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'.
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.
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)
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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).
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Readit News
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)
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.
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.
Dead Comment
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.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.