SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket nails critical 10th test flight

Post by metabagel » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 4:59 PM UTC

terminalshort wrote: post #215

yoz-y wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly hope that Blue Origin will be a worthy competitor. For me what this shows that the most important thing for a CEO to be successful is to have money, a vison (no matter how unrealistic or unnecessary) and a cult personality. Nothing else matters. Also it shows that with enough virtual money (I.e.: massively overblown Tesla stock) you can do just about anything.

Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos had way more money back then. And when Elon Musk founded SpaceX few people had heard of him and he wasn't even a billionaire. Tesla didn't exist yet, so there was no "massively overblown stock." And where is the "unrealistic vision?" Looks like it turned out to be pretty realistic to me.

Post by marcusverus » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 5:00 PM UTC

thesmart wrote: post #148

Aeolun wrote: post #79

And maybe more interesting. How much did it cost them to get this far vs the sls?

You can't really compare them because SLS was a jobs program intended to spread out contracts across many states by reusing suppliers from shuttle programs. Cheap? No. Wasteful? also no. Most of that money went back into those economies.

Post by FireBeyond » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 5:01 PM UTC

sho_hn wrote: post #221

FireBeyond wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The first mars expeditions will probably be stocked with a thousand tons of gear, enough to easily last a guy 5 years. > The Martian is a vision for a 2035 mission from 2011. We seem likely to beat that! What, exactly, is that guy doing for those five years? We don't know how to terraform Mars, and it's questionable what having someone on the surface will add to the knowledge we have of surface composition. And the…

https://idlewords.com/2025/02/the_shape_of_a_mars_mission.ht...

Post by hiddencost » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 5:03 PM UTC

GMoromisato wrote: post #169

Starship is like AI/LLMs in that success would revolutionize the world, but technological failure is very possible. And despite the confident predictions on the internets, we don't know which it's going to be. After the Shuttle program ended in failure, work on reusable launch systems stopped for decades. A similar thing would happen if Starship fails. Space would remain the province of the military and large governm…

Post by stetrain » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 5:07 PM UTC

slipperydippery wrote: post #208

stetrain wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Apollo missions landed two crew members in a tin can with extreme limits on what weight they could bring with them in either direction. A single trip launch will always be constrained like this due to the tyranny of the rocket equation. A modular mission system with multiple launches is the best way to expand capabilities and enable things like landing larger payloads for more advanced or long-term missions.

IIRC, the expected return payload for this is lighter than Apollo. In no small part because they're dropping all their return fuel and their entire return vehicle into the Moon's gravity well, rather than leaving it in orbit. Subjecting themselves to extra abuse from the good ol' rocket equation. One of many wacked-out things about the plan.