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You are comparing "sending a small crew for a few days on the Moon ASAP for propaganda purposes" with "setting up a permanent outpost on the Moon". Do you know

by aredox 1y ago

You are comparing "sending a small crew for a few days on the Moon ASAP for propaganda purposes" with "setting up a permanent outpost on the Moon". Do you know the McMurdo permanent Antarctica base is costing us far more than the dogs, sleds, and tents of Admundsen and Shackleton? Incredible, isn't it?

MrSkelter 1y ago
This is an inane comparison. Starship is “the program to build a permanent base in the moon”. It’s not even the only vehicle involved in the moon program. It’s a rocket designed to take astronauts from moon orbit to the moon’s surface. The astronauts will actually fly to the moon in SLS. So far it’s proved incapable of being launched, attaining orbit, and returning to earth as designed. That’s without a payload. It has no life support system built and is literally years behind schedule. Rather than making progress it is being redesigned on the fly to mitigate fundamental problems with its capability which Musk laughs off as “moving fast and breaking things”. The problem is we aren’t moving fast at all. The rocket is a disaster. Saturn V was better by an order of magnitude and likely cheaper if you consider how much fundamental work went into creating it which is now easy to buy off the shelf. Comparing the programs while ignoring the fact that hobbiest regularly reach the Karman line is deceitful. Starship is doing this on easy mode and it’s failing.
- madaxe_again 1y ago
  Nice one. Now do SLS.
- bluescrn 1y ago
  > Starship is doing this on easy mode and it’s failing. But this 'easy mode' is still so incredibly hard that nobody else will even attempt it. I'd love to see some serious competition emerge in the reusable rocket space, but SpaceX is far, far ahead with Falcon 9 being an incredible success, even if the Starship project may be headed for failure. Nobody reports on 100+ successful Falcon 9 launches/landings in a year, those are now mundane. But a small number of Starship failures - test flights of an experimental vehicle - become big news, mostly because they involve spectacular explosions. It seems that Starship may be too big to 'fail fast', mostly because of the visual spectacle of those failures.
  - notahacker 1y ago
    The 'easy mode' is incredibly hard at least partly in terms of nobody else having the capability to finance it (with the possible exception of two superpowers and Jeff Bezos) But yeah, I tend to agree that whether it ultimately succeeds or not, blowing Starship up is a "fail fast" strategy because they have the money (and the reputational capital from successful Falcon 9 launches) to learn from their mistakes that way, and not many others do. Much as the waterfall approach of big space projects gets derided, there's a reason entities that can't take the reputational hit of visibly blowing stuff up on a regular basis do it that way...
- Aeolun 1y ago
  > The astronauts will actually fly to the moon in SLS The program that was paused pending new NASA director, and has burned more money than SpaceX without a single (usable) launch? I’m making things up out of memory here, but suffice to say SLS does not have my confidence.
- panick21_ 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - throwawaymaths 1y ago
    have no idea why the replacement plan isn't launching orion on falcon 9 heavy and rendezvousing with orion on dragon
- tekla 1y ago
  I'm going to guess you don't actually know anything about SLS or rockets at all. How are the astronauts supposed to get on lunar soil on SLS?
- ricardobeat 1y ago
  > Saturn V was better by an order of magnitude and likely cheaper if you consider how much fundamental work went into creating it which is now easy to buy off the shelf. One year of Saturn V development cost the same as the entire Starship program so far. One launch cost 20-30x more than the projected cost of a Starship launch. It is also said that it’s simply impossible to rebuild a Saturn rocket. Not only you can’t “buy components off the shelf” because they simply don’t exist anymore, even if you had all the component blueprints (which we don’t, they were lost to time), the manufacturing know-how is long gone. Starship was developed from scratch. SpaceX developed their own engines, their flight control surfaces are novel, the rocket structure and materials are novel, the entire approach is different. Yes, our modern electronics industry makes it “easier” but this is like saying Porsche is playing in easy mode because of the Ford Model T.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
    It's hard to compare costs when one rocket works and the other doesn't. If Starship never works then the cost is a bit irrelevant. I propose my own imaginary rocket. It costs $0 but it doesn't exist. Totally beats the Saturn V on cost!
- ghxst 1y ago
  IMO calling it "easy mode" really misses the mark. If you ever get the chance to hear directly from the engineers working on Starship, I think you’d come away with a deeper appreciation for the scale and complexity of what they’re building. The solutions they work on go far beyond "just" launching a rocket.
  - tonyhart7 1y ago
    I know right, I think people just spitting on bullshit I have much respect to this guys that works in here that really pushing the innovation beyond the limit reusable rocket is the future if you want permanent present in space, there is no way you throw rocket for only 1 launch
motorest 1y ago
> You are comparing "sending a small crew for a few days on the Moon ASAP for propaganda purposes" with "setting up a permanent outpost on the Moon". No, OP is comparing a launcher that worked reliably (it's in the history books) with a launcher which never performed a mission and is reporting "anomalies".
- m4rtink 1y ago
  Many Saturn V stages blew up on test stands as well (its also in the history books) and some flight were very much on the edge of success. It was also not trying to make the whole system reusable and economicaly sustainable (just check when the last Saturn V flight was - if it was sustainable it would be still flying, right ?).
- aredox 1y ago
  Launched reliably... 12 times.
  - motorest 1y ago
    > Launched reliably... 12 times. Was it required to launch more? How many moon missions did Starship fulfilled? It seems 50 years ago SaturnV launched 12 times more than Starship.
    - aredox 1y ago
      Reliable statistics require a minimum of 30 samples.

by aredox 1y ago

MrSkelter 1y ago

This is an inane comparison. Starship is “the program to build a permanent base in the moon”. It’s not even the only vehicle involved in the moon program. It’s a rocket designed to take astronauts from moon orbit to the moon’s surface. The astronauts will actually fly to the moon in SLS. So far it’s proved incapable of being launched, attaining orbit, and returning to earth as designed. That’s without a payload. It has no life support system built and is literally years behind schedule. Rather than making progress it is being redesigned on the fly to mitigate fundamental problems with its capability which Musk laughs off as “moving fast and breaking things”. The problem is we aren’t moving fast at all. The rocket is a disaster. Saturn V was better by an order of magnitude and likely cheaper if you consider how much fundamental work went into creating it which is now easy to buy off the shelf. Comparing the programs while ignoring the fact that hobbiest regularly reach the Karman line is deceitful. Starship is doing this on easy mode and it’s failing.

madaxe_again 1y ago
Nice one. Now do SLS.
bluescrn 1y ago
> Starship is doing this on easy mode and it’s failing. But this 'easy mode' is still so incredibly hard that nobody else will even attempt it. I'd love to see some serious competition emerge in the reusable rocket space, but SpaceX is far, far ahead with Falcon 9 being an incredible success, even if the Starship project may be headed for failure. Nobody reports on 100+ successful Falcon 9 launches/landings in a year, those are now mundane. But a small number of Starship failures - test flights of an experimental vehicle - become big news, mostly because they involve spectacular explosions. It seems that Starship may be too big to 'fail fast', mostly because of the visual spectacle of those failures.
- notahacker 1y ago
  The 'easy mode' is incredibly hard at least partly in terms of nobody else having the capability to finance it (with the possible exception of two superpowers and Jeff Bezos) But yeah, I tend to agree that whether it ultimately succeeds or not, blowing Starship up is a "fail fast" strategy because they have the money (and the reputational capital from successful Falcon 9 launches) to learn from their mistakes that way, and not many others do. Much as the waterfall approach of big space projects gets derided, there's a reason entities that can't take the reputational hit of visibly blowing stuff up on a regular basis do it that way...
Aeolun 1y ago
> The astronauts will actually fly to the moon in SLS The program that was paused pending new NASA director, and has burned more money than SpaceX without a single (usable) launch? I’m making things up out of memory here, but suffice to say SLS does not have my confidence.
panick21_ 1y ago
[flagged]
- throwawaymaths 1y ago
  have no idea why the replacement plan isn't launching orion on falcon 9 heavy and rendezvousing with orion on dragon
tekla 1y ago
I'm going to guess you don't actually know anything about SLS or rockets at all. How are the astronauts supposed to get on lunar soil on SLS?
ricardobeat 1y ago
> Saturn V was better by an order of magnitude and likely cheaper if you consider how much fundamental work went into creating it which is now easy to buy off the shelf. One year of Saturn V development cost the same as the entire Starship program so far. One launch cost 20-30x more than the projected cost of a Starship launch. It is also said that it’s simply impossible to rebuild a Saturn rocket. Not only you can’t “buy components off the shelf” because they simply don’t exist anymore, even if you had all the component blueprints (which we don’t, they were lost to time), the manufacturing know-how is long gone. Starship was developed from scratch. SpaceX developed their own engines, their flight control surfaces are novel, the rocket structure and materials are novel, the entire approach is different. Yes, our modern electronics industry makes it “easier” but this is like saying Porsche is playing in easy mode because of the Ford Model T.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
  It's hard to compare costs when one rocket works and the other doesn't. If Starship never works then the cost is a bit irrelevant. I propose my own imaginary rocket. It costs $0 but it doesn't exist. Totally beats the Saturn V on cost!
ghxst 1y ago
IMO calling it "easy mode" really misses the mark. If you ever get the chance to hear directly from the engineers working on Starship, I think you’d come away with a deeper appreciation for the scale and complexity of what they’re building. The solutions they work on go far beyond "just" launching a rocket.
- tonyhart7 1y ago
  I know right, I think people just spitting on bullshit I have much respect to this guys that works in here that really pushing the innovation beyond the limit reusable rocket is the future if you want permanent present in space, there is no way you throw rocket for only 1 launch

motorest 1y ago

> You are comparing "sending a small crew for a few days on the Moon ASAP for propaganda purposes" with "setting up a permanent outpost on the Moon". No, OP is comparing a launcher that worked reliably (it's in the history books) with a launcher which never performed a mission and is reporting "anomalies".

m4rtink 1y ago
Many Saturn V stages blew up on test stands as well (its also in the history books) and some flight were very much on the edge of success. It was also not trying to make the whole system reusable and economicaly sustainable (just check when the last Saturn V flight was - if it was sustainable it would be still flying, right ?).
aredox 1y ago
Launched reliably... 12 times.
- motorest 1y ago
  > Launched reliably... 12 times. Was it required to launch more? How many moon missions did Starship fulfilled? It seems 50 years ago SaturnV launched 12 times more than Starship.
  - aredox 1y ago
    Reliable statistics require a minimum of 30 samples.