their 'reusability' adds a significant amount of mass in terms of heatshield and in terms of fuel margins for landing. Using additional stages benefits them more than saturn V. They likely thought they could get away with two stages and have them both return to the launch site, one the short way, the other the long way around. But the exclusion of a multi stage reusable architecture means that their empty mass fraction becomes a linchpin in bringing anything into orbit.
No wonder there's a v2 and v3 with much, much larger fuel tanks and less payload.
mr_toad
They need something that can land on Mars and return with a crew. Or something that can put a very large payload on Mars.
A three stage rocket is something you’d use for one-way missions with smaller payloads, or for putting something in GEO. Starship just isn’t optimised for those missions.
Out_of_Characte
>They need something that can land on Mars and return with a crew
>A three stage rocket is something you’d use for one-way missions with smaller payloads
The only succesfull human spacecraft that landed on another body and taken off again used a three stage rocket to deliver a three stage lander,
The Command and Service Module(CSM) which brought the two stages into low lunar orbit
The Lunar Lander (LM) contained a descent stage and an ascent stage, the descent stage was used as a platform for the ascent stage.
To say that three stage rockets are just for one way missions is silly, especially considering that more stages enable larger payloads. We've yet to see whether SpaceX's two stage solution will actually be any good. I also do not expect a single stage to the surface of the moon and back to Low Lunar Orbit to be very usefull. Any mars mission will likely follow the exact apollo staging plan.
m4rtink
Depending on your mission profile, there are more ways how to get to the Moon and possibly back - the Surveyor space probes did direct ascent without entering lunar orbit & massive burn with an embedded solid rocket engine just before landing.
The soviet plan (if they actually managed to get the N1 to work) was to take the upper stage of that rocket all they way to the Moon (fueled by kerolox BTW) and use it for the final braking burn of the LK lander[1], before eecting the stage to crash on the surface while the lander used its engine for soft landing.
And then the lander would launch directly to lunar orbit using the same (or backup) engine, not dropping any stages, just the landing legs. This was forced by the much lower carrying capacity of the N1. There was just one cosmonaut landing as a result, with another one in the "lunar Souyuz" staying in lunar orbit. So just 2 people versus 3 in Apollo. And there was not even a hatch between the two modules & the cosmonaut was supposed to spacewalk (!) between the two before landing and after meeting back with the Soyuz spacecraft.
So if you can realistically do a single stage to landing & orbit on a body, I'm sure it will be the preferred option going forward, it has a significant benefits.
The more fuel economic way long term is break the mission into parts and reuse vehicles; single ship from surface to Lunar orbit, dock and transfer to a staged lander at a station and take the up and down. Taking Starship all the way to the surface wastes a tremendous amount of fuel hauling around the mass to get back home and through to landing safely.
A third stage with the current Starship design would have to be under 100 tonnes and the payload would be small. It would have to do all the work of injecting into a transfer orbit, landing on Mars, and returning. It’s hard to imagine such a small craft getting all the way to Mars, with a crew, and returning them.
Starship is just not a good design for pushing a third stage into a transfer orbit by itself. It’s totally dependent on the idea of in-orbit refuelling and refuelling on Mars. Once you refuel it, the game changes completely.
It’s also not a workable solution for landing on the Moon without refuelling for the same reasons. In some ways the Moon is more problematic because you can’t manufacture methalox on the Moon.
bell-cot
If you have a good specific https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse , and you can get decent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_ratio s in your lower stages, then 2 stages are definitely the way to go to LEO. Every stage over 2 adds a load of weight (more engines, structure, etc.), lots of ground system/support complexity, and a whole 'nother stage separation worth of failure modes.
jmaestrooper
The full and rapid reuseability is the ultimate goal.
Make rocket launches as frequent and routine as commercial plane flights. Whether they use it for Mars or Moon on Earth-to-Earth or anything in between is irrelevant, this will revolutionize entire industries.
Just look at the share of Falcon 9 comparing to all other launch providers, and that one is only half-reuseable. If they manage to get the StarShip right this will be a game changer.
mlindner
A triple stage rocket when you're trying to do reuse is actually a negative. The second stage needs significant heat shielding as a result which drastically eats into the size of the upper stage and your ultimate payload.
Gravityloss
I guess one issue with that is that the second stage will land far from the launch site. In theory if it has sea level engines for landing, it could fly back though (after refueling).
m4rtink
Starship has 3 sea level engines for landing + 3 vacuum optimized engines.
Gravityloss
Yes. My "if" could have been a "since it probably".
The_President
Unsustainable rate of failures due to the associated costs. SpaceX might have to go public to capture funding opportunities, which would inevitably result in more accountability toward ensuring successful flight development. When the execution of their tech works it is highly impressive. Track record of success rate proven by the Falcon program. Does anyone have the numbers on how much these ships cost each? I've seen estimates of $100 million for a full Starship stack.
jacobkranz
I doubt they’d need to go public. Regardless of your views on Elon, he’s consistently raised billions privately whenever needed. Even without Starship, SpaceX seems cash-flow positive and profitable thanks to Starlink and Falcon 9. It’s simpler to ask private investors to back his R&D efforts when they’re investing in an already profitable company excluding the R&D. Going public might echo Tesla’s early days, when profitability of the company as a whole wasn’t guaranteed.
mempko
Except past Elon didn't do Nazi salutes and was clearly spiraling on drugs. Past performance doesn't imply future performance.
dzhiurgis
SpaceX does well: "He's not even running SpaceX, it's all Shotwell!"
SpaceX does bad: "He's spiraling out of control on drugs!"
lukeschlather
Yeah, $100M is the estimate I have seen. Which actually makes their current track record seem very sustainable compared to SLS which has spent on the order of $4B per launch. This is the first unequivocal failure this year. Aspects of the previous flight failed but proving the booster can be reused was a significant milestone. And they can afford a dozen more of these launches while still being significantly cheaper than SLS.
zx8080
Why is this called "anomaly"? It's "exploded".
MPSimmons
In spaceflight, an anomaly is an anomalous outcome compared to what was expected. The severity of the anomaly varies. Typically, if the world outside of the organization hears about an anomaly, it was severe enough to cause a Loss of Mission (LOM) or Loss of Vehicle (LOV). Internally, when things behave anomalously, they're referred to as off-nominal, and are subject to internal investigations to determine the cause.
This is a _very_ off-nominal outcome and the investigation will absolutely involve outside organizations and halting the program during the investigation until the investigation completes with a sufficient determination of faults and accompanying remediation plans.
jeroenhd
It normally doesn't explode of course!
The linked tweet literally says "it blew up", though. "Anomaly" is just a word used in rocket science lingo that makes for a funnier headline.
Delta 2 rocket exploded during launch, raining flaming debris everywhere and the announcer says we had an anomaly
bernds74
It was slightly more fiery than a mere "observation", hence "anomaly".
tekla
In engineering, there is a preference for accurate terminology
zdc1
There's a comment above that gives Loss of Vehicle (LOV) as an example of a more specific term. Sure "anomaly" is a known technical term, but it's also ambiguous and buries the lede.
kuschkufan
lol, it's an euphemism. don't drag engineering into this.
Was able to reverse to about -1:49:00 to see it "live". But probably this relative timestamp was only current then. In any case, that was a massive explosion
Unfortunately just on Twitter, haven't seen much elsewhere yet. But the link seems to work.
The frame of the video has a burnt in clock in the top left corner though, so if you get that to be about 11:01:50 PM CDT you'll be at the point of the explosion.
The explosion starts at the upper part of starship, not the engine bay.
trhway
Yes, on 0.25x speed it is visible that a large leak quickly sprung up, like something burst, about where the top of the methane tank and exploded.
rkagerer
Here's a framegrab showing what looks like the initial visible release of gas (before it becomes a big fireball), near the top where the arrow points: https://i.ibb.co/qYrn4vSf/image.png
goku12
In that image, you can see a white horizontal line on the heat shield, slightly below the point where the tank bursts. That was already there when the longer video clip starts. The tank later bursts along that line, even before the spilled propellant (which I assume is methane) catches fire. In fact, that line seems to be breaking apart even before the crack from the top reaches that point. However, the failure from the top might have propagated to that line out of our view, underneath the heat resistant tiles.
The crack propagation indicates that the line was a weak point on the structure. However, I'm surprised that it was already there. It's too early to make a reliable guess. But if I were to hazard one, I would say that the tank had too much pressure, well ahead of the explosion.
trhway
The earlier Starships were just manually welded steel. Is still so? If any failed weld can lead to a catastrophe like this, how would you guarantee the quality of each weld without going into nuclear power plant construction level of costs?
Has the media coverage become more selectively focussed on the failures, or has the success rate of their move-fast-and-break-things approach really fallen off the last ~6-12 months?
simmonmt
If it bleeds it leads. Also a bunch of people are cheering Musk's failures, so anything along those lines gets even more clicks.
faefox
It's silly to try to pin this on media bias or Musk haters when the fact is that every Starship launched in 2025 has exploded.
dzhiurgis
You can't be serious. The wording of every article is in worst way possible while completely ignoring crashes from competitors - i.e. European Space Agency's launch in Norway, lunar landers being lost or even that sub-space Blue Origin all-female flight with such cringe slogan (Taking Up Space) that it's been edited from wiki.
simmonmt
I'm not pinning anything. I'm commenting on why SpaceX failures get more press than SpaceX successes. If it bleeds it leads is the way it's always been. And I'd be remiss to point out that there's /more/ appetite for it in the case of SpaceX because of feelings towards Musk.
faefox
Although I feel like SpaceX's successes (many of which have been truly remarkable, like the booster catches) get plenty of press themselves, you make a fair point. I apologize for taking your previous comment in bad faith. :)
steveBK123
Sure but I also remember watching a number of very impressive launches, landings, etc "firsts". Recently I don't recall any of these, and this was watching SpaceX direct streams on their site.
dmix
They are testing V2 of Starship so it provides more opportunity for this sort of thing, not entirely a linear progression.
mikepavone
So looking back to the Falcon 9, there were only 4 failures to complete orbital objectives across 503 launches and one of those was only a partial failure (main payload delivered successfully, but the secondary payload was not due to a single-engine failure). These failures were not consecutive (4th, 19th, what would have been the 29th and 354th). Now apart from the first launch or two (COTS Demo Flight 1 had some useful payload, but still seemed pretty disposable) these all had real payloads so they were less experimental than these Starship test flights.
If we compare to the propulsive landing campaign for the Falcon 9 1st stage it's a bit more favorable. The first 8 attempts had 4 failures, 3 controlled splashdowns (no landing planned) and 1 success. I think in general it felt like they were making progress on all of these though. Similarly for the Falcon 1 launches they had 3 consecutive failures before their first success, but launch 2 did much better than launch 1. Launch 3 was a bit of a setback, but had a novel failure mode (residual first stage thrust resulted in collision after stage separation).
Starship Block 2 has had 4 consecutive failures that seem to be on some level about keeping the propellant where it's supposed to be with the first 2 failures happening roughly in the same part of the flight and this 4th one happening during pre-launch testing.
lukeschlather
They are failing more but they are also succeeding more and the successes aren't recognized as successes. The previous Starship blew up but the Booster successfully launched and landed two flights in a row, and that was in the same two flights both of which were viewed as failures because the Starship blew up.
Even if Starship turns out to be a dumb idea the super heavy booster already seems like it might outperform SLS as a reusable heavy-lift stage.
faefox
Starship has yet to experience a successful launch in 2025.
rsynnott
This version (Block 2) has never had a successful launch.
I guess how much of a setback this is will be determined by how much damage is there on the facilities and the nature of the cause of the explosion(do they need to re-work the next 6 already being assembled so it doesn't happen again?).
shmoe
They cant seem to match launch cadence to ship progression. This will most certainly set them back a few more weeks beyond the end of this month.
MPSimmons
Likely longer as this was the only test site for Starship and there will hopefully be an FAA investigation.
vardump
It didn't fly, so there will be no FAA investigation.
goku12
Is the FAA going to wait around till it does the same in flight?
vardump
I think that's the only thing they can do.
mlindner
The FAA only cares about things that have FAA licenses. A static test fire is not FAA licensed so there won't be any FAA investigation.
verzali
Doesn't mean much if there's a design or production flaw. Having lots of flawed Starships on standby isn't really useful.
t1234s
Any idea if their Prufrock tunnel boring machine (or sections of it) could fit within starship?
t1234s
Also I imagine some version of the cybertruck would be used as a moon buggy. Any idea on how many could fit inside starship?
ReptileMan
Btw - has anyone thought how fully reusable starship eith those launch costs would revolutionize warfare. Being able to drop 50-60 tons of explosive from orbit for the cost of 1-2 million dollars while being untouchable is something I am sure that is at least part of current us military wet dreams.
stogot
It costs more than 1-2 million. $70million for a falcon 9 launch
testing22321
Internal cost to SpaceX is estimated to be $15 million for Falcon 9.
goku12
They're pitching something similar to the US military. The proposal is to use the Starship (the spacecraft alone without the Super Heavy booster) as a suborbital personnel/cargo carrier. Personally though, I'm a bit skeptical about the whole concept. And they're certainly not untouchable. At least 3 other nations have the ability to knock them out in space. And 2 of them are hostile towards the US.
gpxyz
A couple years ago, I happened to overhear a conversation at lunch between two men I gathered were SpaceX engineers. (They were talking very loudly, so it was difficult not to listen in.) Rather than discuss the mission of the company, or anything that showed passion for their job, they instead spent most of the lunch talking about how they were making “day in the life” TikToks and were trying to increase their follower counts, then about how they would drive 150+mph to Vegas since they could afford any speeding ticket if they got pulled over. Really struck me as a red flag for the company that their employees were much more concerned about their own social status than anything they were working on. I suppose incidents like this may well be the result of these attitudes becoming commonplace.
dzhiurgis
Oh wow, what a hearsay.
I really don't get people who be like "Lets undermine all humanity's progress because I don't like Elon Musk". Don't know if you are so stupid or so cynical, but I'm sorry for you anyway.
eqvinox
The pad might actually have less damage than one might assume; that explosion started at the top. The bottom parts of the pad will mostly have heat & fire damage, but not explosion?
(It'll still be fucked, I just wouldn't expect a crater?)
m4rtink
With the Amos explosion on Falcon 9 IIRC the issue was with burning kerosene seeping into the pad, damaging it quite a bit. Both methane and liquid oxygen should burn or evaporate before really pooling on the pad infrastructure, so there could really be less damage.
Still, there was probably more energy stored in the Starship propelants than in the Falcon 9 case.
goku12
I'm not so sure. The biggest explosion I saw in the video was right at the base. I think that the liquid methane spilled and fell to the ground. Probably the oxygen tank also burst by that time, spilling LOX right into the path of the falling liquid methane - creating a nice mixture of methane and oxygen right at the base, ready to explode.
eqvinox
Yeah I'm just speculating, there's no actual data yet anyway. Random other shit might've cascade failed too, so…
gcanyon
I'm imagining Elon like Jeff Bridges in Iron Man, shouting at his team, "The Apollo program built a heavy lifter rocket in the sixties, with a box of scraps!"
mlindner
Sure, but Elon's (SpaceX really) isn't trying to build a heavy lift rocket (they already have one in the Falcon Heavy, and technically even the Falcon 9 in expendable mode) they're trying to build a fully reusable vehicle, and you need a rocket the size of Starship to have enough margin to afford the hardware for reuse on the vehicle.
mulmen(dead)
[flagged]
goku12
They're referring to the dialogue by Obadiah Stane in Iron man. But it's also appropriate in some sense if you consider how they made the carbon dioxide scrubber in-flight in Apollo 13.
mulmen
I understand the reference. It just doesn’t work with the famously well funded and resourced Apollo program.
goku12
I agree that they were well funded. But the designs were complete genius. They were exceptionally clever with the use of rudimentary technologies they had at the time. One of my favorites is how they used an Archimedes spiral in celestial attitude determination. It isn't too farfetched to say that they used scraps to build the program - they just MacGyvered through every challenge they faced.
mulmen
They were extremely clever but I strongly object to characterizing the program as “scrappy”.
They were doing beyond bleeding edge stuff with zero compromise. They didn’t settle. They just kept inventing until they had the capability they needed. Then they moved on to making the next impossible thing possible.
The Apollo Guidance Computer used the first integrated circuits. Like, literally the first batches manufactured went into the AGC. 2/3 of the national supply of a brand new technology is not “scraps”.
They went to the absolute limit of what was technologically possible then and is not technologically possible today. I understand that’s the reason for the Iron Man reference but it just doesn’t work here. The 1960s were not the stone age. Apollo was thousands of Tony Starks with the full backing of the United States. Not a couple guys in a cave fighting for their lives.
Analemma_
Pretty bad: it blew up on the pad before the static fire test even started. I can’t imagine this provides much in the way of useful information, and it looks like the pad was completely destroyed as well.
schiffern
> looks like the pad was completely destroyed
Importantly this was a test pad a few miles away, not the main launch pad.
wombatpm
Probably could use more than one launch pad with the tank farms centrally located and protected.
m4rtink
They are finishing another pad on the launch site & the explosion happened on a separate test site from the main launch site.
nomel
> I can’t imagine this provides much in the way of useful information
I can't really comprehend this statement, since it appears, in a spectacular fashion, that there's some useful information to be learned involving the top half of the ship, especially the flammable bits that you can see burst out before igniting. A rocket ship isn't just its engines, it's a system, with all the bits of it being not only useful, but entirely necessary.
aqme28
There is useful information in that "there is a possible leak at the top." But there are much cheaper ways to find that out.
However, that is absolutely not what they were testing for. Whatever the test's purpose, this failed to actually test it.
chneu
This most likely points to a leak somewhere. So there isnt much valuable information to be learned here. They weren't able to test much.
What they were hoping to test never got started.
nomel
You're very clearly mistaken. I can tell you, with a very reasonable estimate, how much the information is worth: one launch cost + ground infrastructure, in cold hard cash, multiplied by the number of times the flawed design/process will cause it to reoccur.
chneu
A leaking fitting isn't really all that valuable. It happens.
We're not talking about cold hard cash. The discussion is useful information.
nomel
Again, it's a system. Anything learned that prevents that system from literally disintegrating is of value to all components of the system.
I'm sorry, but fittings don't just leak. It's not something that "just happens". A leaking fitting means a design or process flaw exists, and must be fixed, or the whole thing blows up again. It may not be interesting to you, but it's now very very interesting to every other team working at SpaceX, who just had all their shit blown to pieces. It's a (I hope this is obvious to you) critical component of the system, just as critical as, say, the control system and fuel pumps. Serious innovation may be required (yes, things like gaskets still involve PhD's), and was probably already required.
It's really interesting seeing software perspectives of a hardware world. A mech-e would have a stroke reading your comments.
TheAlchemist(dead)
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nekinie
Rapid unplanned disassembly.
Hopefully the ground equipment is not too damaged (unlikely) and block 3 has more success.
bamboozled
I'm pretty sure it's over for that launch pad for a very long time.
trothamel
That wasn't a launch pad - that was a test stand used to test the Startship proper without the rest of the system.
Looks like a production defect. Will be interesting to see what QA process failed.
d--b
Move fast and break huge things
seydor
Maybe it's time to consider a smaller Starship
beshur
Well, it clearly says "Static fire"
yonatan8070
I don't think that was very "static"
rapsey
It seems starship still has a long way to go.
zeroping
(obligatory dad-joke) It seems like parts of this one went pretty far!
amai
Biggest reusable explosion machine?
goku12
I see that comments mentioning the 'move fast and break stuff' philosophy are downvoted quickly here. While I don't have any direct knowledge of the Starship design and the SpaceX work culture, I do have years of experience in both the launch vehicle industry as well as the software industry. I feel that the concerns with this approach are dismissed too easily. It's true that SpaceX has been an industry disruptor and a trend setter, especially with the Falcon series launchers. But Falcon and Starship are two fundamentally different vehicles and the success of one doesn't guarantee the success of the other. And there may be good reasons why the Starship is struggling when the Falcon 9 became a success that's unlike any before.
To start with, Falcon 9 and Starship may share some technologies. But they use different engines, engine cycles, propellants, structural materials and dynamics and even manufacturing processes. SS and Falcon are more dissimilar than any other two launchers I've seen from a single company. There are a lot of design data and procedures that you simply can't carry over from one to the other. The only thing you can realistically carry over is the zealousness with which the design and production quality is enforced. But problems like the repeated failure of the Starship fuel lines raise questions about that zealousness. (In my experience, a traditional space industry facing such issues during the development phase would simply throw out the propellant circuit design and start from scratch, paying more attention to its structural integrity. Frankly, I've seen worse. But that approach is present in the Raptor design. Look how different v1, v2 an v3 are.)
I think everyone here knows that the 'move fast and break things' culture has its roots in the agile development methodology from the silicon valley. Meanwhile, the traditional space development methodology has its roots at NASA. It's even more rigorous than the waterfall methodology used in the software industry, with numerous levels of elaborate reviews for designs, test plans, tests results, integration, schedules, status and even the documentation. From what I understood, the agile methodology is optimized to maximize revenue in a project where the underlying tech stack is reasonably well understood and proven. But it's a poor match for a project where the costs, stakes, complexity, subsystem interdependence, uncertainty in subsystem reliability and lack of engineering margins are all very high. Space launcher is the poster child of such projects. Agile is not even suitable for software projects where you're developing something novel and complex.
The main problem with Agile is the 'let's push to production and see what fails' approach. I'm aware that there are elaborate QA procedures to augment the methodology. But the project is much more tolerant to QA failures. Unlike that, you can't simply leave a flaw in a launcher or its subsystem design and hope to resolve it later. Such flaws are technical debts that will stay hidden for a while and then fail spectacularly on a random day, like the holes in a Swiss cheese. Remember that subsystem interdependence is very high. Failures cascade in ways you couldn't have dreamt of. And the required corrections are elaborate, costly, time consuming and often spanning multiple subsystems. The only reasonable way to manage so much uncertainty is to design meticulously for all foreseeable failures from the start, validating those assumptions at every step of the way (This is why they sometimes throw away faulty designs entirely). And that takes a lot of time and focus. The current approach of 'we will launch in one month to make up for this failure' makes me a bit uncomfortable.
I'm not trying to dismiss SpaceX's approach outright. The biggest aspect of any launcher development is the management of complexity and uncertainty. Perhaps they will find a good way to do that without slowing down. They sure have a lot of smart and hardworking employees. But if I were asked to manage one again, I will choose the NASA style again over the agile style. I'm not smart enough to manage with any other method, the level of uncertainties and complexities I expect from a mid-heavy launcher design, much less something like the Starship. Remember that the management culture was one of the hottest topics in the investigation of the Challenger disaster. Perhaps it's a good idea to revisit the findings of that investigation, as well as the venerable and effective Apollo design philosophy.
danans
Thanks for such a deep explanation, especially for those of us who know nothing about launching space rockets.
> Remember that the management culture was one of the hottest topics in the investigation of the Challenger disaster. Perhaps it's a good idea to revisit the findings of that investigation, as well as the venerable and effective Apollo design philosophy.
IIUC, the goal of SpaceX's "Agile" approach to lower the costs of putting payloads into orbit via launch vehicle reuse by amortizing the R&D and equipment cost over multiple profitable launches. They are searching for the cheapest route to achieve large payload space launches.
NASA's goal in the Apollo program was to spend whatever was necessary in order to match and surpass the Soviets' accomplishments. While I don't doubt they were scrappy when necessary, I suspect that the reputational cost of repeated failures (to the country and individuals) was such that it was worth investing time into "getting it right". When fatal failures happened, it was treated as a national disaster and the dead are today considered heroes: https://www.nasa.gov/mission/apollo-1/
Today nobody would even consider risking their lives (nor be asked to) in the way that the Apollo astronauts did, perhaps because the goals (for profit or the mars-fantasy) are considered to be less virtuous.
Perhaps the quality control doesn't need to be as high when you perceive there is less at stake and you can just do it again and again (until the money runs out). That's not to say that this approach won't eventually work, but the motivations and guiding narrative seem to be really different than in the past.
goku12
Thanks for the reply!
> IIUC, the goal of SpaceX's "Agile" approach to lower the costs of putting payloads into orbit via launch vehicle reuse by amortizing the R&D and equipment cost over multiple profitable launches.
An issue that's deeply intertwined with reusability is reliability. We put absolute emphasis on reliability with expendable launchers. But if you think about it, this is even more paramount in the case of reusable launchers. Hardware tends to degrade overtime, increasing the chance of triggering any design or manufacturing flaws. Expendable launchers need to contend with this only once and for a short time. Reusable launchers have to deal with it over several flights, several structural and thermal cycles (causing fatigue cracks) and a large accumulated operating time. Periodic maintenance can eliminate some flaws - but not design flaws. Launchers also tend to be very sensitive to design flaws, due to the very low engineering margins available. So, there is a bigger incentive here to get it right in the first try itself. (For example, consider the fact there are fewer entities with the capability to build the common turbofan engine than to build a rocket engine.)
Another point is that the agile methodology banks on one particular behavior of software. They rarely degrade over time (unless you manage to leak resources wildly). This makes it amenable to rapid trials, failures and corrections. The cost of experimentation is also minimal, since you don't lose hardware in the process. But in hardware projects, many flaws show up only after an extended period of testing. The trials and corrections are also costly and strenuous.
> They are searching for the cheapest route to achieve their goals.
You may have realized by now what I'm trying to convey. I'm not sure if the agile method is the cheapest route in space tech.
danans
> An issue that's deeply intertwined with reusability is reliability. We put absolute emphasis on reliability with expendable launchers. But if you think about it, this is even more paramount in the case of reusable launchers. Hardware tends to degrade overtime, increasing the chance of triggering any design or manufacturing flaws.
Presumably this was all well understood from history/experience before they applied Agile approaches to space launch. What changed that made this a plausible way to proceed? Some fundamental breakthrough or just Musk's deep pockets?
goku12
> What changed that made this a plausible way to proceed? Some fundamental breakthrough or just Musk's deep pockets?
I don't think anything changed fundamentally. Honestly, the design methodology for any engineering project would evolve organically to be similar to NASA's methodology as its complexity grows. Despite how it looks, Falcon 9 is actually a very conservative design that doesn't depart much from this philosophy. They did everything possible to keep the complexity low and reliability high. Merlin is a simple open cycle engine utilizing pintle injectors. The propellant combination was well known. The vehicle materials and structures were similar to traditional designs. Pneumatic systems were favored in place of pyro systems to improve reusability. Even the vertical landing technology (VTOL) was demonstrated in the 1990s (although Falcon is the first one to land vertically after reentry). The designers were industry veterans utilizing NASA's help. And they took a long time to perfect the basic technologies and had already nailed the basic platform design by the time they started experimenting rapidly with high production rates and landing. Switching to agile mode wasn't a big problem at that stage.
Starship on the other hand, was very unconventional from the word go. Stainless steel structures, methane as fuel, full-flow staged combustion cycle engines with near-limit chamber pressures, cartwheel separation maneuver (which they ultimately abandoned in favor of hot staging, with a lot of ongoing issues), use of sea-level engines in space (on the second stage), the belly-down reentry and the final belly-flop maneuver by the starship, etc. There are more than a dozen things in there that nobody has tried before. It just seems like they have too many things on their plate. Musk's deep pockets did play a big role here. But I'm going to avoid speculating on it.
2OEH8eoCRo0
Now they can't even load propellant. They're going backwards!
93po
yes they're so far behind the competition like boeing... spacex is only doing... checks notes.... 90% of all mass to orbit these days
LightBug1
lol
randomcarbloke
In 2020 Elon said they'd build 100 Starships a year, last year (2024) he said they would build 1 per day.
I have to ask if the world needs 365 $100mm fireworks each year.
marvin
Well, you can make things yourself worth 365 x 100 million and decide to use them for something else.
Fortunately, the rules in well-functioning societies do not allow anyone other than the owner of something to decide how it should be used.
randomcarbloke
If you spend your own money sure why not, I couldn't agree more, but it's the taxpayer's.
This very same individual was until recently trying to highlight frivolous government spending, surprisingly coming up short, obviously it'd be very cynical of me to suggest even a hint of hypocrisy let alone a conflict of interest so I'll leave it.
throwaway758395
SpaceX is not financed by taxpayer money and I believe its contracts are paid on reached milestones.
randomcarbloke
Musk said it himself "that's $100mm every time but it's the taxpayer footing the bill and they should get value for money" (paraphrasing), I can't remember the show but it may have been his Rogan appearance.
Sorry to burst your bubble on that, even if it is just carrying Starlink satellites it's still at public expense, not limited to the rocket itself but the infrastructure, and oversight from third parties.
glowiefedposter
Do you have to ask?
drcongo(dead)
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seydor
It's an explosion. It would be an anomaly if it happened rarely
roer
A starship static fire (seems to even be pre-"fire") explosion is very rare.
OhNoNotAgain_99(dead)
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senectus1
Anomaly?
The thing detonated from the top down... that was spectacular. Anomaly doesn't really describe that very well.
_Yguy_
"rapid unscheduled disassembly"
varelse(dead)
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huhtenberg(dead)
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Cipater(dead)
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aqme28
What are they wrong about?
dcminter
It's fairly clear that v2 has some problems and that SpaceX have not got to the bottom of them. It's not clear whether that's a series of small things of which this is (perhaps) the last, or something systemic where solving one problem moves the problem further along the chain.
But on the other hand, this is a test programme and while I'm sure nobody at SpaceX is sanguine about this particular explosion, their philosophy is still leaning towards more-frequent higher-risk tests.
An explosion of this kind with SLS would be a catastrophe for that programme. For Starship it's a setback - but seems very unlikely to derail the programme in the same way. The costs of an individual Starship are dramatically lower than those for an SLS second stage.
The prize that SpaceX are reaching for is full reusability; achieving it would allow them to totally dominate the launch industry for at least a decade. It's worth a few detonations.
I think a lot of commentators are drawing too much pleasure from seeing Musk fail at his hobby (and, fair, he's a total areshole, I'm enjoying that a little too) to put this particular failure in its proper perspective. Now, if they have another failure or two, or particularly if they have similar failures with v3 then it will start to look like they might have a bigger problem - but for now this is just part of the price you pay for rapid iteration.
buryat(dead)
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ethan_smith
NASA astronauts continue to regularly fly on Crew Dragon missions with the next one (Crew-9) scheduled for August 2025, suggesting professional astronauts maintain confidence in SpaceX's human-rated vehicles despite development issues with Starship.
lofaszvanitt(dead)
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_DeadFred_(dead)
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bamboozled(dead)
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jekwoooooe(dead)
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shmoe
SpaceX supporters can only call this "moving fast, breaking stuff" for so long as the entire program regresses in on itself in terms of milestones. This was never easy, but the Falcon program sure made it look so.
jillesvangurp
Falcon also was hard. They had a few failures and nearly went bankrupt in the process of successfully launching for the first time.
> the entire program regresses in on itself in terms of milestones.
The alternative would be looking at the competing programs from Boeing, Blue Origin, etc. It's not like they are hitting their milestones particularly well with their more traditional waterfall approach. The point of rapid iteration is that it is an inherently open ended process that has no milestones other than to launch the next iteration within weeks/months of the previous one. Which they have been doing fairly consistently.
If SpaceX gets starship in a launcheable and recoverable state, they'll still have many years of competing against competitors that have to rely on single launch vehicles exclusively. They would be very early to market. And there's a decent chance they might start nailing things with a few more launches.
shmoe
They didn't regress like starship has though... they literally just went from orbit to controlled landing in ocean and catching the booster on a fork to the ships blowing up in orbit or not making it there and the boosters aborting the catch for a controlled landing offshore or blowing up as well.
Now they have regressed to blowing up on the pad during static testing.
Seems very different to me than the Falcon story, 100%. Granted, they had luck too.
DoesntMatter22
They literally left astronauts stranded on the space station
adaml_623
You might want to expand your comment to make it clear that the astronauts were 'stranded' by the Boeing Starliner and not by SpaceX Falcon/Dragon
t43562
I wonder if astronauts will be excited to be the first to ride on the Starship given the statistics. Obviously they aren't going to be too keen on the Starliner but that didn't blow up.
Boeing is waterfall but with top managers skipping steps all the time to make the bosses and shareholders happy short-term.
Is Blue Origin following waterfall? Why would the founder of Amazon follow the polar opposite strategy of the rest of his businesses?
cma
If Bezos made a bridge building company, I'd expect it to use something similar to waterfall. That's not to say it is right for rockets, but it is a different domain than software.
m4rtink
Traditional non-SpaceX US launch companies does not seem very conpetent at the moment.
But there seems to be a lot of progress in reusable launcher development outside the US, mainly in China and apparently also among Japanese car manufacturers!
dcminter
At the risk of being a bit Polly-Anna-ish this might be a good thing in the medium term for the project. If this has the same root cause as the in-flight failures of v2, they at least have a chance to analyse the failed components directly instead of having to infer purely from instrumentation what happened.
Or perhaps they are losing people with the passion for the mission.
"How happy are people at this company?" is a non-negligible performance differentiator.
Yet somehow CEOs seem blindsided when everyone at a company hates it and is mailing it in. (Probably because they're only listening to the management chain, which is concealing the problem)
Amazon was pretty notorious for poor culture and high employee turnover yet the company performance has been stellar. Covid-era twitter clearly cared a ton about employee morale but the product stagnated.
I find it's often the opposite causality, IE the success/trajectory of the company is the primary component that determines morale. An increasing stock price makes employees happy.
I think that product quality and money printing ability do eventually converge, but it can take decades to get there. The slow trickle of talent leaving the company causes the product decay over time, but there's a ton of inertia in the meantime.
There is a very bizarre and persistent belief that you can't be successful without grinding, being miserable, and abusing both employees and customers.
What if that's not true?
To me, the belief that Amazon would stand a chance at being as big as they are without taking advantage of people/culture/society is bizarre.
To be frank : if it were true we'd see more competition from groups that don't grind their assets to dust.. and we don't. Amazon is at the top of the game, and they grind things into dust while lobbying for further ability to do so in the future.
In other words : how many more precedents need to be set before we can tell beyond a reasonable doubt that full-bore-capitalism leads to disempowerment of the individual at the behest of corporations, and that it's rigged to do exactly that?
And then d-day comes and it's over. The impetus is gone. And every single time, I try to hang on to it. I give myself new projects and fake deadlines. I force myself to get up early and stay up late, but the moment that magic is gone, those things become... work. And like I said, there are things I would rather do than work.
I think a lot of Elon's success stems from his mastery of this "lock in" phenomenon. He is (or at least was) able to induce it in himself to drive himself harder than normal people do. He is able to induce the same state in his workforce as by setting bold and inspiring goals and setting absurd deadlines.
This is not a secret, btw. Nobody goes to SpaceX without understanding that they're signing up to work double the hours for way less than double the pay. For many, this sounds like a nightmare. If you're a young single guy looking to lock the fuck in, to take on huge responsibilities and grow in the company of some of the smartest, hardest working people on earth, it sounds positively amazing.
tl;dr: It's a feature, not a bug.
Generally, morale is a variable but the coefficient to apply to it is also different from company to company.
Hard things fail from time to time. When you aim for something really at the edge of human enginuity, it might work or it might not, and if it works, it will probably still be a close call.
But somehow years ago already SpaceX and it's followers convinced everyone that Starship will definitely happen. And it still might, but if it does, I still think it will be a rocky road.
I would say SpaceX has been extraordinarily lucky for years (not in the sense that they fluked it, but rather that they achieved so much and made it look easy), and this is just reversion to the mean.
Note that Booster appears to be coming along pretty well. But Ship, which has a much, much more difficult mission profile than Falcon 9, is really struggling, because going to orbit and back is far more difficult than going most of the way to orbit and back. (Please forgive the abstraction - I don't have the relative numbers at hand.)
SpaceX may also have lost Musk as the referee who makes quick decisions and keeps things moving forward. I think people like Thorvalds, Gates, Jobs and Musk are a superpower for organizations. Their decisions may not always be perfect but at least a decision is made so people can proceed. Otherwise you end up with the usual committee decisions that take forever and are mostly driven by internal politics and not about the product.
So I’ve heard working for him can present challenges.
No, I'll show myself out.
As it happened, the only people willing to pay von Braun to build rockets were Nazis, so (shrug) Nazis it was. If the Americans had recruited him in the 1930s, he would have become a loyal American and a credit to his adopted country, just as he ended up doing after the war. If Stalin had been willing to sponsor him, well, he'd have raised the red banner and become a loyal Communist.
There was never any point in prosecuting von Braun as a Nazi, or even thinking of him as one. Treating him as a war criminal, even though he technically was one, would have been a pointless, performative waste of badly-needed talent, like destroying captured V2s instead of studying them.
Elon Musk? He has no such excuse. Musk can be anything, do anything, say anything. He came to America early and made his fortune doing things that a lot of us respected and even envied him for. Then he chose to attach his name to far-right causes, throw Nazi salutes, and do the Kraft durch Freude dance at Trump rallies. Turned out Musk didn't care about building rockets or going to Mars quite so much as he cared about being an immature asshole. In that sense he took a path diametrically opposite that of Wernher von Braun.
So, yeah, if I worked for SpaceX, I wouldn't exactly bust my ass to make the leader's vision happen after losing trust in the integrity of said leader. I'd simply leave and find employment elsewhere, leaving behind people with fewer options.
Turns out skillset usually trumps justice, as long as you're willing to make the right post-hoc mea culpas.
As a developer I'll manually change those numbers if and when they appear.
however..
when he started spamming political misinformation on twitter i had to block him. very concerned he was burnt out and brainwashed into into politics. the nazi salute, then making nazi jokes about it, was just insane.
doge is a joke, he lost the plot.
now i barely check updates on whats happening at starbase, cheer on when the rockets explode, couldn't care less about tesla.. it's a real shame. all that great work by thousands of talented people in his companies..
he needs to resign from everything and go hide under a rock for a few years until he finally gets into orbit and burns up on rentry.
And Musk was personally responsible - not just for that atrocity, but for poisoning the world's leading progressive social media site, for being complicit in the neutering of countless world-leading science projects, for defunding basic research at NASA and firing hundreds of employees with solid achievements and genuine passion for space science, for gutting the FAA, and so on.
I cannot say enough unkind things about the man. The fact that he has any kind of following at all after the last year is both shocking and disappointing.
No, he did not. I still can't believe people bought his BS so easily - "it must be true, because he said it!" No, it isn't, never was, never will be. And I don't even care about that salute - Musk lost all his credibility around 2015 when he promised self-driving cars (coming next year! for the past 10 years, and counting), then by lying about the Solarcity roof tiles (and basically committed fraud for which he didn't go to prison - go figure).
It is also quite dehonestating to those _real_ engineers working for Tesla or Spacex, who actually know their stuff. It was them who made Musk possible, not the other way around.
> all that great work by thousands of talented people in his companies..
Exactly.
Engineering great organizations is still engineering (a fact that I personally wish I'd appreciated at a much younger age.)
And yes, speaking of engineering: FEM.
I still have to respect Starlink, accelerating adoption of EVs and the work SpaceX does. His businesses have reshaped several industries big time. It takes a lot of courage and insight to pull this off.
When he baselessly accused a hero rescue driver of a terrible crime and then refused to back down (if it’s not true sue me for defamation) then hid behind a technicality… yeah that’s the end.
That’s the behavior of a childish bully shithead not a leader. I can’t believe people still think he’s the man to lead the companies he runs.
You must have missed the part where he got divorced and then predictably shifted hard right.
(Being credibly accused of being a sex pest is the only thing more powerful than divorce when it comes to putting men on the right-wing-shift pipeline).
If you're loud, that collapses into a more realistic appraisal.
-- Most likely not Abraham Lincoln.
All the failures have happened with Starship v2, where the ambition is to put 100 tons to Low Earth Orbit. The previous design, Starship v1, was only (theoretically) capable of lifting 80 tons.
20 tons is a huge difference, basically what Falcon 9 can lift when launched in expendable mode.
We also have that Falcon 9 that blew in space due to a leak.
I think they're skimping on quality control.
https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/1lfayba/em_update_o...
So yeah, a QC problem, it seems.
It's not the most likely cause, but in a world where people have been torching Tesla dealerships, I'm sure there's a lot of people now who really want to see Starship fail.
No, it's rocketry. Sometimes things go boom when they're that volatile to begin with.
Long bow bro.
few people want a loud, extremist man, in bed with one of the most polarising figures of our time who seems quite unstable ranting at all hours of the night, especially when his company isn't delivering. politics is everything, you cannot divest from it.
This is the same thing as twitter folding in like 3 days when he did those grand layoffs; arguments entirely grounded in feels of the aformentioned group.
This approach had worked with the R7 rocket (the Sputnik and Gagarin's booster, predecessor of Soyuz). But at this larger scale, it seems things break apart much easier if not properly tested in parts.
Also compared to Super Heavy & Starship, they had more stages (4 vs 2) and most importantly, were not able to test the stages separately - which was possible for the Saturn V & IIRC all its stages exploded on the test stand at least once.
Both Super Heavy and Starship can be tested separately & Starship exploded during such testing, without taking the rest of the rocket with it, like N1 regularly did - including demolishing the super expensive launch pad during at least one occasion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nedelin_catastrophe
I mean, I would note that the first stage of this has 33 engines (N1 had 30, Saturn V had 5).
I suspect that Musks desire to have everything reusable has severely eaten into those margins though. I personally think he'd have been better off making only the first stage ('booster') reusable for the first few years, which then lets you develop more things in parallel later (the first landers can be on mars whilst you're still figuring out second stage reusability)
Going fully reusable may change that equation, but first stage reuse probably isn’t enough to make the program even close to worthwhile.
Questions like rate of successful launches, amount of payload sacrificed, etc really change the economics of the whole process. If the total payload is worth 1 billion a moderately more expense launch with higher success rate can be cheaper.
It's pretty clear there is barely enough commercial launch demand for falcon 9 (it already has ~100% of the non-foreign launch market, and there isn't a huge amount of price elasticity), so no reason at all to develop starship, apart from humans in space.
Mars is at best a long term goal for Starship, and far more likely to be just a nice story that Musk uses to motivate his engineers and investors.
What sort of technologies become enabled when putting things in space gets cheaper?
The current wave of problems is likely caused by optimizations in the v2 of the rocket. Starship v1 was very conservatively built and mostly worked. They are trying to squeeze extra 25 per cent of payload capacity from v2 (from 80 to 100 tons on LEO), and they are running into the edges of multiple envelopes.
Raptor v2 BTW seems fine, the main issues are around the plumbing that feeds propellant into the engines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectron_(locomotive)
Now that would be high-speed rail.
For example 2 of the legendary JGR Class 8620 (nicknamed hachiroku) Japanese steam locomotives could be comfortably launched to orbit in 90 tons. :)
An Abrahams tank would be one designed to carry the Holy Hand Grenade.
:)
Why can't they be? NASA seems to test them on Earth. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19960007443/downloads/19...
Government-run vs private-run (partially govt-bankrolled). Single use vs fully reusable. Moon vs Mars. Traditional development vs iterative ("hardware heavy") development. There's just no parallels whatsoever.
Will the result be the same? We'll see. But the history says don't bet against Elon.
Btw N1 was a failure arguably due to Korolev's death, not his ineptness.
I don't think the comparisons are very apt.
The parts are not what are failing. It's the overall system.
https://youtu.be/0C_L-qgHsE0?t=299
The wet (loaded with propellant) to dry (empty of propellant) mass ratio is determined via the rocket equation to be the exponential of delta V divided by exhaust velocity.
Certain parts of the rocket, such as the external tank structure, scale sub-cubically with the rocket's dimension, as do aerodynamic forces; whereas payload and propellant mass scale cubically.
Hence if the rocket is smaller than a critical threshold size, the requisite vehicle structures are too large relative to its propellant capacity to permit the required wet:dry mass ratio to achieve the delta V for orbit.
At exactly this size, the rocket can reach orbit with zero payload.
As the rocket increases in size beyond this threshold, it is able to carry a payload which is increasingly large relative to the rocket's total mass.
I understand vaguely that those operate and scale based on the area (a square function of their length) of their lifting surfaces, and are pulled down by their mass (a cube function of their length).
A little Estes toy rocket lifts off the pad much more aggressively (in the blink of an eye!) than a full size rocket...
If you really want to, you can reach Mach 10 (~3300 m/s) with a 8 meter long 3500 kg missile in 5 seconds:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile)
All of that in the lower atmosphere with the missile heat shield glowing white hot. :)
However, even if you're taking off of a planet with no atmosphere, you still have a huge force to deal with - you need to maintain an acceleration to exit the gravity well of the planet, and you need to burn fuel for that. But you also have to carry the fuel you'll burn with you, so the more fuel you have, the more fuel you'll need - this is what the rocket equation codifies.
An orbital class rocket--taking that kind of g load is going to break it (just look at the payload specs for the Falcon Heavy--its maximum permitted payload is well below it's performance to low orbit. You load it up to what the engines can do, it breaks. The only use case is when it's going farther than low orbit.) And an orbital class rocket has active steering rather than fins, it doesn't need to be booking it to be stable.
> Our satellite launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California (USA) on Jan 14, 2025. The rocket mission is a Transporter, and SAT GUS was dropped off in low-Earth orbit at about 375 miles above the surface of our pale blue dot.
https://space.crunchlabs.com/
(There's a large difference between staged combustion generally and gas-generator engines, which throw away performance by dumping fuel out of the turbine exhaust).
We might imagine a conservative FFSC design which accepts very low temperatures in exchange for making it easy (low R&D cost) to reach high longevity. Raptor is not a conservative design, so it requires more R&D to achieve that longevity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twnZYPdFgbU
So there's some sort of curve, zero at both ends, between overall rocket size and the payload to orbit. The question is where Starship sits on that curve, and to your point it seems likely that it's looking good on that metric alone.
But then you have another curve that I think starts small and increases near-monotonically, which is the complexity/likelihood-to-fail factor to the size of the rocket. It's (relatively) easy to launch a toy rocket, (fairly) simple to build a missile-sized sub-orbital rocket, difficult to build a small-to-medium orbital rocket, and apparently very difficult to build a Saturn/N-1/Starship-sized rocket. More props to the crazy '60s team that pulled it off.
This doesn't follow. Engineering complexity is not a limit on payload to orbit, it is a fundamentally different parameter. Yeah building a mile tall rocket would be hard, but it would get a shit ton of payload to orbit. There is no maximum beyond which making a bigger rocket starts to reduce your payload to orbit.
> But then you have another curve that I think starts small and increases near-monotonically, which is the complexity/likelihood-to-fail factor to the size of the rocket. It's (relatively) easy to launch a toy rocket, (fairly) simple to build a missile-sized sub-orbital rocket, difficult to build a small-to-medium orbital rocket, and apparently very difficult to build a Saturn/N-1/Starship-sized rocket.
Complexity does not increase with size, people just become more risk averse with size. Toy rockets fail all the time, just nobody really cares. No one would bet the lives of multiple people and hundreds of millions of dollars on a successful toy rocket launch. If complexity increases, it is with capability. If you want to land on the moon, you need something a bit more advanced than a hobby rocket. There is no reason to believe a floatilla of physically smaller rockets capable of achieving any given mission will be less complex in aggregate than a single physically larger rocket.
> This doesn't follow. Engineering complexity is not a limit on payload to orbit
At this point I'm merely talking about size (which I think is clear from the words I use. I don't think "building a mile tall rocket would be hard" adequately describes the difficulty when we haven't even built a mile tall building.
Sea Dragon[1] was only envisioned as 490 feet tall, and as near as I can tell even the Super Orion[2] would only have been 400-600 meters tall. And of course, neither of those was even close to implementation. Therefore I stand by my statement that a mile tall rocket is, for all practical purposes, impossible, and thus has a payload to orbit of zero. If you disagree then add a zero -- surely you agree we can't build a ten-mile-tall rocket?
As far as complexity, I'm not sure what to say. Toy rockets might fail all the time, but the point was complexity, and a toy rocket can be constructed from under a dozen parts. Even larger model rockets have at most a few dozen to a few hundred parts. The part count of the Falcon 9 has to number in the thousands, if not tens of thousands (9 merlin engines with at least several hundred parts each?).
To be clear, I agree with you that complexity increases with capability.
But also, to push back a bit, I don't think complexity aggregates the way you're saying it does. A box of hammers is not more complex than a nailgun, even if it has more parts in total.
I was assuming you were using a comical example to illustrate a "nightmare to engineer." The comparison to a building doesn't actually work at all. The practical limitation on how high we can build buildings is how fast we can make elevators. Just making something tall is not a problem.
> Sea Dragon[1] was only envisioned as 490 feet tall, and as near as I can tell even the Super Orion[2] would only have been 400-600 meters tall. And of course, neither of those was even close to implementation. Therefore I stand by my statement that a mile tall rocket is, for all practical purposes, impossible
First, the optimal design for a rocket is not to just keep making it taller, and second, size was not the obstacle to either of these projects not being built. That does not at all prove that it is impossible. What kind of world would we be living in we presumed anything that hadn't already been actively pursued was impossible?
> and thus has a payload to orbit of zero.
My point was that this does not equate to a payload of zero. Surely you wouldn't argue that the weight of this mile high rocket is zero, and therefore that there is some curve for the weight of rockets where making the rockets larger starts to make them lighter. Just as we can calculate the weight for something without actually building it, so too can we calculate the payload, and it can increase far beyond anything we can actually implement.
> If you disagree then add a zero -- surely you agree we can't build a ten-mile-tall rocket?
I agree it would be impractical, but not that it would be so non-physical that we couldn't calculate what its payload capacity would be were it to be built.
> Toy rockets might fail all the time, but the point was complexity, and a toy rocket can be constructed from under a dozen parts. Even larger model rockets have at most a few dozen to a few hundred parts. The part count of the Falcon 9 has to number in the thousands, if not tens of thousands (9 merlin engines with at least several hundred parts each?).
Falcon 9 is a liquid rocket designed to take people into space. That is the source of its part count. You could scale up a solid rocket motor to an arbitrarily large size while keeping the parts count exactly the same. It's probably not the optimal way to make a solid rocket of that size, and you'd be missing out on a lot of capabilities that are important for a real rocket, but if you just wanted a toy no more capable than what you buy in a hobby store it would be no more complicated. Conversely, try to make a fully functional falcon 9 complete with 9 working liquid rocket engines small enough to hoverslam on your desk and you have an immense engineering challenge on your hands.
> But also, to push back a bit, I don't think complexity aggregates the way you're saying it does. A box of hammers is not more complex than a nailgun, even if it has more parts in total.
I concur that part count is not the same as complexity, but that point is in my favor. Making something bigger is like adding hammers to a box of hammers. The quantity goes up, and at some point you're going to need to make some improvements to the box if you want to keep adding more hammers, but conceptually it is simple. Making something more capable, like a nail-gun, is much harder.
(edits:) It's clearly not ideal for a short lunar landing, considered in isolation. But: what else would you do? Whatever you build, it would land on the moon perhaps once, and never again. Would you, being in charge, design a one-off vehicle for one or two moon landings—spend that R&D budget, in that way? That's not cheaper than 15 Starship launches; it's considerably costlier. (But the Apollo engineers didn't need to worry about this; it's was their express remit to spend $200 billion on one-off designs that would never be used again).
And: I hope no one suggests the "just make a unique lunar Starship variant that's simply a bit smaller". There's no "simply" resizing things in engineering. Recall that the last time Starship's length was altered by 2 meters, new mechanical resonances appeared, and it blew up three times in a row. Any "one-off" change for lunar landings is a less-tested, less-understood machine you'd be putting human lives on.
But it would also never land on Mars, so it would be a waste to build it for that. Build it for what it will actually spend its life doing.
Not saying SpaceX won't go to Mars, but if/when they do it will likely be several rocket generations later and possibly with specialized rockets, with a significant portion of it being one-time-use as you ain't returning.
for up to 0.8% US GDP per year. Today that would be $200B/year, pure spent. Where is Space X today is making, ie. it has a revenue, $15B/year.
>Perhaps web development is not the only thing that is susceptible to bloat.
similarly - web dev today can be done on $300 laptop by any schmuck. Even simple programming back then required a computer which cost a lot, and it was an almost academic activity.
Total lunar effort from 1960-1973, adjusted for 2024 USD: $326 billion
Launch vehicle costs (Saturn V): $113 billion
I think this is what should be compared against the total Starship program cost starting from 2020 until such time it completes 6 lunar landings (not counting SLS or other costs).
Or, for the year that Starship actually lands on the moon, compare against the Saturn V launch vehicle costs for 1969, inflation adjusted: $5.9 billion. See: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTKMekJW9F8Z...
The value added is interesting. For example, both the Merlin and the Raptor family of engines. These are some fine engines, and they are remarkably cheap and reusable.
Source: https://youtu.be/Dar8P3r7GYA?si=RHZ8lWFYKrd7qQhy&t=321
0.8% US GDP in 1969 would be about 8B/yr today. Very different answer
The likes of SpaceX are reporting costs in the range of $15B/year because NASA front loaded the cost of trailblazing launch technology half a century ago, with the technology available half a century ago.
Let's not fool ourselves into believing the likes of SpaceX are reinventing the wheel.
Also, those $15B are buying a fraction of the capabilities of SaturnV, and while SaturnV was proven effective and reliable 50 years ago, here we are discussing yet another "anomaly". Perhaps half these "anomalies" wouldn't exist if they weren't lean'ed into existence?
I wonder what "tons of payload to orbit" vs "dollars budget" would look like for Saturn era NASA vs Current SpaceX.
No doubt they're standing on the shoulders of giants, but let's not forget that they've helped transform the "go to space"-business.
Not even just NASA. SpaceX are building on technologies that originated from both sides of the iron curtain (and beyond)
That's what happens with most domains. At first people don't know the dangers and can go fast and loose: surgery, radioactive material, planes, cars, trains, rockets. Then people start losing their lives or part of their bodies to "easily preventable accidents". So some rules are enacted. Decade after decade, accident after accident, more rules, more red tape: things cost more, take more time. But you get a lot less victims.
So yeah, with a good budget and in a less strict country you could get something to the moon in no time. And potentially many people' parts all over your launchpads too.
Gas pipework: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR486zloao0
Do you know the McMurdo permanent Antarctica base is costing us far more than the dogs, sleds, and tents of Admundsen and Shackleton? Incredible, isn't it?
Starship is “the program to build a permanent base in the moon”. It’s not even the only vehicle involved in the moon program. It’s a rocket designed to take astronauts from moon orbit to the moon’s surface. The astronauts will actually fly to the moon in SLS.
So far it’s proved incapable of being launched, attaining orbit, and returning to earth as designed. That’s without a payload.
It has no life support system built and is literally years behind schedule.
Rather than making progress it is being redesigned on the fly to mitigate fundamental problems with its capability which Musk laughs off as “moving fast and breaking things”.
The problem is we aren’t moving fast at all.
The rocket is a disaster. Saturn V was better by an order of magnitude and likely cheaper if you consider how much fundamental work went into creating it which is now easy to buy off the shelf.
Comparing the programs while ignoring the fact that hobbiest regularly reach the Karman line is deceitful.
Starship is doing this on easy mode and it’s failing.
But this 'easy mode' is still so incredibly hard that nobody else will even attempt it.
I'd love to see some serious competition emerge in the reusable rocket space, but SpaceX is far, far ahead with Falcon 9 being an incredible success, even if the Starship project may be headed for failure. Nobody reports on 100+ successful Falcon 9 launches/landings in a year, those are now mundane. But a small number of Starship failures - test flights of an experimental vehicle - become big news, mostly because they involve spectacular explosions.
It seems that Starship may be too big to 'fail fast', mostly because of the visual spectacle of those failures.
But yeah, I tend to agree that whether it ultimately succeeds or not, blowing Starship up is a "fail fast" strategy because they have the money (and the reputational capital from successful Falcon 9 launches) to learn from their mistakes that way, and not many others do. Much as the waterfall approach of big space projects gets derided, there's a reason entities that can't take the reputational hit of visibly blowing stuff up on a regular basis do it that way...
The program that was paused pending new NASA director, and has burned more money than SpaceX without a single (usable) launch?
I’m making things up out of memory here, but suffice to say SLS does not have my confidence.
I have much respect to this guys that works in here that really pushing the innovation beyond the limit
reusable rocket is the future if you want permanent present in space, there is no way you throw rocket for only 1 launch
One year of Saturn V development cost the same as the entire Starship program so far. One launch cost 20-30x more than the projected cost of a Starship launch.
It is also said that it’s simply impossible to rebuild a Saturn rocket. Not only you can’t “buy components off the shelf” because they simply don’t exist anymore, even if you had all the component blueprints (which we don’t, they were lost to time), the manufacturing know-how is long gone.
Starship was developed from scratch. SpaceX developed their own engines, their flight control surfaces are novel, the rocket structure and materials are novel, the entire approach is different. Yes, our modern electronics industry makes it “easier” but this is like saying Porsche is playing in easy mode because of the Ford Model T.
I propose my own imaginary rocket. It costs $0 but it doesn't exist. Totally beats the Saturn V on cost!
How are the astronauts supposed to get on lunar soil on SLS?
No, OP is comparing a launcher that worked reliably (it's in the history books) with a launcher which never performed a mission and is reporting "anomalies".
That's complete nonsense. 10-15 Starship launches would land a lander that can carry like 100tons of payload orbit.
Saturn V landed 15000kg on the moon, but most of that isn't payload.
But of course with Saturn V you are throwing away a rocket that cost 1 billion $ or more per launch.
You are comparing 'thing lands on moon' to 'things lands on moon' without any nuance.
But you are right Apollo was insane in how fast it was done.
Which as the person you're replying to is point out isn't really a fair comparison because Starship and Saturn V deliver vastly different amounts of mass to and from the moon despite the mission being only to ferry some people there for a few days.
If Starship ends up flying to the moon it effectively enables the landing of a lunar base that could be occupied for years at a time with sufficient resupply of food and the right equipment for extraction of water/oxygen from the moon.
The Saturn V as amazing as it was could never have brought that much equipment to the moon in a cost effective manner.
also military (space force)
The burning question that I have now is whether a Starship explosion during lunar testing will be visible from Earth. I sure hope they would do it during a new moon too for maximum effect.
So yes, I suppose that is more inefficient, in a way.
Second, SpaceX has consistently shown lower development cost then anybody else. Starship is expensive its likely cheaper then New Glenn.
Remember, Ariane 6, a marginal upgrade over Ariane 5 with only a new upper stage engine cost 6 billion $.
And SpaceX is already at much higher launch rates and manufacturing rates for thing like engines. SpaceX is investing into mass production already.
The shuttle was a deathtrap. It had inadequate abort modes and a launch process that practically guaranteed minor (until it wasn't) damage to the heat shield during launch.
Classic example of https://danluu.com/wat/ --- the normalization of deviance.
STS crews were lucky that only two of the things got violenly disassembled.
Does Starship have launch abort boosters? Seems infeasible with the amount of fuel and mass on it since it also serves as a second stage, but maybe they solved that somehow?
Your arguments are strange, a mirage concocted to fit a narrative of denigration and darkness. You mock with zeal, yet have no point to the mocking.
Always with the mocking, you cause an ache which cannot be balmed. Cease, I pray you. Stop these machinations, this mad canter.
Falcon was built the same way. It blew up many times too, explosions aplenty. Now it is the most successful lift on the planet.
I think the only reasonable comparison would be after cost equivalency. The Starship has a long way to go, to catch up.
Of course commercial rockets are always going to be as shoddy as they can get away with rather than as good as possible, but if it still takes SpaceX or Boeing as much money to build a rocket as it did back in the Saturn V days, they're doing something wrong.
And Saturn V never had a military mission, neither had Shuttle.
That sounds military enough for me.
Operations cost. They are sublinear on payload/size. At least this is what Space X/Musk seem to go for.
There's also many advantages to being able to lift something large/heavy in one go, rather than smaller payloads that need to be unfolded (like JWST) or assembled in space, which can drastically increase the development costs.
So far in history, we didn't have enough to launch. If the volume we launch increases then a larger rocket flying often is helpful.
We are at the peak of what a rocket the size of Falcon 9 can do. If you want full re-usability, the size helps you out quite a bit.
And hauling the 'orbiter' into 'orbit' is only wasteful if you can't reuse it. I would argue what's actually wasteful is throwing the second stage in the ocean, even when it costs minimum 10million $, and likely more.
Disagree. The overall Starship system's problems are obviously in Starship, not in the Super Heavy booster. The latter is far heavier. But it only has to do 2 things well - sub-orbital launch, and sub-orbital precision return. And the launch tower's chopsticks give it a lot of help with the latter.
Vs. the Starship has to do far more things - all of them mission-critical - while being ruthlessly optimized for weight.
We knew from the Soviet that it was going to be really hard but after the successful flights I thought they had it in the bag.
We might be touching on the limits of SpaceX constant tweaking fail fast approach.
But SpaceX's brand of rocket development is certainly exciting
So might as well use up the remaining Starship 2 & Raptor 2 inventory in destructive testing (both intentional and emergent).
I think about the countless engineering success stories I’ve read where you can tell the people involved were just living and breathing the problem.
https://www.comparably.com/companies/spacex/culture/seattle
https://www.comparably.com/companies/spacex/enps
U.S. tech companies are notorious for high turnover and SpaceX doesn't seem particularly bad.
Then again, they are launching tons of rockets, and any cult leader has his followers, so what do I know...
Especially with how hot the field is these days. I suspect "key" SpaceX engineers do not lack for lucrative offers.
[1] https://x.com/dwisecinema/status/1935552171912655045
I like the idea of hardware-rich development, but it seems they might have fiddled too much here or maybe just tried to go too fast.
If an engine blows up, because its pulling in bubbles, its not the engines fault.
I think Raptor 2 has a few issues still but as we can see on the booster, the can perform fine for what most rocket engines have to do.
The problems all started with v2.
Still in hindsight, a couple more flights to test the improved heat shield could help move that are forward & reduce some of the unknowns.
It doesn't mean the approach SpaceX is taking isn't valuable in some contexts, but it's certainly not the only method.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars
The first one [1] actually landed but failed to send back any data (kinda like the soviet example) due to deployment failure.
But the second one will at least have an impact on future generations, with people being confused why there are two Shiaparelli[2] craters on Mars. ;-)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_2 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schiaparelli_EDM
Sadly, this would make a rocket too heavy to reach orbit. So they end up being 1.1x stronger than anticipated loads. And it's hard to exactly anticipate loads. Vibration can add to a peak load, and it's notoriously hard to model how much vibration might happen. SpaceX rockets are filled with cryogenic methane at -160C, which causes everything it touches to shrink which creates forces between the parts that get cold and the parts that don't. A rocket-sized tank contracts by inches, but has to be supported by the structure around it. A single support member that doesn't move the right way can cause a fracture. So it's actually a hard problem.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footfall
As a result we got booster landings delayed by 20 years - and SpaceX would also not get there with Falcon 9 if they would call it quit after spcetacular failures (see Falcon 9R test bed).
This could be a "simple" production error (think "cracked pipe") which can be fixed with more effective monitoring of the construction, and not a major design flaw.
It might be someone forgot a wrench somewhere for what we know.
Obviously it's not trivial, since they already flew a few spaceships and rockets, but it could be an edge case not considered until now which can still be fixed, rather than a "well, it turned out to be impossible to fly a rocket with this design".
The real problem is the damaged infrastructure. They don't have several launch towers in the pipeline like they have Starships. This is a "pause and rebuild" scenario, with the wait time much harder to parallelize with something else. Whatever time they spend until they have the second launch tower functional, I'd bet about half of it will be an overall addition to the whole project.
They didn't lose a launch tower. It happened at a site only used for static fire tests.
(And they kinda do have several launch towers in the pipeline...)
So what, 6 to 9 months while they repair/build new test site(s)?
Might as well cut the losses and scrap Block 2 altogether, and move on to Block 3.
There's a simple fault, and then there's the question of why did it happen anyway?
Good luck trying to get launch insurance for that without a full root cause and proof in double triplicate that this has been fixed.
Are you going to put you payload on one of those, a payload that will take 3 years to rebuild, and might end the company?
AMOS-6 was a pretty similar situation where a rocket exploded prior to a static-fire, and in fact is the reason that static fires are done without payloads, though Starship would not yet have a payload. The difficult to explain nature of the explosion, alongside some quite compelling circumstantial evidence, caused a theory of sabotage (sniping an exact segment of the rocket) to become widespread. Of course the cause here could be more straight forward to pin down - we'll know a lot more in a few days!
And also (IIRC) the reason Starship abandoned helium COPV tanks and switched to autogenous pressurization.
https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1lf8huf/preli... ("Preliminary data suggests that a nitrogen COPV in the payload bay failed below its proof pressure...")
There’s no way it’s COPV
It was COPV
(Adapted from https://www.cyberciti.biz/humour/a-haiku-about-dns/)
No wonder there's a v2 and v3 with much, much larger fuel tanks and less payload.
A three stage rocket is something you’d use for one-way missions with smaller payloads, or for putting something in GEO. Starship just isn’t optimised for those missions.
The only succesfull human spacecraft that landed on another body and taken off again used a three stage rocket to deliver a three stage lander,
The Command and Service Module(CSM) which brought the two stages into low lunar orbit The Lunar Lander (LM) contained a descent stage and an ascent stage, the descent stage was used as a platform for the ascent stage.
To say that three stage rockets are just for one way missions is silly, especially considering that more stages enable larger payloads. We've yet to see whether SpaceX's two stage solution will actually be any good. I also do not expect a single stage to the surface of the moon and back to Low Lunar Orbit to be very usefull. Any mars mission will likely follow the exact apollo staging plan.
The soviet plan (if they actually managed to get the N1 to work) was to take the upper stage of that rocket all they way to the Moon (fueled by kerolox BTW) and use it for the final braking burn of the LK lander[1], before eecting the stage to crash on the surface while the lander used its engine for soft landing.
And then the lander would launch directly to lunar orbit using the same (or backup) engine, not dropping any stages, just the landing legs. This was forced by the much lower carrying capacity of the N1. There was just one cosmonaut landing as a result, with another one in the "lunar Souyuz" staying in lunar orbit. So just 2 people versus 3 in Apollo. And there was not even a hatch between the two modules & the cosmonaut was supposed to spacewalk (!) between the two before landing and after meeting back with the Soyuz spacecraft.
So if you can realistically do a single stage to landing & orbit on a body, I'm sure it will be the preferred option going forward, it has a significant benefits.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK_(spacecraft) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_7K-LOK
Starship is just not a good design for pushing a third stage into a transfer orbit by itself. It’s totally dependent on the idea of in-orbit refuelling and refuelling on Mars. Once you refuel it, the game changes completely.
It’s also not a workable solution for landing on the Moon without refuelling for the same reasons. In some ways the Moon is more problematic because you can’t manufacture methalox on the Moon.
Make rocket launches as frequent and routine as commercial plane flights. Whether they use it for Mars or Moon on Earth-to-Earth or anything in between is irrelevant, this will revolutionize entire industries.
Just look at the share of Falcon 9 comparing to all other launch providers, and that one is only half-reuseable. If they manage to get the StarShip right this will be a game changer.
SpaceX does bad: "He's spiraling out of control on drugs!"
This is a _very_ off-nominal outcome and the investigation will absolutely involve outside organizations and halting the program during the investigation until the investigation completes with a sufficient determination of faults and accompanying remediation plans.
The linked tweet literally says "it blew up", though. "Anomaly" is just a word used in rocket science lingo that makes for a funnier headline.
Well…
Delta 2 rocket exploded during launch, raining flaming debris everywhere and the announcer says we had an anomaly
Chinese static fire accidentally becomes not-static.
Unfortunately just on Twitter, haven't seen much elsewhere yet. But the link seems to work.
The frame of the video has a burnt in clock in the top left corner though, so if you get that to be about 11:01:50 PM CDT you'll be at the point of the explosion.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1lf3g...
The crack propagation indicates that the line was a weak point on the structure. However, I'm surprised that it was already there. It's too early to make a reliable guess. But if I were to hazard one, I would say that the tank had too much pressure, well ahead of the explosion.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1lf3g...
If we compare to the propulsive landing campaign for the Falcon 9 1st stage it's a bit more favorable. The first 8 attempts had 4 failures, 3 controlled splashdowns (no landing planned) and 1 success. I think in general it felt like they were making progress on all of these though. Similarly for the Falcon 1 launches they had 3 consecutive failures before their first success, but launch 2 did much better than launch 1. Launch 3 was a bit of a setback, but had a novel failure mode (residual first stage thrust resulted in collision after stage separation).
Starship Block 2 has had 4 consecutive failures that seem to be on some level about keeping the propellant where it's supposed to be with the first 2 failures happening roughly in the same part of the flight and this 4th one happening during pre-launch testing.
Even if Starship turns out to be a dumb idea the super heavy booster already seems like it might outperform SLS as a reusable heavy-lift stage.
I guess how much of a setback this is will be determined by how much damage is there on the facilities and the nature of the cause of the explosion(do they need to re-work the next 6 already being assembled so it doesn't happen again?).
I really don't get people who be like "Lets undermine all humanity's progress because I don't like Elon Musk". Don't know if you are so stupid or so cynical, but I'm sorry for you anyway.
(It'll still be fucked, I just wouldn't expect a crater?)
Still, there was probably more energy stored in the Starship propelants than in the Falcon 9 case.
They were doing beyond bleeding edge stuff with zero compromise. They didn’t settle. They just kept inventing until they had the capability they needed. Then they moved on to making the next impossible thing possible.
The Apollo Guidance Computer used the first integrated circuits. Like, literally the first batches manufactured went into the AGC. 2/3 of the national supply of a brand new technology is not “scraps”.
They went to the absolute limit of what was technologically possible then and is not technologically possible today. I understand that’s the reason for the Iron Man reference but it just doesn’t work here. The 1960s were not the stone age. Apollo was thousands of Tony Starks with the full backing of the United States. Not a couple guys in a cave fighting for their lives.
Importantly this was a test pad a few miles away, not the main launch pad.
I can't really comprehend this statement, since it appears, in a spectacular fashion, that there's some useful information to be learned involving the top half of the ship, especially the flammable bits that you can see burst out before igniting. A rocket ship isn't just its engines, it's a system, with all the bits of it being not only useful, but entirely necessary.
However, that is absolutely not what they were testing for. Whatever the test's purpose, this failed to actually test it.
What they were hoping to test never got started.
We're not talking about cold hard cash. The discussion is useful information.
I'm sorry, but fittings don't just leak. It's not something that "just happens". A leaking fitting means a design or process flaw exists, and must be fixed, or the whole thing blows up again. It may not be interesting to you, but it's now very very interesting to every other team working at SpaceX, who just had all their shit blown to pieces. It's a (I hope this is obvious to you) critical component of the system, just as critical as, say, the control system and fuel pumps. Serious innovation may be required (yes, things like gaskets still involve PhD's), and was probably already required.
It's really interesting seeing software perspectives of a hardware world. A mech-e would have a stroke reading your comments.
Hopefully the ground equipment is not too damaged (unlikely) and block 3 has more success.
To start with, Falcon 9 and Starship may share some technologies. But they use different engines, engine cycles, propellants, structural materials and dynamics and even manufacturing processes. SS and Falcon are more dissimilar than any other two launchers I've seen from a single company. There are a lot of design data and procedures that you simply can't carry over from one to the other. The only thing you can realistically carry over is the zealousness with which the design and production quality is enforced. But problems like the repeated failure of the Starship fuel lines raise questions about that zealousness. (In my experience, a traditional space industry facing such issues during the development phase would simply throw out the propellant circuit design and start from scratch, paying more attention to its structural integrity. Frankly, I've seen worse. But that approach is present in the Raptor design. Look how different v1, v2 an v3 are.)
I think everyone here knows that the 'move fast and break things' culture has its roots in the agile development methodology from the silicon valley. Meanwhile, the traditional space development methodology has its roots at NASA. It's even more rigorous than the waterfall methodology used in the software industry, with numerous levels of elaborate reviews for designs, test plans, tests results, integration, schedules, status and even the documentation. From what I understood, the agile methodology is optimized to maximize revenue in a project where the underlying tech stack is reasonably well understood and proven. But it's a poor match for a project where the costs, stakes, complexity, subsystem interdependence, uncertainty in subsystem reliability and lack of engineering margins are all very high. Space launcher is the poster child of such projects. Agile is not even suitable for software projects where you're developing something novel and complex.
The main problem with Agile is the 'let's push to production and see what fails' approach. I'm aware that there are elaborate QA procedures to augment the methodology. But the project is much more tolerant to QA failures. Unlike that, you can't simply leave a flaw in a launcher or its subsystem design and hope to resolve it later. Such flaws are technical debts that will stay hidden for a while and then fail spectacularly on a random day, like the holes in a Swiss cheese. Remember that subsystem interdependence is very high. Failures cascade in ways you couldn't have dreamt of. And the required corrections are elaborate, costly, time consuming and often spanning multiple subsystems. The only reasonable way to manage so much uncertainty is to design meticulously for all foreseeable failures from the start, validating those assumptions at every step of the way (This is why they sometimes throw away faulty designs entirely). And that takes a lot of time and focus. The current approach of 'we will launch in one month to make up for this failure' makes me a bit uncomfortable.
I'm not trying to dismiss SpaceX's approach outright. The biggest aspect of any launcher development is the management of complexity and uncertainty. Perhaps they will find a good way to do that without slowing down. They sure have a lot of smart and hardworking employees. But if I were asked to manage one again, I will choose the NASA style again over the agile style. I'm not smart enough to manage with any other method, the level of uncertainties and complexities I expect from a mid-heavy launcher design, much less something like the Starship. Remember that the management culture was one of the hottest topics in the investigation of the Challenger disaster. Perhaps it's a good idea to revisit the findings of that investigation, as well as the venerable and effective Apollo design philosophy.
> Remember that the management culture was one of the hottest topics in the investigation of the Challenger disaster. Perhaps it's a good idea to revisit the findings of that investigation, as well as the venerable and effective Apollo design philosophy.
IIUC, the goal of SpaceX's "Agile" approach to lower the costs of putting payloads into orbit via launch vehicle reuse by amortizing the R&D and equipment cost over multiple profitable launches. They are searching for the cheapest route to achieve large payload space launches.
NASA's goal in the Apollo program was to spend whatever was necessary in order to match and surpass the Soviets' accomplishments. While I don't doubt they were scrappy when necessary, I suspect that the reputational cost of repeated failures (to the country and individuals) was such that it was worth investing time into "getting it right". When fatal failures happened, it was treated as a national disaster and the dead are today considered heroes: https://www.nasa.gov/mission/apollo-1/
Today nobody would even consider risking their lives (nor be asked to) in the way that the Apollo astronauts did, perhaps because the goals (for profit or the mars-fantasy) are considered to be less virtuous.
Perhaps the quality control doesn't need to be as high when you perceive there is less at stake and you can just do it again and again (until the money runs out). That's not to say that this approach won't eventually work, but the motivations and guiding narrative seem to be really different than in the past.
> IIUC, the goal of SpaceX's "Agile" approach to lower the costs of putting payloads into orbit via launch vehicle reuse by amortizing the R&D and equipment cost over multiple profitable launches.
An issue that's deeply intertwined with reusability is reliability. We put absolute emphasis on reliability with expendable launchers. But if you think about it, this is even more paramount in the case of reusable launchers. Hardware tends to degrade overtime, increasing the chance of triggering any design or manufacturing flaws. Expendable launchers need to contend with this only once and for a short time. Reusable launchers have to deal with it over several flights, several structural and thermal cycles (causing fatigue cracks) and a large accumulated operating time. Periodic maintenance can eliminate some flaws - but not design flaws. Launchers also tend to be very sensitive to design flaws, due to the very low engineering margins available. So, there is a bigger incentive here to get it right in the first try itself. (For example, consider the fact there are fewer entities with the capability to build the common turbofan engine than to build a rocket engine.)
Another point is that the agile methodology banks on one particular behavior of software. They rarely degrade over time (unless you manage to leak resources wildly). This makes it amenable to rapid trials, failures and corrections. The cost of experimentation is also minimal, since you don't lose hardware in the process. But in hardware projects, many flaws show up only after an extended period of testing. The trials and corrections are also costly and strenuous.
> They are searching for the cheapest route to achieve their goals.
You may have realized by now what I'm trying to convey. I'm not sure if the agile method is the cheapest route in space tech.
Presumably this was all well understood from history/experience before they applied Agile approaches to space launch. What changed that made this a plausible way to proceed? Some fundamental breakthrough or just Musk's deep pockets?
I don't think anything changed fundamentally. Honestly, the design methodology for any engineering project would evolve organically to be similar to NASA's methodology as its complexity grows. Despite how it looks, Falcon 9 is actually a very conservative design that doesn't depart much from this philosophy. They did everything possible to keep the complexity low and reliability high. Merlin is a simple open cycle engine utilizing pintle injectors. The propellant combination was well known. The vehicle materials and structures were similar to traditional designs. Pneumatic systems were favored in place of pyro systems to improve reusability. Even the vertical landing technology (VTOL) was demonstrated in the 1990s (although Falcon is the first one to land vertically after reentry). The designers were industry veterans utilizing NASA's help. And they took a long time to perfect the basic technologies and had already nailed the basic platform design by the time they started experimenting rapidly with high production rates and landing. Switching to agile mode wasn't a big problem at that stage.
Starship on the other hand, was very unconventional from the word go. Stainless steel structures, methane as fuel, full-flow staged combustion cycle engines with near-limit chamber pressures, cartwheel separation maneuver (which they ultimately abandoned in favor of hot staging, with a lot of ongoing issues), use of sea-level engines in space (on the second stage), the belly-down reentry and the final belly-flop maneuver by the starship, etc. There are more than a dozen things in there that nobody has tried before. It just seems like they have too many things on their plate. Musk's deep pockets did play a big role here. But I'm going to avoid speculating on it.
I have to ask if the world needs 365 $100mm fireworks each year.
Fortunately, the rules in well-functioning societies do not allow anyone other than the owner of something to decide how it should be used.
This very same individual was until recently trying to highlight frivolous government spending, surprisingly coming up short, obviously it'd be very cynical of me to suggest even a hint of hypocrisy let alone a conflict of interest so I'll leave it.
Sorry to burst your bubble on that, even if it is just carrying Starlink satellites it's still at public expense, not limited to the rocket itself but the infrastructure, and oversight from third parties.
The thing detonated from the top down... that was spectacular. Anomaly doesn't really describe that very well.
But on the other hand, this is a test programme and while I'm sure nobody at SpaceX is sanguine about this particular explosion, their philosophy is still leaning towards more-frequent higher-risk tests.
An explosion of this kind with SLS would be a catastrophe for that programme. For Starship it's a setback - but seems very unlikely to derail the programme in the same way. The costs of an individual Starship are dramatically lower than those for an SLS second stage.
The prize that SpaceX are reaching for is full reusability; achieving it would allow them to totally dominate the launch industry for at least a decade. It's worth a few detonations.
I think a lot of commentators are drawing too much pleasure from seeing Musk fail at his hobby (and, fair, he's a total areshole, I'm enjoying that a little too) to put this particular failure in its proper perspective. Now, if they have another failure or two, or particularly if they have similar failures with v3 then it will start to look like they might have a bigger problem - but for now this is just part of the price you pay for rapid iteration.
> the entire program regresses in on itself in terms of milestones.
The alternative would be looking at the competing programs from Boeing, Blue Origin, etc. It's not like they are hitting their milestones particularly well with their more traditional waterfall approach. The point of rapid iteration is that it is an inherently open ended process that has no milestones other than to launch the next iteration within weeks/months of the previous one. Which they have been doing fairly consistently.
If SpaceX gets starship in a launcheable and recoverable state, they'll still have many years of competing against competitors that have to rely on single launch vehicles exclusively. They would be very early to market. And there's a decent chance they might start nailing things with a few more launches.
Now they have regressed to blowing up on the pad during static testing.
Seems very different to me than the Falcon story, 100%. Granted, they had luck too.
Starship = regressing every flight.
This isn't hard to parse man.
Is Blue Origin following waterfall? Why would the founder of Amazon follow the polar opposite strategy of the rest of his businesses?
But there seems to be a lot of progress in reusable launcher development outside the US, mainly in China and apparently also among Japanese car manufacturers!