SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today
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SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
Zigurd · · focus · HN ↗
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.
DarmokJalad1701 · · focus · HN ↗
As it stands today - Starship Flight 14 just deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites, 52 tonnes total. At around $110M marginal per launch, that is about $2.1M per tonne. A Falcon 9 at $30M carrying 15 tonnes is about $2M per tonne. So even as a fully expendable rocket, Starship is already basically in Falcon 9 cost-per-ton territory.
> and they need to find 50 tons more capacity by shedding weight elsewhere in the system.
Or increase performance in the engines and elsewhere. Falcon 9 Block 1 was 9000kg to LEO. The Block 5 that is flying now is 22000 kg to LEO. It's not magic. They already have a path forward with Raptor 4 and other improvements.
> needs a launch cadence fast enough so that refueling doesn't take 15 separate starship tankers
They don't need to launch special tanker missions for a depot. Their goal is to start launching Starlinks and AI inference sats en-masse. Once they demonstrate on-orbit fuel transfer, the easiest way is to fill the depot during normal missions. They can cut out some payload from specific flights to carry excess fuel and top off the depot. The sheer scale of their other flights is enough to keep it full. It is infrastructure that they need for higher energy missions. I doubt they are going to launch 15 dedicated flights just to fill up the tank.
> just a minor milestone on the way to that launch cadence: catching both stages.
They can hit massive cadence even fully expending every Starship, still work out kinks with reusability in the process and still make a profit off of Starlinks given their pace of production.
And given what they have shown so far, I think they are going to try to catch both in the next 2-3 flights barring unforeseen issues.
> Once both stages are reliably caught after a mission, refurbishment needs to be minimal
Nope. Even a cadence of once a week means that by the time they have 10+ launch pads up (in LA+FL+TX), they can be launching once a day if not more frequently. Their rate of production can already sustain that. What's missing is fuel source which will get built out in Louisiana.
> really big blind spot for the project management implications
Lol. The guy got partially reusable rockets and human rated spacecraft working at a cadence unheard of in the aerospace industry. Quite the accomplishment with such a blind spot for the project management!
Zigurd · · focus · HN ↗
Now that the most recent test flight is complete, we can see a glaring hole in the optimistic projections: everyone is celebrating that an orbital insertion was possible even with an engine out on the upper stage, and multiple engines failed to light on the booster when it ran a simulation of a return to launch. It's nice that the mission did not fail due to failed engines. But it also means that it will likely take years of further development to attain rapid reuse.
This person is living in the same days of future past when people didn't utterly dismiss the PowerPoint Mars colony. We now know better, and even the stans have limited themselves to touting an oversized rocket for orbital launches.