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SpaceX will ‘hopefully’ launch first orbital Starship flight in January

63 points by hsnewman 5y ago

crakenzak 5y ago
The pace of which Elon & the SpaceX team continues to prototype and develop the Starship is beyond mind boggling to me — especially in contrast to the complete waste of taxpayer money that is the SLS. Yet again another example that the government is unbelievably inefficient and an incompetent manager of our taxes/public funds.
- garmaine 5y ago
  The government is extremely efficient and funneling taxpayer money to Boeing. That was the whole point of the SLS, no? The best rocket lobbyists could buy.
  - jaybrendansmith 5y ago
    Exactly. Government waste is laid at the foot of the Lobbyists from private companies. We need better laws on this, but good luck, all the politicians are bought and paid for. Meanwhile, the corrupt class of contractors milking the government claims that government is the problem. Find me an honest man in Washington, and I will show you a corpse.
    - garmaine 5y ago
      Kathy Lauder on the NASA side. But old aerospace made sure she got what was coming to her for the HLS contract.
- credit_guy 5y ago
  > the complete waste of taxpayer money that is the SLS. SLS is such if you see it as a space exploration program. If you see it as a qualified workforce preservation program, then it is quite successful. There's a chance it is exactly that. The US has built thousands, or maybe tens of thousands rockets capable of reaching space in the '60s, '70s, '80s and a bit in the '90s. The Trident II SLBM is an absolute marvel of technology, and it's probably unsurpassed even today, three decades after it was introduced. But what do you do with your workforce once you built all the rockets you need? Do you simply fire them all? What if there's some new development 20 years from now, some Chinese or Russian innovation (maybe hypersonic missiles? nuclear thermal rockets?) that destabilizes the balance of powers? You won't be able to flip a switch and bring all your engineers back to work to figure out some way to stay relevant. So what you do instead is you give them some pretend work. What you don't want is to turn that pretend work into real results, because those results is not what you are paying them for. You are just paying them to keep them around and a little busy, not to take you to the Moon.
  - aeternum 5y ago
    This would be more convincing if there weren't a major labor shortage right now. There are plenty of companies including aerospace companies where the skills of that qualified workforce could help move things forward.
    - credit_guy 5y ago
      It's a free country, those people are not slaves. Do you think they don't know how to write a resume, make a profile on LinkedIn, or get in touch with a recruiter?
      - aeternum 5y ago
        Change is hard, the status-quo can persist even if it leaves participants worse-off.
  - cameldrv 5y ago
    One problem with this strategy is that the sort of workforce you will attract to a make work project is much different than with an exciting new technology. If you're essentially telling your workers that what they're doing isn't very important, why would they bust their butts and make major sacrifices in their lives to do it (as SpaceX employees do)?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - mullingitover 5y ago
    > If you see it as a qualified workforce preservation program, then it is quite successful. There's a chance it is exactly that. This is my take on why we have such a huge automobile industry - it's not that the automobile is the best mass transit option, it's wildly inefficient, but having the manufacturing capacity for automobiles on tap keeps what's essentially a hot standby for a wartime manufacturing of tanks, etc. I think SLS is in the same boat, we have it operating inefficiently for civilian purposes, but it's a hot standby in case we need to manufacture a lot of ICBMs in short order.
- aeternum 5y ago
  It's crazy that we are still funding the non-reusable SLS. Promoting competition makes sense but reusability is now proven and should be a requirement. Funding would be better spent with Blue Origin or the many other smaller companies that have demonstrated reusability or a path to it.
  - warning26 5y ago
    > Funding would be better spent with Blue Origin Funding Blue Origin is basically the same as SLS at this point -- creating JOBS but not, you know, rockets or what is actually supposed to be paid for.
    - JoshCole 5y ago
      If Blue Origin isn't building rockets why is there a video of a reusable rocket being launched which has Blue Origin branding on it on the Blue Origin YouTube channel? [1] [1]: https://youtu.be/ZUZZ0EDzII0?t=4913 https://youtu.be/ZUZZ0EDzII0?t=4913
      - rtsil 5y ago
        Anybody can make a video. A rocket, let alone a reusable one, appears to be harder.
        JoshCole 5y ago
        I asked the rhetorical question because the claim that they don't make rockets is obviously false and the evidence that they do is easily found. I think it is worthwhile when people make false claims to counter those claims with the truth, overcoming darkness with light. Stoking anger with falsehood is folly.
      - mrjangles 5y ago
        Blue origin was formed 20 years ago. They have never delivered a single orbital class product. There are currently around 5 privately run space companies that have produced orbital class rockets that have flown, or will fly this year (Firefly Space, Spacex, Relativity Space, Virgin Orbit, Rocketlab... and probably others I don't know about). Every one of these companies took about 6 years to develop their rocket from scratch. That thing in the video is essentially just a spaceplane. It has about 1/100th the amount of energy needed to reach orbit. It isn't comparable to any of the companies mentioned above. Blue origin has had billions of dollars pumped into it and has produced nothing.
- boringg 5y ago
  So what you fail to understand and much of the "govt waste" argument also fails to understand is that the government has funded the basic research and incredible high risk capital to do any the projects in the first place. With out the decades of work and capital that the R&D programs have built in this country none of SpaceX would be possible. Everything that Elon has done has been piggybacked on the heavy lifting of the government. Most of all climate technology, space tech and the internet has been developed off their back and productionized (ie most of the technology is de-risked thanks to the fundamental research from the government). This, frankly, unintelligent argument that the government is a waste of resources probably better represents your understanding of how difficult technology gets funded in the US. Critical word here is difficult (not some ad-tech SAS company). FWIW the government has a ton of inefficiencies but their goal isn't to productionize something and turn it into a business.
  - thereisnospork 5y ago
    Basic research has nothing to do with the pork barrel boondoggle that is the SLS. SpaceX in the last decade has dramatically outdone NASA et. al[0] to the point of embarrassment. If building rockets and going to space was a football game, NASA vs. SpaceX is looking like Cumberland vs. Georgia Tech (0-222). Frankly as someone who is on 'team USA' I'd like us to suck a lot less at building rockets[1]. [0]Who not only also benefit from all the same basic research, but have more direct and firsthand access. [1]Among other things.
    - sumtechguy 5y ago
      Elon is hyper focused on one task. Go to mars. Everything he is doing is that. Orbital network so you can talk to each other. Boring company to dig places to live as the surface is probably too harsh. Electric vehicles and solar to move around the surface. Reusable rockets to dramatically lower the costs going there and back. To move the amount of material to build a city there is going to be daunting the rocket cost was one of the large outliers. Think he said that cost had to come down 10-20x for him to make this happen. SpaceX is doing research and they are willing to blow up rockets to do that. NASA seems to have lost the taste for that years ago.
- MangoCoffee 5y ago
  https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/revealed-the-secret-notes-of-blue-origin-leaders-trying-to-catch-spacex/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/revealed-the-secret-... the take away for me from this article is SpaceX's appoarch is like software development. fail often and fail fast, stock options for employees to retain talents. i also believe Elon's vision for Mars paint a goal for SpaceX employees and Gwynne Shotwell. She is the force behind SpaceX.
  - deepsun 5y ago
    Soviets tried that approach with their Moon robotic landing. I mean landings. The heads of that effort were mostly military generals from artillery, who used to test by firing it. After a few unsuccessful launches (sometimes at the very late stages during moon landing, and sometimes fully capable drone got just blown up on launchpad), they realized they need to change the strategy and test rigorously on land every small piece.
    - panick21_ 5y ago
      SpaceX does that and have always done. SpaceX was famous in the industry for test firing. SpaceX has early on internalized a lot of iterative testing, testing in the small and then testing in the large. The Soviets moon rocket was the opposite, they build engines and only did sample testing because they used non-reusable pyros on the rocket. Those engines also couldn't restart.
- crate_barre 5y ago
  Well hold on now, what about the pace of government funded space programs in the 60s and 70s? Government became mired and slow over time as the means of capturing money from tax payers became more routine. It’s entirely possible the private sector will get mired in the same way over time. Things ebb and flow like this. Healthcare in this country is mired due to the private sector, and can only really flow the other way due to government. It’s a natural cycle. Once something becomes a money printing machine, all parties involved naturally want to keep it the same money printing machine (it prints money for god’s sake). Once private space ventures print money in a predictable way, the pace in which an Elon will move forward will stop (or such an Elon will cease to be involved, ala your Bezos and Google founders, gone from their money printing machine at this point).
  - mrjangles 5y ago
    Actually the government space program was mired and slow in the 50s as Werner von Braun was walled out of the main programs because he was unpopular among the bureaucrats. It was only after the success of the Soviet space program that the US government got worried and decided things needed to change. They put von Braun in charge an the rest is history. The lessons one learns from this isn't that he government is good at science. The lessons are that great individuals produced just about every great thing humanity has, and the best way to empower individuals in through the private sector, rather then having them bogged down in the bureaucracy. The other lesson is something that most totalitarian regimes in history worked out pretty quick: that an all powerful governments can only function well when it has an enemy. It is something in human nature that we fight among ourselves and are happy to corrupt and ruin things for our own benefit. It is only when faced with an enemy that the human instinct to work together for survival kicks in.
    - inglor_cz 5y ago
      This had a mirror situation in the East. Korolev was a genius engineer. He was also a workaholic who would not relent until he got first class components for his rockets, even if it involved bitter fights with ossified Soviet industry. When he died, his peers Glushko and Chelomei could not really replace him. After Korolev's death, innovation in Soviet space program slowed down and they lost the edge.
- rndmind 5y ago
  You speak in absolutes, but the world is not black and white. Look at the publicly funded Bell Labs in the 1940's - 1970's They invented everything from the transister, tcp/ip, C language, satellites, cellphones, and the list goes on ... they were not-for-profit because the government allowed ma bell to be a government sponsored monopoly. Look at that incredible work done, which would not have occurred if they had been forced to churn a profit each and every quarter. It is a tragedy what happened to Bell Labs when they finally were cut off from being a non-profit in he mid 1970's. The shell of Bell Labs remains, iirc the buildings are now owned by Nokia, but it is a very sad result for the company that pioneered our modern society. A great book on Bell Labs is called The Idea Factory, highly recommend that.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    Bell Labs were owned by Western Electric and AT&T. AFAIK they weren't directly public funded. You can argue that AT&T being a monopoly amounted to indirect help, but that still does not it itself generate enough money for research itself, neither does it ensure that the entity will be even willing to do and finance more research than absolutely necessary. They could have spent all the revenue on executive bonuses and campaign contributions to their congressmen.
  - mrjangles 5y ago
    What on earth? Bell Labs wasn't publicly funded. Talk about turning things around. Bells Labs is the best example of the universal rule that just about every good piece of science for the last 70 years was produced by the private sector. Every time I see something along the lines of "<so and so> tech wouldn't exist without government funding because...." I do some research and it turns out that the article was based on one person working for the government who contributed about 1/100'th of the important work, meanwhile the other 99% of the work being done by the private sector doesn't get mentioned. Sometimes the government also takes credit because they funded 50 million out of a 5 billion dollar budget, or something equally ridiculous. As for Bell Labs, I remember watching a documentary about Shockley and co inventing the transistor. The military decided they needed that technology and managed to get their hands on some samples from Bell Labs. They set up a team to try to work out what Bell Labs was doing. Even having all of the Bell Lab's work in front of them, and knowing what to do, they couldn't keep up. They interviewed the military scientists much later for the documentary and they were all very depressed by the whole situation because for every one month of work the military group did catching up, Bell Labs had pulled 3 months further ahead. The government can't even keep up with the private sector when they are copying them, let alone actually initiating that kind of research. It isn't a coincidence that almost all the best research in the world is done at privately run American universities. At best, good research can get done at public universities when they receive industry funding.
warning26 5y ago
Looking forward to it! If they can get Starship working, it will completely change the game for not just super heavy lift boosters, but access to space in general. Good luck, SpaceX! I hope that everyone else copies your approach (assuming it works).
thuccess129 5y ago
> ... especially in contrast to the complete waste of taxpayer money that is the SLS. Time to chop down the knowledge trees of economic theory and bureaucratic budget proceduralism. Crazy to think of all those 1960s concepts left on the drawing board in the U. S. A. meanwhile Communists in China were subsisting in caves.
dave333 5y ago
NASA should have a crash (NPI) program to re-booster most of its missions on reusable boosters. And reimagine its goals in the light of the vastly cheaper cost of mass to orbit (that will likely soon be) achieved by Starship. Of course pork barrel projects die hard so it may take some technical or economic setback to deliver the coup de grace.
panick21_ 5y ago
Its really amazing to see, in 2016 people basically called Musk crazy and the whole vehicle was consider insane. Re-usability was just beginning and the 'its never be economical' was still widely believed. In interviews with people form places like ESA/Arianespace, ULA and co they were still basically totally patronizing towards SpaceX and them not understanding the 'real' difficulty and so on. BlueOrigin was gone have all that funding and beat SpaceX to methane, staged-combustion and so on. BlueOrigin would be a 'second mover' and would bring a large high performance rocket to market take SpaceX cake. This rocket is now delayed to 2023 and some people question even that year. Ariane 6 has been delayed years and might launch next year, with some now fearing it will slip to 2023. Apparently this amazing company so superior to 'upstart' SpaceX can't even make a slightly upgraded Ariane 5 less then 8 years despite the different engine being in development for decades. Not to mention this slightly updated non-reusable Ariane 6 cost 4-5 billion $ to develop. Continuing to fly Ariane 5 would have been cheaper. ULA Vulcan also delayed to at some point in 2022, flight engines are not yet even in testing. SLS, was once going beat Falcon Heavy to Orbit and is now delayed to 2022 and maybe slipping towards mid-22. Even if it achieves that it wont fly again for a long time. The amazing upper stage EUS has been frozen because the development is so expensive, you can't pay for EUS at the same time. EUS would be an additional 5 billion at least and take another 5 year at least. Some Russian commentators were talking like the Angara was gone be the next big thing even. Now Starship has the chance and honestly a high likelihood to beat all of these other rockets to Orbit. That is really a staggering achievement.

63 points by hsnewman 5y ago

The pace of which Elon & the SpaceX team continues to prototype and develop the Starship is beyond mind boggling to me — especially in contrast to the complete waste of taxpayer money that is the SLS. Yet again another example that the government is unbelievably inefficient and an incompetent manager of our taxes/public funds.

garmaine 5y ago
The government is extremely efficient and funneling taxpayer money to Boeing. That was the whole point of the SLS, no? The best rocket lobbyists could buy.
- jaybrendansmith 5y ago
  Exactly. Government waste is laid at the foot of the Lobbyists from private companies. We need better laws on this, but good luck, all the politicians are bought and paid for. Meanwhile, the corrupt class of contractors milking the government claims that government is the problem. Find me an honest man in Washington, and I will show you a corpse.
  - garmaine 5y ago
    Kathy Lauder on the NASA side. But old aerospace made sure she got what was coming to her for the HLS contract.
credit_guy 5y ago
> the complete waste of taxpayer money that is the SLS. SLS is such if you see it as a space exploration program. If you see it as a qualified workforce preservation program, then it is quite successful. There's a chance it is exactly that. The US has built thousands, or maybe tens of thousands rockets capable of reaching space in the '60s, '70s, '80s and a bit in the '90s. The Trident II SLBM is an absolute marvel of technology, and it's probably unsurpassed even today, three decades after it was introduced. But what do you do with your workforce once you built all the rockets you need? Do you simply fire them all? What if there's some new development 20 years from now, some Chinese or Russian innovation (maybe hypersonic missiles? nuclear thermal rockets?) that destabilizes the balance of powers? You won't be able to flip a switch and bring all your engineers back to work to figure out some way to stay relevant. So what you do instead is you give them some pretend work. What you don't want is to turn that pretend work into real results, because those results is not what you are paying them for. You are just paying them to keep them around and a little busy, not to take you to the Moon.
- aeternum 5y ago
  This would be more convincing if there weren't a major labor shortage right now. There are plenty of companies including aerospace companies where the skills of that qualified workforce could help move things forward.
  - credit_guy 5y ago
    It's a free country, those people are not slaves. Do you think they don't know how to write a resume, make a profile on LinkedIn, or get in touch with a recruiter?
    - aeternum 5y ago
      Change is hard, the status-quo can persist even if it leaves participants worse-off.
- cameldrv 5y ago
  One problem with this strategy is that the sort of workforce you will attract to a make work project is much different than with an exciting new technology. If you're essentially telling your workers that what they're doing isn't very important, why would they bust their butts and make major sacrifices in their lives to do it (as SpaceX employees do)?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- mullingitover 5y ago
  > If you see it as a qualified workforce preservation program, then it is quite successful. There's a chance it is exactly that. This is my take on why we have such a huge automobile industry - it's not that the automobile is the best mass transit option, it's wildly inefficient, but having the manufacturing capacity for automobiles on tap keeps what's essentially a hot standby for a wartime manufacturing of tanks, etc. I think SLS is in the same boat, we have it operating inefficiently for civilian purposes, but it's a hot standby in case we need to manufacture a lot of ICBMs in short order.
aeternum 5y ago
It's crazy that we are still funding the non-reusable SLS. Promoting competition makes sense but reusability is now proven and should be a requirement. Funding would be better spent with Blue Origin or the many other smaller companies that have demonstrated reusability or a path to it.
- warning26 5y ago
  > Funding would be better spent with Blue Origin Funding Blue Origin is basically the same as SLS at this point -- creating JOBS but not, you know, rockets or what is actually supposed to be paid for.
  - JoshCole 5y ago
    If Blue Origin isn't building rockets why is there a video of a reusable rocket being launched which has Blue Origin branding on it on the Blue Origin YouTube channel? [1] [1]: https://youtu.be/ZUZZ0EDzII0?t=4913 https://youtu.be/ZUZZ0EDzII0?t=4913
    - rtsil 5y ago
      Anybody can make a video. A rocket, let alone a reusable one, appears to be harder.
      - JoshCole 5y ago
        I asked the rhetorical question because the claim that they don't make rockets is obviously false and the evidence that they do is easily found. I think it is worthwhile when people make false claims to counter those claims with the truth, overcoming darkness with light. Stoking anger with falsehood is folly.
    - mrjangles 5y ago
      Blue origin was formed 20 years ago. They have never delivered a single orbital class product. There are currently around 5 privately run space companies that have produced orbital class rockets that have flown, or will fly this year (Firefly Space, Spacex, Relativity Space, Virgin Orbit, Rocketlab... and probably others I don't know about). Every one of these companies took about 6 years to develop their rocket from scratch. That thing in the video is essentially just a spaceplane. It has about 1/100th the amount of energy needed to reach orbit. It isn't comparable to any of the companies mentioned above. Blue origin has had billions of dollars pumped into it and has produced nothing.
boringg 5y ago
So what you fail to understand and much of the "govt waste" argument also fails to understand is that the government has funded the basic research and incredible high risk capital to do any the projects in the first place. With out the decades of work and capital that the R&D programs have built in this country none of SpaceX would be possible. Everything that Elon has done has been piggybacked on the heavy lifting of the government. Most of all climate technology, space tech and the internet has been developed off their back and productionized (ie most of the technology is de-risked thanks to the fundamental research from the government). This, frankly, unintelligent argument that the government is a waste of resources probably better represents your understanding of how difficult technology gets funded in the US. Critical word here is difficult (not some ad-tech SAS company). FWIW the government has a ton of inefficiencies but their goal isn't to productionize something and turn it into a business.
- thereisnospork 5y ago
  Basic research has nothing to do with the pork barrel boondoggle that is the SLS. SpaceX in the last decade has dramatically outdone NASA et. al[0] to the point of embarrassment. If building rockets and going to space was a football game, NASA vs. SpaceX is looking like Cumberland vs. Georgia Tech (0-222). Frankly as someone who is on 'team USA' I'd like us to suck a lot less at building rockets[1]. [0]Who not only also benefit from all the same basic research, but have more direct and firsthand access. [1]Among other things.
  - sumtechguy 5y ago
    Elon is hyper focused on one task. Go to mars. Everything he is doing is that. Orbital network so you can talk to each other. Boring company to dig places to live as the surface is probably too harsh. Electric vehicles and solar to move around the surface. Reusable rockets to dramatically lower the costs going there and back. To move the amount of material to build a city there is going to be daunting the rocket cost was one of the large outliers. Think he said that cost had to come down 10-20x for him to make this happen. SpaceX is doing research and they are willing to blow up rockets to do that. NASA seems to have lost the taste for that years ago.
MangoCoffee 5y ago
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/revealed-the-secret-notes-of-blue-origin-leaders-trying-to-catch-spacex/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/revealed-the-secret-... the take away for me from this article is SpaceX's appoarch is like software development. fail often and fail fast, stock options for employees to retain talents. i also believe Elon's vision for Mars paint a goal for SpaceX employees and Gwynne Shotwell. She is the force behind SpaceX.
- deepsun 5y ago
  Soviets tried that approach with their Moon robotic landing. I mean landings. The heads of that effort were mostly military generals from artillery, who used to test by firing it. After a few unsuccessful launches (sometimes at the very late stages during moon landing, and sometimes fully capable drone got just blown up on launchpad), they realized they need to change the strategy and test rigorously on land every small piece.
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    SpaceX does that and have always done. SpaceX was famous in the industry for test firing. SpaceX has early on internalized a lot of iterative testing, testing in the small and then testing in the large. The Soviets moon rocket was the opposite, they build engines and only did sample testing because they used non-reusable pyros on the rocket. Those engines also couldn't restart.
crate_barre 5y ago
Well hold on now, what about the pace of government funded space programs in the 60s and 70s? Government became mired and slow over time as the means of capturing money from tax payers became more routine. It’s entirely possible the private sector will get mired in the same way over time. Things ebb and flow like this. Healthcare in this country is mired due to the private sector, and can only really flow the other way due to government. It’s a natural cycle. Once something becomes a money printing machine, all parties involved naturally want to keep it the same money printing machine (it prints money for god’s sake). Once private space ventures print money in a predictable way, the pace in which an Elon will move forward will stop (or such an Elon will cease to be involved, ala your Bezos and Google founders, gone from their money printing machine at this point).
- mrjangles 5y ago
  Actually the government space program was mired and slow in the 50s as Werner von Braun was walled out of the main programs because he was unpopular among the bureaucrats. It was only after the success of the Soviet space program that the US government got worried and decided things needed to change. They put von Braun in charge an the rest is history. The lessons one learns from this isn't that he government is good at science. The lessons are that great individuals produced just about every great thing humanity has, and the best way to empower individuals in through the private sector, rather then having them bogged down in the bureaucracy. The other lesson is something that most totalitarian regimes in history worked out pretty quick: that an all powerful governments can only function well when it has an enemy. It is something in human nature that we fight among ourselves and are happy to corrupt and ruin things for our own benefit. It is only when faced with an enemy that the human instinct to work together for survival kicks in.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    This had a mirror situation in the East. Korolev was a genius engineer. He was also a workaholic who would not relent until he got first class components for his rockets, even if it involved bitter fights with ossified Soviet industry. When he died, his peers Glushko and Chelomei could not really replace him. After Korolev's death, innovation in Soviet space program slowed down and they lost the edge.
rndmind 5y ago
You speak in absolutes, but the world is not black and white. Look at the publicly funded Bell Labs in the 1940's - 1970's They invented everything from the transister, tcp/ip, C language, satellites, cellphones, and the list goes on ... they were not-for-profit because the government allowed ma bell to be a government sponsored monopoly. Look at that incredible work done, which would not have occurred if they had been forced to churn a profit each and every quarter. It is a tragedy what happened to Bell Labs when they finally were cut off from being a non-profit in he mid 1970's. The shell of Bell Labs remains, iirc the buildings are now owned by Nokia, but it is a very sad result for the company that pioneered our modern society. A great book on Bell Labs is called The Idea Factory, highly recommend that.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  Bell Labs were owned by Western Electric and AT&T. AFAIK they weren't directly public funded. You can argue that AT&T being a monopoly amounted to indirect help, but that still does not it itself generate enough money for research itself, neither does it ensure that the entity will be even willing to do and finance more research than absolutely necessary. They could have spent all the revenue on executive bonuses and campaign contributions to their congressmen.
- mrjangles 5y ago
  What on earth? Bell Labs wasn't publicly funded. Talk about turning things around. Bells Labs is the best example of the universal rule that just about every good piece of science for the last 70 years was produced by the private sector. Every time I see something along the lines of "<so and so> tech wouldn't exist without government funding because...." I do some research and it turns out that the article was based on one person working for the government who contributed about 1/100'th of the important work, meanwhile the other 99% of the work being done by the private sector doesn't get mentioned. Sometimes the government also takes credit because they funded 50 million out of a 5 billion dollar budget, or something equally ridiculous. As for Bell Labs, I remember watching a documentary about Shockley and co inventing the transistor. The military decided they needed that technology and managed to get their hands on some samples from Bell Labs. They set up a team to try to work out what Bell Labs was doing. Even having all of the Bell Lab's work in front of them, and knowing what to do, they couldn't keep up. They interviewed the military scientists much later for the documentary and they were all very depressed by the whole situation because for every one month of work the military group did catching up, Bell Labs had pulled 3 months further ahead. The government can't even keep up with the private sector when they are copying them, let alone actually initiating that kind of research. It isn't a coincidence that almost all the best research in the world is done at privately run American universities. At best, good research can get done at public universities when they receive industry funding.

warning26 5y ago

Looking forward to it! If they can get Starship working, it will completely change the game for not just super heavy lift boosters, but access to space in general. Good luck, SpaceX! I hope that everyone else copies your approach (assuming it works).

thuccess129 5y ago

> ... especially in contrast to the complete waste of taxpayer money that is the SLS. Time to chop down the knowledge trees of economic theory and bureaucratic budget proceduralism. Crazy to think of all those 1960s concepts left on the drawing board in the U. S. A. meanwhile Communists in China were subsisting in caves.

dave333 5y ago

NASA should have a crash (NPI) program to re-booster most of its missions on reusable boosters. And reimagine its goals in the light of the vastly cheaper cost of mass to orbit (that will likely soon be) achieved by Starship. Of course pork barrel projects die hard so it may take some technical or economic setback to deliver the coup de grace.

panick21_ 5y ago

Its really amazing to see, in 2016 people basically called Musk crazy and the whole vehicle was consider insane. Re-usability was just beginning and the 'its never be economical' was still widely believed. In interviews with people form places like ESA/Arianespace, ULA and co they were still basically totally patronizing towards SpaceX and them not understanding the 'real' difficulty and so on. BlueOrigin was gone have all that funding and beat SpaceX to methane, staged-combustion and so on. BlueOrigin would be a 'second mover' and would bring a large high performance rocket to market take SpaceX cake. This rocket is now delayed to 2023 and some people question even that year. Ariane 6 has been delayed years and might launch next year, with some now fearing it will slip to 2023. Apparently this amazing company so superior to 'upstart' SpaceX can't even make a slightly upgraded Ariane 5 less then 8 years despite the different engine being in development for decades. Not to mention this slightly updated non-reusable Ariane 6 cost 4-5 billion $ to develop. Continuing to fly Ariane 5 would have been cheaper. ULA Vulcan also delayed to at some point in 2022, flight engines are not yet even in testing. SLS, was once going beat Falcon Heavy to Orbit and is now delayed to 2022 and maybe slipping towards mid-22. Even if it achieves that it wont fly again for a long time. The amazing upper stage EUS has been frozen because the development is so expensive, you can't pay for EUS at the same time. EUS would be an additional 5 billion at least and take another 5 year at least. Some Russian commentators were talking like the Angara was gone be the next big thing even. Now Starship has the chance and honestly a high likelihood to beat all of these other rockets to Orbit. That is really a staggering achievement.