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This is good. Flight 1 had 63 corrective actions and it took 5 months to complete the report. This one took 3 months and had 17 corrective actions. They'll get

This is good. Flight 1 had 63 corrective actions and it took 5 months to complete the report. This one took 3 months and had 17 corrective actions. They'll get to orbit this year for sure

rbanffy 3y ago
I love that Superheavy/Starship can be profitable even if they are expendable.
- iwontberude 3y ago
  Considering the reusable Falcon 9 costs more than twice as much as launching a Soyuz despite the reusable components. It's a bit of a boondoggle, but I am so glad we have national capacity for launching payloads.
- baq 3y ago
  There are customers from three letter agencies who could find a use for this payload capacity, for sure. OTOH imagine if a reusable launch of this costs approximately the same as an expendable Atlas 5 in it's most performant configuration and reliability is proven - NASA could launch a Pluto probe like New Horizons, except it'd be able actually make orbit over there.
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    Atlas 5 is already completely obsoleted by the Falcon Heavy which costs about half as much, for a reusable launch, and carries about 3x as much. But for Starship, most people don't seem to realize what a potential game changer this is. The goal for Starship is to get costs down to about 15x less than Falcon Heavy. When you can start sending stuff to space for a few dollars per pound, we're not talking about just probes, but rather opening the door to the complete commercialization and exploitation of space. Such an exponential jump (downward) in prices would also largely end the only-for-the-super-rich phase of space we're currently in. You could be doing a flyby around the Moon for what you might spend on a holiday to Asia, in the very foreseeable future. That's what makes Starship so tantalizing. If it succeeds - this is a revolutionary step forward for space. Of course, there's no guarantee that it will succeed, but it increasingly looks like it will!
    - misiti3780 3y ago
      Also, wont it theoretically speed up and decrease international shipping + travel. We should be able to go from the US to Japan in an hour or two in the future.
      - Sanzig 3y ago
        I am pretty skeptical of Starship ever getting used for suborbital transportation, other than maybe for ultra-elite VIP transport or something like a rapid deployment system for military special forces. It seems highly unlikely they will ever get the price down to where it can compete with commercial airliners, and Concorde's commercial failure showed us that people will happily choose cheap subsonic flight over fast supersonic flight. You can get almost anywhere on Earth in 36 hours' notice with conventional jet travel relatively cheaply on 1-2 weeks of US median income for a return ticket - that sweet spot of speed and cost is hard to beat.
        deprecative 3y ago
        Watch Elon call it something like Airship and have it be fit for tens to hundreds of people per launch with no need for a pilot (though one may be present). It'd take twenty years to get to market, sure, but hey that's progress.
        rbanffy 3y ago
        Getting it to airline-level safety will take at least that much, unless they start flying multiple times a day without any anomalies whatsoever.
        njarboe 3y ago
        I think there is a pretty large market for a trip to space and an hour flight from LA to New Zealand, New York-Sydney, London-Shanghai, etc. for $10-20k. What an amazing combination that would be.
        3y ago
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  Expending the second stage would almost certainly be cheaper per kg than Falcon 9, but I doubt this is still true if you have to expend the booster. Keep in mind we would have to compare it to the ~20M marginal cost of a F9 launch, not the $70M sticker price that a customer would pay.
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    It might actually be cheaper even if the booster is expended. Falcon9 is estimated to cost about $30M/launch. $20M to build the upper stage, and $10M to launch. Starship is estimated to cost about $100M to build both the booster and the second stage. Add $10M to launch. So 17t/$30M vs 150t/$110M.
    - looofooo0 3y ago
      110m crazy, a380 was 4x
      - bryanlarsen 3y ago
        $110M is insane. Anything under $1B seems unfathomable. $25M for a 2MN full flow staged combustion engine seems cheap. SpaceX plans on building them for $250K a piece. They're not there yet, but current estimates of $1M a piece are just as insane.
- imtringued 3y ago
  It will be half the cost of SLS.
stoneman24 3y ago
I suspect if test flight 3 makes orbit then flight 5 will be delivering starlink satellites and then testing on the way back down. If I remember correctly, a starship can deliver 440+ starlink satellites compared to around 60 for falcon 9.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  Probably why they're hoping to get permission for 9 launches this year. Even if they throw away the entire stack, it probably costs less than the equivalent number of F9 launches.
  - mjevans 3y ago
    I strongly suspect they'll achieve at least partial re-usability if not full by 9 launches. If not SpaceX will at least have a very clear understanding of the engineering problem by that point. I'm most worried about the final landing which I would not want to be anywhere close to until they've had a solid string of successes without any issues.
    - dotnet00 3y ago
      I'm not sold on them achieving partial reusability in practice in 9 launches (assuming that the 9 launches happen mainly this year as they have requested). I think they'll have achieved it in theory (ie demonstrated a hover landing of the booster over water), but they've only just started to build out the second tower that'll be needed to actually test reusability without risking the entire launch infrastructure. Between the construction pauses during testing/launch, and things they can't really speed up like concrete hardening times, I don't think they'll be able to both have 9 flights AND operationalize the second tower this year.
      - mjevans 3y ago
        Yes, we solidly agree on the risks associated with an as yet, as far as I know offhand, completely new landing system... Two really strong metal toothpicks.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
With the Falcon 1 they also needed a several attempts before they started getting it right. The Falcon 9 went through a similar set of launches and also it took a while from successful launch to successful landing. The ambition level is really high with Starship but if there's any company that can get it done it's spacex. Basically what they are doing is a form of agile development where instead of speccing out the whole thing years in advance, they basically iterate and redesign what needs redesigning. Even if the project ultimately fails, there are multiple things coming out of the project that are at this point valuable. Like the merlin engines. Or their welding innovations. The notion of launching a steel contraption this size to orbit is ludicrous. Yet, they almost pulled it off last time. Worst case they have learned a lot to do a better falcon rocket. Best case, this thing actually starts working.
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  Even here on HN plenty of people seem to misunderstood the fundamentals of "hardware-rich development" and assume that it must be fantastically expensive and/or reckless. It is not exactly cheap to do it like SpaceX does, but the savings in time and increases in robustness may very well offset the cost of all the prototypes that undergo a RUD.
  - evilduck 3y ago
    Even SpaceX's methods of fail fast (and often explosively) is relatively cheap. SLS is doing it the hard and expensive way.
    - bumby 3y ago
      The downside is that rapid iteration doesn't always give the same insight in terms of scientific understanding. E.g., Design_A fails. We quickly pivot to Design_B, which works. However, we don't spend the time ultimately understanding why Design_A failed. This can be operationally great, but it can also risk conflating being lucky with being good. If you don't fundamentally understand why the thing failed the first time, it's much harder to understand if those failure modes are fully mitigated. Personally, I think the ideal approach is to have SpaceX continue the rapid enginneering iterations, but give NASA (or some other entity) the resources to research the rest.
jwells89 3y ago
It’s so exciting to keep track of. Feels like everything I hoped to see happening in spaceflight back in the 90s and 00s is finally (maybe) becoming reality and absolutely shattering the stagnancy that had overcome the field, hopefully this time for good. If this pace can continue unabated, maybe it’s not too unrealistic to hope that my grandkids’ generation in a few decades has astronaut as one of their most aspired careers much as was the case for the kids of the 70s, 80s, and 90s… except this time it’d be much more practically achievable since there’d be greatly increased demand for people with that skillset.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  I am not sure if there is enough profitable space industry. Last I checked asteroid mining was not super feasible, but maybe some like space based solar.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    In my mind the potential for profitable industry beyond earth orbit depends almost entirely on how low we can manage to bring cost of kg to orbit. It doesn’t have to be cheap enough to make e.g. asteroid mining profitable on its own (which is an awfully high bar), just high enough to make construction of large, permanently spacebourne ships feasible. Ships like that ease the bootstrapping problem and make it more feasible to mine asteroids in-place instead of having to move them to an orbit that’s not expensive to reach. Their flexible, multipurpose nature also helps pay for them over time; they can for example drop crew and cargo off at the moon and Mars en route to the asteroid belt.
  - Animats 3y ago
    The asteroid Psyche is expected to have a lot of gold content. NASA sent a probe last year, but it's a long trip and will take until 2029 to get there. Even then it just orbits.
    - panick21_ 3y ago
      That's nonsense. Sure Psyche has a lot of valuable materials on it, but so do mountains on earth, doesn't mean its great way to make money. There are things far closer to earth that are far easier to get to, and those things are also far smaller then Psyche and thus far easier to mine. The most serious space mining company right now is targeting near earth asteroids for platinum group metals.

This is good. Flight 1 had 63 corrective actions and it took 5 months to complete the report. This one took 3 months and had 17 corrective actions. They'll get to orbit this year for sure

rbanffy 3y ago

I love that Superheavy/Starship can be profitable even if they are expendable.

iwontberude 3y ago
Considering the reusable Falcon 9 costs more than twice as much as launching a Soyuz despite the reusable components. It's a bit of a boondoggle, but I am so glad we have national capacity for launching payloads.
baq 3y ago
There are customers from three letter agencies who could find a use for this payload capacity, for sure. OTOH imagine if a reusable launch of this costs approximately the same as an expendable Atlas 5 in it's most performant configuration and reliability is proven - NASA could launch a Pluto probe like New Horizons, except it'd be able actually make orbit over there.
- somenameforme 3y ago
  Atlas 5 is already completely obsoleted by the Falcon Heavy which costs about half as much, for a reusable launch, and carries about 3x as much. But for Starship, most people don't seem to realize what a potential game changer this is. The goal for Starship is to get costs down to about 15x less than Falcon Heavy. When you can start sending stuff to space for a few dollars per pound, we're not talking about just probes, but rather opening the door to the complete commercialization and exploitation of space. Such an exponential jump (downward) in prices would also largely end the only-for-the-super-rich phase of space we're currently in. You could be doing a flyby around the Moon for what you might spend on a holiday to Asia, in the very foreseeable future. That's what makes Starship so tantalizing. If it succeeds - this is a revolutionary step forward for space. Of course, there's no guarantee that it will succeed, but it increasingly looks like it will!
  - misiti3780 3y ago
    Also, wont it theoretically speed up and decrease international shipping + travel. We should be able to go from the US to Japan in an hour or two in the future.
    - Sanzig 3y ago
      I am pretty skeptical of Starship ever getting used for suborbital transportation, other than maybe for ultra-elite VIP transport or something like a rapid deployment system for military special forces. It seems highly unlikely they will ever get the price down to where it can compete with commercial airliners, and Concorde's commercial failure showed us that people will happily choose cheap subsonic flight over fast supersonic flight. You can get almost anywhere on Earth in 36 hours' notice with conventional jet travel relatively cheaply on 1-2 weeks of US median income for a return ticket - that sweet spot of speed and cost is hard to beat.
      - deprecative 3y ago
        Watch Elon call it something like Airship and have it be fit for tens to hundreds of people per launch with no need for a pilot (though one may be present). It'd take twenty years to get to market, sure, but hey that's progress.
        rbanffy 3y ago
        Getting it to airline-level safety will take at least that much, unless they start flying multiple times a day without any anomalies whatsoever.
      - njarboe 3y ago
        I think there is a pretty large market for a trip to space and an hour flight from LA to New Zealand, New York-Sydney, London-Shanghai, etc. for $10-20k. What an amazing combination that would be.
        3y ago
sebzim4500 3y ago
Expending the second stage would almost certainly be cheaper per kg than Falcon 9, but I doubt this is still true if you have to expend the booster. Keep in mind we would have to compare it to the ~20M marginal cost of a F9 launch, not the $70M sticker price that a customer would pay.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  It might actually be cheaper even if the booster is expended. Falcon9 is estimated to cost about $30M/launch. $20M to build the upper stage, and $10M to launch. Starship is estimated to cost about $100M to build both the booster and the second stage. Add $10M to launch. So 17t/$30M vs 150t/$110M.
  - looofooo0 3y ago
    110m crazy, a380 was 4x
    - bryanlarsen 3y ago
      $110M is insane. Anything under $1B seems unfathomable. $25M for a 2MN full flow staged combustion engine seems cheap. SpaceX plans on building them for $250K a piece. They're not there yet, but current estimates of $1M a piece are just as insane.
imtringued 3y ago
It will be half the cost of SLS.

stoneman24 3y ago

I suspect if test flight 3 makes orbit then flight 5 will be delivering starlink satellites and then testing on the way back down. If I remember correctly, a starship can deliver 440+ starlink satellites compared to around 60 for falcon 9.

dotnet00 3y ago
Probably why they're hoping to get permission for 9 launches this year. Even if they throw away the entire stack, it probably costs less than the equivalent number of F9 launches.
- mjevans 3y ago
  I strongly suspect they'll achieve at least partial re-usability if not full by 9 launches. If not SpaceX will at least have a very clear understanding of the engineering problem by that point. I'm most worried about the final landing which I would not want to be anywhere close to until they've had a solid string of successes without any issues.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    I'm not sold on them achieving partial reusability in practice in 9 launches (assuming that the 9 launches happen mainly this year as they have requested). I think they'll have achieved it in theory (ie demonstrated a hover landing of the booster over water), but they've only just started to build out the second tower that'll be needed to actually test reusability without risking the entire launch infrastructure. Between the construction pauses during testing/launch, and things they can't really speed up like concrete hardening times, I don't think they'll be able to both have 9 flights AND operationalize the second tower this year.
    - mjevans 3y ago
      Yes, we solidly agree on the risks associated with an as yet, as far as I know offhand, completely new landing system... Two really strong metal toothpicks.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

With the Falcon 1 they also needed a several attempts before they started getting it right. The Falcon 9 went through a similar set of launches and also it took a while from successful launch to successful landing. The ambition level is really high with Starship but if there's any company that can get it done it's spacex. Basically what they are doing is a form of agile development where instead of speccing out the whole thing years in advance, they basically iterate and redesign what needs redesigning. Even if the project ultimately fails, there are multiple things coming out of the project that are at this point valuable. Like the merlin engines. Or their welding innovations. The notion of launching a steel contraption this size to orbit is ludicrous. Yet, they almost pulled it off last time. Worst case they have learned a lot to do a better falcon rocket. Best case, this thing actually starts working.

inglor_cz 3y ago
Even here on HN plenty of people seem to misunderstood the fundamentals of "hardware-rich development" and assume that it must be fantastically expensive and/or reckless. It is not exactly cheap to do it like SpaceX does, but the savings in time and increases in robustness may very well offset the cost of all the prototypes that undergo a RUD.
- evilduck 3y ago
  Even SpaceX's methods of fail fast (and often explosively) is relatively cheap. SLS is doing it the hard and expensive way.
  - bumby 3y ago
    The downside is that rapid iteration doesn't always give the same insight in terms of scientific understanding. E.g., Design_A fails. We quickly pivot to Design_B, which works. However, we don't spend the time ultimately understanding why Design_A failed. This can be operationally great, but it can also risk conflating being lucky with being good. If you don't fundamentally understand why the thing failed the first time, it's much harder to understand if those failure modes are fully mitigated. Personally, I think the ideal approach is to have SpaceX continue the rapid enginneering iterations, but give NASA (or some other entity) the resources to research the rest.

jwells89 3y ago

It’s so exciting to keep track of. Feels like everything I hoped to see happening in spaceflight back in the 90s and 00s is finally (maybe) becoming reality and absolutely shattering the stagnancy that had overcome the field, hopefully this time for good. If this pace can continue unabated, maybe it’s not too unrealistic to hope that my grandkids’ generation in a few decades has astronaut as one of their most aspired careers much as was the case for the kids of the 70s, 80s, and 90s… except this time it’d be much more practically achievable since there’d be greatly increased demand for people with that skillset.

whimsicalism 3y ago
I am not sure if there is enough profitable space industry. Last I checked asteroid mining was not super feasible, but maybe some like space based solar.
- jwells89 3y ago
  In my mind the potential for profitable industry beyond earth orbit depends almost entirely on how low we can manage to bring cost of kg to orbit. It doesn’t have to be cheap enough to make e.g. asteroid mining profitable on its own (which is an awfully high bar), just high enough to make construction of large, permanently spacebourne ships feasible. Ships like that ease the bootstrapping problem and make it more feasible to mine asteroids in-place instead of having to move them to an orbit that’s not expensive to reach. Their flexible, multipurpose nature also helps pay for them over time; they can for example drop crew and cargo off at the moon and Mars en route to the asteroid belt.
- Animats 3y ago
  The asteroid Psyche is expected to have a lot of gold content. NASA sent a probe last year, but it's a long trip and will take until 2029 to get there. Even then it just orbits.
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    That's nonsense. Sure Psyche has a lot of valuable materials on it, but so do mountains on earth, doesn't mean its great way to make money. There are things far closer to earth that are far easier to get to, and those things are also far smaller then Psyche and thus far easier to mine. The most serious space mining company right now is targeting near earth asteroids for platinum group metals.