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Due 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
by londons_explore 1y ago
Due 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.