Starship's Tenth Flight Test

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.