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Houston, you have a SpaceX problem. 13 test flights in, Starship still hasn't successfully shown orbital payload delivery. Maybe it's a flawed design that never will? (abcnews.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/futurology@futurology.today
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SpaceX is preparing for Starship's 13th test flight. Starship is still experiencing issues during ascent and has yet to successfully launch anything from orbit. This test flight will only be sub-orbital.

Is Starship's design flawed? Is it too heavy to achieve its goals? Rocket development is notoriously time-consuming, but SpaceX promised it had cracked that code.

NASA selected SpaceX's Starship Human Landing System (HLS) to transport astronauts from lunar orbit down to the Moon and back. Starship had a tremendous set of goals to achieve before taking on the Moon. Including mastering space-based & lunar refuelling & becoming a crew-capable craft that can land on the Moon, refuel there, and take off again with people on board.

Does any of this have any chance of happening soon if Starship is more fundamentally flawed and cannot reliably reach orbit with cargo?

SpaceX's 1st Starship test flight since going public is set to launch

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[–] 4 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I'm sure they will be able to get it into orbit at some point. The issue is they need to do ~10 successful launches of this thing to be able to get enough fuel into orbit to get it to the Moon. They haven't been able to pull off one successful launch to orbit yet.

So the problem isn't weight in regards to getting to orbit. But weight is a problem for getting this thing to the Moon. Making a 100% reusable spacecraft of this size seems to be difficult to make reliable.

Why is it so important to have a 100% reusable spacecraft when you've lost more than a dozen of those "reusable" spacecraft while trying to make it work? If they just sent up a dedicated moon lander, and Orion capsule, and a disposable booster, would that it have been any worse to have disposed of those things a dozen times and actually had a dozen moon landings? Or is it better to dispose of a dozen spacecraft (and counting) in an attempt to make a reusable spacecraft... some day... maybe.

I think we're deep in the sunk cost fallacy now. They have had so many failures (which they've characterized as successes) and spent so much money, and have NASA's planing based around this thing working, that they can't even consider that this may be a bad idea.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

    Why is it so important to have a 100% reusable spacecraft when you’ve lost more than a dozen of those “reusable” spacecraft while trying to make it work?

    Seriously?

    You don't understand why having a fully reusable rocket would be useful, even if it takes awhile to figure out?

    Whether NASA should rely on it for the moon at this phase is an entirely separate matter, but humanity figuring out a fully reusable rocket is paramount to any proper space exploration. 12 launches to the moon isn't going to cut it, we've sent hundreds to the ISS alone.

    Also, this is the 3rd version of Starship/Super Heavy.

    The first version after a few tries was successfully going up and down and landing where they wanted.

    The second version (essentially a new rocket) took a few extra tries, but was also mostly successful in that sense.

    This 3rd version (also a essentially new rocket) has all the improvements they've learned from the prior two and should be the one they start doing real work with.

    They even caught and relaunched one of the boosters on their first attempt, but now they're toying around with different descent patterns and burn patterns to eek out every extra % of performance that they can.

    That's not the kind of thing you care about when it's disposable. Does it go up and deliver the payload? Yes? Done. Not, how much performance can we optimize out of this thing before we finalize it and start building thousands of them.

    Edit: Just an example of performance gains - SpaceX successfully did hot staging numerous times with the booster being able to land exactly where they wanted. Then they were like, what if we can coax the booster (the size of a sky scraper building) to flip a certain way during hot staging, so we use less fuel overall getting it in the right position after separation? They've only tried this 2-3 times now, with it working at least once (can't remember if it was bad/good/bad or good/bad) but on the last v3 launch it had issues, which they will fix. Did they have to do this? No, what they did for multiple prior launches was working just fine, but because they are trying this out, they will be able to launch more payload per launch now.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Thank you for adding this perspective to the thread.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    np, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding of what they're trying to do, and how they're going about it. By no means am I saying they will be successful either, they got a lot of work still ahead of them and some very difficult problems.

    I also hink this picture is a great picture as well that showcases it on just one part of the ship

    Raptor 1: Works, may have been as far as NASA ever went for the entire moon project if they were in control.

    Raptor 2: Okay we've figured out how to optimize some things, lets see how this works and get more data

    Raptor 3: Okay we should be able to cost effectively mass produce this version after we work out the kinks. (edit: also the jump from 2 -> 3 was them doing 3d printing to make those tubes/channels in the structure to make it more reliable and easier to manufacture. It's not like all that plumbing wasn't needed)

    Internet: They keep having engine problems, Starship is broken!

    Edit: For reference, the RS-25 engine that SLS is using, and how the engine works is less complex than the Raptor engine which is the first ever flown full-flow staged-combustion rocket engine. The optimized v3 Raptor engine meanwhile has about 2.25x the thrust/weight capabilities

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