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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 4 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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[–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

How about falcon 9? That was flying for years before it worked properly. The only reason it didn't get the same criticism as starship is that they were using it to actually launch payloads during that time.

Starship can't get away with that because the upper stage is big enough they can't be careless about letting it drift back to earth, they have to be in control, but it's not actually taking more time than falcon 9 did.

Meanwhile falcon 9 is now the most successful and reliable rocket in human history, so criticisms you can level at spacex, you can't claim their approach doesn't work

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    the only reason it didn’t get the same criticism as starship is that they were using it to actually launch payloads during that time.

    And that's a very valid reason. Falcon 9 was accomplishing things even when it wasn't fully reusable. If instead of Starship they had a second stage rocket with some heat tiles and it was deploying payloads, it would be fine. If the first stage and second stages weren't reliable in terms of being re-used they'd still be making progress in the space program as long was reliably getting payloads into orbit.

    The problem with Starship is it's trying to be a big cargo carrying reusable human rated spacecraft. It's a shittier version of the space shuttle. The space shuttle wasn't a good idea, we should've learned this. Making a shittier version of the space shuttle is obviously a bad idea.

    They already have a way to get humans into space with the Falcon 9 / Dragon system. So why are they trying to build a human rated super-heavy launch system?

    Remove the human rated requirement, build a second stage with heat tiles. If the heat tiles fail on your second stage, you lose that, but not the payload. You're losing money, but nobody dies and you're still successfully launching payloads into space. Get a moon lander, an Orion capsule, and a rocket with enough fuel to get to the moon and back into space. Once you have the stuff you need for a moon mission up in space, send a Dragon up on a Falcon 9 with people on it.

    Trying to build a super-heavy cargo carrier that's also human rated is just dumb. Remove the human rated requirement and just build a launch system that can get large payloads into space. The Starship thing is all about Elon Musk's ego and wanting to have something like in science fiction where you have a ship that you give a name and you can take that spaceship around wherever you want to go. Elon Musk and his fanbase don't want to admit it was a dumb idea and kill the whole Starship idea.

    Currently the US space program is blocked from getting heavy payloads into space until SpaceX can make a dumb idea work. It's the space shuttle program all over again.

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