Starship Flight 7

It sounds like he's talking to investors and not to general public.

In my experience in corporate america you communicate efficiency by proclaiming a checklist of things to do - plausible, but not necessarily accurate things - and then let engineers figure it out.

Nobody cares of the original checklist as long as the problem gets resolved. It's weird but it seems very hard to utter statement "I don't have specific answers but we have very capable engineers, I'm sure they will figure it out". It's always better to say (from the top of your head) "To resolve A, we will do X,Y and Z!". Then when A get's resolved, everyone praises the effort. Then when they query what actually was done it's "well we found out in fact what were amiss were I, J K".

Even NASA years into their existence has suffered catastrophic fatal failures. Even with the best and most knowledgeable experts working on it we are ultimately still in the infancy of space flight. Just like airlines every incident we try and understand the cause and prevent it from happening again. Lastly what they are doing is incredibly difficult with probably thousands of things that could go wrong. I think they are doing an amazing job and hope one day, even if I miss it, that space flight becomes acceptable to all who wish to go to space.

Can you name a space company with less failures? Also I think it is unfair to even compare SpaceX to anything else, because of the insane amount of starts / tests combined unparalleled creativity.

According to this website their current success rate is 99,18%. That's a good number I guess? Considering other companies did not even land their stages for years.

https://spaceinsider.tech/2024/07/31/ula-vs-spacex/#:~:text=....

He's talking to the FAA, because this will trigger an investigation and would usually mean months of no launches.

It says right there in your source that that figure refers to Falcon in particular. For comparison, Starship's current track record is 3/7 launch failures (+1 landing failure).

There's an order of magnitude difference between them. If they were cars, it'd be like comparing the smallest car you can think of vs one of the biggest tanks ever made.

Success rate isn’t a great metric for efficient initial work: it will keep improving as more launches are done, regardless of the initial work.

It’s like comparing the reliability of the Model 3 and the Cybertruck.

Test flights.

My tests keep failing until I fix all of my code, then we deploy to production. If code fails in production than that's a problem.

We could say that rockets are not code. A test run of a Spaceship surely cost much more than a test run of any software on my laptop but tests are still tests. They are very likely to fail and there are things to learn from their failures.

There's more to "overall success" then launch failure rate. Cost and time are very important, which are the other dimensions they are optimizing for here.

I ignored those, since the starship at this stage can be considered a prototype. I am just trying to argue, that calling SpaceX unreliable, especially compared to its competitors and time to market, is bold.

I you are referring to the two Space Shuttle accidents, both of them could have been avoided with just a little bit more care - not launching in freezing temperatures for Challenger, and making sure insulation foam doesn't fall off the tank for Columbia.

Running a code test doesn't require firing a rocket.

How would you test a rocket?

Test code by running it.

Test a rocket by launching it.

In hindsight yes. The trick is knowing which of the thousands of things to do are necessary. And yes, that’s how you end up with preflight checklists

In production? I don't disagree that tests 'in production' are sometimes necessary (canary tests), but most of the quirks are often fixed by then.

Honestly I thought they would be live testing fuel exchange in orbit by now. Seems pretty far from it sadly.

Fortunately (for him) he'll be President on Monday and can then order the FAA to let him do whatever he wants.

You test components in isolation, you test integration of components, you run simulations of the entire rocket, and finally you test the rocket launch.

You’ll catch issues along the way, but you can’t catch all of them before a full launch test. That’s why there are launch tests.

That might still happen this year, it’s the next step in the development plan.

What makes these launches “non-production” tests is that they are not carrying any valuable payload. Blowing up rockets like this is exactly what gives the company it’s advantage over competitors who try to anticipate everything during design stages.

launching a rocket is far more analogulous to shipping a release, than it is running code.

This is the programmer fallacy if you have a bunch of code passing unit tests, it’s going to work when combined.

Thank god you're not building rockets.

The history of rocketry goes much further back than the space shuttle. The shuttle was supposed to be a step towards reusability but didn’t succeed or progress the way they thought it would. Starship is continuing that dream of full reusability and their approach is working. You can’t plan everything on paper when it comes to hardware especially when attempting things that have never been done before, you just don’t have the data in that case. You have to build prototypes and test them to destruction. All manufacturers do this.

It's just taxpayer money they're blowing up, so it doesn't really matter.

The usual definition of success for a rocket is getting the payload to the intended orbit. Since Starship doesn't have a payload yet, at least not a real one, its "success rate" is not measuring the same thing.

I'd say that only the 7th mission was legitimately a failure, because there was some rerouting of flights outside the exclusion zone. The other six missions were successful tests since nothing other than the rocket itself was affected.

They had that on the timeline for 2023, so it's reasonable to assume they would do it.

There was no real payload on this, so I'd argue it's closer to a QA environment than production.

It's true that other rocket companies are treating launches as production, but SpaceX has always been doing "hardware-rich" testing.

He just means MORE checking for leaks.

They already implemented a whole host of changes to the vehicles after the first test back in 2023. There's a list of corrective actions here.

https://imgur.com/a/Y9dd43o

They're blowing up their own money, unless you still count it as being the taxpayer's after the government pays them for launch services.

Testing to failure is pretty common in rocketry. If you don’t push the limits you’ll never really know where the limits are.

Testing their ability to deploy satellites is a short-term goal that will make them money now. Testing refuelling will be needed for Luna and Mars missions, but that’s a long way off anyway.

Starship program is funded in part by NASA as part of Artemis program. So some of this money is ours.

R&D for starship has a several-billion-dollar NASA grant. Something like 30-50% of the money being blown up on this program is taxpayer money.

Fair. I think that was for HLS rather than the launch systems, but I guess if it’s already been disbursed, it’s probably all commingled.

But that still means it’s not just taxpayer money, it’s mostly theirs. They’ve been raising equity rounds this whole time.

I would consider these launches test launches. Production is when they include commercial payloads and humans.

The taxpayer money is for r&d. We should be very tolerant of failure. Aggressively testing with real hardware is a key part of how we learn to make a more robust systems. Fear of failure and waste will slow down progress.

Did they say that?

It hasn't been disbursed yet (entirely). They get rewards for certain accomplishments.

This has been SpaceX’s methodology for a long time now and has gotten them to the point where they have the most reliable western launch vehicles ever launching record amounts of mass to orbit each year at record low prices.

The savings Spacex has promise of delivering to NASA make every dollar given to them probably an easy 2x-3x ROI.

Without Spacex, the typical cohort of gov contractors would have been happy bleeding NASA dry with one time use rockets that have 10x the launch cost and carry 1/4 the cargo.

Boeing did, with Starliner.

King. Presidents are elected.

Why precisely? Can you elaborate?

Thats not what he said. Unit tests are the first stage, and are very useful at isolating the problem.

Integration tests are the next where multiple units are combined.

Then there is staging.

You cannot compare a mature product to something that is still under initial development.

That would be like comparing a 1-y.o.'s ability to run to a 10-y.o.'s. Of course the younger kid doesn't yet control their legs, but that doesn't mean it's going to stumble and fall forever.

I truly hope that if you ever design a rocket yourself, that you will test it. I have no idea why you'd think testing is a terrible thing to do if it has to do with rockets.

This can get as far as the test plan is complete, multiply iterated under different interface conditions and thorough. And you are still relying upon the adherence of the simulated models to the physical reality.

Real tests do all of this at once with no option to escape reality.

Again, one thing is automating thorough software tests, another one is testing physical stuff.

Sorry, Artemis carried more than one banana and actually made it to orbit. SpaceX has not provided any ROI yet. You can't compare the (very optimistic) promises of SpaceX against the actual returns of the rest of the industry.

I think we all agree that you need to test eventually. I do think most of us would already be double checking for leaks. It just seems one of the obvious things that may go wrong when putting it all together.

They likely did test it, and it passed. The leak was probably caused by the somewhat violent environment of the launch, and that can’t be entirely replicated on the ground.

Zero ROI?

Isn’t SpaceX the largest launch provider in the world and for the U.S. government?

Many times than the rest of the U.S. space industry combined.

Launching a rocket is far more complex than shipping a release.

It is more like an "all or nothing" process.

Some domains have so many different parties doing different things, you just have to test in production. Rockets are probably one of them.

*Starship has zero ROI and has sucked up a lot of federal funds.

Falcon 9 has had plenty of "ROI" but it wasn't really federally funded. Let's not get carried away though about "more than the entire US space industry combined," though.