SpaceX is preparing for Starship's 13th test flight. Starship is still experiencing issues during ascent and has yet to successfully launch anything from orbit. This test flight will only be sub-orbital.
Is Starship's design flawed? Is it too heavy to achieve its goals? Rocket development is notoriously time-consuming, but SpaceX promised it had cracked that code.
NASA selected SpaceX's Starship Human Landing System (HLS) to transport astronauts from lunar orbit down to the Moon and back. Starship had a tremendous set of goals to achieve before taking on the Moon. Including mastering space-based & lunar refuelling & becoming a crew-capable craft that can land on the Moon, refuel there, and take off again with people on board.
Does any of this have any chance of happening soon if Starship is more fundamentally flawed and cannot reliably reach orbit with cargo?
SpaceX's 1st Starship test flight since going public is set to launch
The only reason these test flights aren't reaching orbit is because they're actively aiming for a suborbital trajectory. They're not "yet to successfully launch anything from orbit", they're yet to want to go to orbit in the first place. The difference between what they get and an actual orbit is minute, relatively speaking. They've amply demonstrated that if orbit was what they wanted, they'd be there with every flight.
They're sticking with suborbital flights for now because they still have things to work on to make it more reliable, but none of them are "the rocket's too heavy"
Well they also aren't aiming for orbit because they are legally not allowed to do so. Their flight license only allows for suborbital until they can show they can reliably control the craft until touchdown. They don't want something up in orbit that might come down at any random place. With a suborbital path, even if they lose control early (which they have done a couple of times) the crash path will be known. Obviously they select a trajectory with a minimal chance of hitting anything.
Once they show the craft can be controlled reliably, they will get a flight clearance for an orbital attempt. The booster has plenty of delta-V, so no doubt in my mind something will make it up into orbit. No telling what state the ship might be in once it gets there tho and if they can get it down in one piece and on target.
The development plan they chose is especially difficult, because they are changing stuff all the time. This makes it very hard to prove the thing is actually reliable. With a dozen critical changes that might kill the entire vehicle at any time, I expect getting a license would be pretty hard. However with the huge amounts of de-regulation and corruption going on these days, I'm sure Musk will get his license if he wants it.
Right now they're trying to get the best shield good enough, that and make engines that keep working and don't explode
Also they are making larger changes each flight, intruding new problems as they fix others
The upcoming flight test is expected to perform a stage 2 engine relight to prove it can deorbit itself, it wasn't able to prove that last test flight as stage 1 didn't deliver enough energy so stage 2 spent too much propellant and didn't have enough spare for the relight
Yeah, fuck making money sending shit into space for a profit.
All the best businesses pursue billions in debt to work out problems their competitors don't have.
Dont worry though, after the initial capital burn of a few trillion, and the half a billion that Elon steals from the company each year they'll make that money back after just a few decades. Maybe.
I guess one thing we can be sure of is that Elon will make a ton of money before space x goes under, or gets bought out.
NASA is gonna have to rescue it. Unless maga goons are still in charge in which case they’ll just keep subsidizing it.
How many other rockets have needed more than a dozen sob-orbital flights to work out all of the issues?
How about falcon 9? That was flying for years before it worked properly. The only reason it didn't get the same criticism as starship is that they were using it to actually launch payloads during that time.
Starship can't get away with that because the upper stage is big enough they can't be careless about letting it drift back to earth, they have to be in control, but it's not actually taking more time than falcon 9 did.
Meanwhile falcon 9 is now the most successful and reliable rocket in human history, so criticisms you can level at spacex, you can't claim their approach doesn't work
And that's a very valid reason. Falcon 9 was accomplishing things even when it wasn't fully reusable. If instead of Starship they had a second stage rocket with some heat tiles and it was deploying payloads, it would be fine. If the first stage and second stages weren't reliable in terms of being re-used they'd still be making progress in the space program as long was reliably getting payloads into orbit.
The problem with Starship is it's trying to be a big cargo carrying reusable human rated spacecraft. It's a shittier version of the space shuttle. The space shuttle wasn't a good idea, we should've learned this. Making a shittier version of the space shuttle is obviously a bad idea.
They already have a way to get humans into space with the Falcon 9 / Dragon system. So why are they trying to build a human rated super-heavy launch system?
Remove the human rated requirement, build a second stage with heat tiles. If the heat tiles fail on your second stage, you lose that, but not the payload. You're losing money, but nobody dies and you're still successfully launching payloads into space. Get a moon lander, an Orion capsule, and a rocket with enough fuel to get to the moon and back into space. Once you have the stuff you need for a moon mission up in space, send a Dragon up on a Falcon 9 with people on it.
Trying to build a super-heavy cargo carrier that's also human rated is just dumb. Remove the human rated requirement and just build a launch system that can get large payloads into space. The Starship thing is all about Elon Musk's ego and wanting to have something like in science fiction where you have a ship that you give a name and you can take that spaceship around wherever you want to go. Elon Musk and his fanbase don't want to admit it was a dumb idea and kill the whole Starship idea.
Currently the US space program is blocked from getting heavy payloads into space until SpaceX can make a dumb idea work. It's the space shuttle program all over again.
Basically anyone who is going 'omg starship is a failure' really has zero understanding of what's going on.
Or because they can't?
Musk was 80% confident this issue would be fixed by test flight 3 back in 2023.
On March 17, 2023 -"So I think we've got, hopefully, about an 80% chance of reaching orbit this year," Musk said on March 7 during an interview at the Morgan Stanley Conference. "It'll probably take us a couple more years to achieve full and rapid reusability."
Fuck musk. But gwynne knows what she's doing
He also said tesla will be a fully auto pilot in 2018, and that we should have datacenters in space...