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

304 points · 367 comments · geox

  1. paulus_magnus2 · · 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 · · focus · HN ↗
      Is nobody concerned about putting things in a ship that explodes every other time they launch it
      1. jfoster · · 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.

        1. jltsiren · · focus · HN ↗
          Falcon 1 had a few failures, but Falcon 9 was successful from the beginning. Early SpaceX played it safe, because they couldn't afford to lose big expensive rockets. The only explosion after launch happened on flight 19.

          There were many explosions when SpaceX was trying to figure out how to land the booster safely. But those were after the booster had already completed the actual paid mission.

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