SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight

The haters create conversation. Smarter people come along and correct them. And most people who read it and the response will take the side of this being a great test.

SpaceX doesn't compete directly with them but the rockets from Virgin Orbit, RocketLab, and Relatvity Space are also exciting.

It seems people are giving way too much credit to Blue Origin; they haven't even sent hardware to orbit yet. They have a bunch of cool paper rockets, but they haven't achieved much beyond New Shepard (and that rocket has only done test flights). They are not even in the same league.

ULA on the other hand is much more accomplished. Tory Bruno seems like a cool dude (he even comments on /r/SpaceXMasterRace!), and his factory tour with SmarterEveryDay (on YouTube) was very instructive. However, they seem to have absolutely no regard for costs. You can see it in the factory tour; they machine huge aluminium blocks down into panels for the rocket sides, removing ~90% of the material in the process. How is that cost-effective in terms of time or materials? They send back the chips for recycling, but still. And that's not even starting on the reusability angle; SpaceX is currently working on a fully-reusable rocket (and has flown hardware!) when ULA only has vague plans to save the engines at some point on their next rocket.

I think the only launch company that could credibly compete on innovation would be Rocket Labs, but I fear they're too small and too late to compete commercially; they'll probably end up in the "very small sats in weird orbits" niche, as ridesharing on Starship will eat the rest of the small-sat market.

I'm not sure they'd even reuse them, they're still tweaking the design. The Raptors that flew yesterday were probably already outdated; the ones on SN9 are improved versions already.

I could also appreciate your enthusiasm if you could get your facts right.

1. Raptor does not use Pintle injectors (invented at Caltech), it uses coaxial swirl injectors.

2. Raptor was designed and developed completely by SpaceX for six years before the USAF gave it small contracts to develop specific versions for their potential needs.

3. Raptor is the first full-flow staged combustion rocket engine ever flown. Flying is a lot more important than the lab. And a lot harder given vibration and acceleration effects.

4. The Shuttle autoland system was incomplete when first implemented, it could not land the Shuttle. Even when “completed” NASA never trusted it or allowed its use . The Russians did land Buran with their system.

5. While it’s technically true that RS-25 engines were re-used, they were also required to be completely torn down and rebuilt between flights. At some point you’ve replaced so many parts it’s basically a new engine, and it was an extremely expensive maintenance requirement that entirely negated the value of reuse.

6. BO has never made an orbital flight, which is the key first step for any space travel. It’s never risked a human life in its mini rocket, nor ever flown a paid cargo. It’s still behind the 2006 version of SpaceX, which was attempting orbital flights and succeeding in 2009.

7. Without a thermal protection system your flights are one way and everything is “mass inefficient”. The inefficiency of throwing away a complete launch system every flight is the only inefficiency that matters.

SLS is designed to put 100 tons of payload in orbit. Not including development costs, each launch will cost roughly $1B, with development costs it will be over to $4B per launch. Every bit of that hardware will be destroyed every launch. It’s payload cost per pound will be over $40,000.

The Starship stack is designed to put 110+ tons of cargo in orbit, inside a 120 ton Starship. It’s launch mass will be nearly double the SLS. So on paper it’s actual payload mass percentage is about half the SLS.

But none of the Starship stack is destroyed at launch, it’s all reused. Cost of fuel for each flight is around $500K. It’s launch cost will be less than $50M, eventually maybe $5M. That means it’s payload cost per pound starts at $200/lb and could drop as low as $20/lb.

Sure, build a Starship out of aluminum or carbon fiber if you never want to be able to land it on earth again, or want to land on Mars with far smaller payloads without the massive fuel savings from Aerobraking.

NASA isn’t paying SpaceX to develop Starship. SpaceX is actually getting paid to design a lunar only version of Starship that won’t need thermal protection. Perhaps they’ll custom build NASAs versions out of lighter materials to increase their lunar landing payloads.

But they won’t do that for Starships in general because it makes them too inefficient for their planned missions. Starships efficiency cones from in-orbit refueling, which is how the same Starship can take the same 110+ ton payload to earth orbit, and on to land it on Mars.