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A full Starship will require 39 engines, and they will likely lose some during development. Even with a raptor a day that is less than 10 Starships a year. Of c
by fabian2k 4y ago
A full Starship will require 39 engines, and they will likely lose some during development. Even with a raptor a day that is less than 10 Starships a year. Of course if it is fully reusable and doesn't explode too often even 10 per year will be too much production (unless large-scale Mars colonization missions actually happen ). But it will take time, and for the meantime SpaceX does need to build up a fleet of Starships, and that takes a lot of engines.
- mrtree 4y ago
- prox 4y agoAnd that’s exactly the plan for SpaceX, a whole fleet of Starships. Mentioned by SpaceX and Elon Musk.
- hinkley 4y ago“Fully reusable” is still a little wiggly. Cars are fully reusable and they still get replaced after 150k miles. Are we going to begrudge someone calling it reusable if they have a MTBF of 10 flights? Or at least, as long as partial failure results in a successful mission but a decommissioned engine or unibody? You’d use your whole manufacturing capacity then to do 90 missions a year.
- zlsa 4y agoThere's not a huge number of datapoints yet, but there are several Falcon 9 boosters that have flown >10 times (including two that have flown 14 times.) I'm quite confident in Super Heavy at least handily exceeding 10 flights MTBF.
- hinkley 4y agoMTBF is mean time. So “a few over 14” isn’t anomalous if the mean is ~10. In fact it’s a bit low.
- mlindner 4y ago"Fully reusable" in all uses I've seen of with respect to aerospace it seems pretty fixed to me. We don't talk about "fully reusable" cars because there isn't an example of a non-reusable car. The "fully" part doesn't refer to how many times it lasts, just that the vehicle is reusable in whole instead of in part. "Wholly reusable" might have been a more semantically correct term, but "fully reusable" is what has stuck.