Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah so you just don't actually understand the economics. The thing is, unless you massively increase the volume of Falcon 9, you are not going to get it that much cheaper. Its already incredibly cheap given that its made out of fancy aerospace material that needs to be shaped and welded with complex processes. If they invested a lot, could they get it a little cheaper? Sure maybe a few % ever year. They have been re…
You summed up the naïve approach to the cost and reusability issue: > To actually reach the next level of profit opportunity you need to achieve full re-usability. Upper stage reusability is hard, heavy, and expensive. At least 5X as hard as booster reusability. On top of that they have to bet that they can scale starship launches to the point where they can economically fly 15 starship refueling missions just to get…
You would likely have called it naive to try to develop reusability in the first place. Yes its harder. But they also have a much, much bigger team. They have an experience engine team. Simulation team and so on. And they have the need and the financial positioning.
Re-usability is the holy grail of space flight, if in the current situation SpaceX would not go after it they would be insane.
Its certainty smarter then your idea of an incrementally improved Falcon 9 upgrade.
> On top of that they have to bet that they can scale starship launches to the point where they can economically fly 15 starship refueling missions just to get one starship out of low orbit.
That just nonsense, where are you getting your information from. The 15 missions are for getting something from LEO to the moon, land and go back to Lunar orbit.
> As of now, completing an orbit at any elevation is a trust me bro thing.
No its a 'if you actually thing about it for 2s' then you can trust it thing. They have basically achieved orbital velocity and could have gone into orbit. This is beyond question.
The important and difficult thing is getting the ship to the ground and landing. And they have demonstrated precision landing after orbital speed insertion. They have even done extra hot approach to stress the heat shield even more, and have even left many tiles out to test what happens when tiles are missing.
If they actually did a full orbit or not is completely 100% totally and utterly irrelevant to anybody except a few people who hate Musk for political reasons.
> Every one of Elon's gambles has five subsidiary gambles: if starship falls 30% short of expected payload capacity, it no longer takes 15 refueling missions but 25. That's just one example.
And that only costs them a like 1 billion $ max if they can't do the lunar flights.
Even a 30% less Starship could be useful for Starlink. And worse case the can fly Starship in Falcon 9 mode and drop the upper stage and have fucking insane payload to Orbit.
> That's what you get when one of your software guys told you about agile, and you thought let's build a rocket that way.
You get the largest rocket ever built and the best engine ever built. The largest vehicle ever returned from orbit and so on.
Do you have any actual critic of their approach. Can you actually show that some other approach would have been cheaper? What are you basing that assumption on? Starship has been reasonably cheap and incredibly so given the problem its trying to solve and how much infrastructure they are building.
Why should I trust you rather then, you know the people at SpaceX who have revolutionized the space industry? Have launched and landed more rocket then anybody. Have better data then anymore. Have worked on this problem for a decade, and have changed their design a bunch of time. What expertise do you have in the development of fully reusable launch vehicles?