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Starship Flight 7

(www.spacex.com)
649 points chinathrow | 5 comments | 16 Jan 25 21:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.964s | source
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EncomLab ◴[17 Jan 25 11:33 UTC] No.42736458[source]▶
First Shuttle orbited astronauts and successfully recovered all intended components. Every Saturn 5 was successful, the 3rd flight sent a crew to lunar orbit, and the 6th put a crew on the moon.

To date a Starship has yet to be recovered after flight - and those launched are effectively boilerplate as they have carried no cargo (other than a banana) and have none of the systems in place to support a crew.

Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure - but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land.

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bboygravity ◴[17 Jan 25 11:40 UTC] No.42736510[source]▶
So what does a rocket company need to do to be imrpessive in your eyes?
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hooli_gan ◴[17 Jan 25 11:47 UTC] No.42736566[source]▶
A Mars cargo mission, according to the timeline spacex set for themselves. https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-F2HFqsVkiZc/YT9bPpXSKDI/AAAAAAAAG...
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1. pclmulqdq ◴[17 Jan 25 14:54 UTC] No.42738102[source]▶
A lot of people have been shitting on SLS for being too expensive over the last 5 years, but it's worth noting that the Artemis program has been completely fucked due to SpaceX massively missing its milestones on Starship. So many people believe that Elon Musk is going to bring humanity back to the Moon, but he is largely the reason that humanity is not back on the moon already.

The GAO put out a report on this a few months ago, pointing out the failures of SpaceX here (including massive cost overruns) much more than the supposed cost overruns of SLS. Incidentally, after this GAO report came out, Elon Musk became very interested in being in charge of managing "government waste."

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2. ceejayoz ◴[17 Jan 25 15:36 UTC] No.42738671[source]▶
This is a very partial telling of the current situation.

Orion is delayed due to a heat shield issue: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis/nasa-identifies-cause-...

The first SLS launch was six years behind and massively over budget.

Lunar Gateway is almost certainly getting delayed.

None of these programs rely on SpaceX in any way thus far.

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3. pclmulqdq ◴[17 Jan 25 17:13 UTC] No.42740575[source]▶
There was no heat shield issue, it was investigated and the resolved: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/artemis/nasa-delays-...

There is an issue with another dependency for Artemis 2 and 3, though - Starship is nowhere near where it needs to be.

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4. ceejayoz ◴[17 Jan 25 17:32 UTC] No.42740860{3}[source]▶
"There was no heat shield issue" and "it was investigated and resolved" cannot both be true. There was a heat shield issue; they investigated for two years, and it has caused a delay.

Artemis II has no Starship dependency. It's entirely SLS/Orion.

Your own article agrees with me:

> Artemis 2 likely would've been delayed by a year or so, to late 2026, had a heat-shield replacement been required, NASA officials said today. But the mission team still needs more time than originally envisioned to get Orion up to crew-carrying speed, explaining the roughly six-month push.

> "The heat shield was installed in June 2023, and the root cause investigation took place in parallel to other assembly and testing activities to preserve as much schedule as possible."

5. panick21_ ◴[17 Jan 25 18:21 UTC] No.42741555[source]▶
Complete nonsense. There are many issues with Artemis timeline.

And of course its completely ridiculous to blame a program that received 2 billion $ and only really started a few years ago, vs things like SLS Orion that have been going for decades and absorbed 50 billion $.