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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. dwaltrip · · focus · HN ↗
        The exploding rockets were all test launches. SpaceX is pretty good at launching rockets successfully:

        > Rockets from the Falcon 9 family have a success rate of 99.57% and have been launched 703 times over 16 years, resulting in 700 full successes, two in-flight failures [...], one pre-flight failure [...], and one partial failure [...]. The active version of the rocket, the Falcon 9 Block 5, has flown 633 times successfully and failed once [...], resulting in a 99.84% success rate.

        Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_Heavy_launches#Launch_statistics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...

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