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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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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.