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SpaceX loses contact with Starship rocket after ninth test flight launch
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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Just for comparison, on their 9th test flight the Apollo program they had already successfully reached orbit 5 times.
The 9th test flight of the Soyuz was their 7th time reaching orbit.
Elon's 9th attempt is his second time reaching the bottom of the Indian ocean. Shows the level of proficiency in spacex.
As a comparison too SpaceX can launch Starship at least 6 more times before reaching the cost of a single Saturn V launch, I an not even talking about development cost.
Starship also did reach orbital velocity on several launches.
The goals are different.
There hasn't been a single one of elon's companies that delivered on promised prices.
Falcon 9 is more expensive than promised. His tunnels weren't cheaper. His cars are more expensive than promised. Cybertruck is over $100k when he promised under $40k at the launch.
Focus on what his companies can deliver. That is real. His fantasy rockets that would be superior in all ways do not exist.
It concerns me from a standpoint that is similar to Oceangate - the engineers are probably aware something is going wrong, but money is getting the final say. Then the people on one of these things end up dying, and it won't be Musk.
I'm also concerned because this lax approach to engineering is becoming more apparent in the private sector. Engineers have a very difficult job -traditionally balancing budget, schedule, and quality. But we also are vital in ensuring regulatory compliance, safety, disposal, process, efficiency etc.
Engineer salaries, however, have stagnated like the rest of American workers. It's true we still get paid better, but compared to how much the salary got you in the 80s-90s, we get much less.
Private sector engineers are largely not PEs as we're shielded by our employers. We are more worried about being laid off than fucking up a project to the point lives get risked.
Part of this is why I chose to no longer work on systems that can cause injuries/ harm to a user. If I'm doing that, I can assume I'm not alone. If those of us consciously avoiding it because of fears of hurting users, it might mean that the ones working on the systems aren't motivated by safety of the user.
The one good thing from oceangate was the fact that the CEO trusted his own life to his invention. He was in the sub when it imploded.
As stupid as he is, musk is unfortunately smart enough to know not to risk his own life in his own rockets.
he was use defective airplane parts as part of the hull, carbonfiber, instead of steel or titanium subs. he went supercheap, since his rides are 150k/per person. while the one james cameron was in was the titanium sub, which is 6-10mil per ride.
Oceangate, stockton basically cut corners on everything. hence he got killed by his owned hubris.
And while both of those programs weren't starting from zero, like Apollo learned from Mercury and Gemini, SpaceX should have learned from all of them.
spacex is also not starting from zero. They previously made the falcon 9.
They don't seem to be using what they learned from that, though.
The Saturn V's 9th flight was the third time it took humans to the moon...
~~Apollo 9~~ Apollo 8 went to the moon but they had multiple test flights prior to that numbering. Those are a more reasonable point of comparison.
Edit: I misremembered the number.
Apollo 9 did not go to the moon. It was earth orbit rendezvous practice with the command module and the lunar lander module. Apollo 8 flew to and around the moon. Apollo 10 flew to the moon and lowered the lander (but not to the surface) and rendezvoused with the command module. Apollo 11 was the first to land on the moon.
I believe this is the 4th (or is it 5th?) time starship successfully reached orbit too (just lacking an insertion burn which is on purpose for these tests). But it’s also important to keep in context the fact that starship and super heavy are so big, while trying to be completely reusable and be assembly lined. Very different goals, technology, and ideas happening between the generations. One starship launch intends to replace between 3 and 5 falcon 9 launches if they can nail down the reliability.
They still haven't tested it under the Artemis payload weights, either. They're testing with 17 ton payload and last year at the starship launch celebration Musk said starship is supposed to be capable of 50 ton payloads to LEO. For comparison SLS block 2 ~~can lift~~ will be able to lift 100 tons to LEO.
The Artemis HLS is supposed to be 110 tons to the lunar surface, but supposedly loaded up in like 12 launches.
I assume they're still a few years away from Starship being usable.
Artemis block 2 doesn't exist yet, so it would be more accurate to say it "will be able to" lift 100 tons.
The space shuttle was also big and reusable. It did not have issues like these during development.
Starship block 2 design is significantly larger than shuttle was. Total cargo volume is already multiples of what shuttle could carry to space and is set to get larger in future designs as early as block 3. Shuttle also rode on a largely one-shot SLS rocket that was a lot smaller (by volume) than super heavy. It had reusable SRBs that were recovered but refurbishment was essentially the same cost as new. Meanwhile they have already caught booster multiple times and reused one, beating SLS in just tests.
It’s important to remember that both super heavy and starship are two separate projects and testbeds doing their own range of things while being literally the largest thing ever built and launched. The carrying capacity to orbit and beyond is completely unprecedented.
People laugh at the fact that it will take ~15-20 super heavy launches to refill one starship in orbit. But if they pull it off, it will be the only platform capable of bringing up to ~200 tonnes of capacity to the moon and beyond. That’s way more than Saturn V. And eclipses what shuttle ever did. Again, all while attempting to be completely reusable.
Technically the booster/starship combo has yet to lift the tonnage that SLS already lifted with Artemis I.
It's obvious that it'll be cheaper per ton than SLS but It's still a little early to say what level of cost savings it has until we know how many tons super heavy and starship can actually lift. (The estimate SpaceX has been giving goes down by 50 tons every year)
starship's payload to orbit is zero. No matter what is promised, a rocket that can only deliver payloads destructively to the bottom of the indian ocean is not a valuable launch vehicle. There are far more cost effective ways of making artificial reefs.
If you've followed elon musk's projects you would know that the only thing he knows how to do is over-promise and under-deliver. It would be incredible if the things he's promised happened, but none of them ever do. This starship will not be the exception.
That's the thing though. NASA effectively deemed reuse an abject failure. They just sunk-cost their way through the SLS program until they couldn't get the budget needed to keep to keep it up anymore. Also, do we even need to mention Challenger and Columbia? Or Apollo 1?
Elon is no more than a front-man for the band that is SpaceX who is doing the real engineering and hard work on this insanely huge project. All those engineers and workers who put everything they have into it are what is making this possible. The nazi can fuck off and SpaceX will still be able to achieve these incredible goals.
I'd also like to provide another gentle reminder that the way SpaceX are going about designing, iterating, and testing is completely different from the approach NASA and others have taken traditionally. Even Blue Origin are doing it the "safe" way more or less and are still having tons of problems. This is an extremely difficult thing to do at all. What people like to highlight as failures and "haha bad" are kinda the point. This past launch they built out a whole new flight profile for super heavy that pushed it beyond its calculated and simulated limits, to see how it behaves, which is why they didn't attempt to catch this time.
While we don't have exact figures, your 15-20 is probably a bit high. 15 is probably the high end of the estimates.
There's that Smarter Every Day video that says something like 8-12 (joke is that with schedule slippage it's more like 20)
By schedule slippage do you mean they can't get them all up in time before it boils off too much and they need to do more?
Yea I think "8-12 launches" is the ideal with the launches being at a steady pace (not taking into account weather, launch problems requiring delays etc.)
Ah that does make sense then.
I think that is less about competence and more about a completely different style of work. I don’t want to sound like a fanboy, but it isn’t apples and apples. There were much more stringent testing standards for that program. SpaceX is all about throwing shit in the dryer on the fluff cycle and seeing what they scrape off the lint screen.