216 ms·

I believe the general consensus of the informed is that Starship is going to take years longer than originally predicted. There's a history of this. Case in poi

by jmyeet 5y ago

I believe the general consensus of the informed is that Starship is going to take years longer than originally predicted. There's a history of this. Case in point: Falcon Heavy. It ended up being delayed so long that improvements in the Merlin engine greatly reduced the payloads that Falcon Heavy was originally built for to the point there are a couple of launches a year at best. Musk does deserve a lot of credit for SpaceX. The Falcon 9 vehicle is arguably the most reliable launch system we've ever made [1]. It's cheap to produce and launch. It's even cheaper once you factor in reuse. Starlink will probably be a game changer for many (but it isn't yet). But that doesn't matter because Starlink is driving down launch costs (with reuse) and improving the Falcon 9 track record. All of this for <$20B in investment, which is about the development cost of SLS. SLS hasn't even launched yet and will probably cost ~$1B/launch anyway. And it's not just an issue of throwing money at the problem. Blue Origin has had just as much money thrown at it and was founded years before SpaceX yet it still hasn't reached orbit and its BE-4 engines have been delayed years. Starship is incredibly ambitious but if it doesn't reach orbit before 2025 I won't be surprised. [1]: https://www.thespacetechie.com/falcon-9-the-most-loved-rocket https://www.thespacetechie.com/falcon-9-the-most-loved-rocke...

chipsa 5y ago
Falcon Heavy was repeatedly delayed, but as you mentioned, Falcon 9 got repeatedly upgraded during that same time. They decided to allocate the resources to 9 instead of Heavy. However, they're not going to be doing that with Starship. I think they'll get it orbital before the end of 2024.
gameswithgo 5y ago
It will get to orbit way before 2025. That just isn't that hard. Maybe 2025 before both parts land from oribt.
- phkahler 5y ago
  Yeah, I think if they wanted to launch disposable starships they could do that right now and probably for lower cost than SLS. But just like SLS there isn't much market for a billion dollar ultra-heavy payload launch. It would be a waste of time to even demo that.
go_elmo 5y ago
Getting to orbit isnt the hard part having reliable engines (tested) and rocket (also tested), its returning in a state allowing for rapid reusability / not already having a RUD on deorbiting. I would be extremely surprised if any heat shield system manages a few flights without significant inspection / replacement.
thereddaikon 5y ago
The reason Falcon Heavy was delayed is because it is based on Falcon 9 which was still rapidly evolving. They couldn't decide on a spec to freeze it on and begin serious development because of how much F9 was improving. By the time it slowed down enough to begin work on FH, F9's performance and started to cover some of FH's originally envelope. I don't think it was really a case of Elon time as much as F9 proved to have a lot more room for development than they thought. Starship is a different can of worms. Its radical and innovative in many ways so there are a lot of work that needs to be done. This is definitely where Elon mis estimated how long it would take. It took them nearly a year to get the fuel tanks right. Then it took them a few prototypes to prove the belly flop concept. I wouldn't be surprised if the same proves to be true for the heat shield. The easiest part about Starship is the booster because its not doing anything F9 isn't already. Just at a much larger scale. That of course isn't easy either. But it does but things into perspective somewhat. And after all of that, my money is still on it beating SLS to orbit. Starship may be audacious but SLS's goal was never to get into space. In fact the longer they can drag it out the better it serves its purpose as a social welfare program.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  Naive question: "The easiest part about Starship is the booster because its not doing anything F9 isn't already. Just at a much larger scale." Why is it in general required, to design a new, more heavy rocket - and not "just scale" up an existing design? I mean, "just scaling up" means a different build process and this alone could probably prevent it when, using off the shelf solutions and not build everything yourself (screws and cables included), but are there other fundamental reasons, why usually a redesign is required?
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    > Why is it in general required, to design a new, more heavy rocket - and not "just scale" up an existing design? Because defense contractors make a lot more money for the new one.
    - mcguire 5y ago
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
Exactly who formed this "general consensus"?
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  Elon Musk himself. He estimates like software engineers - best case, "if nothing goes wrong" sort of stuff. Very much a known phenomenon, to the point it even has a name. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=elon%20time https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=elon%20time https://elontime.io/ https://elontime.io/
- jmyeet 5y ago
  It's really the people who are left after you eliminate all the irrational Elon haters and the rabid fan boys.
  - qsdf38100 5y ago
    What about the rational haters?
chriswarbo 5y ago
What's also interesting about Falcon 9 is that it didn't need to figure out landing and re-use before it was performing commercial missions in an expendable fashion. Once the payloads had separated, SpaceX were free to experiment with the boosters; until they eventually figured out reliable landings, and could start re-launching used boosters. I imagine a similar thing will happen with Starship: once it reaches orbit, I wouldn't be surprised if each subsequent mission was full of Starlink satellites (and perhaps other payloads, from brave customers!); even if it takes a long time to get reliable re-entry, re-fuelling, landing, etc.
- jmyeet 5y ago
  Falcon 9 reuse means expendable Starships probably will never be a thing (IMHO). Why? Economics. The Falcon 9 can get ~22t to LEO. Starship is planned for ~100t. If the net cost of a Falcon 9 launch (factoring in reuse) is $20m then that puts an effective cap of $100m on the cost of a Starship launch. You can still launch beyond that but it means you're doing so for non-economic reasons. This could be range (eg geosynchronous or Moon orbit instead of LEO) or larger payloads. Falcon Heavy launches seem to be pretty much exclusively military payloads to high orbits that the Falcon 9 just can't carry. People forget that payloads are deeply coupled to the launch system. Starship will ultimately allow a much larger payload (eg think of JWST 2.0 but with way less complexity) but that will take years for the industry to adapt to, possibly a decade or more. Starlink exists in part because the launch demand for getting payloads into space just doesn't exist otherwise. Cheaper launch costs will ultimately create more use cases (because they're now economic) but this will take time too. Starships may be lost in attempting to land but I honestly believe that attempted landing and reuse will be there from day one.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    Falcon 9 has a launch velocity limit imposed by the throwaway second stage. Starship can be more expensive and still make sense if you want to launch a lot of payloads quickly. That said, SpaceX is targeting $10M for a Starship launch early on, with aspirations of bringing that down towards a single million. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-spacex-starship-rocket-update-flight-cost-million-2022-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-spacex-starship-ro...
xoa 5y ago
>I believe the general consensus of the informed is that Starship is going to take years longer than originally predicted. Are you joking? That isn't even vaguely the "general consensus of the informed", at best it's "wishful thinking by old space types who are seeing the real time overturning of their gravy train". Frankly, at this point the major risk factors as far as getting to orbit are done. Raptor works and generates plenty of thrust. Starship can go up, complete a bellflop maneuver, and then land. And under harder conditions, they did an extremely aggressive fast landing to save fuel, much higher g's then they have to. The only critical component to save in SS/SH is the SH booster, which is where most of the expense is in terms of lots of Raptor engines. However, that's also the easiest part technically speaking, it just goes up and straight down again and SpaceX has proven capability to do that obviously. In fact fundamentally it's easier than F9. SH will have a minimum empty TWR (thrust/weight ratio) below 1, which means it's capable of hovering. F9 doesn't, so when they light up empty even a single engine on minimum throttle it'll still be heading right back up again. That's why they need the "hover slam" landing procedure, where they very carefully time things so that downward velocity and thrust counteract at exactly the landing height. Steel is easy to work with and more reliable. People have this notion that "bigger is harder" but that's no in fact always true. And SpaceX has engineered every last bit about Starship as part of an overall self-reinforcing system. It's cheap to iterate. Mass manufacturing has been a core part of the plan from day 1. So they can be hardware rich, cheaply. Flight is also engineered to be cheap, from the materials in construction to the construction procedures themselves and right down to the fuel (RP-1 rocket grade kerosene is quite pricey, methane is not). And they can self-bootstrap thanks to Starlink. SpaceX can look at a true MVP: all they have to do to start iterating is launch SS/SH and recover SH, it's fine to have SS be fully expended while they figure things out and it will still be cheaper/kg (maybe even cheaper outright!) than F9. So they can be making money off it very fast, and then make more money once SS is landing too. They can do initial proof with their own payload, then riskier commercial payload, then full commercial, then manned, ironing out issues with actual real flight the entire way. So what's revolutionary about Starship isn't merely the vehicle itself, but the entire system around the vehicle including the fact that "the vehicle" can pretty rapidly evolve and get tweaked. There's a history of this. Case in point: Falcon Heavy. It ended up being delayed so long that improvements in the Merlin engine greatly reduced the payloads that Falcon Heavy was originally built for to the point there are a couple of launches a year at best. No, you've got this completely backwards. The rapid iteration and increasing power of the F9 negated the initial economic proposition for Falcon Heavy, so they just didn't need to bother and put it on the backburner until F9 was fully baked. Then they didn't devote much more resources to FH because Starship will completely obsolete it anyway.
DisjointedHunt 5y ago
HN is great. "For the informed" comments like this with absolutely no substance or information from the past two years of progress at Starbase. They achieved the highest chamber pressure for a full flow staged combustion engine. . . . EVER. They've flown and landed upper stage prototypes, achieved an engine production capacity that not even China or any state power in the WORLD has managed in the history of humanity and account for a significant portion of global payload to orbit right now. They've developed an in house metal alloy that allows for temperatures in the turbine and combustion chamber to reach levels that the United States Government considered "Impossible" during the cold war and one so exotic that only like 4 engines have ever been built in all of human history. The only one of those engines to leave the test stand is . . .the Raptor. They develop and build their own heat tiles and have achieved significant output capacity in the past two years. The support system at the launch site which includes the launch tower, grappling arms, fuel stores etc are in very advanced stages at the moment and certainly ready to handle a steady stream of iterative full flight tests. All this IN PARALLEL !! The weight of the booster through iterative design has been steadily coming down as well, the engine ISP and chamber pressure has been rising in insane steps to the point where it is already amongst the best rocket engines known. Complexity of the engine build has visibly come down in the past few months alone. Each of these items by themselves take YEARS and were similarly expected to take YEARS even when Spacex started work on them. They're much further along than many people thought they would be two years ago. There is a lot of juicy detail in the three part video that the Everyday Astronaut did with Elon Musk at Starbase, i'd urge the people interested in this thread to go watch that instead of the armchair idiocy of either the OP or myself and make up your own minds.
- kranke155 5y ago
  HN is full of rich techies who suffer from confirmation bias who think they know everything since they are in the top 1% of earning power, even though the truth is most of them are of average intelligence.
  - lief79 5y ago
    Unfortunately, I suspect you might over estimate average intelligence. I do hope I'm wrong.
tempnow987 5y ago
SLS is more like $4-5B per launch including sustaining costs. If you gave spaceX that money they could move whatever the equivalent needed mass was to orbit today on existing F9 solutions. And they could do EXPENDABLE starships (or different upper stages) that would absolutely CRUSH SLS. Take the heatshield off and fly a cargo variant of the upper stage - for $4B per launch they would be raking it in.
Buttons840 5y ago
Interesting observations about the sunk costs vs achievements. Makes me wonder if just starting over really is the best approach at times.
mips_avatar 5y ago
Starlink already is a game changer. The comparisons with cable/fiber are besides the point. For my family in Montana it enabled movie streaming, that's a big leap forward.
Veedrac 5y ago
2025 doesn't make sense. SpaceX has a Raptor 2 run-rate of 250/yr today, and they're ramping up, so you're talking about them sitting on around 750 engines, or about 18 full Starship stacks on the low end. The only way things would take that long is if they had a severe blanket roadblock like having to move their entire production somewhere else and spin it up from the beginning. Musk's time estimates are generally terrible, but not perpetually-in-the-future terrible. SpaceX isn't going to build a bunch of super heavy launchers and then just not launch them.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  They will launch Starships and discard them, at first. Probably for the first couple of years, the Starships carrying Starlink satellites will be one-shots, with just three vacuum Raptor bells and no central gimbal system, heat shield tiling, or flaps. Those might have smaller fuel/oxidizer tanks to leave more room inside for the satellites. The only expensive bit is the three Raptor movements, but those are getting cheaper all the time. Until they work out a good, new tile system, there won't be any quick turnaround Starships.
  - Veedrac 5y ago
    I'm pretty certain that they'd rather try and fail to land than not try at all.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      There is little doubt they could land, if equipped. At issue is how much it costs to have the capability and to get ready to loft again. A SS with flaps, tiles, full-size tankage, and a gimbaled sea-level Raptor triplet will cost a lot more to build, fly, and refurbish than one with none of those. If you could fit 50 more birds in a custom throwaway, in place of tankage, it would be hard to justify not. (Which is not to say Elon won't insist, anyway.) So landing and turning (a few of) them around will be a marketing play.
cryptonector 5y ago
> Case in point: Falcon Heavy. It ended up being delayed so long that improvements in the Merlin engine greatly reduced the payloads that Falcon Heavy was originally built for to the point there are a couple of launches a year at best. Did you mean that "improvements in the Merlin engine greatly increased" the payloads that Falcon 9 can deliver, therefore reducing the need for Falcon Heavy? Because if that's what happened, then there wasn't a delay as such and it's quite disingenuous to put it as such. > All of this for <$20B in investment, which is about the development cost of SLS. $1B is <$20B, and the cost of SLS will be much more than $20B. This sentence is particularly disingenuous if not outright dishonest. > SLS hasn't even launched yet and will probably cost ~$1B/launch anyway. SLS has been in the works for longer than Starship, has it not? And Starship supposedly will cost much less per ton to orbit than Falcon 9 / Falcon heavy, which means "~$1B/launch" is just nuts. > Starship is incredibly ambitious but if it doesn't reach orbit before 2025 I won't be surprised. Meh. They'll reach orbit when they reach orbit, but you've not shown any arguments for why it would take them that long. > Blue Origin has had just as much money thrown at it and was founded years before SpaceX yet it still hasn't reached orbit and its BE-4 engines have been delayed years. BO hasn't even reached orbit at all, while SpaceX sure has! What are you on about?!
- tonmoy 5y ago
  I think you are misreading GP’s comments. I got the impression that GP is praising SpaceX same as you..
- jmyeet 5y ago
  > Did you mean that "improvements in the Merlin engine greatly increased" the payloads that Falcon 9 can deliver I believe that's what I said. The specs for FH claim ~64t to LEO. F9 is ~22t but it didn't start at 22t. It got that way with increasing improvements in the Merlin engines. That improved capability ate away at the payloads that would otherwise have necessitated FH. > This sentence is particularly disingenuous if not outright dishonest. You've misunderstood my point. I'm arguing SpaceX has been ridiculously more economical than the SLS welfare program for defense contractors and pork barrelling for Congressional districts (which is what it is). There is quite literally no reason for SLS to exist. For the cost of a handful of launches, SpaceX has done over 100 launches. > BO hasn't even reached orbit at all, while SpaceX sure has! What are you on about?! Again, you've misunderstood my point. We're agreeing.
MPSimmons 5y ago
There is no path forward for the F9 or FH that provide another magnitude of improvement in payload to orbit. I can't say anything about the timeline of S/SH to orbit, though, because Space Is Hard(tm).
narrator 5y ago
One thing I think that SpaceX proves is that money is not the only solution to all problems. In the pure world of theory of government spending, all producers are as good as any other, everyone is replaceable by everyone, there are no great men. The wild success of SpaceX is a great example of how this is not actually the case. Billions spent anywhere else would hardly do anything and would not be met with criticism of the failed contractors tasked with carrying out the job. Instead, there would mearly be calls for more money and time and that the same results would have been achieved with any other contractor.
sfifs 5y ago
> Starship is incredibly ambitious but if it doesn't reach orbit before 2025 I won't be surprised. Can someone elucidate what are the major technical challenges related to Starship that can cause such a delay? Powered descent and landing I assume is a largely solved problem from Falcon rockets. Re-entry would require heat shielding tech but isn't that a fairly mature technology? Also the fact that SpaceX isn't trying to maximize payload per launch and compensate with launch frequency argues they can use more robust tech than NASA used. The engines are completely new and the only one of it's kind that's ever flown but I've not heard that they are a problem now. Re-launch so quickly may not happen initially but that's ok and SpaceX does have experience with the other rocket. So I'm wondering what's the big unknown left?
- ncmncm 5y ago
  It will need a wholly new heat shield technology before they can do anything resembling quick turnaround. What they have now just gets them safely down, provided it works. It would not be at all surprising if they didn't work out the new shielding until after 2025.
bell-cot 5y ago
IANARS (Not A Rocket Scientist)...but has there ever been a major new model of rocket which has been delivered within the originally predicted time? And without "Moon Race" levels of funding and national urgency? I'm guessing "no".
simonh 5y ago
>Blue Origin has had just as much money thrown at it and was founded years before SpaceX... I think that's a bit unfair. For most of it's existence BO was just a think tank, and while Bezos has put a few billion into it that is small potatoes compared to the funding and contract revenue Musk has rallied for SpaceX so far.
rlt 5y ago
SpaceX is betting on Starship to launch the next generation of Starlink satellites, so I’d be very surprised if it doesn’t reach orbit in the next 1-2 years. Re-entry, landing, and full reusability could easily take several more years though.

by jmyeet 5y ago

chipsa 5y ago

Falcon Heavy was repeatedly delayed, but as you mentioned, Falcon 9 got repeatedly upgraded during that same time. They decided to allocate the resources to 9 instead of Heavy. However, they're not going to be doing that with Starship. I think they'll get it orbital before the end of 2024.

gameswithgo 5y ago

It will get to orbit way before 2025. That just isn't that hard. Maybe 2025 before both parts land from oribt.

phkahler 5y ago
Yeah, I think if they wanted to launch disposable starships they could do that right now and probably for lower cost than SLS. But just like SLS there isn't much market for a billion dollar ultra-heavy payload launch. It would be a waste of time to even demo that.

go_elmo 5y ago

Getting to orbit isnt the hard part having reliable engines (tested) and rocket (also tested), its returning in a state allowing for rapid reusability / not already having a RUD on deorbiting. I would be extremely surprised if any heat shield system manages a few flights without significant inspection / replacement.

thereddaikon 5y ago

The reason Falcon Heavy was delayed is because it is based on Falcon 9 which was still rapidly evolving. They couldn't decide on a spec to freeze it on and begin serious development because of how much F9 was improving. By the time it slowed down enough to begin work on FH, F9's performance and started to cover some of FH's originally envelope. I don't think it was really a case of Elon time as much as F9 proved to have a lot more room for development than they thought. Starship is a different can of worms. Its radical and innovative in many ways so there are a lot of work that needs to be done. This is definitely where Elon mis estimated how long it would take. It took them nearly a year to get the fuel tanks right. Then it took them a few prototypes to prove the belly flop concept. I wouldn't be surprised if the same proves to be true for the heat shield. The easiest part about Starship is the booster because its not doing anything F9 isn't already. Just at a much larger scale. That of course isn't easy either. But it does but things into perspective somewhat. And after all of that, my money is still on it beating SLS to orbit. Starship may be audacious but SLS's goal was never to get into space. In fact the longer they can drag it out the better it serves its purpose as a social welfare program.

hutzlibu 5y ago
Naive question: "The easiest part about Starship is the booster because its not doing anything F9 isn't already. Just at a much larger scale." Why is it in general required, to design a new, more heavy rocket - and not "just scale" up an existing design? I mean, "just scaling up" means a different build process and this alone could probably prevent it when, using off the shelf solutions and not build everything yourself (screws and cables included), but are there other fundamental reasons, why usually a redesign is required?
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  > Why is it in general required, to design a new, more heavy rocket - and not "just scale" up an existing design? Because defense contractors make a lot more money for the new one.
  - mcguire 5y ago

Mountain_Skies 5y ago

Exactly who formed this "general consensus"?

ceejayoz 5y ago
Elon Musk himself. He estimates like software engineers - best case, "if nothing goes wrong" sort of stuff. Very much a known phenomenon, to the point it even has a name. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=elon%20time https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=elon%20time https://elontime.io/ https://elontime.io/
jmyeet 5y ago
It's really the people who are left after you eliminate all the irrational Elon haters and the rabid fan boys.
- qsdf38100 5y ago
  What about the rational haters?

chriswarbo 5y ago

What's also interesting about Falcon 9 is that it didn't need to figure out landing and re-use before it was performing commercial missions in an expendable fashion. Once the payloads had separated, SpaceX were free to experiment with the boosters; until they eventually figured out reliable landings, and could start re-launching used boosters. I imagine a similar thing will happen with Starship: once it reaches orbit, I wouldn't be surprised if each subsequent mission was full of Starlink satellites (and perhaps other payloads, from brave customers!); even if it takes a long time to get reliable re-entry, re-fuelling, landing, etc.

jmyeet 5y ago
Falcon 9 reuse means expendable Starships probably will never be a thing (IMHO). Why? Economics. The Falcon 9 can get ~22t to LEO. Starship is planned for ~100t. If the net cost of a Falcon 9 launch (factoring in reuse) is $20m then that puts an effective cap of $100m on the cost of a Starship launch. You can still launch beyond that but it means you're doing so for non-economic reasons. This could be range (eg geosynchronous or Moon orbit instead of LEO) or larger payloads. Falcon Heavy launches seem to be pretty much exclusively military payloads to high orbits that the Falcon 9 just can't carry. People forget that payloads are deeply coupled to the launch system. Starship will ultimately allow a much larger payload (eg think of JWST 2.0 but with way less complexity) but that will take years for the industry to adapt to, possibly a decade or more. Starlink exists in part because the launch demand for getting payloads into space just doesn't exist otherwise. Cheaper launch costs will ultimately create more use cases (because they're now economic) but this will take time too. Starships may be lost in attempting to land but I honestly believe that attempted landing and reuse will be there from day one.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  Falcon 9 has a launch velocity limit imposed by the throwaway second stage. Starship can be more expensive and still make sense if you want to launch a lot of payloads quickly. That said, SpaceX is targeting $10M for a Starship launch early on, with aspirations of bringing that down towards a single million. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-spacex-starship-rocket-update-flight-cost-million-2022-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-spacex-starship-ro...

xoa 5y ago

>I believe the general consensus of the informed is that Starship is going to take years longer than originally predicted. Are you joking? That isn't even vaguely the "general consensus of the informed", at best it's "wishful thinking by old space types who are seeing the real time overturning of their gravy train". Frankly, at this point the major risk factors as far as getting to orbit are done. Raptor works and generates plenty of thrust. Starship can go up, complete a bellflop maneuver, and then land. And under harder conditions, they did an extremely aggressive fast landing to save fuel, much higher g's then they have to. The only critical component to save in SS/SH is the SH booster, which is where most of the expense is in terms of lots of Raptor engines. However, that's also the easiest part technically speaking, it just goes up and straight down again and SpaceX has proven capability to do that obviously. In fact fundamentally it's easier than F9. SH will have a minimum empty TWR (thrust/weight ratio) below 1, which means it's capable of hovering. F9 doesn't, so when they light up empty even a single engine on minimum throttle it'll still be heading right back up again. That's why they need the "hover slam" landing procedure, where they very carefully time things so that downward velocity and thrust counteract at exactly the landing height. Steel is easy to work with and more reliable. People have this notion that "bigger is harder" but that's no in fact always true. And SpaceX has engineered every last bit about Starship as part of an overall self-reinforcing system. It's cheap to iterate. Mass manufacturing has been a core part of the plan from day 1. So they can be hardware rich, cheaply. Flight is also engineered to be cheap, from the materials in construction to the construction procedures themselves and right down to the fuel (RP-1 rocket grade kerosene is quite pricey, methane is not). And they can self-bootstrap thanks to Starlink. SpaceX can look at a true MVP: all they have to do to start iterating is launch SS/SH and recover SH, it's fine to have SS be fully expended while they figure things out and it will still be cheaper/kg (maybe even cheaper outright!) than F9. So they can be making money off it very fast, and then make more money once SS is landing too. They can do initial proof with their own payload, then riskier commercial payload, then full commercial, then manned, ironing out issues with actual real flight the entire way. So what's revolutionary about Starship isn't merely the vehicle itself, but the entire system around the vehicle including the fact that "the vehicle" can pretty rapidly evolve and get tweaked. There's a history of this. Case in point: Falcon Heavy. It ended up being delayed so long that improvements in the Merlin engine greatly reduced the payloads that Falcon Heavy was originally built for to the point there are a couple of launches a year at best. No, you've got this completely backwards. The rapid iteration and increasing power of the F9 negated the initial economic proposition for Falcon Heavy, so they just didn't need to bother and put it on the backburner until F9 was fully baked. Then they didn't devote much more resources to FH because Starship will completely obsolete it anyway.

DisjointedHunt 5y ago

HN is great. "For the informed" comments like this with absolutely no substance or information from the past two years of progress at Starbase. They achieved the highest chamber pressure for a full flow staged combustion engine. . . . EVER. They've flown and landed upper stage prototypes, achieved an engine production capacity that not even China or any state power in the WORLD has managed in the history of humanity and account for a significant portion of global payload to orbit right now. They've developed an in house metal alloy that allows for temperatures in the turbine and combustion chamber to reach levels that the United States Government considered "Impossible" during the cold war and one so exotic that only like 4 engines have ever been built in all of human history. The only one of those engines to leave the test stand is . . .the Raptor. They develop and build their own heat tiles and have achieved significant output capacity in the past two years. The support system at the launch site which includes the launch tower, grappling arms, fuel stores etc are in very advanced stages at the moment and certainly ready to handle a steady stream of iterative full flight tests. All this IN PARALLEL !! The weight of the booster through iterative design has been steadily coming down as well, the engine ISP and chamber pressure has been rising in insane steps to the point where it is already amongst the best rocket engines known. Complexity of the engine build has visibly come down in the past few months alone. Each of these items by themselves take YEARS and were similarly expected to take YEARS even when Spacex started work on them. They're much further along than many people thought they would be two years ago. There is a lot of juicy detail in the three part video that the Everyday Astronaut did with Elon Musk at Starbase, i'd urge the people interested in this thread to go watch that instead of the armchair idiocy of either the OP or myself and make up your own minds.

kranke155 5y ago
HN is full of rich techies who suffer from confirmation bias who think they know everything since they are in the top 1% of earning power, even though the truth is most of them are of average intelligence.
- lief79 5y ago
  Unfortunately, I suspect you might over estimate average intelligence. I do hope I'm wrong.

tempnow987 5y ago

SLS is more like $4-5B per launch including sustaining costs. If you gave spaceX that money they could move whatever the equivalent needed mass was to orbit today on existing F9 solutions. And they could do EXPENDABLE starships (or different upper stages) that would absolutely CRUSH SLS. Take the heatshield off and fly a cargo variant of the upper stage - for $4B per launch they would be raking it in.

Buttons840 5y ago

Interesting observations about the sunk costs vs achievements. Makes me wonder if just starting over really is the best approach at times.

mips_avatar 5y ago

Starlink already is a game changer. The comparisons with cable/fiber are besides the point. For my family in Montana it enabled movie streaming, that's a big leap forward.

Veedrac 5y ago

2025 doesn't make sense. SpaceX has a Raptor 2 run-rate of 250/yr today, and they're ramping up, so you're talking about them sitting on around 750 engines, or about 18 full Starship stacks on the low end. The only way things would take that long is if they had a severe blanket roadblock like having to move their entire production somewhere else and spin it up from the beginning. Musk's time estimates are generally terrible, but not perpetually-in-the-future terrible. SpaceX isn't going to build a bunch of super heavy launchers and then just not launch them.

ncmncm 5y ago
They will launch Starships and discard them, at first. Probably for the first couple of years, the Starships carrying Starlink satellites will be one-shots, with just three vacuum Raptor bells and no central gimbal system, heat shield tiling, or flaps. Those might have smaller fuel/oxidizer tanks to leave more room inside for the satellites. The only expensive bit is the three Raptor movements, but those are getting cheaper all the time. Until they work out a good, new tile system, there won't be any quick turnaround Starships.
- Veedrac 5y ago
  I'm pretty certain that they'd rather try and fail to land than not try at all.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    There is little doubt they could land, if equipped. At issue is how much it costs to have the capability and to get ready to loft again. A SS with flaps, tiles, full-size tankage, and a gimbaled sea-level Raptor triplet will cost a lot more to build, fly, and refurbish than one with none of those. If you could fit 50 more birds in a custom throwaway, in place of tankage, it would be hard to justify not. (Which is not to say Elon won't insist, anyway.) So landing and turning (a few of) them around will be a marketing play.

cryptonector 5y ago

> Case in point: Falcon Heavy. It ended up being delayed so long that improvements in the Merlin engine greatly reduced the payloads that Falcon Heavy was originally built for to the point there are a couple of launches a year at best. Did you mean that "improvements in the Merlin engine greatly increased" the payloads that Falcon 9 can deliver, therefore reducing the need for Falcon Heavy? Because if that's what happened, then there wasn't a delay as such and it's quite disingenuous to put it as such. > All of this for <$20B in investment, which is about the development cost of SLS. $1B is <$20B, and the cost of SLS will be much more than $20B. This sentence is particularly disingenuous if not outright dishonest. > SLS hasn't even launched yet and will probably cost ~$1B/launch anyway. SLS has been in the works for longer than Starship, has it not? And Starship supposedly will cost much less per ton to orbit than Falcon 9 / Falcon heavy, which means "~$1B/launch" is just nuts. > Starship is incredibly ambitious but if it doesn't reach orbit before 2025 I won't be surprised. Meh. They'll reach orbit when they reach orbit, but you've not shown any arguments for why it would take them that long. > Blue Origin has had just as much money thrown at it and was founded years before SpaceX yet it still hasn't reached orbit and its BE-4 engines have been delayed years. BO hasn't even reached orbit at all, while SpaceX sure has! What are you on about?!

tonmoy 5y ago
I think you are misreading GP’s comments. I got the impression that GP is praising SpaceX same as you..
jmyeet 5y ago
> Did you mean that "improvements in the Merlin engine greatly increased" the payloads that Falcon 9 can deliver I believe that's what I said. The specs for FH claim ~64t to LEO. F9 is ~22t but it didn't start at 22t. It got that way with increasing improvements in the Merlin engines. That improved capability ate away at the payloads that would otherwise have necessitated FH. > This sentence is particularly disingenuous if not outright dishonest. You've misunderstood my point. I'm arguing SpaceX has been ridiculously more economical than the SLS welfare program for defense contractors and pork barrelling for Congressional districts (which is what it is). There is quite literally no reason for SLS to exist. For the cost of a handful of launches, SpaceX has done over 100 launches. > BO hasn't even reached orbit at all, while SpaceX sure has! What are you on about?! Again, you've misunderstood my point. We're agreeing.

MPSimmons 5y ago

There is no path forward for the F9 or FH that provide another magnitude of improvement in payload to orbit. I can't say anything about the timeline of S/SH to orbit, though, because Space Is Hard(tm).

narrator 5y ago

One thing I think that SpaceX proves is that money is not the only solution to all problems. In the pure world of theory of government spending, all producers are as good as any other, everyone is replaceable by everyone, there are no great men. The wild success of SpaceX is a great example of how this is not actually the case. Billions spent anywhere else would hardly do anything and would not be met with criticism of the failed contractors tasked with carrying out the job. Instead, there would mearly be calls for more money and time and that the same results would have been achieved with any other contractor.

sfifs 5y ago

> Starship is incredibly ambitious but if it doesn't reach orbit before 2025 I won't be surprised. Can someone elucidate what are the major technical challenges related to Starship that can cause such a delay? Powered descent and landing I assume is a largely solved problem from Falcon rockets. Re-entry would require heat shielding tech but isn't that a fairly mature technology? Also the fact that SpaceX isn't trying to maximize payload per launch and compensate with launch frequency argues they can use more robust tech than NASA used. The engines are completely new and the only one of it's kind that's ever flown but I've not heard that they are a problem now. Re-launch so quickly may not happen initially but that's ok and SpaceX does have experience with the other rocket. So I'm wondering what's the big unknown left?

ncmncm 5y ago
It will need a wholly new heat shield technology before they can do anything resembling quick turnaround. What they have now just gets them safely down, provided it works. It would not be at all surprising if they didn't work out the new shielding until after 2025.

bell-cot 5y ago

IANARS (Not A Rocket Scientist)...but has there ever been a major new model of rocket which has been delivered within the originally predicted time? And without "Moon Race" levels of funding and national urgency? I'm guessing "no".

simonh 5y ago

>Blue Origin has had just as much money thrown at it and was founded years before SpaceX... I think that's a bit unfair. For most of it's existence BO was just a think tank, and while Bezos has put a few billion into it that is small potatoes compared to the funding and contract revenue Musk has rallied for SpaceX so far.

rlt 5y ago

SpaceX is betting on Starship to launch the next generation of Starlink satellites, so I’d be very surprised if it doesn’t reach orbit in the next 1-2 years. Re-entry, landing, and full reusability could easily take several more years though.