So I’ve heard and seen the newest launch, and I thought for a private firm it seemed cool they were able to do it on their own, but I’m scratching my head that people are gushing about this as some hail mary.
I get the engineering required is staggering when it comes to these rocket tests, but NASA and other big space agencies have already done rocket tests and exploring bits of the moon which still astounds me to this day.
Is it because it’s not a multi billion government institution? When I tell colleagues about NASA doing stuff like this yeaaaars ago they’re like “Yea yea but this is different it’s crazy bro”
Can anyone help me understand? Any SpaceX or Tesla fans here?
Imagine you want to build a cabin in a very remote place in Alaska.
Getting there is quite difficult, you did it a few times in the 60’s but the path is so bad that you had to throw the truck away each time (around $45,000 per trip, for the truck + gas)
You are still planning to build your cabin but having to buy a new truck for each trip is not great, plus the fact that only one company can make this SLS truck so you can’t get more than once a year.
Building a cabin in these circumstances is close to impossible.
Now SpaceX makes a new Starship truck that can go all the way AND be reused. The trip from the hardware store to the build site now only costs you around $100 for the gas plus truck expenses AND you can now do the trip to the hardware store multiple times a day !
Now building the cabin becomes way more accessible.
Replace the Alaskan cabin with a scientific base on the moon or Mars and multiply the amounts by 100,000 and you have an approximation of the situation
NASA could have done this if they had the budget. Instead we’d rather give huge tax cuts to billionaires so they can build a private sector NASA to charge NASA exorbitant sums to use their private vehicles. It’s the most asinine and innefficient way of going about it.
No, NASA has the budget. They already spent $50 billion on the development of SLS and Orion, Starship development cost is estimated to be around $10 billion.
So in theory with the money they spent on SLS they could have built 5 starship program.
The problem is that NASA has to follow political interests, sometimes the political interests align with technical interest and we get great things like the Apollo program.
They also have a very tight tolerance of failure. Every failure made in the engineering process brings more and more scrutiny by those holding the purse strings in Washington.
Space X has less bureaucracy and can pursue other commercial ventures. The amount nasa pays is high, but it’s still cheaper than continuing their old program
Plus NASA can’t afford the risk. If SpaceX failed, no big deal. We would have lost some money and everyone would ridicule Musk. If NASA tried it and failed, they would not only have lost five times the money, but would be parylized by investigations, audits, cutbacks. NASA does a LOT more than just rockets and it would all be at risk
Plus notice NASA has been investing in multiple commercial programs where possible. 3 big rocket programs. Two crew capsules and multiple cargo capsules. Multiple space stations, etc. NASA could not have created this redundancy on their own
A lot of people pointed out a lot of firsts, huge cost reductions, regular flights, but let’s look from the opposite direction ……
Mass to orbit. SpaceX came from nowhere not too many years ago, jumped ahead of established manufacturers, until now they launch most of the worlds satellite mass to orbit, with an unparalleled success record, even with the recent failures. And this is with a rapidly growing space market
Everything they’ve achieved has not only let them scale up far surpassing the rest of the industry across the world, combined, but with reliability and cost to attract all that business
I don’t know what it would take for you to call it a revolution, but the impact on space business is revolutionary
What you’re asking is akin to: why are people impressed by the airplane? We’ve already reached the Americas and India by boat.
SpaceX, and others actually are not advancing science per se, but are greatly improving/optimising the engineering so that it can be used in cheaper ways by others.
There’s also the issue that after the moon landing we didn’t really improve that much and much of the knowledge faded
There’s also the issue that after the moon landing we didn’t really improve that much and much of the knowledge faded
The NASA budget is now being invested in different rockets.
Because they are impressive in the way NASA was. Which is the problem - we should be doing this as a nation and not subsidizing whatever a billionaire fancies at the moment.
Exactly. It’s concerning that a private individual is allowed to do this, much less without government competition. It’s like we’ve forgotten that the boosters that got us to the moon were the same missiles that terrorized Britain.
Yes. It’s down right scary to think about what the consequences of private ownership will mean.
In best case it will turn into a profitable business which means burning a shit ton of fuel in the atmosphere and leaving tons of garbage in orbit.
Yes it’s impressive that it’s possible, but is it less impressive if it means screwing up the option for others to launch anything in 50 years just because the richest man on earth right now wanted to earn more money.
It’s a small step for a large corporation, but it’s a large step backwards for humanity.
I’d rather see new technologies like the slingshot launches becoming successful than seeing SpaceX launching the same old dirty rockets over and over for profit.
eh, it will probably be good thing to just commercialize space buses and leave NASA to the science.
Good thing in what way
It would allow NASA to focus on science and not trivialities of moving things into orbit. Thought that was well implied.
Moving things into orbit requires a substantial amount of science.
The science is largely figured out. Takes engineering and refinement, sure. But we know how to do these things.
The science of space flight is largely figured out? That will be news to the scientists on spacex’s staff. I don’t think you know what you’re talking about
Wait, when did NASA land a fully reusable rocket like fucking Buck Rogers?
Then do it again, but capture it with the freakin’ launch tower?
When did NASA even have a reusable rocket? Oh, the shuttle, the bastardized money pit for NSA/NRO/Air Force, that appears to have been designed to orbit a surveillance satellite chassis, which most people know as Hubble (it’s one of many, this one being used to surveil the universe, instead of the earth).
And the shuttle was a quasi-reusable orbiter, not a rocket.
I believe NASA could also refurbish and re-use the SRBs, but the big orange tank was expended with every flight. The Space Shuttle Main Engines are actually still in service, we have a small inventory of them and they either have been or will be flown since 2011.
But I would definitely say that the moment the Falcon Heavy’s two booster stages returned to Cape Canaveral and made synchronized powered landings was the moment 21st century space flight arrived. SpaceX is head and shoulders above what anyone else is doing with reusable rockets and spacecraft. Meanwhile Boeing is in the broom closet huffing Lysol and muttering about quarterly earnings.
They could reuse the SRB but the cost to refurbish them was like 90% of a new one. So it wasn’t terribly useful.
Can I just add that “fucking Buck rogers” is an excellent phrase and all three words can mean sex and when combined they don’t.
Honestly “Buck fucking Rogers” is a pretty big missed opportunity
Did you just talk shit on the shuttle and Hubble? Whaaat?
The shuttle was a massive and unsafe waste of space ship.
Not sure what Hubble did to catch this stray however.
There are a few things that are different from what NASA has done in the past:
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SpaceX Rocket is the most powerful rocket ever, surpassing everything that NASA or anyone else has ever done.
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they are landing the rockets, with the aim of being able to recover them. If you skip the technicality that SpaceX first stage is suborbital but is part of an orbital launcher, that makes SpaceX the only entity who has achieved that, with some comparison to the Space Shuttle and Buran, though both were losing significant sections of the initial launcher, with very difficult repairs once on the ground.
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the cost of the launcher. In terms of capabilities, NASA’s SLS is probably close to Starship. However, it costs around $2B/launch, and nothing is recoverable. Starship is meant for low cost. It is estimated that the current hardware + propellant for a single launch is under $100M. With reusability, a cost per launch under $10M is achievable in the mid term (10 years I would say) once the R&D has been paid ($1.4B/year at the moment, I would guess the whole development for Starship will be $10-20B, so same if not less than SLS).
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the aim for high speed reusability - SpaceX aim is to launch as much as possible, as fast as possible, with the same hardware. While it is a bit early to understand how successful they will be (Elon was saying a launch every 1hr, which seem to be very optimistic, I would bet 6-12hrs to be more achievable). That was NASA’s original goal for the Space Shuttle, and they failed that.
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finally, orbital refueling means you have a single vehicle that can basically go anywhere in the inner solar system without much issues, and minimal cost.
Also, what gets people excited are the prospects of what this enables. A 10-100x decrease in the access to orbit changes completely the space economics and opens a lot of possibilities. This means going to the Moon is a lot simpler because now you don’t need to reduce the mass of everything. This makes engineering way easier as you do not need to optimise everything to death, which tends to increase costs exponentially. And as for Mars, Starship is what makes having a meaningful colony there possible. Doing an Apollo like mission on Mars would have been possible for decades, but at a significant price for not much to show for. With cheap launch, you can just keep sending hardware there.
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Have you seen their boosters land? It very much IS impressive. They basically made reusable rockets viable, which is a huge step for more affordable space flight.
Also their raptor engine is a marvel of engineering.
Here’s some solid numbers:
The Shuttle was so expensive that it might have been better to keep using the Saturn V. It accomplished a lot, but was ultimately a failure at its original goal of a reusable rocket with a fast turnaround. Some of the old hopes for it were to launch 100 Shuttle missions per year. As problems were found, it was clear it would never be close to that.
Falcon 9 was already an order of magnitude drop from what came before. Being able to grab the Starship booster by the chopstick method means it can quite possibly do the quick turnaround the Shuttle promised. That could mean another order of magnitude drop. Possibly even two orders of magnitude.
That’s transformative. It’s not just cheaper. It let’s things be done that weren’t possible before.
One subtle thing that’s already come out of this is related to Starlink. Now, this has a whole lot of problems that I won’t get into here, but it does have one fascinating effect. A rocket coming back down generates plasma that blocks radio signals to the ground. This means there’s a blackout time where everyone in mission control stands by nervously while waiting to hear if it blew up or not.
What Starlink does is provide a high bandwidth link above the rocket, letting them relay data back to the ground. This means that not only do we have full communication during reentry, but even a live video feed of the exterior. This was not possible until fairly recently.
It should also be noted that we SpaceX didn’t do this on their own. They benefited from decades of NASA R&D, launch facilities, and funding. Their biggest success comes from working around the pork barrel politics that hangs around NASA’s neck.
I remember an interview with a former NASA engineer that said NASA would never be able to do anything near what SpaceX (or any other private company) can do. The reason given is that SpaceX spent billions after billions on what were essentially very expensive fireworks until they finally achieved a breakthrough. A breakthrough that wasn’t a guarantee. Even Musk himself had said he would have eventually closed SpaceX if they hadn’t achieved something and it would have been a multi billion dollar failure. He, and everyone else really, got very lucky.
Imagine NASA asking taxpayers for another billion dollars after blowing up the last billion with no guarantee this next billion would produce anything but another explosion. How many times would the public foot that bill? Not even once. Not while people don’t have healthcare and homelessness and hunger exist. The government can’t justify it and that’s just how it is. The only way we get space travel, with our current system, is to hope someone with a lot of money is willing to bet it on a breakthrough. It sucks but the problem isn’t Musk, it’s the system that makes us reliant on billionaires for nice things.
In the meantime the military burns trillions on anti terrorism missions that are guaranteed to end up creating more terrorists that will be angry at the US, it’s not as if the public wasn’t used to their money being wasted on things that aren’t guaranteed or that are guaranteed to lead to the opposite of what’s intended and SpaceX isn’t a charity, in the end the public will pay for all those billions they spent on R&D.
Rapidly reusable orbital launch vehicles were unheard-of until Falcon 9. The Space Shuttle was supposed to fill that role, but NASA, ULA, and government elements have made it a horrid overbuilt pile of feature creep that was, at the same time, the crowning achievement of American aeronautical engineering, which was impossible to refurbish quickly. The same thing that is currently happening to SLS.
Propulsive landing of a first stage booster was an insane idea. Even massive space nerds like Everyday Astronaut were skeptical, and I watched him cream his jeans live when the first booster landed. That alone, the ability to reuse both the structure and the engines of the booster, as opposed to ditching them in the ocean (or in China’s case, on top of villages), has made access to low Earth orbit significantly cheaper, and affordable to underfunded scientific organizations.
That being said, competition is closing in. Rocket Lab (New Zealand) is targetin the same industry with the Neutron rocket (CEO Peter Beck literally ate his hat when the announcement was made) and is experimenting with recovering its smaller Electron rocket using mid-air capture by a helicopter. Astra (USA) is developing a rapidly deployable small orbital launch rocket that can fit inside a standard shipping container. There’s also Jeff Bezos and his massive overcompensation of a dick rocket that can also land propulsively, but not worth discussing.
Jeff Bezos and his massive overcompensation of a dick rocket that can also land propulsively, but not worth discussing.
In case anyone doesn’t know why… it’s not an orbital rocket. It just goes up and down. Orbital is going up AND sideways very fast.
Yep. It’s called a sounding rocket. Jeff Bezos and his dick-shaped sounding rocket.
If he ever gets two vehicles into orbit and makes them dock together, the mental image might just be enough to kill me.
Short answer economics. Long answer a reusable rocket platform reduces the cost per launch to a fraction the price of traditional launches. That reduced the price per kg of mass in space making far more possible in space. I think ultimately its selling the idea that humanity can be a multi planetary species where we shall own the stars.
Well, at least the one star 😉
Lots of people here with very well fleshed out takes. Mine is simpler though, and by no means mutually exclusive:
Good marketing.
They know how to advertise themselves as a brand. They’re easy to follow on any social media platform. For one or another, people are going to be looking at them- either in admiration, comparing it to others, just to be critical, or simply out of curiosity.
I’m not very impressed by nasa. What have they done in the last 50 years? If anything, they seem to be sleeping.
I honestly don’t think they have the desire to make earth a space traveling civilization. They are just looking for bacteria and will continue to do so for hundreds of years. It’s all so pointless.
Didn’t they just send a rocket to Europa?
Looking forward to blurry pictures you can’t even see what it is, and then having nasa proudly state that we are looking at ice on Europa.
Kinda like how blurry those mars pictures were huh
Those pictures that look exactly like earth pictures?
I agree they were not blurry though. :)
Oh god…
Both are doing impressive things, but only one is deliberately using media to build hype.
They are also very different organizations with very different goals.
NASA is focussed on science, they are trying to learn as much as possible about our solar system and the universe.
SpaceX by contrast is focussed on engineering. They aren’t trying to find life on Mars, they are trying to build the ferry service to it.
When NASA built rockets back in the 60’s, space flight was a science problem. We needed to figure out if it was even possible to do so. Can we even get a capsule into space? Can humans survive in zero gravity? Nowadays space flight is an engineering problem. We know it’s possible, we know the math, but can we actually build those things?
Also, economics of the equation are important. NASA is funded by american tax payer money, so politics gets involved. SpaceX is a business, so normal ameircan capitalism applies here.
Disclaimer: Fuck Elon Musk and all the shady shit he’s been pulling off.
That said, this is one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen in terms of the potential it holds to shape the future.
Up until 5 short years ago we had:
- No main booster recovery
- No rocket nearly as powerful as this one
- No successful flight of a full-flow stage engine
- Nobody even considering the catch with chopsticks thing
- No private company testing super heavy lift vehicles (BO is about to enter the chat as well)
- No push for reusability at all
This was all built on top of the incredible engineering of NASA, but this one launch today has all of the above ticked.
This is like making the first aeroplane that’s able to land and be flown again. SpaceX uses this example as well, like, imagine how expensive any plane ticket would have to be if you had to build a brand new A380 every single time people wanted to fly and then crashing it into the sea.
Going to space is EXPENSIVE. If this program succeeds it will both massively reduce the cost to space and spin off hundreds of companies looking to do the same in various ways.
Look at any new rocket currently in development, they all include some level of reusability in the design and that’s all thanks to the incredible engineers of SpaceX paving the way, first with Falcon 9 and now with Starship.
We’re talking industrial revolution levels of progress and new frontiers in our lifetimes, which is very, very exciting.
I hate Musk and his personal everything, but Like SpaceX. However, when people gush about reusability, they seem to forget the 135 Space Shuttle missions (2 fatal failures , yes.). All done with 5 vehicles. Yes expensive etc, but truly amazing.
Also, I really don’t find anything SpaceX is doing revolutionary. Impressive? Yes, but it’s essentially incremental engineering, made possible by ginormous funding, including NASA money, and a private company doing things that NASA can-t politically afford.
Imagine NASA crashing 4 Shuttles before getting landing right. There’d be no NASA by now.
The space shuttle was technically reusable, but not in a way that was beneficial to anyone. The time and cost of refurbishing the shuttle after every launch was so much they may as well have built a brand new disposable rocket for each mission.
SpaceX may have built the first reusable rocket that actually saves money
I thought it was the boosters that were in retrospect pointlessly refurbished and would have been cheaper to make new.
Are you sure it was also the shuttle itself being cheaper to make new? The shuttle also took something like 6 months to refurb. Reusable, but not rapid.
Not remake the entire shuttle, but to simply design a disposable rocket and build a hundred of those, instead of a space plane.
Yes, but it’s essentially incremental engineering, made possible by ginormous funding, including NASA money, and a private company doing things that NASA can-t politically afford.
NASA spent about 50 Billion today-dollars developing (not launching) the shuttle program and that went to private contractors (Boeing, Lockheed, United Space, etc.) Starship has a long way to go to hit those numbers.
I really don’t find anything SpaceX is doing revolutionary
Really? Nothing? Many people said what Falcon 9 now does on a regular basis could not be done. No one was even trying. The closest plans were still going to land horizontally and went nowhere. Now, you have to explain why you’re not landing your booster, and what your plans are to fix that going forward: https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/international/2024/09/11/china-wants-to-replace-jeff-bezos-as-musks-greatest-space-threat/
They quite literally revolutionized the space industry in terms of the cost to launch to orbit.
Imagine NASA crashing 4 Shuttles before getting landing right. There’d be no NASA by now.
Yet another way they’ve revolutionized the industry. Almost everyone is doing expendable tests now so that they can move forward quickly. Columbia started construction in 1975, launched for the first time in 1981. When they launched it, it was a fully decked out space shuttle and they put the whole thing on the line - including two astronauts. Imagine NASA trying to do that now. They’d be grounded so hard they’d be jealous of Mankind having a table to land on.
I tried to explain to someone months ago that SpaceX testing things to failure was part of their success, and gave an example like purposely leaving heat shield tiles off starship to see what happened, or launching a version of starship that didn’t have all the improvements that the next starship had, and they then came back saying that is exactly why they (and other people) hate SpaceX. They don’t know everything up front and they should!
Like SpaceX. However, when people gush about reusability, they seem to forget the 135 Space Shuttle missions (2 fatal failures , yes.). All done with 5 vehicles. Yes expensive etc, but truly amazing.
The Space Shuttle was a marvel of engineering. But while it was reusable, it wasn’t actually good at it. Reusability was supposed to bring down cost and turnaround time and it did neither. And not just that, it was actually much more expensive than competing expendable rockets. Plus, it had lots of other issues like being dangerous as fuck. You couldn’t abort at all for major parts of the ascent and there was the whole issue with the fragile heat protection tiles, both of which caused fatalities.
I think part of the reason why people aren’t impressed by the Shuttle anymore is because it flew 135 missions. It’s 40 year old technology. And it’s not like SpaceX are just doing the same thing again 40 years later, they’re reusing their rockets in a completely different way, which no one else had done before. And in doing so they seem to be avoiding most of the disadvantages that came with the Shuttle’s design.
Also, I really don’t find anything SpaceX is doing revolutionary. Impressive? Yes, but it’s essentially incremental engineering, made possible by ginormous funding, including NASA money, and a private company doing things that NASA can-t politically afford.
Sure, I wouldn’t say that no one else could do this with a similar amount of money (and the will to actually do it). Whether you want to call it revolutionary or not is subjective, but they’re definitely innovating a lot more than any other large player in spaceflight. The Falcon 9 is a huge step forward for rocket reusability and SpaceX have also been the first to fly a full-flow staged combustion engine as well as the most powerful rocket ever. They’re making spaceflight exciting again after like 40 years of stagnation and I think that’s what resonates with people.
I think your last sentence answers the OP in a nutshell. There’s nothing more to it than that, and there needn’t be.
The space shuttle wasn’t as reusable as it was claimed to be.
Each airframe required massive refurbishment after every flight.
And the “crashes” you’re talking about were part of the project process, articles that were never going to be any more than test objects to begin with.
NASA crashed a lot of stuff, unintentionally. Three off of the top of my head, killed 15 astronauts, all which were preventable (not to mention the launch pad failures getting to Apollo).
NASA/NACA/Air Force crashed a lot of stuff along the way.
Ffs they knew Columbia had a tile problem, and said “it’ll be OK”. They knew it had been too cold for the booster seals on Discovery, and launched anyway.
Pedantic, but the shuttles were orbiters not rockets
The big ass rocket engines in the back fueled by the massive fuel tank may disagree with you
No, the shuttle ALONE is not a launch vehicle. It’s an orbiter. They are apples to oranges.
It does not power itself off the pad, it uses boosters. So comparing the boosters to the SpaceX stuff is most relevant
The Space Shuttle missions did not recycle the rockets, not to mention that the SpaceX missions were rated super-heavy: Only Apollo has done this before in America.
Imagine NASA crashing 4 Shuttles before getting landing right.
You think they didn’t?
The Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs) from shuttle launched were recycled. They parachuted into the ocean after being jettisoned and were recovered and refused. They just didn’t land themselves. The external fuel tank was not reused.
TIL, thanks. That’s just a small part of the rocket though
Between the orbiter (reused), the boosters (reused), and the external fuel tank (not reused), which parts are not “just a small part” (in terms of technology/complexity/cost, not physical size)?
I take the part about “a small part” back as that’s a misleading term for what I meant: The Super Heavy booster is much bigger in both technology/complexity and physical size and has many more parts than the old space shuttle rockets as it needs to carry the weight of two space shuttle orbiters. Plus, spaceplane is weird.
Remember, unless we’re talking about Enterprise, “space shuttle rockets” includes the orbiter itself. The orbiter’s main engines were where all that fuel from the external tank was going, after all! From that perspective, I would argue that the main “space shuttle rocket” was definitely much more complex than the Super Heavy booster, because the crew stuff, cargo stuff, spaceplane stuff, etc. was integrated into it.
I feel like your criticism of the shuttle system being less reusable than advertised might have been more applicable if we were talking about the Soviet Buran (which indeed used expendable Energia rockets to reach orbit), not NASA’s shuttles.
There was an extensive amount of refurbishment required to re-use the SRBs. Not to mention they had to be physically recovered, and salt water certainly made the process more complicated.
The shuttle itself needed each of its heat shield tiles replaced, which due to the shape of the shuttle were all unique.
The fuel tank was not reused.
The shuttle was meant to be a leap forward in rocket reusability, but it didn’t really pan out that way. There’s good reason the program was scrapped and not replaced with another space plane.
The Starship booster has the potential to launch multiple times per day. The only refurbishment period is how long it takes to refuel it.
Agreed. As I mentioned elsewhere, Falcon 9 is still revolutionary, but I was just clarifying that the SRBs were recycled, as that is sometimes forgotten.
You think they didn’t?
No, they didn’t. Enterprise conducted 5 approach and landing tests where she was carried aloft by a 747 and then detached to glide to a landing, three with that aerodynamic tailcone thing, two with mockup main engines to simulate a return from space. Though there were issues with PIO revealed during the last flight, all five of Enterprise’s approach and landing test flights resulted in successful landings.
I would not describe any space shuttle as “crashed.” Challenger exploded during launch and Colombia broke up during re-entry; destroyed in service yes, crashed no. Enterprise, Atlantis, Discovery and Endeavour all survived service and are on display at museums. No other airworthy space shuttles were built. Explorer/Independence and Inspiration are 1:1 scale models, and Pathfinder was basically a boilerplate meant for testing and incapable of flight.
- Okay, I stand corrected, NASA tests probably didn’t disintegrate. But something to consider is that SpaceX has always expected that the pretty early tests would fail as you can see in their statements.
- The Starship tests didn’t crash either. The first three disintegrated at different points in time and the fourth succeeded (albeit with one engine failure out of 33 and slight damage on reentry).
NASA blew up a LOT of shit before the space shuttle program. Who can forget Ranger 1 aka Stayputnik that blew up on the pad? But I’m especially thinking of a Little Joe launch, which I think was intended to test the Apollo launch escape tower, which developed an uncontrolled roll and threw itself apart. It was actually considered by NASA to be a double success because the escape system functioned correctly when the rocket was legitimately out of control.
Also, the Space Shuttle was THE WORST idea. It was as safe as barb wire contact lenses; it’s God’s greatest miracle that it only killed 15 people.
Frankly I’m surprised that I couldn’t find any disintegrated SLS flight tests with what happened to Colombia. There was something about Orbiter Integrated Tests but I couldn’t find some sort of itemized record on it.
I refrained from bringing up ancient stuff like Ranger because that’s a much higher R&D milestone to surpass.
The space shuttle never flew unmanned. Enterprise did all her glide tests manned, and STS-1 and STS-2 were flown by 2-man crews.
John Young, commander of STS-1, was informed by fellow astronaut Tony England that the House had included the space shuttle program in the budget on April 21, 1972. At the time, he was standing in the Descartes Highlands on the surface of the Moon in his capacity as Commander of Apollo 16.
The shuttle was reusable in the same way a soyuz capsule is. And NASA very much crashed shuttle prototypes on the way.
The Saturn 5 was able to lift 141t to LEO.
The Space shuttle was reusable.
The Saturn V could lift 141t to LEO…once. Also it’ll be at least another 5 years before we reach a stable max power version of Starship.
For example the Falcon 9 v1.0 first flew in 2010 and the current Block 5 version first flew in 2018 with more than double the LEO capacity when fully expendable.
If they configure Starship as fully expendable it can lift 250t to LEO (per SpaceX, so grain of salt there to be fair).
As for the shuttle, I love it to bits and I’m sad it had to be grounded. It was refurbishable but not really reusable and the massive liquid fuel tank was discarded in each flight.
A bit of a timeline correction. The falcon 9 started landing succesfully in 2016. So 8 years ago but your argument still stands.
That can’t be right! 2016 was just… Fuck I’m getting old so fast
no rocket as powerful as this one.
So I’m confused on this because people still seem to be using Starships’s old estimates of 100 tons to LEO orbit, which the SLS can put 145 tons to LEO.
Then 6 months ago Musk got on stage and updated the specs to Say that Starships’s current design can only do 40-50 tons.
This feels awfully familiar for anyone that’s seen early Tesla specs/presentations/promises and I can’t help but wonder as to the validity of everyone saying SpaceX is mostly insulated from Musk’s “influence.”
I think they mean the “superheavy” (somehow a more stupid name than starship) booster rocket is the most powerful. I’m pretty sure by thrust metrics it is. It’s just that the superheavy-starship system can’t put much up in LEO because the starship is huge and heavy on its own.
If you put an expendable second stage on top of the superheavy booster instead of a starship it could put a lot more up to LEO.
To be very honest even if Starship is able to only lift 50 tons, which I’m sure they’ll be able to hit 100/150 tons eventually. The huge difference in cost would easily cover the extra times Starship would have to fly, compared to SLS. Considering each flight of a SLS will be around 4 billion dollars.
