6 ms·

Sorry doubters, Starship had a remarkably successful flight

60 points by mlindner 3y ago

petermcneeley 3y ago
1969 called; they are asking if you need a rocket designed with slide rules.
- sidewndr46 3y ago
  I don't think I've ever really doubted SpaceX could build such a rocket & eventually get it to work. But why? What is the commercial utility in such a large launch platform?
  - justrealist 3y ago
    "No one will need more than 637KB of memory for a personal computer. 640KB ought to be enough for anybody"
    - failbuffer 3y ago
      Likewise, AT&T licensed the transistor to a small Japanese startup and told them it would probably only be useful for making a hearing aid. Fortunately, Sony had a knack for finding consumer applications of the device and humanity now makes quadrillions of transistors every year.
      - jjeaff 3y ago
        quadrillions (a quadrillion is 1,000 trillions) seemed a bit high to me, so I looked it up. it's actually about 2 Billion Trillion a year.
      - eesmith 3y ago
        That account does not appear to be true. From "Technology Importation, Corporate Strategies, and the Rise of the Japanese Semiconductor Industry in the 1950s" at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/256067/pdf https://muse.jhu.edu/article/256067/pdf > In March 1952, Ibuka traveled to the United States to investigate its domestic tape-recorder market and to learn from American firms. It was during this trip that Ibuka ran across a WE newsletter announcing that AT&T was openly licensing its transistor patents for a nominal licensing fee of $25,000. Literally overnight, he decided that transistor radios should be Sony’s next major product. ... Iwama and Tsukamoto, along with three other researchers, officially began Sony’s transistor-development project in July 1953, just months before the company signed a patent-licensing agreement with AT&T (Sony Corporation, 1986, p. 325). (If that is not accessible, https://project.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/kikkawa/iss-6.pdf https://project.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/kikkawa/iss-6.pdf says Sony "Concludes transistor license agreement with Western Electric" in October 1953. Western Electric was "the primary equipment manufacturer, supplier, and purchasing agent for the Bell System from 1881 until 1984" says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Electric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Electric). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor points out AT&T "first used transistors in telecommunications equipment in the No. 4A Toll Crossbar Switching System in 1953" and "The first prototype pocket transistor radio was shown ... from August 29 to September 6, 1953." A quick look of publications of the time finds articles like this August 1952 piece from the Illinois Business Review : > The Electronic Department of the General Electric Company reports that a whole new electronics business is growing out of the development of the transistor, said to be a potential successor to the vacuum tube. Transistors are made of germanium, which is recovered as a byproduct in the smelting and refining of zinc ores. Since they contain no heated element they never “burn out” and last indefinitely. The giant digital computers, or magic brains, which now use several thousand vacuum tubes and occupy a large-size room can conceivably become small enough to be applied to everyday business and industrial problems as are comptometers. Most of the telephone, industrial control, and business machine applications can be filled by the transistor; it will become practical to build amplifiers for use on transoceanic telephone cables. The simplicity and ruggedness of the transistor will have a direct effect also on military electronics, especially on airborne equipment. or this October 1952 article on some of the uses of transistors - https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iSEDAAAAMBAJ/page/n137/mode/2up?q=transistor https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iSEDAAAAMBAJ/page/n137/mo... with the subtitle "look for them soon in pocket radios and TVs almost that small" and the comment " RCA has just announced that it has boosted the frequency of several units high enough for use in FM radios and TV sets." If you don't mind the high noise, the same 1952 issue includes a description of how you can build your own transistor radio, at https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iSEDAAAAMBAJ/page/n239/mode/2up?q=transistor https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iSEDAAAAMBAJ/page/n239/mo... . Hard to think Western Electric didn't know of any of these possibilities when discussing licensing with Sony.
        failbuffer 3y ago
        Very thorough, thank you My source was Chris Miller's /Chip War/: "Upon landing in the United States in 1953, Morita was shocked by the country’s vast distances, open spaces, and extraordinary consumer wealth, especially compared to the deprivation of postwar Tokyo. This country seems to have everything, Morita thought. In New York, he met AT&T executives who agreed to issue him a license to produce the transistor. They told him to expect to manufacture nothing more useful than a hearing aid." Certainly many Americans were aware of and were chasing the potential of transistors almost immediately. This is not incompatible with management at the top being slow to grasp same.
        eesmith 3y ago
        The "Technology Importation, Corporate Strategies, and the Rise of the Japanese Semiconductor Industry in the 1950s" link says it was Western Electric ("the manufacturing arm of the Bell System") who did the licensing, so it technically should have been WE executives, yes? That may be a minor point, but you can also read that after Morita signed the patent license, he "returned to Tokyo with a few sample transistors, a piece of high-grade germanium crystal, and a copy of Transistor Technology." What was Transistor Technology? "After the first symposium, WE began to license the patent rights to manufacture transistors to anyone willing to pay a fee of $25,000, which was “to be applied as an advance against any future royalties [usually 2% of sales].” This was the news Sony’s Ibuka Masaru heard when he arrived in the United States in early 1952. After the second symposium, the company published the two-volume Transistor Technology—a compilation of articles by key researchers at Murray Hill and Allentown—to be provided to its patent licensees (Riordan & Hoddeson, 1997, pp. 196–197). By 1952, most major U.S. companies, including GE, Raytheon, Texas Instruments, and Westinghouse, became WE licensees (Transistor Technology Symposium, 1952)." (An updated version of Transistor Technology is available from archive.org, in three volumes, eg, https://archive.org/details/transistor_technology_v1/page/n5/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/transistor_technology_v1/page/n5... ) I can hardly think the WE execs thought all those licensees were going to make hearing aids at best. While I don't have a copy of Chip Wars handy, archive.org has a copy of the 1989 book "The Chip War" by Fred Warshofsky. At https://archive.org/details/chipwarbattlefor00wars/page/62/mode/2up?q=sony https://archive.org/details/chipwarbattlefor00wars/page/62/m... you can read how Ibuka told the WE engineers he wanted "to make the world's smallest radio. He was laughed at." The frequency characteristics were too poor for radio. Sony ended up having to develop the ground-junction transistor to solve that noise problem. I think a fair reading is that WE did not think Sony could do anything with the transistor regarding voice or music beyond a hearing aid as they knew their transistors couldn't handle the bandwidth. We can read that WE needed convincing to provide a license in the first place because "Technology Importation ..." writes: "When he finally got in touch with WE, the U.S. company reacted suspiciously to small, unknown company from the Far East. WE asked Sony to send more detailed information about the firm, including a brief company history, recent financial reports, and a list of technical achievements."
  - wolfram74 3y ago
    The fact that musk has publicly called induced demand nonsense[0] despite his launch company relying on it is an irony I find delicious. [0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2020/12/29/elon-musk-dismisses-induced-demand-a-phenomenon-first-witnessed-in-1866/?sh=583f5f6b7c5d https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2020/12/29/elon-mus...
    - zbrozek 3y ago
      It's just demand. We don't call increases in demand 'induced demand' unless we're trying to throw shade on the thing being demanded. The classical case is road use. Add lanes to highways and folks will utilize the capacity to do whatever it is that creates value to them. And we call it induced demand. If transit headways shrink and there are more riders because the service got better, we don't call it induced demand. Or if milk or eggs get cheaper and consumption of those items grows, it's also not induced demand.
  - yinser 3y ago
    100-150 tons to orbit or the moon or Mars per starship. NASA is counting on it for lunar operations and Musk anticipates it being the Martian workhorse vehicle
  - ericd 3y ago
    The utility is decreasing launch cost per kg by a couple orders of magnitude from the Falcon Heavy, which already represented a huge decrease from other launch systems. Decreasing costs to <1% of former costs seems likely to open a lot of new potential use cases.
  - fiftyfifty 3y ago
    Well for one thing they’ll be able to launch 240 Starlink satellites at a time instead of just 60 on the Falcon 9. If they get to the point of reusing the booster and the second stage the cost savings with Starship will be significant over the Falcon 9.
  - snapplebobapple 3y ago
    He's pretty clear, he expects to be building a startship every couple days relatively soon after the design is successfully finalized so that they can launch a crap ton of them at mars to get a colony going (Which I think is dumb, figure out how to build a workable version of o'neill cylinders and focus on mining space and then moving heavy industry off planet into space to solve the pollution issue on planet.) In the near term there will be pretty heavy demand from starlink, as that platform is basically required to economically launch their larger, next gen satellites.
    - jakobson14 3y ago
      https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/aug/28/the-case-against-mars-colonisation https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/aug/28/the-cas... Humanity, from now until the sun explodes, will only get one chance to check mars for life. Right now the first samples are still waiting in tubes to get picked up from the martian surface. Musks' solution to the problem of contamination is to fire as many rockets as he can as fast as he can and hope to contaminate mars completely before anyone can red tape his ass. We owe it to all future generations to make sure he never lands a single payload before the question can be thoroughly resolved.
      - snapplebobapple 3y ago
        Yes, lets retard human technological expansion to answer a fairly irrelevant question in the grand scheme of things, that seems prudent... While I think going down the gravity well on mars is stupid, it's stupid because there's no need to trap people there when we should be able to more closely approximate earth gravity and generate nearly limitless surface area while having access to more useful minerals with o'neill cylinders (or something along those lines). Ironically, this could go a long way to fixing the earth... Also, it's really boring whether mars has/had bacterial life or not. If it does, then it rejigs the math on everywhere else, making it way more probable we find it elsewhere as well. That leaves us with it's either not there, so it doesn't matter, or it is there and it's probably in a lot of other spots too, so we'll find it on the next one, once we're actually established in space and multi planetary and the cost of not going to said next one isn't as high as holding the whole species up from getting off this rock into space permanently. The only situation where it actually matters is the very slim chance it's both there and deadly to humans in a way that makes it likely the astronauts make it back to earth and contaminate us all before it kills them.
  - soperj 3y ago
    If they can get reuse going and it's cheaper than flying a falcon 9, I think there's a lot of commercial utility. If you can put a 110 ton satellite into orbit for the current price of an 8 ton satellite, then you really don't have to worry about weight as much, which means you can use cheaper parts to build your satellite.
  - stevage 3y ago
    >What is the commercial utility in such a large launch platform? It's a very interesting question. Much like StarLink, I suspect he has some other plan for monetising this lift capability. I don't buy the Moon base/Mars base plan at all.
    - sidewndr46 3y ago
      From my perspective Mars is kind of a fantasy. If we actually wanted or needed to go to Mars it'd have happened right after the first moon missions. It's very risky and the returns from a manned mission aren't really apparent
balthasar 3y ago
[flagged]
kchoudhu 3y ago
If Eric Berger ever has anything bad to say about SpaceX, I will chop my costume cowboy hat up into small pieces and eat all of it.
- kchoudhu 3y ago
  Just look at this text attempting to pass itself off as serious analysis of SpaceX. > Since its heady days during the Apollo program, NASA has steadily become an agency filled with checkers, rather than doers... Part of the magic of SpaceX is that it's filled with doers, with relatively few checkers
  - Narishma 3y ago
    Is that wrong?
  - causi 3y ago
    When the average NASA project is about a thousand percent over budget and fifteen years behind schedule, that's a very polite way of putting it.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - ikidd 3y ago
      You blow up a spacecraft full of people and you might get into the habit of second guessing yourself too.
      - causi 3y ago
        The spacecrafts not full of people have the same problem. I don't know how you can look at something like the JWST, which was awarded to TRW as an $824 million 7-year development project and became a $9.7 billion 20-year project and not think someone should be in prison.
  - debatem1 3y ago
sgift 3y ago
> Starship launches are clarifying events. Pretty quickly after liftoff you find out who understands the rocket business, and who are the casual observers bereft of a clue. I love it when opinion pieces open with the equivalent of "What follows now is the truth. If you disagree with the truth, as presented by me, the arbiter of the truth, you don't know shit." Berger must have really good faith in his arguments, if he feels the need to begin an article this way. And, unfortunately, what follows sounds more like a letter by an angry SpaceX fan than a quality analysis weighing the successes and failures of the start.
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  Even just the first two words of the title speak volumes. Feel the need to “win?” It’s easy: report on your fancy like an adult, lending it an air of legitimacy and maturity.
stevage 3y ago
The problem is basically that we want to categorise the mission as either success or failure, and yet there was no clearly defined metric for success, so everyone defaults to "if it blows up, it's a failure". On the other hand, you clearly can't call it a complete success. There were three goals that weren't met: water-landing the booster, reaching orbit (or whatever you call where it was trying to get to), and water-landing Starship. So maybe we should think in terms of a score out of 10. Like with gymnastics, there are degrees of difficulty. SpaceX aimed very high, and delivered...ok. Maybe give them a 6/10?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- valine 3y ago
  The largest rocket ever built got to space for the first time, powered by 33 full-flow staged combustion engines, considered to be the holy grail of engine design. First successful use of 33 engines firing in unison. First full-flow engine to make it to space. First methane engine to make it to space. I’ve followed starship development for a while now. A year ago starship was doomed to fail because 33 engines firing at once would tear the rocket apart. Now it’s a failure because they screwed up the landing. I know this sounds crazy, but I think the rocket company known for landing rockets might be able to fix the rocket landing issue.
  - mlyle 3y ago
    https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/07/chinese-company-wins-race-for-first-methane-fueled-rocket-to-orbit/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/07/chinese-company-wins-r...
  - poleight 3y ago
    > A year ago starship was doomed to fail because 33 engines firing at once would tear the rocket apart. Now it’s a failure because they screwed up the landing. I’m unsure what you mean by “screwed up the landing”, both stages exploded in flight. Scott Manleys analysis and reasoning seems sound: that the error was likely due to hot staging burn causing damage or being mistimed causing propellant sloshing. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hF2C7xE9Mj4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hF2C7xE9Mj4 Lots of data from this launch. Definitely a successful test. Falcon failed 3 times. Looking forward to seeing if starship beats or matches or if bigger means more.
rich_sasha 3y ago
I think a lot of the scepticism is a counterpoint to the unbridled starry eyed optimism. Building this thing is hard and will remain hard. Having achieved 80% is only a weak indicator that they will achieve the remaining 20%. And yet every news for the past 5 years or whatever has been "wow it's a runaway success and basically done". Something flies? Great! Something blows up? Ooh actually that's even better because [convoluted argument] and Starship will fly in 6 weeks time. I wish them well. The crazy optimism still strikes me as a bit mad.
- p1mrx 3y ago
  You need to solve more than 80% of the problems to reach 80% of orbital velocity. Exploding is not a virtue, but the stuff they accomplished before exploding is quite remarkable.
  - rich_sasha 3y ago
    Yes it's remarkable, I agree. They are very competent people and I am excited at what they may still achieve. But it's not a done deal and the I find the sickly sweet optimism jarring - as it seems many other people do. That is the entirety of my point. I'm not dumping on SpaceX, Starship, or on this particular occasion, Musk himself.
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  You'd be right if it weren't for the fact that Elon Musk has a track record of succeeding where others basically insist things can't be done. Falcon 9 rockets being reused is a good example. Completely mad idea. Nearly bankrupted spacex. And now it's a routine event. Tesla now being a best selling car brand is another example. That didn't just happen by accident but is the result of a lot of engineering and planning. Like SpaceX, not everything went according to plan with Tesla and the company nearly bankrupted itself several times in the process of basically becoming the money printing machine it is today. The point is, both companies are still here and really successful at what they do after taking lots of early risk to get there. Starship is a crazy idea. Completely nuts. And it could actually work. That's the crazy part. This was only the second launch. It took four attempts to get the first Falcon rocket to space. What we saw a few days ago was a rocket that nearly worked and only developed issues very late into the launch. Next time, they might get a little further. At this point it looks like there are a lot of challenges but none that look like they can't be overcome. One thing is clear. SpaceX is very well funded and they should not have any budgetary constraints doing this over and over again. There are no 100% guarantees they'll get it right eventually. But it looks like they have a very decent shot at it. If they fail, it won't be for a lack of trying.
simonblack 3y ago
The surgical procedure was a resounding success. The patient died.

60 points by mlindner 3y ago

petermcneeley 3y ago

1969 called; they are asking if you need a rocket designed with slide rules.

sidewndr46 3y ago
I don't think I've ever really doubted SpaceX could build such a rocket & eventually get it to work. But why? What is the commercial utility in such a large launch platform?
- justrealist 3y ago
  "No one will need more than 637KB of memory for a personal computer. 640KB ought to be enough for anybody"
  - failbuffer 3y ago
    Likewise, AT&T licensed the transistor to a small Japanese startup and told them it would probably only be useful for making a hearing aid. Fortunately, Sony had a knack for finding consumer applications of the device and humanity now makes quadrillions of transistors every year.
    - jjeaff 3y ago
      quadrillions (a quadrillion is 1,000 trillions) seemed a bit high to me, so I looked it up. it's actually about 2 Billion Trillion a year.
    - eesmith 3y ago
      That account does not appear to be true. From "Technology Importation, Corporate Strategies, and the Rise of the Japanese Semiconductor Industry in the 1950s" at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/256067/pdf https://muse.jhu.edu/article/256067/pdf > In March 1952, Ibuka traveled to the United States to investigate its domestic tape-recorder market and to learn from American firms. It was during this trip that Ibuka ran across a WE newsletter announcing that AT&T was openly licensing its transistor patents for a nominal licensing fee of $25,000. Literally overnight, he decided that transistor radios should be Sony’s next major product. ... Iwama and Tsukamoto, along with three other researchers, officially began Sony’s transistor-development project in July 1953, just months before the company signed a patent-licensing agreement with AT&T (Sony Corporation, 1986, p. 325). (If that is not accessible, https://project.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/kikkawa/iss-6.pdf https://project.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/kikkawa/iss-6.pdf says Sony "Concludes transistor license agreement with Western Electric" in October 1953. Western Electric was "the primary equipment manufacturer, supplier, and purchasing agent for the Bell System from 1881 until 1984" says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Electric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Electric). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor points out AT&T "first used transistors in telecommunications equipment in the No. 4A Toll Crossbar Switching System in 1953" and "The first prototype pocket transistor radio was shown ... from August 29 to September 6, 1953." A quick look of publications of the time finds articles like this August 1952 piece from the Illinois Business Review : > The Electronic Department of the General Electric Company reports that a whole new electronics business is growing out of the development of the transistor, said to be a potential successor to the vacuum tube. Transistors are made of germanium, which is recovered as a byproduct in the smelting and refining of zinc ores. Since they contain no heated element they never “burn out” and last indefinitely. The giant digital computers, or magic brains, which now use several thousand vacuum tubes and occupy a large-size room can conceivably become small enough to be applied to everyday business and industrial problems as are comptometers. Most of the telephone, industrial control, and business machine applications can be filled by the transistor; it will become practical to build amplifiers for use on transoceanic telephone cables. The simplicity and ruggedness of the transistor will have a direct effect also on military electronics, especially on airborne equipment. or this October 1952 article on some of the uses of transistors - https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iSEDAAAAMBAJ/page/n137/mode/2up?q=transistor https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iSEDAAAAMBAJ/page/n137/mo... with the subtitle "look for them soon in pocket radios and TVs almost that small" and the comment " RCA has just announced that it has boosted the frequency of several units high enough for use in FM radios and TV sets." If you don't mind the high noise, the same 1952 issue includes a description of how you can build your own transistor radio, at https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iSEDAAAAMBAJ/page/n239/mode/2up?q=transistor https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iSEDAAAAMBAJ/page/n239/mo... . Hard to think Western Electric didn't know of any of these possibilities when discussing licensing with Sony.
      - failbuffer 3y ago
        Very thorough, thank you My source was Chris Miller's /Chip War/: "Upon landing in the United States in 1953, Morita was shocked by the country’s vast distances, open spaces, and extraordinary consumer wealth, especially compared to the deprivation of postwar Tokyo. This country seems to have everything, Morita thought. In New York, he met AT&T executives who agreed to issue him a license to produce the transistor. They told him to expect to manufacture nothing more useful than a hearing aid." Certainly many Americans were aware of and were chasing the potential of transistors almost immediately. This is not incompatible with management at the top being slow to grasp same.
        eesmith 3y ago
        The "Technology Importation, Corporate Strategies, and the Rise of the Japanese Semiconductor Industry in the 1950s" link says it was Western Electric ("the manufacturing arm of the Bell System") who did the licensing, so it technically should have been WE executives, yes? That may be a minor point, but you can also read that after Morita signed the patent license, he "returned to Tokyo with a few sample transistors, a piece of high-grade germanium crystal, and a copy of Transistor Technology." What was Transistor Technology? "After the first symposium, WE began to license the patent rights to manufacture transistors to anyone willing to pay a fee of $25,000, which was “to be applied as an advance against any future royalties [usually 2% of sales].” This was the news Sony’s Ibuka Masaru heard when he arrived in the United States in early 1952. After the second symposium, the company published the two-volume Transistor Technology—a compilation of articles by key researchers at Murray Hill and Allentown—to be provided to its patent licensees (Riordan & Hoddeson, 1997, pp. 196–197). By 1952, most major U.S. companies, including GE, Raytheon, Texas Instruments, and Westinghouse, became WE licensees (Transistor Technology Symposium, 1952)." (An updated version of Transistor Technology is available from archive.org, in three volumes, eg, https://archive.org/details/transistor_technology_v1/page/n5/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/transistor_technology_v1/page/n5... ) I can hardly think the WE execs thought all those licensees were going to make hearing aids at best. While I don't have a copy of Chip Wars handy, archive.org has a copy of the 1989 book "The Chip War" by Fred Warshofsky. At https://archive.org/details/chipwarbattlefor00wars/page/62/mode/2up?q=sony https://archive.org/details/chipwarbattlefor00wars/page/62/m... you can read how Ibuka told the WE engineers he wanted "to make the world's smallest radio. He was laughed at." The frequency characteristics were too poor for radio. Sony ended up having to develop the ground-junction transistor to solve that noise problem. I think a fair reading is that WE did not think Sony could do anything with the transistor regarding voice or music beyond a hearing aid as they knew their transistors couldn't handle the bandwidth. We can read that WE needed convincing to provide a license in the first place because "Technology Importation ..." writes: "When he finally got in touch with WE, the U.S. company reacted suspiciously to small, unknown company from the Far East. WE asked Sony to send more detailed information about the firm, including a brief company history, recent financial reports, and a list of technical achievements."
- wolfram74 3y ago
  The fact that musk has publicly called induced demand nonsense[0] despite his launch company relying on it is an irony I find delicious. [0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2020/12/29/elon-musk-dismisses-induced-demand-a-phenomenon-first-witnessed-in-1866/?sh=583f5f6b7c5d https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2020/12/29/elon-mus...
  - zbrozek 3y ago
    It's just demand. We don't call increases in demand 'induced demand' unless we're trying to throw shade on the thing being demanded. The classical case is road use. Add lanes to highways and folks will utilize the capacity to do whatever it is that creates value to them. And we call it induced demand. If transit headways shrink and there are more riders because the service got better, we don't call it induced demand. Or if milk or eggs get cheaper and consumption of those items grows, it's also not induced demand.
- yinser 3y ago
  100-150 tons to orbit or the moon or Mars per starship. NASA is counting on it for lunar operations and Musk anticipates it being the Martian workhorse vehicle
- ericd 3y ago
  The utility is decreasing launch cost per kg by a couple orders of magnitude from the Falcon Heavy, which already represented a huge decrease from other launch systems. Decreasing costs to <1% of former costs seems likely to open a lot of new potential use cases.
- fiftyfifty 3y ago
  Well for one thing they’ll be able to launch 240 Starlink satellites at a time instead of just 60 on the Falcon 9. If they get to the point of reusing the booster and the second stage the cost savings with Starship will be significant over the Falcon 9.
- snapplebobapple 3y ago
  He's pretty clear, he expects to be building a startship every couple days relatively soon after the design is successfully finalized so that they can launch a crap ton of them at mars to get a colony going (Which I think is dumb, figure out how to build a workable version of o'neill cylinders and focus on mining space and then moving heavy industry off planet into space to solve the pollution issue on planet.) In the near term there will be pretty heavy demand from starlink, as that platform is basically required to economically launch their larger, next gen satellites.
  - jakobson14 3y ago
    https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/aug/28/the-case-against-mars-colonisation https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/aug/28/the-cas... Humanity, from now until the sun explodes, will only get one chance to check mars for life. Right now the first samples are still waiting in tubes to get picked up from the martian surface. Musks' solution to the problem of contamination is to fire as many rockets as he can as fast as he can and hope to contaminate mars completely before anyone can red tape his ass. We owe it to all future generations to make sure he never lands a single payload before the question can be thoroughly resolved.
    - snapplebobapple 3y ago
      Yes, lets retard human technological expansion to answer a fairly irrelevant question in the grand scheme of things, that seems prudent... While I think going down the gravity well on mars is stupid, it's stupid because there's no need to trap people there when we should be able to more closely approximate earth gravity and generate nearly limitless surface area while having access to more useful minerals with o'neill cylinders (or something along those lines). Ironically, this could go a long way to fixing the earth... Also, it's really boring whether mars has/had bacterial life or not. If it does, then it rejigs the math on everywhere else, making it way more probable we find it elsewhere as well. That leaves us with it's either not there, so it doesn't matter, or it is there and it's probably in a lot of other spots too, so we'll find it on the next one, once we're actually established in space and multi planetary and the cost of not going to said next one isn't as high as holding the whole species up from getting off this rock into space permanently. The only situation where it actually matters is the very slim chance it's both there and deadly to humans in a way that makes it likely the astronauts make it back to earth and contaminate us all before it kills them.
- soperj 3y ago
  If they can get reuse going and it's cheaper than flying a falcon 9, I think there's a lot of commercial utility. If you can put a 110 ton satellite into orbit for the current price of an 8 ton satellite, then you really don't have to worry about weight as much, which means you can use cheaper parts to build your satellite.
- stevage 3y ago
  >What is the commercial utility in such a large launch platform? It's a very interesting question. Much like StarLink, I suspect he has some other plan for monetising this lift capability. I don't buy the Moon base/Mars base plan at all.
  - sidewndr46 3y ago
    From my perspective Mars is kind of a fantasy. If we actually wanted or needed to go to Mars it'd have happened right after the first moon missions. It's very risky and the returns from a manned mission aren't really apparent

balthasar 3y ago

[flagged]

kchoudhu 3y ago

If Eric Berger ever has anything bad to say about SpaceX, I will chop my costume cowboy hat up into small pieces and eat all of it.

kchoudhu 3y ago
Just look at this text attempting to pass itself off as serious analysis of SpaceX. > Since its heady days during the Apollo program, NASA has steadily become an agency filled with checkers, rather than doers... Part of the magic of SpaceX is that it's filled with doers, with relatively few checkers
- Narishma 3y ago
  Is that wrong?
- causi 3y ago
  When the average NASA project is about a thousand percent over budget and fifteen years behind schedule, that's a very polite way of putting it.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - ikidd 3y ago
    You blow up a spacecraft full of people and you might get into the habit of second guessing yourself too.
    - causi 3y ago
      The spacecrafts not full of people have the same problem. I don't know how you can look at something like the JWST, which was awarded to TRW as an $824 million 7-year development project and became a $9.7 billion 20-year project and not think someone should be in prison.
- debatem1 3y ago

sgift 3y ago

> Starship launches are clarifying events. Pretty quickly after liftoff you find out who understands the rocket business, and who are the casual observers bereft of a clue. I love it when opinion pieces open with the equivalent of "What follows now is the truth. If you disagree with the truth, as presented by me, the arbiter of the truth, you don't know shit." Berger must have really good faith in his arguments, if he feels the need to begin an article this way. And, unfortunately, what follows sounds more like a letter by an angry SpaceX fan than a quality analysis weighing the successes and failures of the start.

Waterluvian 3y ago
Even just the first two words of the title speak volumes. Feel the need to “win?” It’s easy: report on your fancy like an adult, lending it an air of legitimacy and maturity.

stevage 3y ago

The problem is basically that we want to categorise the mission as either success or failure, and yet there was no clearly defined metric for success, so everyone defaults to "if it blows up, it's a failure". On the other hand, you clearly can't call it a complete success. There were three goals that weren't met: water-landing the booster, reaching orbit (or whatever you call where it was trying to get to), and water-landing Starship. So maybe we should think in terms of a score out of 10. Like with gymnastics, there are degrees of difficulty. SpaceX aimed very high, and delivered...ok. Maybe give them a 6/10?

deleted 3y ago
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valine 3y ago
The largest rocket ever built got to space for the first time, powered by 33 full-flow staged combustion engines, considered to be the holy grail of engine design. First successful use of 33 engines firing in unison. First full-flow engine to make it to space. First methane engine to make it to space. I’ve followed starship development for a while now. A year ago starship was doomed to fail because 33 engines firing at once would tear the rocket apart. Now it’s a failure because they screwed up the landing. I know this sounds crazy, but I think the rocket company known for landing rockets might be able to fix the rocket landing issue.
- mlyle 3y ago
  https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/07/chinese-company-wins-race-for-first-methane-fueled-rocket-to-orbit/ https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/07/chinese-company-wins-r...
- poleight 3y ago
  > A year ago starship was doomed to fail because 33 engines firing at once would tear the rocket apart. Now it’s a failure because they screwed up the landing. I’m unsure what you mean by “screwed up the landing”, both stages exploded in flight. Scott Manleys analysis and reasoning seems sound: that the error was likely due to hot staging burn causing damage or being mistimed causing propellant sloshing. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hF2C7xE9Mj4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hF2C7xE9Mj4 Lots of data from this launch. Definitely a successful test. Falcon failed 3 times. Looking forward to seeing if starship beats or matches or if bigger means more.

rich_sasha 3y ago

I think a lot of the scepticism is a counterpoint to the unbridled starry eyed optimism. Building this thing is hard and will remain hard. Having achieved 80% is only a weak indicator that they will achieve the remaining 20%. And yet every news for the past 5 years or whatever has been "wow it's a runaway success and basically done". Something flies? Great! Something blows up? Ooh actually that's even better because [convoluted argument] and Starship will fly in 6 weeks time. I wish them well. The crazy optimism still strikes me as a bit mad.

p1mrx 3y ago
You need to solve more than 80% of the problems to reach 80% of orbital velocity. Exploding is not a virtue, but the stuff they accomplished before exploding is quite remarkable.
- rich_sasha 3y ago
  Yes it's remarkable, I agree. They are very competent people and I am excited at what they may still achieve. But it's not a done deal and the I find the sickly sweet optimism jarring - as it seems many other people do. That is the entirety of my point. I'm not dumping on SpaceX, Starship, or on this particular occasion, Musk himself.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
You'd be right if it weren't for the fact that Elon Musk has a track record of succeeding where others basically insist things can't be done. Falcon 9 rockets being reused is a good example. Completely mad idea. Nearly bankrupted spacex. And now it's a routine event. Tesla now being a best selling car brand is another example. That didn't just happen by accident but is the result of a lot of engineering and planning. Like SpaceX, not everything went according to plan with Tesla and the company nearly bankrupted itself several times in the process of basically becoming the money printing machine it is today. The point is, both companies are still here and really successful at what they do after taking lots of early risk to get there. Starship is a crazy idea. Completely nuts. And it could actually work. That's the crazy part. This was only the second launch. It took four attempts to get the first Falcon rocket to space. What we saw a few days ago was a rocket that nearly worked and only developed issues very late into the launch. Next time, they might get a little further. At this point it looks like there are a lot of challenges but none that look like they can't be overcome. One thing is clear. SpaceX is very well funded and they should not have any budgetary constraints doing this over and over again. There are no 100% guarantees they'll get it right eventually. But it looks like they have a very decent shot at it. If they fail, it won't be for a lack of trying.

simonblack 3y ago

The surgical procedure was a resounding success. The patient died.