Starship's Tenth Flight Test

Not quite, but it's a major milestone. Still quite a bit of work to go on the rapid reusability part (burnt flaps, oxidized body, missing tiles, tile waterproofing). Starship might actually deliver payload to orbit on flight 11.

It accomplished all the goals for this flight. That’s 100% successful

They mentioned in the stream they were intentionally stressing the ship on reentry.

But yes, “rapid reusability” is a ways off. I expect they’ll be spending weeks inspecting and repairing ship and booster before reflight for a few years, but they’ll drive it down over time.

TBD how “rapid” the reusability ends up being in the end.

The push for rapid reusability seems somewhat at odds with the push for large scale production of ships.

It seems like if they can get boosters to rapid reuse (a much easier goal), and churn out ships at sufficient scale, they can afford to take time inspecting/refurbing each ship as part of a pipelined approach.

The stated goal was always to have a lot of ships, and also to have them be reusable.

Starship is a fuel-hungry beast - it can get to LEO by itself, but it needs a lot of tanker launches to go beyond. And if your goal is a Mars colony, you don't want to be limited to one launch per launch window.

Their scenario is that the ships are mostly going to be "fuel mules" to ferry propellant to the ship that is destined to go somewhere (i.e. Mars) - so if you want an armada to travel to another planet, you need a much larger fleet of supply vehicles to prepare your armada. Hence the need to mass produce them.

Not at odds at all. It doesn't matter how fast you can make them if each one costs $5-10 million. Much better to amortize that over 100+ flights and not waste the booster.

Once the tanker version is needed, a ship ship could go up 5+ times a day. The logistics of backfilling a pad with a new ship is much more involved

If "rapid reusability" was a proxy goal for maintaining a given launch pace we wouldn't need any of this.

We could just construct 200 Space Shuttles and spend months refurbishing them after every flight, and still send one up every week.

The goal is to drive down launch costs, time is money, and a system that requires time consuming refurbishments is more expensive.

What's the need for tile waterproofing ?

The ship and booster both sank in the ocean as planned, so there is no inspecting and repairing phase.

I think that work can be done quite well based on all the footage and other collected metrics.

They are extremely hydrophilic.

Thunderf00t shows various tile problems with Starship: https://youtu.be/MZUQe38SJIs?si=QAVIk7fMX1HIQETb (he's not a fan of Musk)

> rapid reusability seems somewhat at odds with the push for large scale production of ships

As you say, they reïnforce each other by speeding up the learning curve and deployment of learning to the real world, serving as both a bolstering of the product and experimental validation.

Mildly interesting to be exposed to the world of 'YouTube engineers' who are derisory of the real-world engineering success of SpaceX. Informed criticism is fine but when you're just openly calling a world class engineering company 'stupid' then you deserve to be ignored (except, obviously, by everyone suffering from MDS).

Thunderfoot is a long-time Musk project hater for some reason. That's now his specialty which probably appeals to his audience. There are plenty of equally uninformed youtubers with glowing praise for SpaceX. Just like the real news, people divide themselves into bubbles of whatever reinforces their beliefs.

> There are plenty of equally uninformed youtubers with glowing praise for SpaceX

Definitely true

> Just like the real news, people divide themselves into bubbles of whatever reinforces their beliefs

Hopefully HN can be better than that and be a place for informed criticism or informed praise from whatever provenance

Still, LEO is halfway to anywhere in the Solar System, so that's exciting.

That guy is so annoying.

Also you can assemble things in LEO from multiple launches. Once you're up there, you have a lot more freedom in terms of size and shape.

Mars transit takes far longer than one week. And their plan is in orbit refueling so getting a single starship to Mars takes more than one ship.

> The push for rapid reusability seems somewhat at odds with the push for large scale production of ships.

Elon always talks about a city on Mars but seeing for the first time the gargantuan size of Starfactory it dawned on me that SpaceX are true believers. It is still a big IF, because the dimension of the mission is absolutely bonkers, but IF the goal is to send every two years hundreds of Starships to Mars (everyone needing around 3-4 tanker missions) you need large scale production of ships.

I didn't mean this ship and booster, I mean in a year or so when they're done with the test phase and frequently launching Starlink satellites on Starship.

Ten years ago every expert said a hundred launches a year was utterly impossible. Five years ago they said it was unlikely. SpaceX have launched more than a hundred times this year already.

Anyone who thinks they can’t do stuff is not seeing the whole picture.

Halfway to anywhere, but the window to anywhere is quite small. For Mars, I think it's only a few weeks every two years or so. So having a lot of mass already halfway there when the window opens would be quite advantageous.

Provenance kind of matters though because we can't work out all the details of every piece of information and have to put a bit of trust in the source. A way I like it to cite a source with the opposite bias of what you're trying to say. If even the opponents of the general idea agree with some part of it, that's stronger support than it's supporters agreeing.