SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

Somewhere there is a team that is over the top happy about an incredibly successful explosion. Their job was to make sure that if flight path deviated beyond some threshhold that the whole vehicle would be blown into tiny parts that would become ballistically safe. They were on the edge of their seats on how well that would work.

They saw the lift off team celebrate their success. They saw the booster team fist pumping. They saw the concern from the separation team and their own anticipation spiked. They saw the flight correction team studying realtime data intensely and taking some pride that all that spinning was semi-controlled. The anxiety for the demolition team had to be through the roof. Then, finally, it happened. The system they had spent so much effort to design and integrate finally deployed. It didn't fire prematurely. It didn't fail to deploy. It got everything exactly right.

There is still a ton of data to evaluate, and some improvements to be made. But that unnoticed team from the back of the shed at the back of the lot is celebrating picture perfect execution. Here's a salute to real engineers doing real work, getting it exactly right, and getting no credit. Well done.

Elon says Starship launches will get down to $10M per launch within 2-3 years. But he also said we would have our CyberTrucks by now, so... ymmv.

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-spacex-starship-ro...

By comparison, Falcon Heavy costs about $62M per launch, but Gwynne Shotwell predicted they can shave 40% off that price tag when they start re-using heavies.

https://spacedotbiz.substack.com/p/is-starship-really-going-...

But Elon has supposedly said the TDC (total development cost) of the Starship is projected to be 2-10 billion. [I found this at the Daily Mail website, so take it with as large a grain of salt as you wish.]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-11994755/Wha...

If it costs $10B to build one and $10M per launch and you get 10 launches per vehicle, that's $1.1B per launch if you amortize the development costs. But if it takes $2B to build one and $2M per launch and you get 10 launches, then it's only $220M per launch. But if you build five operational starships that each have 10 launches each, things start to get downright affordable.

So if the question is how much has SpaceX spent on the Starship to date? I don't know that's public info. If the question is how much will they spend on development, the answer is $2B-$10B (though that's from the Daily Mail.) If the question is how much will each launch cost (including amortizing development costs)? It could be as cheap as $42M. Or depending on how much of the $2.9B from NASA they're able to apply to previous development costs... who knows!? They could make $1.6M per launch as long as the GSA doesn't audit them too closely.

There's a myth in US government purchasing that competition drives costs down, and that's probably true for commodities. But Starship class super-heavy-launch vehicles aren't commodities. There's a TREMENDOUS amount of cost (both opportunity cost and dollars) associated with fiscal oversight of large projects. The hope has always been that when Blue Origin built something to compete, it would bring total costs down. I am skeptical.

That short interview with Cal Breed was the absolute best 60 seconds of video I have seen in quite a while. The raw footage should be re-edited into a longer video.

huh - TIL: https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-com3.htm

TL;DR: Compleat and Complete were originally different spellings for the same word. In UK, compleat is still just an archaic spelling. In USA, compleat is used as an adjective to refer specifically to having all the necessary elements or skills.

They have two more ships built and two under construction. I think the iteration time could be driven by the (1) condition of the launch pad (2) the cause of S24 destruction.