4 ms·

> After the Shuttle program ended in failure, work on reusable launch systems stopped for decades. A similar thing would happen if Starship fails. Space would r

by sho_hn 1y ago

> After the Shuttle program ended in failure, work on reusable launch systems stopped for decades. A similar thing would happen if Starship fails. Space would remain the province of the military and large governments. I really don't agree with this take. It may appear as if SpaceX is the only game in town, but in reality a lot of this technology is commoditized now, and space is as diversified and vibrant as ever. The starting point today is very different from the post-Shuttle environment. If Starship fails, it is unlikely to be for pure technology reasons and something else will take its place with perhaps better product-market fit. SpaceX is a symptom, not the cause. The true dangers to all of these lofty human enterprises are geopolitics, domestic political destabilization and environmental collapse.

GMoromisato 1y ago
I disagree. If Starship fails, the most likely reason will be technological. Either they can never get the heat shield to be reliable, or they can't get cost down below Falcon 9 (meaning, refurbishment costs are too high). And if it fails, who will spend billions on a new vehicle? Stoke Space: They are working on Nova, which is designed for 2nd-stage re-use, and they've got a novel architecture. But they are not well-funded and if Starship fails, it is likely that investor sentiment will shift away from full reusability (you know how investors are). And even if they succeed, their current vehicle can only get 3 tons to orbit. That means each launch must cost less than $1 million to get to the $300/kg target. In contrast, Starship can loft 100 tons, so it can cost up to $30 million per launch and still hit the target. Blue Origin: They are still working on 1st stage re-use, and even assuming they get that to work next year, they are at least a decade away from testing 2nd stage re-use. And their current designs don't have any of the cost-savings in Starship (like launch-tower catch). And that's it! There are no other companies seriously working on 2nd-stage reuse. If Starship fails, there will not be another contender for cheap flights to orbit for decades.
- m4rtink 1y ago
  AFAIK there is a bunch of Chinese startups pitching some fully reusable designs and/or ready to clone something that works. There is already some Falcon 9 like first stage reusable booster prototypes in development.
  - GMoromisato 1y ago
    Maybe. There are a few trying 1st-stage reuse. I don't know of anyone actually working on 2nd-stage (beyond concept stage).
- jjk166 1y ago
  > Either they can never get the heat shield to be reliable, or they can't get cost down below Falcon 9 (meaning, refurbishment costs are too high). There are a lot of other potential technological problems (dozens of engines, stainless steel construction, the belly flop maneuver, etc). Ultimately if Starship would were to fail for technical reasons, it would only indicate the particulars of Starship's implementation don't work. Starship is not the only (or even in my opinion the best) way to achieve full reusability. And partial reusability, which just a few years ago was considered radical, has already been so firmly proven that just about everyone is doing, or trying to do it. The idea of "don't destroy this extremely expensive vehicle after only a single use" won't die for as long as people can see expenses on their books. If anything, the alternative approach, making a low cost, mass producible rocket has been abandoned, possibly pre-maturely.
  - GMoromisato 1y ago
    Rocket Lab tried the alternative: low-cost, mass-produced expendable rockets, and Peter Beck famously ate his hat when they pivoted to reusable. Partial reusability won't get the cost down to the ~$100/kg range. And it definitely won't do that and still loft ~100 tons to orbit. Falcon 9 can get 15 tons to LEO for $45 million, and that's already the lowest price on the market. To hit $300/kg they would need to build a 2nd-stage, launch, recover (on a drone-ship) and refurbish for $4.5 million. That's just not going to happen. There are only two companies that are actively building hardware for 2nd-stage reusability: Blue Origin (which doesn't even have a prototype yet) and Stoke (which has a max 3-ton payload). If Starship fails, we are not getting $300/kg orbital costs for 1-2 decades minimum. I agree that Starship has lots of other potential technological blockers (although fewer each attempt--I never thought tower-catch would work the first time). But no other designs are even close to fulfilling the promise of low-cost orbital launch.
    - jjk166 1y ago
      > Partial reusability won't get the cost down to the ~$100/kg range. I don't see why $100/kg is a particularly important threshold. > Falcon 9 can get 15 tons to LEO for $45 million, and that's already the lowest price on the market. To hit $300/kg they would need to build a 2nd-stage, launch, recover (on a drone-ship) and refurbish for $4.5 million. That's just not going to happen. Falcon 9 reusable is 20 tons to LEO, and the cost SpaceX charges is what customers are willing to pay, not their costs incurred. Before they had reusability, the cost to make a complete, expendable falcon 9 rocket was $50 million. The marginal launch cost for a falcon 9 was approximately ~$15 million in 2020 when they were doing 20% of the launches they're doing now. They are very likely already below $500/kg. Remember this is a system that wasn't initially designed with any level of reusability in mind. A more optimized design that shifted more of the cost to the booster and which was produced at the appropriate scale would almost certainly see a further lower cost. Falcon 9 boosters can fly back to an onshore landing pad, and Starship has already demonstrated landing back on the launch tower itself. > If Starship fails, we are not getting $300/kg orbital costs for 1-2 decades minimum. That's a substantially shifted goalpost. Even if starship succeeds we're still probably more than a decade out from $300/kg orbital costs being a reality. Rockets take a long time to develop, and longer still to mature. SpaceX has been working on Starship for over a decade already. Of course if we assume every rocket currently under development gets cancelled and something new needs to be started from scratch, it will take at least one full rocket development cycle time to bear fruit. But OP was worried that if Starship fails it will cause a loss of faith such that no one even starts working on another attempt for decades.
m4rtink 1y ago
I would actually argue that Apollo and the space race damaged reusable launcher projects more than the Space Shuttle. Before the mad scramble to the Moon there were many interesting infrastructure projects and incremental manned mission planned as well as partially or fully reusable launcher or variants of existing expendable launchers. Then everything that was not contributing to MOON ASAP was thrown away & massive spending on space hardware essentially normalized. The end result (Apollo) was impressive and achieved the goal (first on the Moon) - but was also totally unsustainable, resulting in a big crunch and a lot of setbacks and slowdowns. Another contributing factor has been military involvement - again, wee need that milsat on orbit and we need it now, costs be damned. ICBMs not being exactly reusable does not help. Even the Space Shuttle design being perverted into its partially reusable clunky form can be traced back to military requirements.
- GMoromisato 1y ago
  Great point! There were many reusable projects in that era, but Apollo budgets consumed everything else. I still think Shuttle could have worked, if it had been cheaper to evolve it. Elon's focus on Starship is to make each iteration as cheap as possible, which means they can radically evolve the design without fear. Think of the (recent) switch to hot-staging or the evolution of Raptor. If Shuttle had been able to evolve like that, I think they could have gotten the cost down. If you think about it, Starship is basically just Shuttle with the orbiter stacked on top of the booster and with propulsive landing.
  - WalterBright 1y ago
    > I still think Shuttle could have worked, if it had been cheaper to evolve it. I doubt it. It's a gigantic kludge that isn't fixable. For example, the requirement that it land like an airplane meant it needed wings, landing gear, and a full set of flight control surfaces. None of that is useful apart from the landing, and yet it is necessary to push it all into space and re-enter it. I once emailed Homer Hickam about it, and he was kind enough to reply and said he'd argued the same thing.
    - 1y ago
bookofjoe 1y ago
>It may appear as if SpaceX is the only game in town, but in reality a lot of this technology is commoditized now, and space is as diversified and vibrant as ever. Really? SpaceX conducts more than half the world's rocket launches and deploys 80% of the world's satellites.
- stinkbeetle 1y ago
  And that's underselling it. Of the 550 tons of payload launched in Q1 this year, 478 of them were launched by SpaceX. More than 10x more than China's space agency. More than 5x the rest of the world's governments and corporations (including the US government and other US companies) combined. https://brycetech.com/reports/report-documents/bryce-briefing-2025-Q1/ https://brycetech.com/reports/report-documents/bryce-briefin... Why? It's not because they somehow cheat by sending most of their mass in starlink satellites. It is the other way around -- their satellite comms business is only viable because of their advances in rocket technology: cost of mass to orbit has not really come down since the 50s, not until SpaceX which slashed it dramatically. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-space-launches-low-earth-orbit https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-space-launches-low-e...

by sho_hn 1y ago

GMoromisato 1y ago

I disagree. If Starship fails, the most likely reason will be technological. Either they can never get the heat shield to be reliable, or they can't get cost down below Falcon 9 (meaning, refurbishment costs are too high). And if it fails, who will spend billions on a new vehicle? Stoke Space: They are working on Nova, which is designed for 2nd-stage re-use, and they've got a novel architecture. But they are not well-funded and if Starship fails, it is likely that investor sentiment will shift away from full reusability (you know how investors are). And even if they succeed, their current vehicle can only get 3 tons to orbit. That means each launch must cost less than $1 million to get to the $300/kg target. In contrast, Starship can loft 100 tons, so it can cost up to $30 million per launch and still hit the target. Blue Origin: They are still working on 1st stage re-use, and even assuming they get that to work next year, they are at least a decade away from testing 2nd stage re-use. And their current designs don't have any of the cost-savings in Starship (like launch-tower catch). And that's it! There are no other companies seriously working on 2nd-stage reuse. If Starship fails, there will not be another contender for cheap flights to orbit for decades.

m4rtink 1y ago
AFAIK there is a bunch of Chinese startups pitching some fully reusable designs and/or ready to clone something that works. There is already some Falcon 9 like first stage reusable booster prototypes in development.
- GMoromisato 1y ago
  Maybe. There are a few trying 1st-stage reuse. I don't know of anyone actually working on 2nd-stage (beyond concept stage).
jjk166 1y ago
> Either they can never get the heat shield to be reliable, or they can't get cost down below Falcon 9 (meaning, refurbishment costs are too high). There are a lot of other potential technological problems (dozens of engines, stainless steel construction, the belly flop maneuver, etc). Ultimately if Starship would were to fail for technical reasons, it would only indicate the particulars of Starship's implementation don't work. Starship is not the only (or even in my opinion the best) way to achieve full reusability. And partial reusability, which just a few years ago was considered radical, has already been so firmly proven that just about everyone is doing, or trying to do it. The idea of "don't destroy this extremely expensive vehicle after only a single use" won't die for as long as people can see expenses on their books. If anything, the alternative approach, making a low cost, mass producible rocket has been abandoned, possibly pre-maturely.
- GMoromisato 1y ago
  Rocket Lab tried the alternative: low-cost, mass-produced expendable rockets, and Peter Beck famously ate his hat when they pivoted to reusable. Partial reusability won't get the cost down to the ~$100/kg range. And it definitely won't do that and still loft ~100 tons to orbit. Falcon 9 can get 15 tons to LEO for $45 million, and that's already the lowest price on the market. To hit $300/kg they would need to build a 2nd-stage, launch, recover (on a drone-ship) and refurbish for $4.5 million. That's just not going to happen. There are only two companies that are actively building hardware for 2nd-stage reusability: Blue Origin (which doesn't even have a prototype yet) and Stoke (which has a max 3-ton payload). If Starship fails, we are not getting $300/kg orbital costs for 1-2 decades minimum. I agree that Starship has lots of other potential technological blockers (although fewer each attempt--I never thought tower-catch would work the first time). But no other designs are even close to fulfilling the promise of low-cost orbital launch.
  - jjk166 1y ago
    > Partial reusability won't get the cost down to the ~$100/kg range. I don't see why $100/kg is a particularly important threshold. > Falcon 9 can get 15 tons to LEO for $45 million, and that's already the lowest price on the market. To hit $300/kg they would need to build a 2nd-stage, launch, recover (on a drone-ship) and refurbish for $4.5 million. That's just not going to happen. Falcon 9 reusable is 20 tons to LEO, and the cost SpaceX charges is what customers are willing to pay, not their costs incurred. Before they had reusability, the cost to make a complete, expendable falcon 9 rocket was $50 million. The marginal launch cost for a falcon 9 was approximately ~$15 million in 2020 when they were doing 20% of the launches they're doing now. They are very likely already below $500/kg. Remember this is a system that wasn't initially designed with any level of reusability in mind. A more optimized design that shifted more of the cost to the booster and which was produced at the appropriate scale would almost certainly see a further lower cost. Falcon 9 boosters can fly back to an onshore landing pad, and Starship has already demonstrated landing back on the launch tower itself. > If Starship fails, we are not getting $300/kg orbital costs for 1-2 decades minimum. That's a substantially shifted goalpost. Even if starship succeeds we're still probably more than a decade out from $300/kg orbital costs being a reality. Rockets take a long time to develop, and longer still to mature. SpaceX has been working on Starship for over a decade already. Of course if we assume every rocket currently under development gets cancelled and something new needs to be started from scratch, it will take at least one full rocket development cycle time to bear fruit. But OP was worried that if Starship fails it will cause a loss of faith such that no one even starts working on another attempt for decades.

m4rtink 1y ago

I would actually argue that Apollo and the space race damaged reusable launcher projects more than the Space Shuttle. Before the mad scramble to the Moon there were many interesting infrastructure projects and incremental manned mission planned as well as partially or fully reusable launcher or variants of existing expendable launchers. Then everything that was not contributing to MOON ASAP was thrown away & massive spending on space hardware essentially normalized. The end result (Apollo) was impressive and achieved the goal (first on the Moon) - but was also totally unsustainable, resulting in a big crunch and a lot of setbacks and slowdowns. Another contributing factor has been military involvement - again, wee need that milsat on orbit and we need it now, costs be damned. ICBMs not being exactly reusable does not help. Even the Space Shuttle design being perverted into its partially reusable clunky form can be traced back to military requirements.

GMoromisato 1y ago
Great point! There were many reusable projects in that era, but Apollo budgets consumed everything else. I still think Shuttle could have worked, if it had been cheaper to evolve it. Elon's focus on Starship is to make each iteration as cheap as possible, which means they can radically evolve the design without fear. Think of the (recent) switch to hot-staging or the evolution of Raptor. If Shuttle had been able to evolve like that, I think they could have gotten the cost down. If you think about it, Starship is basically just Shuttle with the orbiter stacked on top of the booster and with propulsive landing.
- WalterBright 1y ago
  > I still think Shuttle could have worked, if it had been cheaper to evolve it. I doubt it. It's a gigantic kludge that isn't fixable. For example, the requirement that it land like an airplane meant it needed wings, landing gear, and a full set of flight control surfaces. None of that is useful apart from the landing, and yet it is necessary to push it all into space and re-enter it. I once emailed Homer Hickam about it, and he was kind enough to reply and said he'd argued the same thing.
  - 1y ago

bookofjoe 1y ago

>It may appear as if SpaceX is the only game in town, but in reality a lot of this technology is commoditized now, and space is as diversified and vibrant as ever. Really? SpaceX conducts more than half the world's rocket launches and deploys 80% of the world's satellites.

stinkbeetle 1y ago
And that's underselling it. Of the 550 tons of payload launched in Q1 this year, 478 of them were launched by SpaceX. More than 10x more than China's space agency. More than 5x the rest of the world's governments and corporations (including the US government and other US companies) combined. https://brycetech.com/reports/report-documents/bryce-briefing-2025-Q1/ https://brycetech.com/reports/report-documents/bryce-briefin... Why? It's not because they somehow cheat by sending most of their mass in starlink satellites. It is the other way around -- their satellite comms business is only viable because of their advances in rocket technology: cost of mass to orbit has not really come down since the 50s, not until SpaceX which slashed it dramatically. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-space-launches-low-earth-orbit https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-space-launches-low-e...