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The program looks similar to the Soviet N1 program, in scale, testing and failures. Korolyov was in hurry to get to the moon, and tried to assemble everything a
by culebron21 1y ago
The program looks similar to the Soviet N1 program, in scale, testing and failures. Korolyov was in hurry to get to the moon, and tried to assemble everything and test in actual flight. After 4 failed test flights, the program was scrapped.
This approach had worked with the R7 rocket (the Sputnik and Gagarin's booster, predecessor of Soyuz). But at this larger scale, it seems things break apart much easier if not properly tested in parts.
- rtkwe 1y agoI think you can see the cracks opening, for example unless I've missed it they haven't managed to open the little satellite door successfully on any of these flights.
- londons_explore 1y agoDue to the scaling laws of rocketry, it should be easier to make a huge rocket. You can afford to have proportionally bigger safety margins on everything. I suspect that Musks desire to have everything reusable has severely eaten into those margins though. I personally think he'd have been better off making only the first stage ('booster') reusable for the first few years, which then lets you develop more things in parallel later (the first landers can be on mars whilst you're still figuring out second stage reusability)
- rsynnott 1y agoHistorically this hasn't _really_ been the case; the N1, of course, was a bit of a disaster, this one seems to be similar. Saturn V worked, but had a number of near-misses over a small number of launches. Beyond those, nothing in the super-heavy category has enough launches to draw conclusions.
- Retric 1y agoThere’s little need for big rockets, falcon heavy has flown 11 times including the initial test flight Feb 2018. Going fully reusable may change that equation, but first stage reuse probably isn’t enough to make the program even close to worthwhile.
- HPsquared 1y agoFull reusability would totally change the game. It'd be an order-of-magnitude cost reduction. Maybe even 2 orders of magnitude (cost per kg to orbit)
- Retric 1y agoFull reuse can be anywhere from more expensive to multiple orders of magnitude cheaper, thus could rather than would. Questions like rate of successful launches, amount of payload sacrificed, etc really change the economics of the whole process. If the total payload is worth 1 billion a moderately more expense launch with higher success rate can be cheaper.
- floatrock 1y agoyou still thinking the mars line is anything more than musk's latest FSD or hyperloop distraction/hype story?
- londons_explore 1y agoIf you didn't want to go to mars, you wouldn't be making starship at all. It's pretty clear there is barely enough commercial launch demand for falcon 9 (it already has ~100% of the non-foreign launch market, and there isn't a huge amount of price elasticity), so no reason at all to develop starship, apart from humans in space.
- awongh 1y agoIsn't there a degree of market creation that happens when there are big price drops though? What sort of technologies become enabled when putting things in space gets cheaper?
- simiones 1y agoThe first goals of Starship are putting a human on the Moon (this is what the US government is paying SpaceX for) and decreasing cost-to-orbit (primarily for SpaceX's own use with Starlink). Falcon 9 simply can't fly to the moon, it doesn't have the power. Also, both Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are still too expensive for Starlink to make a good profit. Mars is at best a long term goal for Starship, and far more likely to be just a nice story that Musk uses to motivate his engineers and investors.
- stevage 1y agoThat's a great summary.
- mr_toad 1y agoEverything about the design of Starship, from the fuel choice, to the size, aerobraking capability, to vertical landing system says this is a rocket designed to land and return from Mars. It’s a terrible design for anything else, because it can barely get beyond LEO without in-orbit refuelling. None of the competing rockets (e.g. New Glenn) resemble Starship in the slightest, because none of them are intended to fly to Mars.
- s1artibartfast 1y agoThere are other scaling laws at play as well. Defects that are not addressed by design safety margins.
- inglor_cz 1y agoI don't think so. For starters, they test a lot in SpaceX. N1 had ablative engines, which could not be test-fired on Earth. They could only test them by launching the entire stack and hoping that it would go into the orbit. The current wave of problems is likely caused by optimizations in the v2 of the rocket. Starship v1 was very conservatively built and mostly worked. They are trying to squeeze extra 25 per cent of payload capacity from v2 (from 80 to 100 tons on LEO), and they are running into the edges of multiple envelopes. Raptor v2 BTW seems fine, the main issues are around the plumbing that feeds propellant into the engines.
- tedmcory77 1y agoThats enough to put a fully loaded Abrahams tank (with crew) into orbit…
- inglor_cz 1y agoBeing a fan of railways, I tend to compare to electric locomotives. The heaviest Vectrons are about 90 tons, and they would fit into the payload bay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectron_(locomotive) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectron_(locomotive) Now that would be high-speed rail.
- xattt 1y agoWhy not a whale to make the Douglas Adams trope a reality?
- inglor_cz 1y agoI've never taken a whale somewhere so far.
- qingcharles 1y agoNot again...
- m4rtink 1y agoI think a steam locomotive would be even cooler - first steps to Galaxy Express. ;-) For example 2 of the legendary JGR Class 8620 (nicknamed hachiroku) Japanese steam locomotives could be comfortably launched to orbit in 90 tons. :)
- m4rtink 1y agoThere are definitely some parallels, but it is not the same in many regards. For example the N1 was severely hampered by engine availability - Glushko wanted to push his hypergolic rockets and engines and refused to build an engine like he did for the R7. So they had to pick something else & ended up with far too many (for that time) not very reliable NK-15 engines. Also compared to Super Heavy & Starship, they had more stages (4 vs 2) and most importantly, were not able to test the stages separately - which was possible for the Saturn V & IIRC all its stages exploded on the test stand at least once. Both Super Heavy and Starship can be tested separately & Starship exploded during such testing, without taking the rest of the rocket with it, like N1 regularly did - including demolishing the super expensive launch pad during at least one occasion.
- slenk 1y agoStarship seems to explode much more taking everything with it - not just parts on a launch stand
- ceejayoz 1y agoThe Soviet program had plenty of that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nedelin_catastrophe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nedelin_catastrophe
- slenk 1y agoI know. I thought we (the USA) were supposed to be better than them. We were with the Apollo program
- ceejayoz 1y agoWe did accidentally torch the Apollo 1 crew in their capsule. My fav Apollo-era fuckup is when they tested the launch abort system. The test went bad, but was 100% successful in demonstrating it worked. Heh. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DpdKxv9WINY https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DpdKxv9WINY Getting to Apollo involved a lot of big booms, too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13qeX98tAS8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13qeX98tAS8
- mlindner 1y agoN1 was much simpler in a lot of ways though than what Starship is trying to do. There also aren't engine problems like the N1 had. I don't think the comparisons are very apt. The parts are not what are failing. It's the overall system.
- rsynnott 1y agoAt least the first, second, eighth and ninth launch attempts of this one failed in whole or in part due to engine failure.
- mlindner 1y agoThose first two with engine failures you mentioned were caused by contamination issues inside the vehicle, solved by adding filtration systems. Those last two were on the second stage so no comparison to the N1 with its massive numbers of engines and the ninth flight you mentioned wasn't even an engine failure.
- jmaestrooper 1y agoAside from the fact that both were the largest rockets in their time there's literally NOTHING in common between these 2 programs. Government-run vs private-run (partially govt-bankrolled). Single use vs fully reusable. Moon vs Mars. Traditional development vs iterative ("hardware heavy") development. There's just no parallels whatsoever. Will the result be the same? We'll see. But the history says don't bet against Elon. Btw N1 was a failure arguably due to Korolev's death, not his ineptness.
- numpad0 1y agoN1's problem was having that many engines at all. R7 is a "Heavy" design and doesn't cross feed everything like N1 or SH do while also having fewer engines. Those are probably big differences.
- creer 1y agoTo be fair, there is now a thorough understanding and computing capability for doing statistical failure analysis. They are not doing this at random. And SpaceX is NOT testing everything in actual flight. See engine testing, pressure testing, static fires, massive instrumentation (tests including flights with gathering data as the primary objective) - all as evidence of that. And they have commented on the wide availability of hardware - currently arriving faster than the capability to try and launch it. So, no, not similar.