Thread

SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today

304 points · 367 comments · geox

paulus_magnus2 · 1790605967 · focus · HN ↗
Starship is not yet reusable but they have the MVP and a fantastic position to iterate forward.
-- they have an orbital launcher with the largest diameter cargo bay
-- larger sats have bigger antennas and bigger PV area and more bus power. this scales as diam^2
-- 26 x Starlink v3 ~40-65 tons to LEO
-- every launch generates revenue, locks out the orbit for competitors.
-- they can launch more volume, more mass and cheaper than anyone else by a large margin
-- the design is validated - things will work
-- there is technical debt, issues but the rocket did the job
Caveats
-- timelines for full reusability are optimistic etc
-- there will be other issues in scaling to launching gigawats into orbit
-- cooling will have to be
-- Musk might go Full Villan mode before the thing works
[meta] I really didn't like that other negative comment getting voted to the top. Looks like it's made by someone who never worked in a bigco. For every bigco I worked, at any time there were hundreds if not thousands of open issues. You could list them and try arguing the company is about to fail and you'd scare people who don't know better.
It's the judgement of the severity of the issue that matters not #no_of_issues. And if there were 0 issues would our job exist?
[edit] getting the formatting right is very hard, maybe we could get a preview / TinyMCE ?
1. trencedamp · 1790611117 · focus · HN ↗
  Is nobody concerned about putting things in a ship that explodes every other time they launch it
  1. jfoster · 1790612641 · focus · HN ↗
    Falcon 9 used to do that when being tested.
    They push them to the limits in testing/development to make them reliable in production.
    Starship still in testing/development.
    spwa4 · 1790625185 · focus · HN ↗
    Or you could do it like every other rocketry startup: either succeed first time or go bankrupt. Hell, occasionally they go bankrupt after succeeding at their first flight.
    People here act like SpaceX is the only or the best rocket startup. That trial-and-error is somehow the superior design strategy and that that is responsible for SpaceX's success.
    In reality, of course, SpaceX's only real distinguishing feature is how much they blow up and how they keep getting funding despite financial analysis after financial analysis saying "this will never work, it's a loss". But no worries! Starlink will fix it! Except ... when calculating Starlink profits they're ... also negative. Starlink caused a huge boost in SpaceX funding, while losing money. How do you do that?
    In my personal experience, creating a company that runs at a loss results in losing money. I guess SpaceX makes it up on volume?
    SpaceX's secret is dollars. Investor dollars. The amount of money Musk has (frequently literally) more than the funding of EVERY other private rocket startup COMBINED.
    QuiEgo · 1790626829 · focus · HN ↗
    SpaceX has some absurd majority of the launch market. Because their rockets work.
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competition" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competitio...
    I won’t comment on the finances, but their technical success is self-evident.
    spwa4 · 1790627213 · focus · HN ↗
    My point was that working rockets is not exactly a good explanation for SpaceX's success.
    Rocket Lab Electron works
    Galactic Energy Ceres-1 works
    Virgin Orbit LauncherOne rocket works
    Astra Rocket 3.3 works (no relation to OpenAI)
    Firefly AerospaceAlpha works
    And this is disregarding that of course these are hardly the only kind of organization with working rockets. Did you know a rocket startup with working rockets was forced into bankruptcy for fear it might give Congo access to ballistic rockets?
    ... What makes the difference for SpaceX is investor money, not engineering excellence. In fact most of the above companies got to orbit on their first try, no blowing up rockets and hundreds of millions of dollars required.
    mmustapic · 1790629237 · focus · HN ↗
    No, Spacex is different because of engineering. By being able to reuse rockets they can launch frequently (every week?). By launching frequently they can measure and improve the rockets, so reliability goes up and price down.
    [deleted] · 1790668717 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    spwa4 · 1790670795 · focus · HN ↗
    Really? Do you realize how insane it is what you're saying? A "fully loaded" cost for a Falcon launch, including the cost of development and of course the debt SpaceX took on to get here, comes an eye-watering 2.9 BILLION dollars per launch (just shy of double the space shuttle's cost). Of that debt, Musk spent about 100 million per launch on materials, employees, development, ... and kept 2.8 billion per launch for himself and his investors (that's why it's such brilliant financial engineering, also that's how you become a trillionnaire). To just keep it's current valuation, SpaceX needs something close to 2000 launches per year, indefinitely, more than double their current pace. That market doesn't exist. There aren't enough people to pay for launching satellites to launch that many rockets. And ... that's disregarding that SpaceX has competitors that are ~2 years behind and don't have SpaceX debt load, and should be able to launch whatever you want in about 2 years at half SpaceX's $/kg.
    Several of the already named startups had rockets that are reusable. You act like SpaceX is the origin, or the first working example of the idea of reusable rockets. They are not, and they are not a little bit short of that standard, but a reusable rocket flew to Space and landed over 60 years ago. SpaceX is an accounting/finance accomplishment, not an engineering accomplishment.
    At this point in time, both Europe (Arianespace) and China (CASC) have bet money they can duplicate the effort, Europe at less than 1% of the money SpaceX spent. Of course they usually go to a little over 2 times their planned budget. In other words, should come out below 2.5% the budget SpaceX spent ... (but does that matter given that SpaceX is not profitable?)
    The whole space shuttle program (where SpaceX got half its employees I might add) is not just an attempt at making reusable rocket motors work. It's a successful attempt at making reusable rockets work first try, in 1981 (first motor reuse 6 months later, same year).
    The engines on the orbiter could be, and regularly were, reused. This was done on its first ever launch (and second, obviously). The first 3 engines that launched the first Space Shuttle Orbiter were reused. Now how's that for engineering? A class above SpaceX, with 50 years older tech?. Obviously those engines landed. And even the Space Shuttle program over it's entire life (30+ years) lost less engines to everything than SpaceX lost designing it's rocket before launching it's first rocket to orbit.
    If you allow for pure demonstration flights you could even say the first demonstration of a reusable rocket launching to space (ie. above the 100km line) was NASA X-15 flight 90, by Joseph A. Walker on 19th July 1963. Joseph Walker landed that engine, and reused that very engine to do it again, by the way. Of course, that wasn't into orbit.
    And one of the startups had a reusable rocket at its first ever launch too. All these efforts had problems. Yes NASA did this first try, but very expensively. The startup did it cheaper than SpaceX did (and it wasn't remotely close), but wasn't able to continue (lack of money). You could complain their rocket was way smaller, and didn't make it to orbit (made it to space though).
    Critically, SpaceX engineering still falls into the "not good enough" category, as mean as that is to say. It does not have the kg/$ performance the market demands, and SpaceX is only destined for bankruptcy. Plus, given their debt load, it really can't take that long (let's say a decade, tops). Let me explain. There is a clear commercial standard, from the Iridium days. Replacing 4000 satellites in orbit every 5 years, forever, on the income you can get from such a network from subscriptions, is not commercially viable with SpaceX technology. And you could say, the math is clear: cheap enough only seems achievable with a "spaceplane" design, launching from an airstrip. That was the motivation for the Space Shuttle program, but they couldn't make that work. SpaceX uses 12000 satellites btw, so not only do they not solve the Iridium problem, they make it harder for themselves.
    And despite your comment asserting the opposite, SpaceX isn't even trying (the cost curve "Spaceship" is on does not reach commercial viability, not that it would even matter given the debt load SpaceX has)
    Oh and when it comes to Musk's usual promises vs performance? You know who launched a spaceship to Mars and who didn't? Blue Origin did. SpaceX did ... not.
    There is no engineering axis, other than perhaps eventual scale, where SpaceX wins on the engineering.
    And of course, Trump is really helping to destroy SpaceX by making it clear to Europe that access to SpaceX is contingent on Trump's seemingly somewhat unstable mood.

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