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.
DavidSJ · 14m ago
A larger rocket mitigates the effects of the rocket equation.
The wet (loaded with propellant) to dry (empty of propellant) mass ratio is determined via the rocket equation to be the exponential of delta V divided by exhaust velocity.
Certain parts of the rocket, such as the external tank structure, scale sub-cubically with the rocket's dimension, as do aerodynamic forces; whereas payload and propellant mass scale cubically.
Hence if the rocket is smaller than a critical threshold size, the requisite vehicle structures are too large relative to its propellant capacity to permit the required wet:dry mass ratio to achieve the delta V for orbit.
At exactly this size, the rocket can reach orbit with zero payload.
As the rocket increases in size beyond this threshold, it is able to carry a payload which is increasingly large relative to the rocket's total mass.
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.
varjag · 7m ago
Whenever my Volkswagen car software glitches I can't help but to observe it was done by a 6000 people strong development team vs 600 in Apollo programme within similar timeframe. The latter had vastly more primitive hardware, tools and younger programming culture available too.
panick21_ · 13m ago
> what we're now proposing to do with 10-15 Starship launches
That's complete nonsense. 10-15 Starship launches would land a lander that can carry like 100tons of payload orbit.
Saturn V landed 15000kg on the moon, but most of that isn't payload.
But of course with Saturn V you are throwing away a rocket that cost 1 billion $ or more per launch.
You are comparing 'thing lands on moon' to 'things lands on moon' without any nuance.
But you are right Apollo was insane in how fast it was done.
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.
motorest · 1h ago
> 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 · 48m 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.
motorest · 39m ago
> To be fair, they're also doing launches at a pace NASA could only have dreamed of back then.
That's like comparing how many containers Maersk moves today with how much sea cargo was moved back in the age of discovery.
Also, Saturn V worked and fulfilled it's mission, whereas Starship blows up.
ghxst · 10m ago
Starship hasn't had a mission yet that I'm aware of. I love the Saturn V but I don't think this is a fair comparison. Just because your software didn't compile first try doesn't mean it's bad. Those two vehicles fundamentally have different approaches to development and that's fine.
Aeolun · 16m ago
I’m sure if the government gives SpaceX 200B a year to build a more reliable starship they can do it without blowing them up.
tekla · 8m ago
> Saturn V worked
Its impressive how ignorant HN is about how many failures the S5 had during testing, falling for cold war propoganda at full speed
supermatt · 50m 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)
schiffern · 38m ago
Heck, fundamentally it's building on Iron Age technology, which is thousands of years old.
How far back is the "start" of history in this telling, and (more importantly) why?
varjag · 12m ago
It's not unreasonable to suggest that most of specifically rocket and spacefaring technology SpaceX uses now was introduced by someone else. Their main achievement is reusability and adjacent technical solutions.
supermatt · 6m ago
Are you being deliberately obtuse?
The grandparent comment was pointing out that it cost NASA 200bn, and spaceX 15bn.
The parent comment pointed out that spaceX are actually saving money because they already got what nasa spent 200bn on.
My comment pointed out that they aren't just saving money by using NASAs tech, but tech from the Soviet Union as well.
DoesntMatter22 · 12m ago
What a ridiculous point of view.Do you know how many anamolies nasa had on the way to make the Saturn 5? Orders of magnitudes more blow ups than Space x has ever had
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).
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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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.
Aeolun · 13m ago
> The astronauts will actually fly to the moon in SLS
The program that was paused pending new NASA director, and has burned more money than SpaceX without a single (usable) launch?
I’m making things up out of memory here, but suffice to say SLS does not have my confidence.
bluescrn · 59m 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.
panick21_ · 4m ago
> The astronauts will actually fly to the moon in SLS.
Because its a dumb program that literally wouldn't happen if SLS was not involved. SLS is not needed if you re-architected the program. Its pure politics.
> So far it’s proved incapable of being launched, attaining orbit, and returning to earth as designed.
It has reached orbit in all but name.
Its the second rocket ever to have reused a booster. Literally in human history.
But I guess in your book building the biggest rocket in history and reusing part of it is no big deal.
> The problem is we aren’t moving fast at all.
Literally only if you compare it to Appollo. Compare to the last 30 years of the space industry its still lighting fast. Actually testing something real that can land on the moon, is something for example Constellation never even got to.
> Saturn V was better by an order of magnitude and likely cheaper
Except it wasn't and you are clueless about cost. You are just asserting things based on less then nothing.
> Starship is doing this on easy mode and it’s failing.
You are literally the only person on earth dumb enough to consider a full reusable rocket that can land on multiple bodies in the solar system 'easy'.
madaxe_again · 1h ago
Nice one. Now do SLS.
motorest · 1h 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".
panick21_ · 19m ago
Falcon 9 is by no means small or even medium. In the history of rockets its quite a large and powerful rocket. And so is Ariane 5. Not sure what you are referencing with Ariane, I guess Ariane 1-4 were small.
So far in history, we didn't have enough to launch. If the volume we launch increases then a larger rocket flying often is helpful.
We are at the peak of what a rocket the size of Falcon 9 can do. If you want full re-usability, the size helps you out quite a bit.
And hauling the 'orbiter' into 'orbit' is only wasteful if you can't reuse it. I would argue what's actually wasteful is throwing the second stage in the ocean, even when it costs minimum 10million $, and likely more.
trhway · 2h 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.
There's also many advantages to being able to lift something large/heavy in one go, rather than smaller payloads that need to be unfolded (like JWST) or assembled in space, which can drastically increase the development costs.
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 · 2h 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 · 1h 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 · 46m 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.
Aeolun · 10m ago
If you use that as an argument any comparison becomes meaningless by default.
cma · 56m 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?
MPSimmons · 11m ago
Starship doesn't currently have launch abort modes
aredox · 1h ago
Also, both Saturn V and the Space Shuttle were dual-purpose programs - they had military goals on top of the scientific ones.
blkhawk · 1h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 3h 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 · 2h 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 · 1h 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.
Well that video makes it very clear: the problem is the front fell off, and a bit too enthusiastically.
amoss · 31m ago
Is the front supposed to fall off?
Paradigma11 · 4m ago
Did they use cardboard derivatives?
inasio · 1h ago
There's something strangely beautiful about this video, similar to the Hindenburg video perhaps, so much detail everywhere
fabian2k · 29m ago
The earlier Starship tests looked more promising. But when it looked like they were making real progress it got much worse again with Starship V2.
I like the idea of hardware-rich development, but it seems they might have fiddled too much here or maybe just tried to go too fast.
rapsey · 2h ago
If the task is difficult, what other approach is there?
beaned · 2h 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.
randomcarbloke · 39m ago
In 2020 Elon said they'd build 100 Starships a year, last year (2024) he said they would build 1 per day.
I have to ask if the world needs 365 $100mm fireworks each year.
drcongo · 21m ago
Yeah, but if you translate that from Muskshit to reality, there's really nothing to worry about.
nomilk · 3h 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...
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 · 2h 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.
fabian2k · 27m ago
A simple error like that should be caught before you fill the rocket with methane and liquid oxygen. If a simple error gets through to this point your procedures are bad, which is a big problem for a complex rocket with many parts that could have simple errors.
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 · 1h 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 · 1h ago
Falcon 9 seems pretty competently run.
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!
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 · 1h ago
Plus the rocket is reusable, right? No reason to freak out. /s
zx8080 · 1h ago
Why is this called "anomaly"? It's "exploded".
MPSimmons · 6m ago
In spaceflight, an anomaly is an anomalous outcome compared to what was expected. The severity of the anomaly varies. Typically, if the world outside of the organization hears about an anomaly, it was severe enough to cause a Loss of Mission (LOM) or Loss of Vehicle (LoV). Internally, when things behave anomalously, they're referred to as off-nominal, and are subject to internal investigations to determine the cause.
This is a _very_ off-nominal outcome and the investigation will absolutely involve outside organizations and halting the program during the investigation until the investigation completes with a sufficient determination of faults and accompanying remediation plans.
jeroenhd · 41m ago
It normally doesn't explode of course!
The linked tweet literally says "it blew up", though. "Anomaly" is just a word used in rocket science lingo that makes for a funnier headline.
padjo · 31m ago
I always like BFRC as a euphemism
tekla · 3m ago
In engineering, there is a preference for accurate terminology
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.
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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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?
goku12 · 14m ago
> The earlier Starships were just manually welded steel. Is still so?
I don't know if they use manual welding or robotic welding. But robotic welding is well established and is justified for the volumes of work that SpaceX carries out. What is more difficult is to avoid vertical weld seams on its cylindrical segments. I'm yet to encounter a roll forged cylinder that big, especially with stainless steel. (Disclaimer: I have no direct experience with industrial metalworking)
> 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?
That is done using Non-destructive testing (NDTs). The usual methods are high-energy X-ray imaging, ultrasound testing (UT) and dye penetration testing (DP). These methods are usually reliable in catching such faults - even for machinery that's in use. For example, turbine blades in a jet engine.
Updated: As the other commenter pointed out, robotic welding doesn't ensure elimination of defects. The robotic process is more consistent and therefore reduces the defects. But uncontrollable random variations can still cause defects that could fail later. The only way to eliminate them (almost) entirely is to identify them with NDT and rectify them as long as the defects are within a certain tolerance limit.
XorNot · 29m ago
X-ray weld inspection is standard in the pipe fitting industry. Even with automation you wouldn't bet your rocket on "probably okay".
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?)
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 · 2h 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.
selivanovp · 2h ago
It looks like a fuel tank had a leak.
Analemma_ · 3h 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 · 53m ago
> looks like the pad was completely destroyed
Importantly this was a test pad a few miles away, not the main launch pad.
nomel · 1h 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.
chneu · 25m ago
This most likely points to a leak somewhere. So there isnt much valuable information to be learned here. They weren't able to test much.
What they were hoping to test never got started.
wombatpm · 3h ago
Probably could use more than one launch pad with the tank farms centrally located and protected.
Chinese static fire accidentally becomes not-static.
seydor · 58m ago
Maybe it's time to consider a smaller Starship
d--b · 1h ago
Move fast and break huge things
lofaszvanitt · 1h ago
Well, Elon has been reined in.
rapsey · 3h ago
It seems starship still has a long way to go.
shmoe · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 1h 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.
DoesntMatter22 · 4m ago
They literally left astronauts stranded on the space station
aredox · 1h 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 · 43m 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 · 3h ago
It's an explosion. It would be an anomaly if it happened rarely
roer · 3h ago
A starship static fire (seems to even be pre-"fire") explosion is very rare.
senectus1 · 2h ago
Anomaly?
The thing detonated from the top down... that was spectacular. Anomaly doesn't really describe that very well.
The wet (loaded with propellant) to dry (empty of propellant) mass ratio is determined via the rocket equation to be the exponential of delta V divided by exhaust velocity.
Certain parts of the rocket, such as the external tank structure, scale sub-cubically with the rocket's dimension, as do aerodynamic forces; whereas payload and propellant mass scale cubically.
Hence if the rocket is smaller than a critical threshold size, the requisite vehicle structures are too large relative to its propellant capacity to permit the required wet:dry mass ratio to achieve the delta V for orbit.
At exactly this size, the rocket can reach orbit with zero payload.
As the rocket increases in size beyond this threshold, it is able to carry a payload which is increasingly large relative to the rocket's total mass.
That's complete nonsense. 10-15 Starship launches would land a lander that can carry like 100tons of payload orbit.
Saturn V landed 15000kg on the moon, but most of that isn't payload.
But of course with Saturn V you are throwing away a rocket that cost 1 billion $ or more per launch.
You are comparing 'thing lands on moon' to 'things lands on moon' without any nuance.
But you are right Apollo was insane in how fast it was done.
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.
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.
That's like comparing how many containers Maersk moves today with how much sea cargo was moved back in the age of discovery.
Also, Saturn V worked and fulfilled it's mission, whereas Starship blows up.
Its impressive how ignorant HN is about how many failures the S5 had during testing, falling for cold war propoganda at full speed
Not even just NASA. SpaceX are building on technologies that originated from both sides of the iron curtain (and beyond)
How far back is the "start" of history in this telling, and (more importantly) why?
The grandparent comment was pointing out that it cost NASA 200bn, and spaceX 15bn.
The parent comment pointed out that spaceX are actually saving money because they already got what nasa spent 200bn on.
My comment pointed out that they aren't just saving money by using NASAs tech, but tech from the Soviet Union as well.
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...
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.
The program that was paused pending new NASA director, and has burned more money than SpaceX without a single (usable) launch?
I’m making things up out of memory here, but suffice to say SLS does not have my confidence.
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.
Because its a dumb program that literally wouldn't happen if SLS was not involved. SLS is not needed if you re-architected the program. Its pure politics.
> So far it’s proved incapable of being launched, attaining orbit, and returning to earth as designed.
It has reached orbit in all but name.
Its the second rocket ever to have reused a booster. Literally in human history.
But I guess in your book building the biggest rocket in history and reusing part of it is no big deal.
> The problem is we aren’t moving fast at all.
Literally only if you compare it to Appollo. Compare to the last 30 years of the space industry its still lighting fast. Actually testing something real that can land on the moon, is something for example Constellation never even got to.
> Saturn V was better by an order of magnitude and likely cheaper
Except it wasn't and you are clueless about cost. You are just asserting things based on less then nothing.
> Starship is doing this on easy mode and it’s failing.
You are literally the only person on earth dumb enough to consider a full reusable rocket that can land on multiple bodies in the solar system 'easy'.
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".
So far in history, we didn't have enough to launch. If the volume we launch increases then a larger rocket flying often is helpful.
We are at the peak of what a rocket the size of Falcon 9 can do. If you want full re-usability, the size helps you out quite a bit.
And hauling the 'orbiter' into 'orbit' is only wasteful if you can't reuse it. I would argue what's actually wasteful is throwing the second stage in the ocean, even when it costs minimum 10million $, and likely more.
Operations cost. They are sublinear on payload/size. At least this is what Space X/Musk seem to go for.
There's also many advantages to being able to lift something large/heavy in one go, rather than smaller payloads that need to be unfolded (like JWST) or assembled in space, which can drastically increase the development costs.
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
I like the idea of hardware-rich development, but it seems they might have fiddled too much here or maybe just tried to go too fast.
It doesn't mean the approach SpaceX is taking isn't valuable in some contexts, but it's certainly not the only method.
I have to ask if the world needs 365 $100mm fireworks each year.
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?
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 is a _very_ off-nominal outcome and the investigation will absolutely involve outside organizations and halting the program during the investigation until the investigation completes with a sufficient determination of faults and accompanying remediation plans.
The linked tweet literally says "it blew up", though. "Anomaly" is just a word used in rocket science lingo that makes for a funnier headline.
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...
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.
I don't know if they use manual welding or robotic welding. But robotic welding is well established and is justified for the volumes of work that SpaceX carries out. What is more difficult is to avoid vertical weld seams on its cylindrical segments. I'm yet to encounter a roll forged cylinder that big, especially with stainless steel. (Disclaimer: I have no direct experience with industrial metalworking)
> 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?
That is done using Non-destructive testing (NDTs). The usual methods are high-energy X-ray imaging, ultrasound testing (UT) and dye penetration testing (DP). These methods are usually reliable in catching such faults - even for machinery that's in use. For example, turbine blades in a jet engine.
Updated: As the other commenter pointed out, robotic welding doesn't ensure elimination of defects. The robotic process is more consistent and therefore reduces the defects. But uncontrollable random variations can still cause defects that could fail later. The only way to eliminate them (almost) entirely is to identify them with NDT and rectify them as long as the defects are within a certain tolerance limit.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1lf3g...
(It'll still be fucked, I just wouldn't expect a crater?)
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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.
What they were hoping to test never got started.
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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