311–320 of 326 posts
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Just because you defeat popular consensus of what is possible in one place doesn't mean you can continue to do it again and again. This stuff is hard.
Yes reusing falcon 9 was hard too. Being a cynical naysay isn’t hard.
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Time costs money as well. Im guessing the cost is irrelevant compared to a faster timeliness.
part of my argument is that if your test platform is 1/4th the size, you get much faster iterations. the path they took meant that every test destroys 39 engines, a huge amount of rocket fuel, and all of their construction. A falcon 9 design (9+1) with raptor engines would let them already have a falcon heavy capacity vehicle because everything about a smaller scale vehicle is way easier
They wouldn’t be testing how to transport, generate, store, load and offload massive quantities of liquid oxygen and methane quickly and reliably.
They wouldn’t be testing the simultaneous ignition of 33 engines, the massive fuel demands of that (which appears to be very difficult), and blasting the pad with 33 engines.
They wouldn’t be testing the structural loads and stresses of max Q of such a massive vehicle.
They wouldn’t be testing tank slosh and pressure issues of massive tanks.
They wouldn’t be testing the heat loads on the shield with huge mass.
All the manufacturing too would be learning how to do things on such a large scale.
In short, they simply wouldn’t be learning the lessons they need to learn to make this work.
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Near real time fpv drones anywhere on the planet, free of jamming due to starlink is the real game changing capability. What would any military pay for that? Plenty I wager.
Wait a moment. How exactly is Starship supposed to usefully deliver a pile of FPV drones to a hostile area? Starship itself is highly engineered to survive reentry and can even land anywhere that an appropriately flat surface is available. It will conveniently toast anything hanging out on the landing zone. But it is extremely far from stealthy, it seems likely to be extremely vulnerable both before and after landing…
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Human rating is irrelevant to what they want to do, it is only a NASA rating - if NASA wants to ride they will have to come up with a rationale but private astronauts can fly on it.
From day one they said their vision was to replace airlines for international air travel.
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part of my argument is that if your test platform is 1/4th the size, you get much faster iterations. the path they took meant that every test destroys 39 engines, a huge amount of rocket fuel, and all of their construction. A falcon 9 design (9+1) with raptor engines would let them already have a falcon heavy capacity vehicle because everything about a smaller scale vehicle is way easier
They already have a falcon heavy capacity vehicle - Falcon heavy. I guess I am confused about what you think they would get out of testing with a smaller platform. It seems like most of their focus is specifically figuring out how to make a large platform work. What do you think would translate?
The raptor engine is a pretty giant advance over the merlin engine and methane seems like a reasonable fuel, but testing of the engine has been consistently held back by issues they're running into due to scaling up the rocket so much. Starship has only had 12 test flights in 3 years (vs 50 launches since january for falcon 9). Had raptor testing taken place on a smaller vehicle it seems pretty likely that they already would have a falcon heavy replacement in service that could be launching real payload.
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Loyal wingman aircraft would have to be stealthy though to do it. The whole point of the F-35 is that it is a stealthy platform with a very advanced set of targeting and weapons capabilities: but the issue is a similar capability drone would basically have a similar price tag since the expense of the pilot is minor in that case. Like plausibly the best autonomous F-35 platform would just be an F-35.
Low-level drones are also stealthy. If they're not stealthy enough you can send them in bulk to overwhelm defences. Ukraine's success with precision targeting of Russian assets would have been unthinkable with a fleet of F-35s and associated missiles because of the cost. Cheap, smart, disposable drones are orders of magnitude cheaper and at least as effective for many mission profiles.
Which is exactly what it was used for in Iran.
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That's a reason the Mig-29 is no longer in production. Point defense fights are obsolete. The F-35 was just in a war, in Iran. It performed as expected and was able to roll back Iran's air defense network in days.
> It performed as expected and was able to roll back Iran's air defense network in days. "Rolling back" Iran's air defense seems like very fuzzy phrasing. Certainly, Iran was not able to close its own airspace, nor prevent ongoing airstrikes on many American and Israeli targets. At the same time, my armchair observation is that a great many US and Israeli airstrikes were accomplished using stand-off weapons [1], whic…
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Elon negotiated with Nasdaq to automatically accept it in Nasdaq 100 index after 15 days, so the stock traders don't really matter.
I asked about this in previous HN discussions. The old rule: You had to wait three months. Is there a meaningful economic difference between waiting 15 days or ~90 days? I don't see it. (For transparency: I own ETFs that track the S&P 500, which has lots of overlap with Nasdaq 100.) To be clear: OpenAI and Anthropic will sure IPO this year or next and have a similar effect -- they will be (or nearly) trillion dollar…
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Which is true, but at the same time: this is Starship Flight 12. The whole point of Starship is that it's a reusable vehicle with easy turnaround and quick maintenance. And in particular it's supposed to be different than the other reusable vehicle with easy turnaround and quick maintenance, which turned out to be sort of a boondoggle. Yet, they've now hand-built and destroyed twelve of these things across multiple r…
If you can afford it, I'm sure anyone developing a rocket would prefer to do it this iterative way. I don't really understand the complain.
SpaceX is iterating for the sake of a narrative. None of the development goals for Starship require reuse of the upper stages, that's a bonus that should happen after Starship started deploying Starlink satellites.
There is no point in having dedicated reentry tests. Every test flight comes with a free reentry test included.
Even if a company does iterative rocket development, it would never follow the SpaceX way of putting th most difficult but simultaneously unimportant objectives on the critical path at the expense of the essential objectives.
The development program of Starship is basically ignoring every aspect of Falcon 9 development that made it the success people take for granted these days.