The problems with Starship make the Saturn V and STS programs even more impressive. However, I still don't get the rationale of building a rocket with such a large payload. The rocket equation will always force you to build an absolute monster compared to a series of smaller rockets. Even worse if you have to haul up a massive orbiter each time. No wonder that small/medium sized rockets (Soyuz, Atlas, Ariane, Falcon 9,...) have always been the most successful.
hliyan · 1h ago
Even more impressive to me is the fact that Saturn V did in a single launch with 1969 technology, what we're now proposing to do with 10-15 Starship launches (each as large as a Saturn V) and an additional SLS launch for Orion return capsule. What's more, the US had orbital launch expereince of just 3 years (Explorer 1 in 1958) when the Apollo program began, and 8 years later they were on the moon. Perhaps web development is not the only thing that is susceptible to bloat.
trhway · 1h ago
>Saturn V did in a single launch with 1969 technology,
for up to 0.8% US GDP per year. Today that would be $200B/year, pure spent. Where is Space X today is making, ie. it has a revenue, $15B/year.
>Perhaps web development is not the only thing that is susceptible to bloat.
similarly - web dev today can be done on $300 laptop by any schmuck. Even simple programming back then required a computer which cost a lot, and it was an almost academic activity.
Total lunar effort from 1960-1973, adjusted for 2024 USD: $326 billion
Launch vehicle costs (Saturn V): $113 billion
I think this is what should be compared against the total Starship program cost starting from 2020 until such time it completes 6 lunar landings (not counting SLS or other costs).
> for up to 0.8% US GDP per year. Today that would be $200B/year, pure spent. Where is Space X today is making, ie. it has a revenue, $15B/year.
The likes of SpaceX are reporting costs in the range of $15B/year because NASA front loaded the cost of trailblazing launch technology half a century ago, with the technology available half a century ago.
Let's not fool ourselves into believing the likes of SpaceX are reinventing the wheel.
Also, those $15B are buying a fraction of the capabilities of SaturnV, and while SaturnV was proven effective and reliable 50 years ago, here we are discussing yet another "anomaly". Perhaps half these "anomalies" wouldn't exist if they weren't lean'ed into existence?
Zobat · 6m ago
To be fair, they're also doing launches at a pace NASA could only have dreamed of back then. In 2024 SpaceX had 134 launches, we're far into the Space Shuttle program before Nasa had made that in total.
I wonder what "tons of payload to orbit" vs "dollars budget" would look like for Saturn era NASA vs Current SpaceX.
No doubt they're standing on the shoulders of giants, but let's not forget that they've helped transform the "go to space"-business.
supermatt · 8m ago
> NASA front loaded the cost
Not even just NASA. SpaceX are building on technologies that originated from both sides of the iron curtain (and beyond)
supermatt · 29m ago
Sure, but spacex are building on the shoulders of what came before. Easy to save 200bn on research and development if someone else has already paid for it and shares the results for free.
aredox · 54m ago
You are comparing "sending a small crew for a few days on the Moon ASAP for propaganda purposes" with "setting up a permanent outpost on the Moon".
Do you know the McMurdo permanent Antarctica base is costing us far more than the dogs, sleds, and tents of Admundsen and Shackleton? Incredible, isn't it?
MrSkelter · 45m ago
This is an inane comparison.
Starship is “the program to build a permanent base in the moon”. It’s not even the only vehicle involved in the moon program. It’s a rocket designed to take astronauts from moon orbit to the moon’s surface. The astronauts will actually fly to the moon in SLS.
So far it’s proved incapable of being launched, attaining orbit, and returning to earth as designed. That’s without a payload.
It has no life support system built and is literally years behind schedule.
Rather than making progress it is being redesigned on the fly to mitigate fundamental problems with its capability which Musk laughs off as “moving fast and breaking things”.
The problem is we aren’t moving fast at all.
The rocket is a disaster. Saturn V was better by an order of magnitude and likely cheaper if you consider how much fundamental work went into creating it which is now easy to buy off the shelf.
Comparing the programs while ignoring the fact that hobbiest regularly reach the Karman line is deceitful.
Starship is doing this on easy mode and it’s failing.
bluescrn · 17m ago
> Starship is doing this on easy mode and it’s failing.
But this 'easy mode' is still so incredibly hard that nobody else will even attempt it.
I'd love to see some serious competition emerge in the reusable rocket space, but SpaceX is far, far ahead with Falcon 9 being an incredible success, even if the Starship project may be headed for failure. Nobody reports on 100+ successful Falcon 9 launches/landings in a year, those are now mundane. But a small number of Starship failures - test flights of an experimental vehicle - become big news, mostly because they involve spectacular explosions.
It seems that Starship may be too big to 'fail fast', mostly because of the visual spectacle of those failures.
madaxe_again · 29m ago
Nice one. Now do SLS.
motorest · 25m ago
> You are comparing "sending a small crew for a few days on the Moon ASAP for propaganda purposes" with "setting up a permanent outpost on the Moon".
No, OP is comparing a launcher that worked reliably (it's in the history books) with a launcher which never performed a mission and is reporting "anomalies".
trhway · 1h ago
> However, I still don't get the rationale of building a rocket with such a large payload
Operations cost. They are sublinear on payload/size. At least this is what Space X/Musk seem to go for.
quotemstr · 2h ago
> STS programs
The shuttle was a deathtrap. It had inadequate abort modes and a launch process that practically guaranteed minor (until it wasn't) damage to the heat shield during launch.
STS crews were lucky that only two of the things got violenly disassembled.
fsh · 1h ago
Sure, the Saturn V and STS were much less safe than smaller rockets. Still, they blew up an awful lot less than other rockets of their size like N1 or Starship.
nomel · 34m ago
> Still, they blew up an awful lot less than other rockets of their size like N1 or Starship.
I think the only reasonable comparison would be after cost equivalency. The Starship has a long way to go, to catch up.
jeroenhd · 5m ago
Cost equivalency ignores the R&D and decades of scientific progress and advancements in tooling capability. The prices of materials have shifted, but designing and manufacturing a precise propulsion system with modern CAD and simulation tools is a lot cheaper than the hand work hundreds of people used to be doing to verify much simpler engine designs. Precision machining and tools to inspect metal fatigue and imperfections have also come a long way.
Of course commercial rockets are always going to be as shoddy as they can get away with rather than as good as possible, but if it still takes SpaceX or Boeing as much money to build a rocket as it did back in the Saturn V days, they're doing something wrong.
cma · 14m ago
> It had inadequate abort modes
Does Starship have launch abort boosters? Seems infeasible with the amount of fuel and mass on it since it also serves as a second stage, but maybe they solved that somehow?
aredox · 51m ago
Also, both Saturn V and the Space Shuttle were dual-purpose programs - they had military goals on top of the scientific ones.
blkhawk · 43m ago
Well the military purpose was why the Shuttle was so crappy. The original design was smaller and meant to sit on top of its rocket. This would have probably prevented loss of crew in both of the instances where shuttle failed.
imtringued · 1h ago
I suggest you read up on the rocket equation again. There is a massive difference between payload mass fraction and payload. The latter scales linearly with respect to the total mass.
fsh · 1h ago
That's the problem. Building a heavier rocket is much harder than building a lighter one (see explosion above). So why not send a few lighter ones instead of a heavy one? This is what the launch market has concluded for a long time.
Let’s assume starship works out and they come up with a nifty wide-opening payload door solution, one of the advantages will be payload volume as well as mass - the JWST’s main mirror would have fit inside without being folded (although the heat shield would not have).
StopDisinfo910 · 2h ago
I think it’s interesting that SpaceX is struggling so much with the shift to a full flow staged combustion engine using liquid methane.
We knew from the Soviet that it was going to be really hard but after the successful flights I thought they had it in the bag.
We might be touching on the limits of SpaceX constant tweaking fail fast approach.
joha4270 · 1h ago
I think its premature to blame this on Raptor. At least, I couldn't see anything suggesting the static fire was imminent, so my money would be on "anything but the engines" over "the engines". At least with what we know so far.
But SpaceX's brand of rocket development is certainly exciting
goku12 · 1h ago
That's what it seems like to me too. From the slo-mo video, it looks like one of the propellant tanks (likely the methane tank on the top) burst open, spilled a lot of the propellant and then caught fire. Engines are unlikely to be the culprit here. Interestingly, there seems to be a crack or a gap already on the surface, along which the tank bursts open when the accident occurs.
jlmorton · 49m ago
There's a high quality slow motion video available [1] that shows the problem was almost certainly a failed pressure tank, not the engines.
There's something strangely beautiful about this video, similar to the Hindenburg video perhaps, so much detail everywhere
nomel · 31m ago
Well that video makes it very clear: the problem is the front fell off, and a bit too enthusiastically.
rapsey · 1h ago
If the task is difficult, what other approach is there?
beaned · 1h ago
There are rovers on Mars already that landed on the first try. The approach was rigorous planning and study with the highest standards.
It doesn't mean the approach SpaceX is taking isn't valuable in some contexts, but it's certainly not the only method.
Teever · 1h ago
That seems like a poor example given how many failed attempts to land something on Mars that took place before they got to designs that would get it right in the first go.
zx8080 · 24m ago
Why is this called "anomaly"? It's "exploded".
nomilk · 2h ago
This was a entire ship (not just an engine), and nobody was hurt or killed. Is this a major or minor setback for SpaceX? Rapid unscheduled disassemblies may look spectacularly bad but may be par for the course during testing (in order to push things to their limits to learn where they break) - curious to learn how bad this one is.
Ekaros · 2h ago
In normally run project, it would be pretty big. As you would need to do proper analysis just what failed and how. And then decide, design and implement needed fixes. With SpaceX engineering culture who knows...
somenameforme · 2h ago
It's going to be a relatively minor setback. Biggest issue will be pad repair time. Starships is still in development and has been going boom pretty regularly, though not before launch usually! The investigation of the cause will be interesting. Given the current political context it's probably going to be AMOS-6 ramped up exponentially.
AMOS-6 was a pretty similar situation where a rocket exploded prior to a static-fire, and in fact is the reason that static fires are done without payloads, though Starship would not yet have a payload. The difficult to explain nature of the explosion, alongside some quite compelling circumstantial evidence, caused a theory of sabotage (sniping an exact segment of the rocket) to become widespread. Of course the cause here could be more straight forward to pin down - we'll know a lot more in a few days!
tsimionescu · 2h ago
It's a gigantic setback. Most directly, it will delay their launches for a good time while they repair and rebuild the site. But it also shows some kind of severe design flaws if this can happen even with no engines running.
riffraff · 1h ago
I think you're extrapolating too much.
This could be a "simple" production error (think "cracked pipe") which can be fixed with more effective monitoring of the construction, and not a major design flaw.
It might be someone forgot a wrench somewhere for what we know.
XorNot · 1h ago
I worry that the current "favorable" FAA environment is leading to a regression in their engineering quality honestly.
There's a simple fault, and then there's the question of why did it happen anyway?
aredox · 48m ago
If your space program has "simple" errors, then you are incompetent. These have to be stomped out beforehand. Is this amateur hour?
madaxe_again · 26m ago
Falcon 9 seems pretty competently run.
roer · 2h ago
In terms of losing a ship, probably not too bad. The ground equipment might take a bit longer to replace, and they will probably want to understand what happened here before continuing.
Or, as you suggest, this was a more stressing test than usual, but I doubt they'd do that with a complete ship like this.
af78 · 24m ago
Plus the rocket is reusable, right? No reason to freak out. /s
eqvinox · 33m ago
The pad might actually have less damage than one might assume; that explosion started at the top. The bottom parts of the pad will mostly have heat & fire damage, but not explosion?
(It'll still be fucked, I just wouldn't expect a crater?)
schiffern · 6m ago
This was a test pad a few miles from the main pad.
childintime · 2h ago
The explosion starts at the upper part of starship, not the engine bay.
trhway · 2h ago
Yes, on 0.25x speed it is visible that a large leak quickly sprung up, like something burst, about where the top of the methane tank and exploded.
rkagerer · 1h ago
Here's a framegrab showing what looks like the initial visible release of gas (before it becomes a big fireball), near the top where the arrow points: https://i.ibb.co/qYrn4vSf/image.png
goku12 · 35m ago
In that image, you can see a white horizontal line on the heat shield, slightly below the point where the tank bursts. That was already there when the longer video clip starts. The tank later bursts along that line, even before the spilled propellant (which I assume is methane) catches fire. In fact, that line seems to be breaking apart even before the crack from the top reaches that point. However, the failure from the top might have propagated to that line out of our view, underneath the heat resistant tiles.
The crack propagation indicates that the line was a weak point on the structure. However, I'm surprised that it was already there. It's too early to make a reliable guess. But if I were to hazard one, I would say that the tank had too much pressure, well ahead of the explosion.
trhway · 25m ago
The earlier Starships were just manually welded steel. Is still so? If any failed weld can lead to a catastrophe like this, how would you guarantee the quality of each weld without going into nuclear power plant construction level of costs?
Was able to reverse to about -1:49:00 to see it "live". But probably this relative timestamp was only current then. In any case, that was a massive explosion
Unfortunately just on Twitter, haven't seen much elsewhere yet. But the link seems to work.
The frame of the video has a burnt in clock in the top left corner though, so if you get that to be about 11:01:50 PM CDT you'll be at the point of the explosion.
I guess how much of a setback this is will be determined by how much damage is there on the facilities and the nature of the cause of the explosion(do they need to re-work the next 6 already being assembled so it doesn't happen again?).
shmoe · 1h ago
They cant seem to match launch cadence to ship progression. This will most certainly set them back a few more weeks beyond the end of this month.
seydor · 17m ago
Maybe it's time to consider a smaller Starship
Analemma_ · 2h ago
Pretty bad: it blew up on the pad before the static fire test even started. I can’t imagine this provides much in the way of useful information, and it looks like the pad was completely destroyed as well.
schiffern · 11m ago
> looks like the pad was completely destroyed
Importantly this was a test pad a few miles away, not the main launch pad.
nomel · 27m ago
> I can’t imagine this provides much in the way of useful information
I can't really comprehend this statement, since it appears, in a spectacular fashion, that there's some useful information to be learned involving the top half of the ship, especially the flammable bits that you can see burst out before igniting. A rocket ship isn't just its engines, it's a system, with all the bits of it being not only useful, but entirely necessary.
wombatpm · 2h ago
Probably could use more than one launch pad with the tank farms centrally located and protected.
Chinese static fire accidentally becomes not-static.
rapsey · 2h ago
It seems starship still has a long way to go.
shmoe · 1h ago
SpaceX supporters can only call this "moving fast, breaking stuff" for so long as the entire program regresses in on itself in terms of milestones. This was never easy, but the Falcon program sure made it look so.
jillesvangurp · 1h ago
Falcon also was hard. They had a few failures and nearly went bankrupt in the process of successfully launching for the first time.
> the entire program regresses in on itself in terms of milestones.
The alternative would be looking at the competing programs from Boeing, Blue Origin, etc. It's not like they are hitting their milestones particularly well with their more traditional waterfall approach. The point of rapid iteration is that it is an inherently open ended process that has no milestones other than to launch the next iteration within weeks/months of the previous one. Which they have been doing fairly consistently.
If SpaceX gets starship in a launcheable and recoverable state, they'll still have many years of competing against competitors that have to rely on single launch vehicles exclusively. They would be very early to market. And there's a decent chance they might start nailing things with a few more launches.
shmoe · 54m ago
They didn't regress like starship has though... they literally just went from orbit to controlled landing in ocean and catching the booster on a fork to the ships blowing up in orbit or not making it there and the boosters aborting the catch for a controlled landing offshore or blowing up as well.
Now they have regressed to blowing up on the pad during static testing.
Seems very different to me than the Falcon story, 100%. Granted, they had luck too.
aredox · 37m ago
Boeing is waterfall but with top managers skipping steps all the time to make the bosses and shareholders happy short-term.
Is Blue Origin following waterfall? Why would the founder of Amazon follow the polar opposite strategy of the rest of his businesses?
cma · 2m ago
If Bezos made a bridge building company, I'd expect it to use something similar to waterfall. That's not to say it is right for rockets, but it is a different domain than software.
seydor · 2h ago
It's an explosion. It would be an anomaly if it happened rarely
roer · 2h ago
A starship static fire (seems to even be pre-"fire") explosion is very rare.
senectus1 · 1h ago
Anomaly?
The thing detonated from the top down... that was spectacular. Anomaly doesn't really describe that very well.
for up to 0.8% US GDP per year. Today that would be $200B/year, pure spent. Where is Space X today is making, ie. it has a revenue, $15B/year.
>Perhaps web development is not the only thing that is susceptible to bloat.
similarly - web dev today can be done on $300 laptop by any schmuck. Even simple programming back then required a computer which cost a lot, and it was an almost academic activity.
Total lunar effort from 1960-1973, adjusted for 2024 USD: $326 billion
Launch vehicle costs (Saturn V): $113 billion
I think this is what should be compared against the total Starship program cost starting from 2020 until such time it completes 6 lunar landings (not counting SLS or other costs).
Or, for the year that Starship actually lands on the moon, compare against the Saturn V launch vehicle costs for 1969, inflation adjusted: $5.9 billion. See: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTKMekJW9F8Z...
The likes of SpaceX are reporting costs in the range of $15B/year because NASA front loaded the cost of trailblazing launch technology half a century ago, with the technology available half a century ago.
Let's not fool ourselves into believing the likes of SpaceX are reinventing the wheel.
Also, those $15B are buying a fraction of the capabilities of SaturnV, and while SaturnV was proven effective and reliable 50 years ago, here we are discussing yet another "anomaly". Perhaps half these "anomalies" wouldn't exist if they weren't lean'ed into existence?
I wonder what "tons of payload to orbit" vs "dollars budget" would look like for Saturn era NASA vs Current SpaceX.
No doubt they're standing on the shoulders of giants, but let's not forget that they've helped transform the "go to space"-business.
Not even just NASA. SpaceX are building on technologies that originated from both sides of the iron curtain (and beyond)
Do you know the McMurdo permanent Antarctica base is costing us far more than the dogs, sleds, and tents of Admundsen and Shackleton? Incredible, isn't it?
Starship is “the program to build a permanent base in the moon”. It’s not even the only vehicle involved in the moon program. It’s a rocket designed to take astronauts from moon orbit to the moon’s surface. The astronauts will actually fly to the moon in SLS.
So far it’s proved incapable of being launched, attaining orbit, and returning to earth as designed. That’s without a payload.
It has no life support system built and is literally years behind schedule.
Rather than making progress it is being redesigned on the fly to mitigate fundamental problems with its capability which Musk laughs off as “moving fast and breaking things”.
The problem is we aren’t moving fast at all.
The rocket is a disaster. Saturn V was better by an order of magnitude and likely cheaper if you consider how much fundamental work went into creating it which is now easy to buy off the shelf.
Comparing the programs while ignoring the fact that hobbiest regularly reach the Karman line is deceitful.
Starship is doing this on easy mode and it’s failing.
But this 'easy mode' is still so incredibly hard that nobody else will even attempt it.
I'd love to see some serious competition emerge in the reusable rocket space, but SpaceX is far, far ahead with Falcon 9 being an incredible success, even if the Starship project may be headed for failure. Nobody reports on 100+ successful Falcon 9 launches/landings in a year, those are now mundane. But a small number of Starship failures - test flights of an experimental vehicle - become big news, mostly because they involve spectacular explosions.
It seems that Starship may be too big to 'fail fast', mostly because of the visual spectacle of those failures.
No, OP is comparing a launcher that worked reliably (it's in the history books) with a launcher which never performed a mission and is reporting "anomalies".
Operations cost. They are sublinear on payload/size. At least this is what Space X/Musk seem to go for.
The shuttle was a deathtrap. It had inadequate abort modes and a launch process that practically guaranteed minor (until it wasn't) damage to the heat shield during launch.
Classic example of https://danluu.com/wat/ --- the normalization of deviance.
STS crews were lucky that only two of the things got violenly disassembled.
I think the only reasonable comparison would be after cost equivalency. The Starship has a long way to go, to catch up.
Of course commercial rockets are always going to be as shoddy as they can get away with rather than as good as possible, but if it still takes SpaceX or Boeing as much money to build a rocket as it did back in the Saturn V days, they're doing something wrong.
Does Starship have launch abort boosters? Seems infeasible with the amount of fuel and mass on it since it also serves as a second stage, but maybe they solved that somehow?
We knew from the Soviet that it was going to be really hard but after the successful flights I thought they had it in the bag.
We might be touching on the limits of SpaceX constant tweaking fail fast approach.
But SpaceX's brand of rocket development is certainly exciting
[1] https://x.com/dwisecinema/status/1935552171912655045
It doesn't mean the approach SpaceX is taking isn't valuable in some contexts, but it's certainly not the only method.
AMOS-6 was a pretty similar situation where a rocket exploded prior to a static-fire, and in fact is the reason that static fires are done without payloads, though Starship would not yet have a payload. The difficult to explain nature of the explosion, alongside some quite compelling circumstantial evidence, caused a theory of sabotage (sniping an exact segment of the rocket) to become widespread. Of course the cause here could be more straight forward to pin down - we'll know a lot more in a few days!
This could be a "simple" production error (think "cracked pipe") which can be fixed with more effective monitoring of the construction, and not a major design flaw.
It might be someone forgot a wrench somewhere for what we know.
There's a simple fault, and then there's the question of why did it happen anyway?
(It'll still be fucked, I just wouldn't expect a crater?)
The crack propagation indicates that the line was a weak point on the structure. However, I'm surprised that it was already there. It's too early to make a reliable guess. But if I were to hazard one, I would say that the tank had too much pressure, well ahead of the explosion.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1lf3g...
Unfortunately just on Twitter, haven't seen much elsewhere yet. But the link seems to work.
The frame of the video has a burnt in clock in the top left corner though, so if you get that to be about 11:01:50 PM CDT you'll be at the point of the explosion.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1lf3g...
I guess how much of a setback this is will be determined by how much damage is there on the facilities and the nature of the cause of the explosion(do they need to re-work the next 6 already being assembled so it doesn't happen again?).
Importantly this was a test pad a few miles away, not the main launch pad.
I can't really comprehend this statement, since it appears, in a spectacular fashion, that there's some useful information to be learned involving the top half of the ship, especially the flammable bits that you can see burst out before igniting. A rocket ship isn't just its engines, it's a system, with all the bits of it being not only useful, but entirely necessary.
Chinese static fire accidentally becomes not-static.
> the entire program regresses in on itself in terms of milestones.
The alternative would be looking at the competing programs from Boeing, Blue Origin, etc. It's not like they are hitting their milestones particularly well with their more traditional waterfall approach. The point of rapid iteration is that it is an inherently open ended process that has no milestones other than to launch the next iteration within weeks/months of the previous one. Which they have been doing fairly consistently.
If SpaceX gets starship in a launcheable and recoverable state, they'll still have many years of competing against competitors that have to rely on single launch vehicles exclusively. They would be very early to market. And there's a decent chance they might start nailing things with a few more launches.
Now they have regressed to blowing up on the pad during static testing.
Seems very different to me than the Falcon story, 100%. Granted, they had luck too.
Is Blue Origin following waterfall? Why would the founder of Amazon follow the polar opposite strategy of the rest of his businesses?
The thing detonated from the top down... that was spectacular. Anomaly doesn't really describe that very well.
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