FTS is designed for flight termination, not sinking the booster after ocean soft touchdown. So if FTS detonation fails to terminate the flight sufficiently quickly, that counts as an FTS failure which FAA will require to be investigated as a safety mishap, grounding the launch vehicle in the meantime. But if FTS fails to sink the booster after ocean soft touchdown, it wasn’t designed to do that anyway, so I don’t think the FAA will consider it a “failure”. If the flight plan lists this outcome as a possibility, and SpaceX has a backup plan to respond to it, it isn’t a failure as far as the FAA is concerned.
https://spaceexplored.com/2024/09/23/spacex-recovers-flight-...
These are V1s. Not worth the effort.
Transporting empty big rockets is already really hard and finicky. Transporting something even bigger and heavier than the largest known rockets is harder. Then you need to anchor it to the ground strongly enough to take the weight and dynamic forces of a fully loaded rocket and subsequent landing, but weakly enough you can move it again later. Overall it's really a situation that benefits from a permanent concrete foundation.
https://spacenews.com/spacex-drops-plans-to-covert-oil-rigs-...
Does an ocean landing cause significant damage that's not present with an on-land chopsticks landing?
Presumably there are pretty big advantages considering how much it must have cost to develop the chopsticks approach.
- time to transport, move back into initial position.
The environmental impact of a chopsticks landing is likely a whole lot less damaging too.
I don’t know any chemistry but there seem to be a lot of smart people round here. What say you?
- used to be an engineer in aerospace
1. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19690007944/downloads/19...
- Turnaround time is a major one for SpaceX. They want to stack a new Starship on top of it and launch the booster again in hours, not weeks. By catching the booster they can simply lower it back onto the launch mount, refuel and relaunch.
- No need for landing legs. The legs add significant weight, especially on something as large as Super Heavy. Leaving these out means more usable payload to orbit.
I thought the same thing before the first catch, if you go look at the catch footage you can see the booster resting those on the chopsticks.
Legs need to move to deploy. The struts are just there, static things are much simpler. Simpler things weigh less.
Legs need to contain shock absorbers. With the struct solution the shock absorber is in the chopsticks. It doesn’t matter how much the shock absorber weighs when you don’t need to carry it up with you.
On the whole, pad catch is the way to go for non-expeditionary vehicles. For orbital uses each booster basically becomes a pyrotechnic elevator.
Legs require at least 4 points, probably more. Shock absorption hardware, ability to unfurl to an acceptable width. Require reinforcement (cross bracing) near the base of the tanks to handle the loads pushing inwards toward the center of the tanks.
Besides the other answers you've received, the lugs hold the booster from (near) the top. This means that the body of the booster is in tension during and after landing. Legs, on the other hand, support the landing load and weight after loading in compression. The booster is basically a thin-shelled tube, which is limited in compression strength (for a given wall thickness) by buckling; in tension, the strength approaches the strength of the material, so less additional reinforcement is needed in the structure to support landing loads.
Starship uses autogenous pressurization, which is not what Atlas/Centaur used.
This is relevant when designing the landing system.
Rewrite:
"Why doesn't [huge successful project] do [simple thing]?"
At least link to some details of the design? Here's the best diagram of the tank design I could find:
https://www.elonx.net/wp-content/uploads/SpaceX-BFR-spaceshi...
Which doesn't show the design constraints but who wants those - edit and it's not an image of the booster? Elon mentions a design feature missing from the diagram: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1093643894917492736 I would personally guess you'd need to be very careful with your implied load bearing connections between the tanks at x Kelvin and the skin at redhot reentry temperatures...
Good luck on buying spaceY.com and competing against those engineering fools at SpaceX ;)
I am mocking unreasonably, and I know I would find similar comments in my own internet history. I am hoping you will learn to be a little less thoughtless in your armchair. We all assume other rocket-science engineers must not know what they are doing but usually that just shows our own ignorance.
Or you're implying that tank pressurization isn't a standard practice and not a simple thing?..
----- > So the struts (plus supporting structure) are lighter than the legs? Why is that?
Besides the other answers you've received, the lugs hold the booster from (near) the top. This means that the body of the booster is in tension during and after landing. Legs, on the other hand, support the landing load and weight after loading in compression. The booster is basically a thin-shelled tube, which is limited in compression strength (for a given wall thickness) by buckling; in tension, the strength approaches the strength of the material, so less additional reinforcement is needed in the structure to support landing loads. -----
Note how the author says that a thin-shelled tube is limited in compression strength by buckling. Technically it's correct, but practically if you put some extra pressure in that tube - which, after all, has also airtight caps on both ends - then the tube becomes much stronger, and is able to withstand reasonable forces during landing.
That's what I noted, and I can repeat that. I am quite sure SpaceX engineers considered that possibility, and I think they rejected that because they felt they see an even better result. I'm trying to see that here.
I also suspect that you don't know my qualifications in the area, and referring to armchair ones just so. It's interesting how many different and widely qualified people participate in HN discussions.
The big issue during landing is that you need to make sure that the engine doesn't suck in gas. That causes bubbles and can destroy the engine. This was actually the failure that caused some of the earlier SN flights to explode or not produce enough power from the engine.
You need to either have header tanks, like the booster. Or some kind of method to push the liquids into the right place.
If you want to deep dive into the whole problem, 'CSI Starbase' on youtube has a brilliant series on all the engineering problems with all of this. Its a very complex problem.
This bugged me because everyone was saying the deletion of legs was key, but to me the struts are basically legs mounted up high. It's taking advantage of tensile loading that promotes the weight reduction.
The chopsticks don't catch the rocket by the grid fins. There are dedicated supports (pins) sticking out the sides of Super Heavy that support the load. It does negate some of the savings from removing the legs, but by returning not only near the launch site like Falcon 9 but literally to the launch tower itself, they can save a whole bunch of time on transporting the stage back to where it will be launched again. They want to launch these things at such a rapid pace that every hour they can save in the refurb / repair / refuel part after landing matters.
Today, there are about ~1,100 metric tons of satellites launched into orbit annually. Starship is aiming for $100/kilogram cost per kilo to orbit. Let's get absolutely wild and assume that Starship takes over the entire world's launches. It would earn what, 1,100 tons * 1000 kilos/ton * $100/kilo = $110,000,000. $110M is... not a tremendous amount of money. It's definitely not enough to be building a fleet of rockets up.
Only about 20% of satellite costs are due to launch (and that was found in a pre-SpaceX era), so it's not likely satellite builders are going to optimize solely on cost. It's not an order of magnitude cost savings for builders. So SpaceX will have to find other means to compete -- reliability, capability, etc.
The US puts up <100 orbital launches per year. Even if Starship took all of those (and it won't), they'd need to have 10x the number of launches for an hour level restack and refuel to make a difference. And that's not even counting the differences in payload capacity. Add several whole integer multipliers to account for that. For starship to need an "hours-scale" relaunch time, you'd need something like 50x+ the number of launches we currently have AND every launch in the nation to be on the platform.
It's a cool engineering target, but it's total nonsense for now.
And like, I'm a space enthusiast. I think we should be out mining asteroids and setting up space living quarters. I just... hourly starship launches don't make any sort of logical sense.
What they do make sense as is a marketing gimmick for Elon to get on stage to appeal to emotions of investors and nerds online. It's a gorgeous dream! I want it to be! But it's just a clever emotional appeal to get you to not think too hard or too critically.
Yes, because Starship promises 50-100 times cheaper delivery of kg to LEO.
Read https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st... on the subject.
You are suggesting that pessimistically, Starship is aiming at $30-60/kg to LEO. (Or, using the optimistic estimates, $15-$30/kg to LEO).
I don't think in even Elon Musk's wildly optimistic press conferences he pushed a number below ~$100/kg to LEO. I don't know where you get the idea that launch costs are going to come down 50-100x.
Wildly optimistic would seem to be even lower estimations. If both oxygen and methane we can get from atmosphere - and we have both efficient detanders and demonstrations of e.g. Terraform Industries which use solar panels and oxygen to pull CO2 from atmosphere and produce CH4 - then the question is of optimization, and we're just starting here for this application. So, a flight of Starship might get cheaper than $1 million - the question is, how much and how soon?
But SpaceX does see several possibilities. One is supplying a US Moon base and US space stations. Since Starship/Superheavy rockets are so inexpensive to build (about 100M in expendable configuration [1] even doing something like that would be profitable for SpaceX.
For Mars colonization, Elon Musk has said his target for Starship to Mars cost per flight was USD 10M. If it can take 100 people, and they each pay USD 200K per person, that's USD 20M, a 10M profit for SpaceX.
It might also be that a nation state might want to fund something like that to establish a base there.
Again, you may see a viable business in Mars colonization. But SpaceX does. So do other people. It was conventional wisdom that Starlink would not work, but it is now quite profitable. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship
[2] https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/billionaire-elon-musks-new-s...
Musk has lied many times about many things. This one in particular makes less than 0 sense - Starship has nowhere near the capacity to take 100 humans to Mars even just including the provisions needed for the trip, unless you assume that those people will essentially sit in their own little cell for 2 months.
It's simply not possible in the ship they've designed.
Cramming one hundred people into a starship is eerily reminiscent of overloaded slave ships. The assumption is that you will die on the journey or at your destination.
For Mars launches, which is what Starship is mainly designed for, it's also 8-16 Tanker flights to fully fuel a Mars Starship. But SpaceX anticipates sending fleets of ships each synodic period (2 years), when Earth and Mars are closest. For a fleet of 10 Starships, that would be 10 launches of the Mars Starships, then 160 launches of Tanker Starships to fuel them.
You might debate whether Mars colonization is possible or desirable, but Starship and the high launch rate is designed for refueling Moon and Mars landing vehicles.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Landing_System
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship#Planned_launch...
This means that for one mission to the Moon for example you might need >10 Starships to launch, and it's better to have them closer together so that you don't have fuel in space being heated by the sun for days.
It remains to be seen if they will actually reuse a booster on the same day, but there is a use case for it.
A hydrogen stage for Soviet N-1 rocket was designed so that it would be used near the Moon. The shelf life was going to be about 11 days (I think astronautix.com has this datapoint).
Starship is bigger, and methane/LOX is hotter than liquid hydrogen. Will it be storable for a month?..
EDIT: or even just orienting the heat shield itself towards the sun, it probably has a fair amount of insulation ability at normal temperatures too.
For Mars and Moon missions multiple Starships have to launch to refuel the Starship that will actually take the trip. Like, a dozen or more. Again, rapid reusability of the booster is appealing in this situation.
Just because Musk says some things doesn’t mean they should (or will) exist. His predictions are mostly marketing.
He's already landing Starships in oceans.
People today pay $15,000+ USD per seat now for 1st class, and it still takes them 18+ hours.
Especially given that the total trip time will likely be much longer than the flight itself. Consider that you can't take off or land Starship anywhere near a densely populated area, it has to be at least a few hours away by car from anywhere that people actually live.
So you can take a chauffeur to the airport, go trough priority and special luxuries as a first class passenger until your flight for say 1h total, board your 15h flight spent in luxury, and then a limo waits to take you to your destination 30m away from the landing airport.
Or, you can get driven for 3 hours out to the Starship launch site, board the rocket, probably in a special life support suit, wait some hours on the ship for it to be filled (humans are never allowed to approach an already full rocket), fly for one hour in an extremely bare bones flight that literally feels like a roller-coaster (so forget any kind of phone access, you'll be lucky not to puke while just holding on). Then you'll arrive at your destination landing area, ready for some limo to take you on another three hour trip back to civilization.
So you've saved maybe 8-10 hours, being extremely generous and only for the longest haul flights possible, but got none of the luxuries you'd expect. And you get to pay much more for the whole deal.
Remember that the Concorde halved or less the Paris-New York trip, and gave all the luxury you could want, and still went out of business.
https://preview.redd.it/b9f14da6y0ac1.png?width=1105&format=...
You only experience anything over 1.5 Gs for 180 seconds.
Please stop making stuff up and look at the data.
[0] https://www.spacex.com/media/starship_users_guide_v1.pdf
I don't know if rocket passenger service will ever happen or become routine, but there's just so much to the Concorde story that simplifying it like that isn't a good case study that does the program justice.
ICBMs are weapons, and are dangerous because you target them at specific targets and they explode.
How is starship coming down significantly more dangerous than a plane? If they can demonstrate similar levels or reliability (a huge ask), then I don't see a problem.
If you don’t see how earth to earth starship use couldn’t be construed as a type of ICBM, I suspect you’re thinking branding means a lot more than capability.
Trucks have blown up buildings. Anything is a weapon if you arm it.
Conversely...
A fully fueled 747 only carries about 190 tons of fuel and 140 tons of cargo. How do electronics turn that into kilotons of explosives?
Kerosene can be used to make a thermobaric bomb in the right conditions. It’s just just trickier to actually do than detonating TNT. Notably, TNT can certainly help accomplish making a thermobaric bomb.
Either way, the cargo capacity by weight for a 747 is still the same.
I didn’t propose the initial idea, but it actually could probably work if the plane was flying [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001021802...], and [https://tetrazolelover.at.ua/WpnryInTheWoods/Zhang2015_Artic...]. You’d want to run some significant calculations first to get the airspeed/timing just right, but yeah.
It would be one hell of a show. Like a tactical nuke, probably.
Edit: did the math because I was curious. A fully fueled 747 contains approximately 9 trillion joules of energy worth of fuel (not counting any payload, or the energy in its aluminum fuselage - which would be significant). A ton of TNT equivalent is 4.181 gigajoules. So the fuel load of a 747, if properly detonated, would be “equivalent” to a 2KT nuclear bomb.
A 747 has a maximum payload capacity of an additional 100-120 tons.
Same as trucks/cars and carbombs.
For the same reason, anything like we’re discussing will also be considered a potential weapon by any country paying attention at all. And counter measures and restrictions will be installed.
Yet we still have airplanes, boats, cars, sports equipment, lawn tools, and kitchen utensils. Nothing about Starship makes it more likely to be weaponized than anything else we already account for in our daily lives.
> For the same reason, anything like we’re discussing will also be considered a potential weapon by any country paying attention at all. And counter measures and restrictions will be installed.
Is “potential weapon” really the way countries view vehicles crossing borders? I have never gotten that impression. Border crossings maintain some healthy skepticism but not because a Camry is similar to an M1 Abrams if you squint really hard.
ICBMs and M1 Abrams also exist? They also are used carefully and heavily regulated.
Heavy aircraft are also heavily regulated, and their presence near occupied areas is heavily controlled - including with fighter jets and AA installations on standby in many areas.
Car bombs are a huge issue in many parts of the world, and approaching some facilities in a car in those places without going through exactly the right procedures will get you shot before you can get too close.
I’m not saying it shouldn’t be built, rather that if you expect it to be able to be allowed to go anywhere and do anything without significant security measures and/or even bans, that isn’t how this works. Because it wouldn’t be hard for it to be defacto a ICBM, just like it wasn’t hard to turn those planes on 9/11 into massive cruise missiles.
You can’t really turn a car into an ICBM the same way, correct?
Why would I expect this? Did I say something to make you think I believe this? Clearly rocket travel would be regulated, is that not obvious?
ICBMs are scary because of their payloads. A weaponized Starship wouldn’t do anywhere near the damage of an ICBM’s nuclear payload.
Then later I pointed out that 747’s literally had already been used as weapons to commit one of the most notorious crimes in modern history.
Then later you said “Nothing about Starship makes it more likely to be weaponized than anything else we already account for in our daily lives”.
Except it does - because it literally can be trivially turned into an ICBM way easier that anything in our normal daily lives. Just like an airliner being hijacked can give a terrorist a huge cruise missile they otherwise would not.
And ICBMs are not just dangerous because of nukes. But would also allow a non-state actor who somehow gets ahold of a nuke, or dirty bomb, or anthrax, or whatever to potentially deliver it in an ICBM way.
But they could also be targeted at someone with actual nukes to force them into a response which could potentially kick off an actual nuclear war, yes?
None of which is feasible with what anyone normally experiences in their daily lives.
I see, you aren’t differentiating between something created as a weapon and weaponizing otherwise peaceful objects.
> Except it does - because it literally can be trivially turned into an ICBM way easier that anything in our normal daily lives. Just like an airliner being hijacked can give a terrorist a huge cruise missile they otherwise would not.
I don’t think a Starship could be turned into an ICBM at all. Anyone who tried to replicate that trajectory in a Starship would be turned into jelly by G forces shortly before being incinerated by atmospheric drag.
> And ICBMs are not just dangerous because of nukes. But would also allow a non-state actor who somehow gets ahold of a nuke, or dirty bomb, or anthrax, or whatever to potentially deliver it in an ICBM way.
This is already possible with existing rockets. Is your concern that a terrorist would sneak a WMD onto a rocket? Because if they can do that they can also sneak it onto an airliner and do the same damage.
> But they could also be targeted at someone with actual nukes to force them into a response which could potentially kick off an actual nuclear war, yes?
How does Starship uniquely make this a possibility? Like someone hijacks a Starship in Texas and then suicide bombs Beijing in some kind of false flag operation? Starship is clearly not an ICBM. It doesn’t have the same flight characteristics and doesn’t originate at an ICBM site. China can see that.
Given the proposed capabilities of Starship I don’t see a novel threat. Our existing defense mechanisms remain effective.
Noise is a major concern for sure. But when the competition takes 18 hours you can put the launch and landing sites in very remote places where that’s less of a concern then feed them with planes or trains.
Regardless of how practical you think this is it is the reason SpaceX is pushing rapid reusability.
The US military actually has a contract with SpaceX to develop this to enable cargo drops, and in a later stadium even personnel, in 1 hour anywhere on the planet.
I suspect that if you're at the point where the US military intents to drop cargo or soldiers into your country within an hour, they're not going to be too concerned with asking for permission.
The per pax price here would be astronomical. Starship launches are in the tens of millions of dollars per launch, and human rated spacecraft vehicles cost even more. Even if you are putting a thousand people onto the spacecraft (which is a stretch), you are looking at 10s to 100s of thousands of dollars per ticket.
Then you'd need the infrastructure to actually operate the rockets. That includes refurbishment, grounds crews, basically a whole Kennedy Space Center operating to launch these things.
And on top of that, you'd need an urban area willing to deal with constant sonic booms. Even one launch/landing cycle from these rockets is multiple sonic booms. The noise would be unbelievable. No urban center is going to allow regular starship launches out of it, so you'd have to go a loooong ways out. Which then means either a long boat ride or a short flight back to the city center. Which entails baggage transfer and potentially significant delays.
On top of that, space flight is not easy on the body. You can't just put grandma on a rocket and trust that it'd be a comfortable experience. Both the exit, zero-g, and re-entry portions of spaceflight are significant w.r.t. the forces they exert on the body.
It's a neat idea, but like all the neat ideas in the thread mentioned so far it's all marketing. Run the numbers yourself, think through the externalities. It's not like air transport at all.
That’s the case today but they’re essentially all disposable so far. If it meets expectations the cost will be much lower, approaching the cost of fuel.
According to Quora (yuck, I know) fully fueling a Starship snd Super Heavy costs about $1m [1] and a 747 is about $200k [2]. If Starship can carry 1,000 people that’s $1,000 per passenger in fuel. A 747-8 can carry up to about 600 people for $333.00 per passenger.
3x the price in fuel is something but Starship can get to orbit on that fuel load which means anywhere on earth. The 747-8 can “only” go about a third of the way around the earth on a full tank. So it’s within the realm of economic possibility especially considering the enormous time savings.
If all we cared about was fuel efficiency we’d use trains and boats for long distance travel. Time is money.
> It's a neat idea, but like all the neat ideas in the thread mentioned so far it's all marketing. Run the numbers yourself, think through the externalities. It's not like air transport at all.
Correct. The difference is more like an airplane vs an ocean liner or train.
I agree it is impractical but it is a reason for rapid reusability.
A smaller version of something like Starship could be more practical for earth-to-earth service.
It’s already the case that some people can’t fly for health reasons. Space travel won’t be for everyone but the fact is availability will continue to expand.
[1]: https://www.quora.com/What-does-it-cost-to-fully-fuel-a-Spac...
[2]: https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-fill-a-747-je...
I don’t think anyone is suggesting operating Starship anywhere near populated areas so hearing loss also isn’t a concern.
With SpaceX Musk surely understands he's aiming way higher than the capacity of the modern space launch market. Your, whaaaaat, reasoning was - and unfortunately even now sometimes is - the standard among the industry professionals. That's why rather early on Starlink - the project which was going to employ Falcon's capacities - was born.
With Starship we see some obvious uses for launches - orbital tankers - because Starship doesn't really fly anywhere from LEO without refueling, Solar system probes - we probably going to see many, space telescopes, unmanned satellites of many kinds, manned orbital stations. I hope a Moon base - or several - would be another customer of Starship launches. Elon was talking about picking some slice of the world market of cargo and passenger transportation. Maybe we'll see some other uses which we don't see today.
The point, roughly is that, yes, here we have "build and they'll come", and SpaceX will help them to come in all possible ways. So I disagree that it's total nonsense, it might be actually a very good idea.
Legend indeed. All the main Office applications either started on the Mac and/or were bought from third-party developers.
Yes, satellites are expensive compared to launches, but that's because launch costs are so high and launches are so infrequent. If you're spending the money to launch something into space, you'll also spend lots of money making sure that satellite is as reliable and as capable as possible. For example: The James Webb Space Telescope required a complex origami folding mechanism, but it could fit unfolded in Starship's payload bay. Removing that constraint would have saved the program hundreds of millions of dollars.
If the cost of something goes down, people buy more of it. This is basic economics, and it would be foolish to assume it doesn't apply to space launches. There are quite a few potential markets that would become viable if launch costs went down: space tourism, rapid point-to-point Earth transport (this would be especially useful for the military), cheap and rapid deployment of new satellite constellations, single module space stations, cheaper satellites due to fewer mass constraints, orbital radio telescopes, beamed power, space infrastructure such as asteroid harvesting, and so on. I doubt all of these things will exist in the future, but a 20x reduction in launch costs would make quite a few of them profitable. Just as how people 50 years ago couldn't have predicted all the future uses of cheap, fast computers, we can't predict all the uses of cheap, fast launches. What we can predict is that lower costs will increase demand.
Also, reusable spacecraft such as Starship actually reduce the amount of debris created per launch, as most space debris comes from spent upper stages. Of the 25 recent debris producing events listed on Wikipedia[1], 16 were caused by debris that would not be created by a reusable spacecraft (either an upper stage, a payload adapter, or a fairing).
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_debris_producing...
This kind of launch capacity is going to change the entire economics of building stuff for space. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/10/28/starship-is-st... has some interesting writing on this.
There's no demand for travel that would take you to the other side of the earth in 1-2 hours?
There's an interesting post[1] on r/enoughmuskspam drawing some conclusions (based on well documented history) that SpaceX is just an extension of the 80s Star Wars/SDI program. Little easter eggs like the fact that the Falcon rockets are named after the DARPA FALCON Project, Musk's ties to directors of the SDI program, etc.
If the real goals of the SDI program are to be realized, i.e. winning WWIII by knocking down all the enemy ballistic nukes, the US would have to put a lot of mass into orbit. You'd need some kind of cheap heavy launch system to put Brilliant Pebbles[2] up there, or as we're calling it these days, Starshield[3].
I think this is 100% the plan, and Musk has gone so hard right because the Heritage Foundation was the original proponent of SDI/"Let's start and win WWIII" and they're still the power players behind the republican party. (Fun fact, SDI and Brilliant Pebbles were heavily pushed by Dr. Strangelove himself, Edward Teller.) The stuff about populating Mars is just an exciting story to tell the rubes so they don't go asking questions about your massive space-based weapons platform.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1gdx11x/elo...
First, Musk has been talking about Mars since before he founded SpaceX. Other people such as Adeo Ressi, Robert Zubrin, and Reid Hoffman have reported Musk talking about colonizing Mars as early as 2001. It was only after that that he went to Russia to try and buy old rockets, thinking that landing a greenhouse on Mars would excite people about space again.
Second, Falcon 1 was named 18 months before the DARPA FALCON project existed. And the contract that SpaceX was awarded was less than half a million dollars. Nine other companies got similar contracts, including AirLaunch and Orbital Sciences Corp. Only Andrews Space, Lockheed Martin, and Northrup Grumman got phase two contracts.
Third, the Starshield program is almost entirely a product of the Biden administration, and its capabilities are nothing like SDI. Current Starshield satellites are similar to that of Starlink, but owned and operated by the US government. They have better encryption and probably some observational capabilities, but they are incapable of intercepting ICBMs. An SDI program would require technologies very different from what SpaceX has been developing. For example: SpaceX uses liquid fuels, while interceptors would have to be solid boosters.
And finally, SDI is unworkable for several reasons. It takes time to launch a satellite constellation, and during that time an adversary would be incentivized to launch their nukes (since it becomes a use it or lose it situation). Or they would build more anti-satellite weapons and ground based lasers, allowing them to take out enough interceptors to launch a devastating nuclear exchange. And even if the system remained intact, it would do nothing to stop hypersonics, bombers, submarine launched ballistic missiles, and nukes being smuggled into the country. People realized this long ago, which is why (in addition to cost) SDI was cancelled.
The only way your model of the world could be correct is if Musk was a brilliant con man who has spent the past quarter century risking his fortune to develop reusable rockets for the sole purpose of building a system that everyone knows would not protect the US in a global thermonuclear war. And he's somehow kept this secret from the public this entire time, even though he's leaked many other embarrassing secrets. Musk is far from the sanest person around, but such a claim stretches credulity to the breaking point.
You were right about Falcon though, it wasn’t DARPA but the actual SDI Falcon laser program [2].
I don’t claim to know everything and I could be wrong, but it is very unlikely that we’d know all the details the super secret weapons system if SpaceX is actually building it. The parts they wouldn’t be able to hide, however, are definitely visible.
[1] https://spacenews.com/space-development-agency-a-huge-win-fo...
But to see all this as some sort of linear story is just a conspiracy.
Yes people in the 80s who were part of Starwars continued to exist and continue in many place in the US government. And they still believe in many of the ideas in the 80s, specially Missile defense.
Many of them are space nerds, and simply want to see more space development in general. And they are not secretive about that, there are plenty of interviews you can look up. The whole OpenStack project came about because somebody from Starwars wanted to bring in young people to NASA. The whole company Plant came out of that too.
Specifically in regards to the early 2000s, the reason for DoD support for launch was that after 2001 they realised that they didn't have enough sat capacity over the middle east, and then they realised it would take far to long to launch new sats. Since then DoD has supported various programs for small and rapid launch. DoD has continued this, most recently with the company Firefly. That was the reason for early support for SpaceX and others, not any great dreams of Starwars ideas.
SpaceX however wasn't really able to get in with DoD much, the whole Starwars grand scale idea had no real power at DoD. NASA and the needs to supply station that made SpaceX able to continue to exist and develop. That built Falcon 9.
SpaceX themselves then pushed for Falcon 9 reusability and cheaper price. That then in turn made many old-heads at DoD dust off old plans that were shelved in the 80s and started to look into what could be done with the new capabilities that SpaceX dropped into their labs.
Remember, SpaceX wasn't the only company talking about reusability. Rocketplane Kistler had far more support from 'the establishment'. So Musk was just one of many people who want to do things in space, and most people thought he was likely gone fail.
Starlink was a natural thing for SpaceX to do. LEO internet, was a thing people had been wanting to do since the 90s. And SpaceX jumped on it with private funding. They for sure knew they would likely be able to sell to the government, but they also knew that it wouldn't be easy or fast, so they designed it as a consumer system primarily.
Now that SpaceX the largest producers of rockets and sats, of course DoD would look to them for various other projects. And SpaceX wants to make money, so if DoD asks for bids on some projects, then SpaceX will likely bid if they think they can make money.
Mike Griffin has worked with Musk, but they have also fought each other quite a bit. Even in the early days. Just recently Mike Griffin was the spearhead in the anti-SpaceX lunar lander campaign.
Basically, there is no real story here. Literally everything in modern US spaceflight was influenced by the money that flowed into the space industry in the 80s under Reagan. Many of the same people and same ideas are still around and as the space industry develops, many old ideas are warmed up, and new ideas are developed.
His all-in for republicans is partly because he is anti-regulation and because he has always been a free-speech all the way guy, even before he was more directly political.
He really turned more MAGA during the pandemic when in California, the politicians didn't want to allow him to reopen the Tesla factory.
If he's involved in a neo-SDI program I would not expect any of his public statements about his motivations to mean anything at all. He most assuredly has a TS-SCI clearance and probably handlers who are watching his every word and ready to haul him to jail for running his mouth. If I were in that position, I too would be a good soldier and frequently monologue about the agreed-upon cover story of settling Mars.
Why would he since 20+ years talk about Mars? He went to Mars Society conventions long before he wasn't even remotely famous. If he cared about SDI, why not talk about it, its not that controversial. If it was an interest of his, nothing stops him from talking about it. You think he openly talks about Ukraine, trans issues, Israel and almost everything else that's controversial. But mentioning SDI is somehow to controversial? What?
> probably handlers who are watching his every word
You are disagreeing with every journalist who has interacted with Musk. And tons of other people who have interacted with him. In fact its the opposite, its a whole thing that Musk can't shut the fuck up even if he should by any reasonable definition. Have you done literally any research on this topic?
> If I were in that position, I too would be a good soldier and frequently monologue about the agreed-upon cover story of settling Mars.
What the fuck are you even talking about? 'Agreed up on' with who? People from the Starwars days are very open about what they want and thinking that its a good idea to continue that. They talk openly about it.
Musk talking and pushing these ideas publicly that would be a good thing for them. Because the people that need to be convinced are the decision makers at DoD and the congress. If Musk used his lobbying power to push these ideas, people like Griffin would welcome that. But Musk doesn't, because he doesn't really care. And he rather lobbies for Mars.
Of course if he is part of an ongoing DoD project then he would be under NDA for that project and couldn't talk about it. That's not a conspiracy, that just how DoD contracting works. But SpaceX has not started bidding on such contracts until recently.
You just creating a conspiracy where non exists. The whole conspiracy doesn't even make sense. You don't need Mars as a smoke-screen, you can just say 'we build rockets in order to support DoD and NASA and gain commercial contracts as to make money', that is what other rocket companies do. Talking about Mars in 2002 made Musk look like a delusional idiot.
Big picture yes, but definitely not the actual details. And maybe you're right, maybe Musk is a true believer. I just think that I can't possibly know what's the truth or not when, if this project is real it would be treated like the biggest state secret in history with plenty of efforts to obfuscate what's actually happening. In WWII we intentionally let people die to protect the fact that Enigma had been cracked, and keeping this program secret would be at least as important to national security.
> But SpaceX has not started bidding on such contracts until recently.
Literally the first thing that SpaceX ever tried to launch was for a DoD contract[1]. Maybe not a big one, but they go way back with the DoD, before they had any serious prospects. So they started out with DoD, and the second they got a single solitary atom into orbit they got a 1.6 billion dollar contract with NASA. Who was the NASA administrator when they got that contract? Oh that's right: Michael D. Griffin.
[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20060048219/downloads/20...
I was talking about sat contracts, not rockets.
This was the first and so far only one (outside of Starshield): https://spacenews.com/spacex-l3harris-win-space-development-...
And again, non of this is secret, so I have no idea what you are talking about.
And SpaceX just delivers the sat bus, not any of the other missile related stuff.
This is a minor sideshow for SpaceX.
> Big picture yes, but definitely not the actual details.
People don't talk in detail about national security projects ... shocker.
Everything you are arguing is just typical conspiracy theory 'coincidence I THINK NOT' type of argument. You have absolutely nothing even remotely solid. So Ill show you how its done:
> In 1991, Griffin was the president and CTO of Orbital Sciences
and then
> in December 2008, NASA awarded SpaceX and Orbital Sciences
COINCIDENCE? I THINK NOT! Orbital got 300 million $ more then SpaceX for doing LESS!!!!!!
Northrop Grumman has since absorbed Orbital.
> SDA industry partners now include SpaceX, L3Harris Technologies, Northrop Grumman, Ball Aerospace and General Dynamics.
AHAHAHAHAH COINCIDENCE? I THINK NOT!
Even the Falcon 9 when it lands "at sea" is actually landing on a barge that is able to keep it upright (usually) and out of the water, but any booster vehicle that SpaceX (or anyone) launches that does a soft water landing is a write-off. The only real exception to this is return capsules with astronauts in them which are explicitly designed to land in the water and deploy buoys to keep themselves afloat while they wait for the Coast Guard to come pick them, and the capsule (which is a one-time-use component) up.
With SpaceX Dragon (both crew and cargo variants), the capsule is designed to be reusable, so it is no longer a “one-time-use” component. The same is true of Boeing Starliner and NASA/LockheedMartin Orion. “One-time-use” was true of previous ocean-landing capsules, such as Apollo’s Command Module, with the sole exception of the Jan 1965 Gemini 2 uncrewed testflight’s capsule, which was reused for another uncrewed testflight the next year, as part of USAF’s Manned Orbital Laboratory program (which was cancelled in 1969)
Of course, reuse after a spaceflight and ocean landing requires significant refurbishment. Also, both Starliner and Orion are only partially reusable, since both (like Apollo) have a service module designed to burn up on re-entry. Dragon likewise has a trunk, but Dragon’s trunk contains fewer spacecraft systems than Starliner or Orion’s service modules, making it more reusable overall.
https://www.rocketlabusa.com/updates/rocket-lab-announces-re...
If you're asking why they don't land it on a floating barge like Falcon 9, there are two reasons. One is that landing back on the launchpad lets them refuel and relaunch immediately. The other is that landing legs are big and heavy and significantly reduce the payload capacity. If you're already landing on the launchpad you might as well add arms to catch it. The mass of the arms is free because they're on the tower instead of the rocket, and the rocket only needs tiny nubs to catch on the arms instead of giant legs. Also the arms double as a crane to lift and stack the rocket on the launchpad.
So far this hasn't been shown even on much simpler Falcons. The barge gives quite some energy advantage for not having to boost back.
Ideally they'd build a capesize kinda barge with chopsticks to catch it in the ocean, then perhaps service what they have to while it's steaming back.
Spaceship and/or super heavy are (I don't remember the details).
Then the ULA CEO Tory Bruno claiming that the SpaceX photos of the first Raptor 3 were “partially assembled”, to which Gwynne Shotwell replied with this: https://x.com/Gwynne_Shotwell/status/1821674726885924923?t=v...
So, while engines without tilting have been used - e.g. NK-15 - Raptors aren't from that category.
There's clearly a huge advantage somewhere.
Not necessary for launch.
And yeah, Starlink was a great purchase by SpaceX.
SpaceX did purchase some oil rigs with the intention to turn them into launch platforms, but later abandoned the idea. It's probably something they will return to later once Starship is flying regularly. You're right that avoiding the boostback burn is a big advantage. But maybe they don't need to bring the booster back after it lands on a platform, it can just launch again from there. Maybe they could have a bucket brigade of launch platforms ringing the Earth!
I.e. the bulk of near / intermediate term launches
Far fewer people care if you "oops" an unmanned rig in the ocean.
You have to get fuel, and the rocket, out to a pad in the ocean, and have to deal with a rocket lift on varying conditions.
If you dont want to do most of that, then the only option is putting your manufacturing on the rig too, which negates lifting a rocket, but instead makes the rig huge, and requires having a train of ships in and out 24/7 to keep it supplied.
There was even a company in the late 90s that tried oil rig launch platforms and ultimately abandoned it.
Since the 2 stages of Starship aren't intended to be road mobile, due to size, there's no transportation benefit to being land-accessible.
So really the main concern is piping propellant... but afaik some rigs off the shallow coast of Texas are directly piped to land?
The main benefit you get is terrifying the FAA et al. less, as the consequences of a missed catch are now out in the ocean.
The fact that it's required for Artemis to work, and the amount (nobody knows exactly but lower bound is like 15) of Starships required to launch in quick succession just highlights how risky, to the point of unsoundness, the project is.
If you do the thermal design right, possibly use a sun shade (space is a large thermos bottle after all) or even use active cooling to remove the little heat that gets through, then it should work just fine. :)
The force doesn't push against the nozzle of the engine.
I wouldn't want to try to intuit what the force distribution would be and how much is carried through each component of the structure, though — that's what simulations are for.
I’m not sure what you are saying here. The force pushes against the nozzle, (and of course the walls of the combustion chamber.) That is the purpose of the rocket engine, to push the rocket forward. They are not just there to provide mood-lights.
The force doesn't transfer via those walls, rather it goes through the full tank of the rocket and pushes against the top.
Ok? I seem to have said the same.
> The force doesn't transfer via those walls
Where do you think the force starts on a rocket? What pushes the rocket forward?
What probably happened is it failed a safety check (e.g. a sensor read out of range) and so it didn't divert to the launchpad. It's cheaper to dump the booster in the ocean than to build a new launch tower if it's destroyed in a failed landing. They have an assembly line for boosters, but only one fully complete launch tower at the moment.
How do they structurally, electrically, etc. checkout the rocket after landing?
Not sure about the amount of fuel needed to land, as there is much less atmosphere on Mars, and none on the Moon. I would still guess that it needs less fuel there as well.
But the other Starships don't and adding them would make a big difference.
Since you need a huge fuel tank in orbit that needs to be refilled by multiple starships to refuel Starship HLS to actually land on the moon adding legs on those refueling Starships would decrease payload capacity, and thus you'd need even more Starships to refuel the tank for a single lunar landing.
For instance the V2 design seems to use Raptor 2.5 which is a Raptor 2 variant with Raptor 3 style interface with the ship. So they are testing the ship design to support Raptor 3 before they have Raptor 3.
The engines are really heart of these things and drive the development cadence.
In other words, they were optimistic enough to think that another upright landing was within the realm of possibility, while also deliberately doing things which made that outcome less likely, to get the data they need.
If that's true, I wouldn't characterize it as a second attempt at a chopstick land, that would just be a stretch goal. Who knows if it is, but it's consistent with how SpaceX operates.
> During this phase, automated health checks of critical hardware on the launch and catch tower triggered an abort of the catch attempt.
Surely you aren't saying there is middle ground in the way the tower is being tested that caused the abort of the booster landing?
I guess that could be an interesting cost savings measure, just lose/destroy your old inventory instead of paying disposal.
Also, people pay good money for high-quality metals. The scrap value is probably greater than the logistics cost of getting it to a scrapyard.
You wouldn’t even need to scrap it. Cut it up and turn it into some mega silos for agriculture or materials suppliers. Or just set it aside and donated to the Smithsonian in a few decades…
Dropping rockets into the ocean was what everyone* did before SpaceX came along.
If you're already paying the cost to bring it back though, it's very hard to imagine that you would have to pay to scrap it. The thing is primarily a large metal tank, and some engines made up of a bunch of metal - people pay money for the privilege of scrapping metal, not the other way around.
* Technically some other countries dropped them on deserted land, or not so deserted land in the case of China.
Not as crazy an idea as it sounds.
Biggest issue is unlike nap of the earth flying, good luck hiding you were coming in or where you landed. So better get out and moving ASAP once you land.
The other thing is how many options for diverting does a Starship have? How many mechazilla’s ya got? Can Starship change the LZ mid flight? Can it abort? Are there booster stages ready at each location for quick turn around?
And.. what exact cargo needs to be moved in 1hr, announced to the world, that would not serve the mission better by being moved more quietly in a C-130, or C-17, in 12 hours? I can’t think of one. There are spec ops teams pre positioned around the globe, and they like to keep things quiet. So what is this special cargo?
But also, FedEx Worldwide This Afternoon(tm).
Sometimes, the benefit of getting the cargo to the destination outweighs the risk of being shot down.
So we might start seeing test flights actually entering orbit soon. Possibly even carrying some real payloads soon.
The reason was safety. If it was orbital, then controlling the re-entry would require a sucessful relight of the engines. If that failed then the re-entry point would depend upon the vagaries of orbital decay from residual atmospheric drag. That's no doubt why today's relight was so brief; they didn't want to significantly alter the reentry point.
This means you don't have to do anything to deorbit while proving you could have made a full orbit if you wanted to.
Orbital means "on a trajectory that doesn't intersect (or escape from) the body you are orbiting", otherwise the word is meaningless.
(Wouldn't they?)
Well, except for relativity turning it into a black hole with a Schwarzschild radius of 8.87 mm so it won't be "point-like".
But most of the disintegrate sheen of plasma that used to be your body would have had some horizontal motion compared to it, even if only due to you starting off as an extended body.
But would you say you hit neutrinos that pass through you without interaction?
If pointlike was possible, it can be similar: nothing beyond the spaghetification that happens well before you reach the event horizon.
Which is what we call "sub-orbital" :)
And that's sub-orbital. Barely
The flights could deliver cheap payload for example.
The license for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy specifically says “Authorization: SpaceX is authorized to conduct flights of launch vehicles: […] (c) Transporting Dragon 2 to low Earth orbit or a payload to orbit;”
The license for Starship/Super Heavy Launch Vehicle does not include such an authorization.
Putting a starship in low earth orbit right now would be a bit reckless, because if the engines fail to relight it's going to come down at some point in a completely random spot along the trajectory, and it's quite a large piece of debris that is designed to not burn up. By contrast this test (which involved the first 0g relight of a raptor) was designed so that if that failed the ship would still come down in a designated keep out zone in the ocean.
Even ignoring the safety risk, the value SpaceX gets from this flight is largely testing the re-entry (heatshield, flaps, etc) of starship. Putting it in an orbital trajectory risks a failed engine relight making it impossible to test that, because the ship will be dead (out of power) by the time it comes back down. Whatever low-cost payload you could put up there for "free" (the cost of risking the payload being destroyed if the test flight goes wrong too early) might not be sufficient to pay for the risk stopping in an orbital trajectory imposes on the test objectives.
Now that they've successfully lit a raptor in 0g, I imagine they're a fair bit more likely to make the subsequent flights orbital.
More relevantly—it's harder to make a marketing stunt out of a fallible mission.
And don't say launch services, 'cause you're using "it's a marketing stunt" to explain why they aren't taking payloads. "It's R&D" makes a heck of a lot more sense.
SpaceX is well known for making a marketing stunt out of their failures (see "How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster"). In fact, Elon Musk is known to make marketing stunts out of anything.
But that's not it, they could have launched a dummy payload if they wanted to, they have already done it for other rockets, and yeah, they made it a marketing stunt. Famously, they launched Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster in the direction of Mars. But here, launching a payload at this stage of development is just not the best thing to do.
All it really does is remove the explosive potential of the fuel.
So no, it's not designed to do this.
Once in orbit the FTS system is usually deactivated (safed).
While the reality is very complicated, you can make a rough handwave model for orbital debris in a circular orbit: At 100km it lasts 1 orbit (90 minutes) at most, and every ~100km you add after that increases orbital lifespan by ~10x.
I don't expect this to be a major showstopper but obviously they must figure it out before they can start making money off of starship.
Because they couldn't guarantee precise deorbiting, they never put it in orbit to begin with. Starship was on a ballistic trajectory that falls back to Earth. Any payloads they deployed would fall back too, unless they carried their own rockets to reach orbit themselves.
Actually Starship on this flight wasn't quite on a ballistic trajectory, the periapsis was actually above the ground so it counts as an orbital trajectory. Without the atmosphere it would keep going.
they pushed the rocket to the limits in this flight
If they dont catch the starship (upper stage), the whole project is pointless so its important keep things simple (details like payload door, cargo dont matter) until they achieved the whole loop (land & catch starship)
They already have a cheap way of launching. Cheap for current market rate. Whole point of this project is to improve cost by / 1000.
They achieved substantial progress with every flight. 1. It flies, 2. hot staging 3. reach orbit 4. land both & heat shield, 5. catch booster, 6. extreme conditions & improve heat shield.
But the FAI guidelines for for space records at the time were based on normal aircraft flights & expected the crew to board the craft & only disembark on landing.
So soviets just lied about Gagarin landing with the capsule up until 1971: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_1#World_records
Also the orbital booster used (R7) was also still an active ICBM (even sometimes holding combat readiness with a live nuke on top on the same launch pad) so that was IIRC secret as well. :)
Per NYTimes: “It was pretty epic on Attempt 1,” Kate Tice, a senior quality engineering manager at SpaceX, said of the last test flight’s tower catch on the company’s livestream. “But the safety of the teams and the public and the pad itself are paramount.”
Not sure what would have changed compared to the first launch, other than Trump’s presence - and they haven’t described any anomalies.
A launch is one thing: lots of explosive potential, but the kinetic energy is quickly dispersed.
The KE of a botched landing of what’s essentially a ballistic missile would be a whole lot more concentrated…
Or maybe they just didn’t have time to file a modified flight plan for it to enter even-more-specially-restricted controlled airspace.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnBQmEqBCY0
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/02/yusaku-maezawa-opens-up-publ...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DearMoon_project
[3] https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/1/24259588/tesla-lawsuit-au...
It looks like it will take as long as any space project. It will be delayed and take almost a decade from start to completion.
What has been guesstimated by the observers and/or stated by Gwynne/Elon:
- next flight some time in jan/feb
- next flight will be a V1 booster with a V2 ship (still Raptor 2s)
- next flight profile will be similar to this one, if they land the ship in the ocean precisely again, the they will try to catch the next one afer that (note this is not currently possible as no existing ship has catch hardware installed)
- stated flight test cadence they would like to reach in 2025 is 25, observers think 10-12 are more likely, in both cases they need to move pretty fast
- both the star factory and the second launch pad should come online fully within the first half of 2025, launch cadence should improve a lot after that
- for Artemis 3 they need to demonstrate fuel transfer in 2025, otherwise the timeline of that program will for sure have to be extended (probably even beyond the already expected delay to 2027)
- elon wants to send a few starships to mars in the 2026 window, and that may actually happen if everything goes smooth as butter until then, but the 2028 window with humans on board is just a wish, very much "elon time", most observers do not think starship will be human rated for such long flights before 2030s
They are not that far behind the aspirational goals Elon laid out at IAC in 2016.
Then it was called ITS not the starship and steel was not yet thought about. https://youtu.be/WVacRKN1tAo?si=s0MBP8ejQt3zv-sF&t=3309
As you can see from the chart Mars flights from late 2022. But there was a pandemic amongst other things that came along etc.
Plus, the Secret Service may be feeling far less tolerant of "eh, it's less than a 1 in BigNum chance of anyone getting hurt" odds than your average Tom, Dick, or Harry.
Whatever was or wasn't going wrong in the booster during its landing approach, I'd for-sure bet that the "acceptable" parameters for a chopstick landing were tightened down quite a ways from the prior launch. (Or such a landing had simply been ruled out, by Security fiat.)
from here https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-...
