If your test case for left pad passes when it outputs a string of the right length, your boss is going to judge whether it's a good test case. Since this is all being done on federal grant money, it's legitimate to have higher expectations. This test was good, though - the previous two were disappointing.
Holy cow. How are people downplaying something so revolutionary. Without those other tests SpaceX wouldn’t have done what it did today and they show progress each step. They are doing what nasa couldn’t (send stuff to space orders of magnitude cheaper) because they aren’t afraid to blow stuff up.
The boosters parachuted to the ocean and were reused. Only the external fuel tank was not reusable. However, you're correct that the Shuttle failed utterly to realize the point of reusability, that being low cost and quick turnaround.
Nobody has done anything revolutionary and nobody has gotten to space an order of magnitude cheaper. The best estimates of SpaceX's cost advantage per kilo put it at 30-50% better than a Soyuz.
The Starship program so far has soaked up as much money as SLS, and hasn't even left orbit.
Those all sound like incremental technology advances to me that have yet to deliver any real advances in capabilities. Which is nice - don't get me wrong - but not exactly worth rolling out the aircraft carrier for.
Someone else in this thread pointed out that Starship could get the ISS built in just 3 launches! It originally took dozens.
Quantity has a quality all of its own.
You should be familiar with this from IT: there’s nothing fundamentally different about the first computer that I’ve ever used to the one I have right now, other than the factor of a million difference in performance!
Starship today can't launch anything. Saying that it can launch the ISS in 3 launches is what Elon Musk says it can do. I don't trust Elon Musk's word for things until I see what someone does with those words. Generally, he is off by a factor of 10-100 on his promises.
Why not? With the capability demonstrated today, they can just as easily tweak the ascent profile to end up in a stable orbit outside the atmosphere. Their trajectory was suborbital on this flight on purpose.
> The Starship program so far has soaked up as much money as SLS, and hasn't even left orbit
There's a bit of nuance to what you are claiming here.
SLS cost $11B to develop, which is estimated to be in the neighborhood of what Starship will cost when development is complete. We don't know how much has been spent so far.
A huge difference is that producing and launching an SLS rocket costs over $2B, while SpaceX is estimating $10M for Starship. Now, I don't trust that $10M number, that's what they aspire for it to cost. To do it they need to be able to reuse the stages dozens of times. It could take a long time to achieve that or they might not make it at all. However, $2B+ per launch is a whole 'nother level of expense.
The test flights have been right in line with how spacex does development and testing. I’m confident that everyone involved with granting them that money knew this going in.
It's fine that they've not yet completed any stated launch objectives in three tests and have, amongst them, 5 independent catastrophic vehicle loss events because that's what we expect out of SpaceX.
> Since this is all being done on federal grant money
Its true that SpaceX has gotten federal money contract for landing on the moon to the tune of $2.9B. But the Starship program is going to cost a lot more than that, Musk estimated $10B and has done stock offerings to raise money. And you have to take into account that the federal money has to support 100% of the moon specific parts of development.
So, its true that the feds are helping w/ Starship development but "all" is not accurate.
I think each test served exactly its purpose and it's incredible to see the rapid progress. Unclear why you believe the first two were not a success at all? Did you expect a novel vehicle like this would just work the first time?
Going by total program cost, both of those are cheaper than Starship. SpaceX does this sleight of hand where they don't count their R&D cost in their calculations, but they do count it in other peoples' programs when comparing. SLS so far is about $2 billion in, and Starship seems to be at $2-3 billion. Vulcan is way cheaper than both.
SLS flight cost is $2B. Each launch. Did you forget to include the decade prior?
It's so expensive that it can fly no more than once a year. The next flight is scheduled for Sep 2025, three years after the first flight. I bet you think that isn't absurd.
SLS use leftover engines from the Shuttle era. Yet it still cost 160 millions. Each. Thrown away after each flight.
Vulcan is a conservative design with no reuse. It also uses BE-4 engine, which costs them nothing to develop.
- Source for Vulcan total program cost? All I can find is their per-launch pricing. Tory Bruno himself apparently said that "new rockets typically cost US$2 billion, including US$1 billion for the main engine."
- Not sure where you're getting the SLS number, the GAO report at https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-23-105609.pdf claims, "Since 2011, NASA has spent $11.8 billion to develop the initial SLS capability."
- I think the marginal cost is a fair question. The whole party line out of NASA was that this time Moon exploration would be sustainable. If each trip costs > $1B before you even put a payload on the rocket that's a big problem.
I completely agree with you on marginal cost, but I don't believe SpaceX to provide accurate numbers for their own rockets before they are actually built (they love wishful thinking) or their competitors' (making your competitors look bad is better for you).
The word reputable was an interesting choice to describe Boeing. It also carries a bold implication that the space company shuttling astronauts to and from the ISS—only two days ago [1]—is… disreputable? Meanwhile, Boeing Starliner certainly didn't perform nominally on its first orbital flight test [2].
Space flight is hard and different testing methodologies are no silver bullet. But, I suppose we will know them by their fruits.
