Sad to see the failure of hundreds of insanely smart and talented engineers, pushing the limits of what's possible, be celebrated because of the colossal douchebag of a boss they have.
this post was submitted on 30 May 2025
62 points (95.6% liked)
Space
1345 readers
187 users here now
A community to discuss space & astronomy through a STEM lens
Rules
- Be respectful and inclusive. This means no harassment, hate speech, or trolling.
- Engage in constructive discussions by discussing in good faith.
- Foster a continuous learning environment.
Also keep in mind, mander.xyz's rules on politics
Please keep politics to a minimum. When science is the focus, intersection with politics may be tolerated as long as the discussion is constructive and science remains the focus. As a general rule, political content posted directly to the instanceβs local communities is discouraged and may be removed. You can of course engage in political discussions in non-local communities.
Related Communities
π Science
- !curiosityrover@lemmy.world
- !earthscience@mander.xyz
- !esa@feddit.nl
- !nasa@lemmy.world
- !perseverancerover@lemmy.world
- !physics@mander.xyz
- !space@beehaw.org
π Engineering
π Art and Photography
Other Cool Links
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I'm sorry, no.
They obviously aren't 'insanely smart and talented engineers' if they keep building rockets that fail... catastrophically... with nothing learned other than 'oh gee, our quality control is garbage, and our design is fundamentally flawed, better keep "iterating!" '
This is all doubly stupid when the entire business model, financial end of SpaceX is just built on the idea that one day, one of these things will be reusable... but they're blowing up what, 200-300 million $ with each 'iterative test?'
(That cost figure is from Musk himself, btw)
We were supposed to have a demonstration of large scale, ship to ship, orbital fuel transfer... in Q4, 2022.
So far, none of these things have even achieved orbit, and the fuel transfer tech is... vaporware? Hastily drawn on a napkin somewhere? Only exists in CGI renders?
SpaceX is the very kind of MIC style bloated misuse of taxpayer funds that should have been greatly curtailed by some kind of... task force with the goal of cutting fraud and abuse out of government spending.
But instead no, we got Kathy Leuders to single handedly strong arm NASA into continuing funding for Starship by bullshitting the project proposal/review process, and then a couple months after that, she resigns from NASA and now works for... SpaceX!
Never mind that sending astronauts to the moon and back with the Starship + Heavy Booster would require somewhere between 12 to 16 total launches to fully refuel the lunar bound craft... never mind the fact that no Heavy Booster has ever been re-used after recovery... heck I don't even think any Starships have ever been re-used after recovery...
Nope, its all fine, these are very smart and talented people, just whatever you do, do not look at the failure rate for the Saturn V, do not take into account that that program was all literally ground breaking R&D that had never been done before, that inventing a huge chunk of what is now the basis of modern Computer Science was part of its development.
Saturn V Failure Rate
It is 1 out of 13, and this was a partial failure, which never recurred again after subsequent fixes were applied.
The engineers are likely well qualified. But when the boss vetoes your designs to cut costs, that's how you get these results.
One answer per paragraph, let's break it down.
They absolutely have learned a lot by flying the prototypes. They caught one of the largest 1st stages ever made with the freaking launch tower, twice!
The entire cost of the starship program so far is much less than the Saturn V, adjusted for inflation. They can keep blowing them up by the dozens and it'll still take years to get to the Saturn V budget.
They did transfer fuel between tanks in space a few flights back as a small scale demo, the hardware exists.
Corruption definitely exists within the government. However, let's not kid ourselves by believing the starship is being funded for the lunar or Martian missions. They're being funded because they can deliver hundreds of tons of military payload anywhere on the planet within minutes.
The last launch did reuse a booster that was caught 2 launches ago. Starship reuse will come once they can reliably send it, which will probably take a few more catastrophic failures.
If you want to talk about failure rates, how about the Falcon 9, the most successful platform ever made? Also the invention of modern computer science thing was mostly on DARPA at that point for military applications.
They caught one of the largest 1st stages ever made with the freaking launch tower, twice!
Neat. Is... there some kind of point to that?
vs designing a different kind of system, with legs of some kind?
Why not just make it into a 2 stage system, each system has legs, each can vector back to a location... I mean, you'd have to use a smaller number of more powerful and more reliable engines but - oh right maybe that's the problem, a lot of these more recent raptor engines don't have such great quality control...
Don't get me wrong, being able to fly a suborbital boost stage back to a landing zone for reuse is an accomplisment... but SpaceX already achieved that with Falcon, Blue Origin has also done it, and before either of them, DARPA did it in the late 80s / early 90s.
The entire cost of the starship program so far is much less than the Saturn V, adjusted for inflation.
You're doing the thing that is stupid to do, not accounting for all the other things the Saturn V program built and/or pioneered, ... which I tried to list some examples of, but heres another whole category:
Proper launch pad infrastructure, VABs, all that kinda stuff that is ... largely still in use today.
Its a lot easier to spend less money after a whole bunch of reliable engineering research has been done, and is now available for you to learn from.
Of course that doesn't stop SpaceX from ignoring much of it and then re-learning it the hard way.
They can keep blowing them up by the dozens and it'll still take years to get to the Saturn V budget.
Only if the government keeps subsidizing them to do so by taxing the hell out of us and giving money to 'rockets to nowhere', as Trump called them, before Elon bought him the Presidency.
Currently, it looks like Elon and Trump are crashing out hard, quite publically, go check the news... so yeah, maybe not a good bet that SpaceX will keep being so heavily subsidized?
They did transfer fuel between tanks in space a few flights back as a small scale demo, the hardware exists.
If you are talking about the March 14 2024 IFT3 flight... that involved a single, solitary Starship, moving some fuel from one set of tanks to another, within itself.
This is not ship to ship transfer. This is moving fuel around internally, something that basically most rockets can do?
Docking and mating with another ship is a whole other thing entirely, and then doing a controlled fuel transfer of huge masses of fuel without a seal rupturing or one or either of them tumbling out of control... thats another whole other, whole other thing entirely.
Has anyone seen what the design for the docking mechanisms are?
I would love to see this hardware that according to you, 'exists'.
Are they docking end to end, or belly to belly, or has it changed again?
The actual ship to ship transfer demo... you know, involving two actual ships?
That is currently scheduled for 'some time in 2026'... again, this was supposed to have been demo'd back in Q4 2022.
Corruption definitely exists within the government...
Kathy Leuders, thats her name, in a functioning society, she'd be in prison.
But anyway:
They're being funded because they can deliver hundreds of tons of military payload anywhere on the planet within minutes.
Hundreds of tons.
Within minutes.
Ok so how long is it gonna take to prep the launch pad, load everything up, and then unload it all?
Can you land anywhere that isn't basically flat, clear of obstructions?
We tend to make those areas into airstrips or helicopter LZs of some kind already, either temporary via a military engineering corp, or permanently via an established commercial airport or permanently military airbase.
A C5 galaxy can lift up to 135 tons of kit. It can do air drops. It can be refueled and reflown far more rapidly than any rocket ever will be. It can fit a fucking M1 Abrams in it.
... Existing logistics systems are astonishingly more cost effective at this, and in many cases, actualy faster.
It sure isn't gonna be the case that a rocket is going to be able to touch down into some kind of hot lz, a standard 7.62 machine gun at 300 meters would kill everyone inside... and thats assuming the rocket fuel doesn't explode.
Then theres the much more significant G Forces, that'll fuck up people and a lot of gear.
Oh and how is all this stuff gonna be unloaded anyway?
A gantry crane? 100+ feet off the ground? In a thing that'll tip over and crash to the ground (and then detonate) if it gets too off balance? Has that even been designed yet or tested?
The entire point to point suborbital rocket concept for personnel or logistics transport is an absolute non starter, it is horrendously inefficient and impractical in so many ways that it is literally laughably ludicrous.
What was it, Shotwell saying we'd be having point to point passenger rocket flights... 4 years ago now? Saying the trick is to get the turnaround time down to that of a commercial jet... which is on the order of hours, when the fastest turn around time for any SpaceX rocket, ever, is 9 days, and it typically takes more like 2 to 3 weeks?
However, let's not kid ourselves by believing the starship is being funded for the lunar or Martian mission...
I mean, basically the majority of Starship+HeavyBooster developmemt has been funded by NASA contracts to... go to the moon... but sure, who cares about contracts, just stupid pieces of paper.
EDIT: oh right, forgot this one: there still isn't even a design for a potentially human rateable Starship.
They haven't even started to attempt to design something with life support systems... or even... seats.
Only stuff that exists is concept art.
Only if the government keeps subsidizing them to do so by taxing the hell out of us
If Starship cost $3 billion over its lifetime and was entirely funded by US taxes, it would cost, on average $10 per citizen. Note that that is over the lifetime of the project and not by year. Is this the taxing to hell you're talking about? Not NASA's $25 billion this year alone (and that's one of the cheaper budget items)? Do you need to start a GoFundMe to help you out with that?
Now how am I supposed to take you seriously when the easiest statement for you to fact check is so hyperbolically incorrect?
How am I supposed to take you seriously when the guy running SpaceX is a speedball addicted nutjob with a goddamned Hunter S Thompson esque box of various uppers and downers and hallucinigens on his person at all times for at least the last solid year, who is notorious for mismanaging the shit out of every thing he's been in charge of in the last 10 years, who just fucking decommissioned all Dragon capsules because he's having a very messy, very public breakup with his former bestest political friendo?
To refresh,
Me:
Currently, it looks like Elon and Trump are crashing out hard, quite publically, go check the news... so yeah, maybe not a good bet that SpaceX will keep being so heavily subsidized?
You:
Starship alone has cost significantly over $3 billion to date, the vast amount of that funding coming from NASA, whose budget was being slashed by the bill Trump wants passed when I wrote this, but surely costs won't balloon to an order of magnitude more than that whenever R&D and testing that's already 4 years behind schedule is completed and then the project scales up dramatically to be able to actually do the things its been contracted to do... also the stability of the partnership between NASA and SpaceX is unquestionable, rock solid, and also also SpaceX is totally a fiscally solvent entity even if it's primary customer/funding source stops working with it.
Oh wait that's not actually what you said, but it is what you meant to say by choosing to ignore almost every single point I brought up.
Oh and I corrected some of your errors as well.
5 days.
It took 5 days for what I mentioned, and you dismissed without comment, to become extremely relevant.
You keep proving that you have passion, but no facts to back it up. I'd be perfectly fine with SpaceX being nationalized, but Americans believe that's communism. SLS is not only old tech, it's old tech that isn't being produced any more. Using existing supplies, they have at best 5 launches, at slightly less than has been spent by SpaceX on the entrie Starship program, for each one. If you want six, well, you have to reopen plants in over half of the states, as well as train staff, etc. Even if the next 5 cost as much as the 5 they can build now, and you'd be a fool to make that bet, it would still cost 10 times what SpaceX has spent so far.
And no, I don't consider competitive contracts to be subsidizing companies. And the reason SpaceX is doing as well as it is is likely because of people actively working to keep his hands off of it. This may be the only good thing Twitter has accomplished. As for the Dragon capsule ending, I'm pretty sure that technological cat was let out of the bag.
Im not giving you every single possibly relevant fact because there are thousands, it would take me a day or two to compile an 80 page advisory report, and I'm used to being paid for such work.
...
SpaceX is not going to be nationalized, Trump is a fascist, not a leftist.
Fascists facilitate the corporate/business class, they do not disband them and absorb their assets.
SpacrX is going to be cut loose, and then wither on the vine. Maybe some of it will survive, but its either gonna have to go public and/or do even more investor startup rounds... or its gonna have to massively scale back without NASA contracts.
...
You seem to think thag I think that because I don't like Starship, I must think SLS is good in comparison.
No, I don't. It has also been a mess, due to other MIC contractors also fucking shit up and massively overcharging with cost plus accounting bullshit.
Trump already wants to gut NASA's budget in general, and stop the Artemis program after Artemis III... so they're fucked too.
The US is neutering its own space capabilities in general right now.
...
However... Artemis I, you know, actually worked. It accomplished its mission.
Starship+Heavy Booster has been in development for about the same amount of time, and has ao far not accomplished a single, actual mission, of any utility other than 'iterative development testing.'
The SLS system has literally gotten an orbiter around the moon and back, meanwhile Starship+Heavy Booster has a proven maximum suborbital payload of 'a banana', and has now multiple times caused major international incidents requiring relevant airspace to be immediately shut down, as well as rain toxic rocket debris over or near populated areas and fragile ecosystems.
Starship + Heavy Booster hasn't even achieved an actual orbit yet, all of its flights have been suborbital.
...
As for you not considering government contracts and grants to be subsidies... they are, you are just flat out wrong.
Why are a bunch of American small farms suddenly facing bankruptcy?
Well one reason is that the government subsidized them by buying a good chunk of their produce, at prices significantly above what they'd fetch on the open market, and then shipping it across the world as food relief as part of USAID.
But Elon cancelled that, so now kids in Africa are starving to death, and American small farmers are going extinct.
Go learn some actual macro econ theory, or if you wanna pay me for lessons I can tutor you, what with me having an actual degree in Econ and all, and better things to do with my free time.
...
Finally, your provided link referencing the Dragon capsule is a link to an article about a Chinese startup developing a rocket intended to be landed/captured with chopsticks.
I do not see how these two things relate to each other... the Dragon is launched by a Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy... those do not involve or require or use a chopstick method to land/capture them, as they do not need them.
I still an unconvinced by the concept of a chopstick landing in general.
The purported purpose of this is to increase the turn around time of a rocket caught in this way.
To date, only a single rocket that has ever been captured by chopsticks has ever been turned around at all, in any amount of time, and reflown.
That was Super Heavy Booster B14, which RUD'd when it initiated its landing burn in IFT-9, and is uh, no longer with us.
Sure, maybe the Chinese will pull off an actually reusable system with this approach, if they do, then I'll eat crow on that.
But I still remain skeptical of the entire approach.
There were a lot of skeptics that the Falcon would fly, and be reusable, and it has dramatically reduced cost per kg to orbit.
Also, I'm not sure where you got your Econ degree, and I'm not sure I care. Competitive contracts aren't the same as subsidies. If the government says they're going to do something, say build a tunnel, is it a subsidy to the construction company who wins the contract, or is it payment for services rendered? And actual subsidies, such as growing food that can't be sold on the open market at the price the government is paying, can have benefits to the country, such as national security or funding soft power with other nations. So, is your big problem that the government shouldn't be supporting space development, or should instead be doing it internally for more tax payer money? Are you against EVs being promoted by the government making the technology more feasible for car companies? If so, why are you pissed at Musk for taking advantage of these subsidies that one could argue help the country and the world, and not at least as pissed at the other car companies for not getting on board and doing what they could to also access those subsidies?
He doesn't care if it keeps failing, so long as people are still paying him attention