Thread

1. Zigurd · 1790601391 · focus · HN ↗

   Having an impossible critical path will be the demise of the starship project. Too many things have to work that cannot be tested out of order. Too many of those things that needed to work years ago still don't. And those are the easy ones.

   The items I'm listing here are just a subset of the critical path, and each milestone along the way will take months, optimistically, and years more realistically. To the point that starship won't be relevant to moon missions or any commercial use by the time it does what it needs to do to even partially fulfill the plans for it:

   It needs to meet payload specifications. Currently it is off by a factor of two, which sounds doable until you realize the spec is 100 tons, and they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system.

   It needs a launch cadence fast enough so that refueling doesn't take 15 separate starship tankers. Currently it would take years to refuel one single starship to make a one-way trip to the moon.

   There's just a minor milestone on the way to that launch cadence: catching both stages.

   Once both stages are reliably caught after a mission, refurbishment needs to be minimal. Proving that out will take several missions.

   This is a simplified list of items on the critical path, but reaching each of these items has risks, and if those risks prove to be problems to solve, then each of those problems has a list of tasks and tests associated with it.

   Some people think very highly of Elon for proposing technologically elegant solutions. But he's got a really big blind spot for the project management implications.

   1. s08148692 · 1790601867 · focus · HN ↗

      If people didn't try things just because they were hard we'd all be ploughing fields right now

      1. usrbinbash · 1790602499 · focus · HN ↗

         Uh huh.

         Gentle reminder that Saturn 5 worked pretty much eprfectly on its maiden flight.

         1. plqbfbv · 1790603035 · focus · HN ↗

            > Gentle reminder that Saturn 5 worked pretty much eprfectly on its maiden flight.

            Yeah, except it costed 12x per-flight, ran at 30x/kg, and wasn't reusable. So not exactly the same thing.

            1. usrbinbash · 1790682418 · focus · HN ↗

               Remind me again, how many orbital refuelings will it take to make starship reach the moon?
         2. timschmidt · 1790603115 · focus · HN ↗

            Saturn V was the culmination of a loooooong development history which included many rockets in the same family (hence the V), and some spectacular RUDs.
         3. dreamcompiler · 1790603174 · focus · HN ↗

            And it sent 3 people to the moon and brought them back with no refueling.

            60 years ago.

            1. inglor_cz · 1790603570 · focus · HN ↗

               Saturn V worked well, but we seem to be forgetting that Apollo 1 killed three astronauts on Earth and Apollo 13 almost killed another three in space.

               1. dreamcompiler · 1790605769 · focus · HN ↗

                  I never forget either. Both were failures of the command/service module design, not the rocket.

                  1. inglor_cz · 1790606073 · focus · HN ↗

                     True, but ultimately Saturn V + Apollo was a stack intended to fly together, much like Booster + Starship. Both have/had to be reliable as a whole, with disastrous consequences if not. We can praise Saturn's V reliability, but it is just a part of the entire project, and it makes sense to judge the entire project as well.
            2. jve · 1790605520 · focus · HN ↗

               That's an incredible achievement. But you seem to be ignoring the goals of Starship program - to make economically viable and reusable means of space transportation.

               It's like after Jobs unveils iPhone to the world you'd comment that, meh, we could make telephone calls more than 100 years ago?

         4. marcusverus · 1790603276 · focus · HN ↗

            This comparison would make sense if we'd been giving Elon 5% of the federal budget like we did to the Apollo mission.
         5. inglor_cz · 1790603480 · focus · HN ↗

            Gentle reminder that the Apollo project was eating about 0.5 percent of the entire US GDP yearly. That buys a lot of engineers and other capacity.

            An equivalent of this would be about 160 billion USD a year today, and Starship is definitely at least an order of magnitude, perhaps two, cheaper than that.

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