this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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Are you stupid? Falcon 9 is the single most used rocket in the world, and it’s not even close.
Don’t let your hatred force you to ignore facts. Musk is the most colossal asshole on the planet, but that does not invalidate the excellent work done by Shotwell and her team of engineers.
The rocket that's supposed to go to Mars is Starship.
I'm no expert, but apparently the design is very controversial, with some saying it's an extremely risky design.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship
Pennomi:
Please, no need for that:
Firstly, I admit it’s wrong to be so rude, and you’re right to call me out on that.
As you said, Starship is far from proven. It can almost certainly get to orbit in its current state but who even knows if reusability (and propellant transfer) will pan out.
I’m simply sick of people projecting their hatred of Musk on to all the engineers. They assume that because they dislike the man that he must be stupid, and that because he must be stupid, everything he owns must also be stupid. It shows a tribalistic, shallow understanding of the engineering process, when we should instead all be cheering for every success in spaceflight.
No it can't, they've tried twice where it failed very shortly after takeoff. The last attempt was only a month ago, pretty much like some people expected pre launch, because that would be very hard to avoid the way it's designed. Also Musk himself acknowledged it was high risk, with a good chance it wouldn't make it. NASA would NEVER have launched with a high probability of failure, the way the Starship program has been going, it would be very unlikely to be allowed to continue. Musk justified the launch with the value of the telemetry in case of failure. Problem is that they lost contact 8 minutes before it visibly exploded in the sky. So they got no valuable telemetry either!!!
That's not what I see, it seems like Musk has become increasingly irate, and he is calling the shots. The engineers are AFAIK almost never blamed.
You clearly know very little about the history of SpaceX, they run a hardware rich development program and this kind of failure is normal for the first few flights. It’s simply a matter of iterating until it works consistently.
Seriously, look up their process - Falcon 1 failed 3/5 times, and Falcon 9 recovery attempts didn’t succeed until the 8th test. Starship’s suborbital landing tests failed 4 times before they succeeded.
Having a couple launch failures is normal at this phase of development, for SpaceX anyway.
Funny how you claim I know little, when you just claimed Starship is basically ready, when all it can do is a few minutes before it blows up, it can't even leave the atmosphere yet.
One stupid comment more and I block you.
I mean, let’s crunch the numbers: the final velocity was 24,124 km/hr and LEO orbital speed is about 28,000 km/hr. Contrary to what you claim, it did in fact leave the atmosphere at an altitude of ~148km. That means that this iteration of Starship was 86% of the way to its destination. It made it through max q and stage separation, which are generally considered the most dangerous parts of flight.
Yeah, they were damn close.
Yep, its widely used, and its mission profile can be replaced with other existing rockets for around the same cost, and you've always got Blue Origin you know, mastering the basics /before/ tackling more advanced problems.
Musk and Shotwell are still pretty far from delivering on the level of cost savings per launch that Musk has been touting for over a decade at this point.
Off by about a factor of ten.
Shotwell and her /brilliant/ engineers will never build a point to point rocket system, much less one that is economically viable.
Turns out refurbishing a rocket and reusing it is really time consuming and that process basically cannot be significantly sped up without cutting corners that will lead to losing rockets, or by some totally new rocket design philosophy that has yet to be designed.
SpaceX is the company that recently did not even realize that their orbiter module had disassembled itself until 3 minutes after this occurred, then claimed that they had intentionally triggered the abort system.
Shotwell is a joke, as is Starship. At their current rate of development, at best they are looking st something like a promised human rated moon landing capable craft in a decade plus, after some serious redesigns.
Problem is NASA will have picked a different contractor by then, and SpaceX's financials are so bad they will likely go bankrupt, or, at best, just stick with the Falcon 9 and maybe try to actually come somewhere close to the launch costs they originally targeted.
I think you’re intentionally cherry picking some tiny quibbles and ignoring the enormous body of evidence that proves their success. For instance, the vast majority of your complaints are about things they haven’t done (despite saying they would). This is normal in an engineering/marketing dynamic.
This is also why I only focus on actual flight hardware when comparing launch vehicles.
Having competition is great and does not invalidate success in the slightest. I’m looking forward to more competition in the industry. I have my eye on Blue Origin this year.
You could not have chosen a more appropriate topic. This is something we have hard data on, and it turns out that you can in fact refurbish a Falcon 9 without issues in a very short time. The current record is 9 days. I’m pretty sure they’ve done a couple hundred refurbishments by now.
I don’t agree with you about Shotwell, but Starship is certainly a gamble. I have no doubt they’ll get to orbit, but the reuse architecture is harrowing at best. And I agree that Artemis is unlikely to use Starship as a lander.
I suspect using an expendable second stage for Starship (just like Falcon) is the better architecture, but I guess we’ll see if they can pull it off very soon.