Sorry doubters, Starship had a remarkably successful flight

https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/11/heres-why-this-weekends-starship-launch-was-actually-a-huge-success/

by mlindner • 3 years ago

60 55 3 years ago

1969 called; they are asking if you need a rocket designed with slide rules.

sidewndr462• 3 years ago

I don't think I've ever really doubted SpaceX could build such a rocket & eventually get it to work. But why? What is the commercial utility in such a large launch platform?

justrealist• 3 years ago

"No one will need more than 637KB of memory for a personal computer. 640KB ought to be enough for anybody"

wolfram74• 3 years ago

The fact that musk has publicly called induced demand nonsense[0] despite his launch company relying on it is an irony I find delicious.

[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2020/12/29/elon-mus...

yinser• 3 years ago

100-150 tons to orbit or the moon or Mars per starship. NASA is counting on it for lunar operations and Musk anticipates it being the Martian workhorse vehicle

ericd• 3 years ago

The utility is decreasing launch cost per kg by a couple orders of magnitude from the Falcon Heavy, which already represented a huge decrease from other launch systems. Decreasing costs to <1% of former costs seems likely to open a lot of new potential use cases.

fiftyfifty• 3 years ago

Well for one thing they’ll be able to launch 240 Starlink satellites at a time instead of just 60 on the Falcon 9. If they get to the point of reusing the booster and the second stage the cost savings with Starship will be significant over the Falcon 9.

snapplebobapple2• 3 years ago

He's pretty clear, he expects to be building a startship every couple days relatively soon after the design is successfully finalized so that they can launch a crap ton of them at mars to get a colony going (Which I think is dumb, figure out how to build a workable version of o'neill cylinders and focus on mining space and then moving heavy industry off planet into space to solve the pollution issue on planet.) In the near term there will be pretty heavy demand from starlink, as that platform is basically required to economically launch their larger, next gen satellites.

soperj• 3 years ago

If they can get reuse going and it's cheaper than flying a falcon 9, I think there's a lot of commercial utility. If you can put a 110 ton satellite into orbit for the current price of an 8 ton satellite, then you really don't have to worry about weight as much, which means you can use cheaper parts to build your satellite.

stevage3• 3 years ago

What is the commercial utility in such a large launch platform?

It's a very interesting question. Much like StarLink, I suspect he has some other plan for monetising this lift capability. I don't buy the Moon base/Mars base plan at all.

kchoudhu2• 3 years ago

If Eric Berger ever has anything bad to say about SpaceX, I will chop my costume cowboy hat up into small pieces and eat all of it.

kchoudhu2• 3 years ago

Just look at this text attempting to pass itself off as serious analysis of SpaceX.

Since its heady days during the Apollo program, NASA has steadily become an agency filled with checkers, rather than doers... Part of the magic of SpaceX is that it's filled with doers, with relatively few checkers

Narishma• 3 years ago

Is that wrong?

causi2• 3 years ago

When the average NASA project is about a thousand percent over budget and fifteen years behind schedule, that's a very polite way of putting it.

debatem1• 3 years ago

I used to work there and while I don't have the best things to say about that part of my life, this is absolutely true.

SpaceX, whatever you think of its CEO, is chock full of people whose brilliance glows in the dark.

hackeraccount2• 3 years ago

NASA is a prisoner to politics. Anytime it embarks on something there are 3 possibilities - success, failure and continuing to work on it. The first two end up forcing everyone to move on from a status quo that was the creation of time and effort that made the majority of interested parties happy.

sgift• 3 years ago

Starship launches are clarifying events. Pretty quickly after liftoff you find out who understands the rocket business, and who are the casual observers bereft of a clue.

I love it when opinion pieces open with the equivalent of "What follows now is the truth. If you disagree with the truth, as presented by me, the arbiter of the truth, you don't know shit."

Berger must have really good faith in his arguments, if he feels the need to begin an article this way. And, unfortunately, what follows sounds more like a letter by an angry SpaceX fan than a quality analysis weighing the successes and failures of the start.

Waterluvian• 3 years ago

Even just the first two words of the title speak volumes.

Feel the need to “win?” It’s easy: report on your fancy like an adult, lending it an air of legitimacy and maturity.

stevage3• 3 years ago

The problem is basically that we want to categorise the mission as either success or failure, and yet there was no clearly defined metric for success, so everyone defaults to "if it blows up, it's a failure".

On the other hand, you clearly can't call it a complete success. There were three goals that weren't met: water-landing the booster, reaching orbit (or whatever you call where it was trying to get to), and water-landing Starship.

So maybe we should think in terms of a score out of 10. Like with gymnastics, there are degrees of difficulty. SpaceX aimed very high, and delivered...ok. Maybe give them a 6/10?

valine• 3 years ago

The largest rocket ever built got to space for the first time, powered by 33 full-flow staged combustion engines, considered to be the holy grail of engine design. First successful use of 33 engines firing in unison. First full-flow engine to make it to space. First methane engine to make it to space.

I’ve followed starship development for a while now. A year ago starship was doomed to fail because 33 engines firing at once would tear the rocket apart. Now it’s a failure because they screwed up the landing. I know this sounds crazy, but I think the rocket company known for landing rockets might be able to fix the rocket landing issue.

mlyle• 3 years ago

https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/07/chinese-company-wins-r...

poleight• 3 years ago

A year ago starship was doomed to fail because 33 engines firing at once would tear the rocket apart. Now it’s a failure because they screwed up the landing.

I’m unsure what you mean by “screwed up the landing”, both stages exploded in flight.

Scott Manleys analysis and reasoning seems sound: that the error was likely due to hot staging burn causing damage or being mistimed causing propellant sloshing.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hF2C7xE9Mj4

Lots of data from this launch. Definitely a successful test.

Falcon failed 3 times.

Looking forward to seeing if starship beats or matches or if bigger means more.

stevage3• 3 years ago

First successful use of 33 engines firing in unison.

Well, fine, but that's a bit of a silly goal. I don't think there was any doubt that that would work, after the last test in which they all worked except for the ones that got damaged by concrete.

Also, they were already tested on the ground, so...technically already achieved.

Now it’s a failure because they screwed up the landing.

They didn't "screw up the landing". Something went badly wrong with the booster shortly after separation. And Starship went off course.

Landing both the booster and Starship isn't some small "nice to have", it's fundamental to the operation of these craft. They didn't even get a chance to test landing either part, because both failed too early.

CydeWeys3• 3 years ago

I think it's fairest to categorize most of it as stretch goals. They knew the odds of accomplishing all of them on only the second flight ever (and first with this staging design) were quite slim, but might as well be optimistic and have a plan for the small chance that by some miracle everything does actually work out perfectly. The first Falcon Heavy flight is a good example of what it looks like on the rare occasion when it all goes perfectly.

More broadly, SpaceX prioritizes low total cost and speed of development over everything else. That means they'll have more test flights than NASA and not all of them will be totally successful, and that's fine. The overall program will be.

demondemidi4• 3 years ago

To be fair, nasa has had more than half a century to accumulate ‘splosions. It’s part of the job. I’m certain spacex will have a catastrophe at some point because literally every nation with a space program has had them, and they are far more safety conscious then the VC move fast and break things curse that has taken over modern tech.

prox• 3 years ago

With all due respect, I think you still define it as a competition or veiled gamification.

The people at SpaceX are largely all scientists, engineers and the like and they build the best they could do with available data. It got them a lot further this time based on the previous data. That is the only metric that really counts. If they got good data they can use to “debug” the rocket (to speak in HN familiar terms) that is a great thing for them, and very valuable.

seanmcdirmid• 3 years ago

Gradients are much easier to navigate than cliffs. If they get a 6/10 this time and get an 8/10 next, they can eventually make it to 10/10.

rich_sasha3• 3 years ago

I think a lot of the scepticism is a counterpoint to the unbridled starry eyed optimism. Building this thing is hard and will remain hard. Having achieved 80% is only a weak indicator that they will achieve the remaining 20%.

And yet every news for the past 5 years or whatever has been "wow it's a runaway success and basically done". Something flies? Great! Something blows up? Ooh actually that's even better because [convoluted argument] and Starship will fly in 6 weeks time.

I wish them well. The crazy optimism still strikes me as a bit mad.

p1mrx• 3 years ago

You need to solve more than 80% of the problems to reach 80% of orbital velocity.

Exploding is not a virtue, but the stuff they accomplished before exploding is quite remarkable.

rich_sasha3• 3 years ago

Yes it's remarkable, I agree. They are very competent people and I am excited at what they may still achieve.

But it's not a done deal and the I find the sickly sweet optimism jarring - as it seems many other people do.

That is the entirety of my point. I'm not dumping on SpaceX, Starship, or on this particular occasion, Musk himself.

jillesvangurp2• 3 years ago

You'd be right if it weren't for the fact that Elon Musk has a track record of succeeding where others basically insist things can't be done. Falcon 9 rockets being reused is a good example. Completely mad idea. Nearly bankrupted spacex. And now it's a routine event. Tesla now being a best selling car brand is another example. That didn't just happen by accident but is the result of a lot of engineering and planning. Like SpaceX, not everything went according to plan with Tesla and the company nearly bankrupted itself several times in the process of basically becoming the money printing machine it is today. The point is, both companies are still here and really successful at what they do after taking lots of early risk to get there.

Starship is a crazy idea. Completely nuts. And it could actually work. That's the crazy part. This was only the second launch. It took four attempts to get the first Falcon rocket to space. What we saw a few days ago was a rocket that nearly worked and only developed issues very late into the launch. Next time, they might get a little further. At this point it looks like there are a lot of challenges but none that look like they can't be overcome.

One thing is clear. SpaceX is very well funded and they should not have any budgetary constraints doing this over and over again. There are no 100% guarantees they'll get it right eventually. But it looks like they have a very decent shot at it. If they fail, it won't be for a lack of trying.

rich_sasha3• 3 years ago

Yes it may well work. Yes, Musk is, one way or another, associated with these projects. That's not the point.

The point is, these things may still fail. No shame in that. The fact that Musk rolled a 6 on a die ten times in a row doesn't mean he always does that.

But the narrative around it completely denies it. Any outcome is an unmitigated great success and yet another proof that Starship will succeed and we will colonise Mars.

Good luck to Starship succeeding, but the crazy optimism, denialist of even a chance of failure is unbearable.

pete762• 3 years ago

I mean it's literally getting better every time. People can start complaining when progress has stagnated.

hackeraccount2• 3 years ago

SpaceX might succeed with Starship and it might fail but I don't think we'll be scratching our heads in 10 years wondering which will be case.

SLS? If in 10 years they're still spending money on it to launch it once every couple of years - if it's still in some sort of weird limbo between success and failure - I wouldn't be surprised.

simonblack• 3 years ago

The surgical procedure was a resounding success. The patient died.

Sorry doubters, Starship had a remarkably successful flight

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