this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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Have you seen starship?
Or his bid for the lunar lander?
It looks like a back of the napkin drawing that he gave to real engineers and gave them billions of government dollars to turn into something real, at least in the case of starship.
It’s a tube, the same diameter all the way up with a ridiculous number of engine strapped to it. You know why nasa didn’t do that? WEIGHT. The more shit you have to push, the less distance you can go. Elon’s napkin plan is to refuel the upper stage in orbit, something that has never been done before, and something that requires multiple launches per mission.
You know what happened the first time they launched one, it fucking exploded a third of the way to space. You know what didn’t explode? Any of the Apollo missions, except for Apollo 1, which caused nasa to commit to a “no second chances” philosophy. Elon’s philosophy with starship was “if it gets off the pad, it’s a success” would you step into a building if the construction foreman said “if it doesn’t topple over on day one, it’s a success?”
Space travel is hard, but we were doing successful missions that survived failure scenarios over 50 years ago. Rockets that were designed with slide rules and notebooks full of handwritten math. Spacecraft that were hand built by talented engineers and tradesman, all survived their missions on the first and only try. This bullshit move fast and break stuff strategy shouldn’t be applied to human Spaceflight.
He’s not even spending his own money. SpaceX is primarily funded by the US government. Starship was a government payed experiment, and watching it blow up in the sky and hearing everyone at spaceX cheer made me angry. Real research deserved that money, real engine tests should have been done. Instead, we got the most expensive firework in history because Elon wanted to launch that day.
Starship is an amazing chunk of engineering that really does have a shot at revolutionizing launch economics. Musk is an ass but SpaceX is doing some incredible work. Just getting off the pad with that thing was a win and returned a lot of valuable test data.
Getting off the pad is not a success, it should be a given.
This is supposed to be a human rated vehicle.
Where is the launch escape system? Cause they don’t have one.
And launching a brand new rocket and having it reach orbit the first time is not an oddity. SLS did it first try, the Arian family from ULA has been doing it for 5 versions of the rocket.
Building a billion dollar rocket and only being happy if it manages to get off the ground, only shows a severe lack of understanding of how engineering should work.
You know what would have given way more valuable flight data? A successful launch to orbit.
You know what would have given plenty of data without wasting tons of money and an entire launch facility? Test vehicles with smaller numbers of engines.
Oh, and a flame diverter that was a known basic requirement for large rockets over 50 years ago.
Starship’s launch was a failure. If SLS had blown up, heads at NASA would have rolled. But because Elon is some rich tech bro, he gets a pass to waste a billion of our tax dollars to make a fancy firework, that didn’t even self destruct right.
Maybe if someone at spaceX would explain how mass to orbit worked, they would have a better design for a rocket, but their current design is brain dead, and is never going to be rated for human flight.
If your willing to spend the money, testing things in practice can be much quicker than planning everything out. They admitted that they didn't expect it to reach orbit and that anything beyond the launchpad would be a success. I suspect that Elon pressured them to launch too early though.
The SLS is built using tried and tested technology, so it should have (and did) work, but due to (effectively) corruption it's stupidly expensive per launch.
The falcon 9 was 'impossible' to re-use untill they did it. It's now revolutionised the launch business. If they can do that again by doing the 'impossible' then it will have been worth it.
I do kinda agree with you on the lack of an escape system though, but if they can prove reliability on unmanned missions then it could work.
Yeah, making it reliable enough not to need an escape system is the goal. One of the original concepts was that in a stage 1 failure outside black zones (also, Starship on paper does a great job minimizing the black zones due to re-entry design), stage 2 will light up and go for a powered landing. A stage "explosion" is usually very energetic but more burny-energetic than explosive-energetic, because the fuel can't efficiently mix, which should be within the tolerances of the upper stage.
Planes don't need escape systems, and hopefully Starship can get into at least 5 nines of reliability, preferably more. It's never going to be entirely safe (planes have an accident rate around 1 per million flights, not many of which are fatal), but there's no reason to think that we couldn't get to that safety level in time.
I sure wouldn’t get on a rocket that Elron said was so safe it didn’t need an escape system.
I certainly wouldn't take his word for it either. Thousands of flights with a proven record would be my bar.