←back to thread

Starship Flight 7

(www.spacex.com)
649 points chinathrow | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.202s | source
Show context
EncomLab ◴[] 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.

replies(22): >>42736473 #>>42736508 #>>42736510 #>>42736544 #>>42736558 #>>42736593 #>>42736608 #>>42736877 #>>42737180 #>>42737649 #>>42737788 #>>42738106 #>>42738784 #>>42739075 #>>42739145 #>>42741930 #>>42741991 #>>42742118 #>>42742635 #>>42743357 #>>42744151 #>>42745261 #
bboygravity ◴[] No.42736510[source]
So what does a rocket company need to do to be imrpessive in your eyes?
replies(5): >>42736553 #>>42736566 #>>42736587 #>>42736607 #>>42736649 #
tsimionescu ◴[] No.42736587[source]
Maybe match some achievements from 60 years ago, like having a rocket that can put someone on the moon, back when the largest supercomputer in the space program had less FLOPS than my watch.
replies(2): >>42736611 #>>42740477 #
jve ◴[] No.42736611[source]
Decreasing price of a launch by multiple orders of magnitude and increased cadence is also an achievement that hasn't been achieved previously.
replies(1): >>42736667 #
tsimionescu ◴[] No.42736667[source]
Increased launch cadence is an operational achievement, not an engineering one.

And I'm not so sure that they actually decreased price to launch all that much. First of all, it's definitely not "several orders of magnitude", the best numbers quoted are maybe half price or so for a Falcon 9 compared to another contemporary rocket. And by my understanding, the US government at least is paying about as much for Falcon 9 as it was for a Soyuz to bring an astronaut to the ISS, at least.

replies(3): >>42737231 #>>42737890 #>>42738040 #
inemesitaffia ◴[] No.42737890[source]
NASA pays both Boeing and SpaceX less than Soyuz was.
replies(2): >>42738200 #>>42738221 #
1. tsimionescu ◴[] No.42738221[source]
According to this [0] article from Business Insider, from 2006 to 2019, per seat costs for NASA from Russia rose from less than $25M ($38M inflation adjusted) to around $81M ($101M inflation adjusted). The cost per seat in 2012, the year after the USA lost crewed space launch capability entirely, was ~$55M ($75M inflation adjusted). According to this [1] article from Reuters, NASA is currently paying Boeing $90M, and SpaceX $55M per seat.

So, NASA today is paying Boeing more than the monopoly prices Russia charged (up to 2016 or so), and paying both of them more than Russia was charging back when they were competing with the Space Shuttle. And it's paying SpaceX about half of the top price it payed Russia per seat, still nowhere close to an order of magnitude in cost savings.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/astronaut-cost-per-soyuz-sea...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/science/boeing-sending-first-astrona...