Two months ago, New York Magazine Intelligencer (“intelligence” even in the name of the publication), “Is Elon Musk’s Starship Doomed? The future of SpaceX keeps blowing up, and no one knows if he can fix it.”:
“Having a rocket ascend a few hundred meters and blow up is not a success to me,” says Dallas Kasaboski, an analyst who covers the space industry for the research firm Analysys Mason.
Reusing both parts of a rocket, instead of just one, sounds like a modestly more ambitious undertaking — if you can do it once, why not twice? — but in fact, it’s exponentially harder, since the amount of energy to be dissipated while returning to Earth goes up not as a linear function of velocity but its square. The energy gets turned into heat, which sends the temperature of the Starship soaring into the thousands of degrees, such that it glows white-hot. To reduce the effects of this heat, the rocket’s exterior is coated in thermal tiles. But these are heavy. So is the internal bracing required to hold the ship together during the turbulence of reentry.
For critics, like Substack writer Will Lockett, the fact that Starship has failed so many times in a row is proof that the concept is fundamentally unworkable. “SpaceX is having to make the rockets too light, resulting in them being fragile, meaning that just the vibrations from operation with a fraction of its expected payload would be enough to destroy the rocket,” he wrote in one typically acerbic post.
“I remember reading a book in the 1970s about how the space shuttle would be flying every two weeks and cost low hundreds of dollars per pound to orbit,” says Grant Anderson, co-founder of the space-systems-maker Paragon Space Development Corporation, which helped launch SpaceX in 2002. “It never did that, obviously.” … When would we know if Starship is toast? One major red flag is persistent failures. “If you have a failure at the same stage twice for the same reason, and they can’t solve the problem, that’s an indication that there’s a design flaw that’s more than just an ‘Oops!’” says Anderson.
Readers: What do you think? Is it possible that Elon Musk and SpaceX are right and the expert consensus is wrong? Is there any way that Starship could one day make it into orbit without exploding? And, perhaps one day many years or decades from now, that both booster and Starship could land back on Earth?
Did they give up on Apollo 13 when it had a few issues? With a little love, and 1960s-era engineering, anything is possible…
you forget an near endless amount of taxpayer’s money
Democrats have that figured out:
$ = <3 c^2
(Einstein's lost money/love equivalence equation) proving Democrats are the party of love.
Did we give up when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? No!
@SuperMike
And did the French give up when the Japanese bombed the Bastille? Hell no.
I do not care and do not follow the wonderful world of rockets and reusable rocket components, but it seems to be a bit like the situation when Theranos promised to do what nobody else had ever managed to do. Apparently the general failure to achieve what Theranos had tried to sell was not for lack of trying. It is hard to judge from my admittedly ignorant standpoint whether industry has been extremely conservative and happy to keep the status quo, or whether some problems are hard or impossible to crack, but I guess Elon will eventually run out of other people’s money on this, and either deliver or fail.
Last expert in the field was Werner von Braun with his overall command over Saturn V rocket project, and I believe he exploded many rockets until his V2 took to the (British and Dutch) skies. Yesterday Starship test was mostly successful and I think we (Musk) will have the most powerful rocket ship in few (maybe a few) years time. I have heard that Saturn V blueprint were lost at NASA. So we have no choice, old Soviet equivalent of Saturn V exploded and took out many of Soviet generals in the process so USSR cancelled its Moon return capable rocket.
SpaceX deserves a lot of credit for developing Falcon into what it is today. But the big strategic decisions were to build a totally new system instead of evolving Falcon with a reusable second stage, and to make that new system a huge step up in size. Those were big business risks. Maybe they will get away with it but this should set off some alarm bells for software engineers!
To be fair, they can trivially pivot and re-purpose super heavy booster for conventional second stage. The main value of the project is Raptor engine, which is far ahead of the competition.
It’s a difficult problem, but it’s not like smaller scale similar things haven’t been done, ~60 years ago, with a pilot.
https://www.nasa.gov/reference/x-15/
Today’s performance grid is pretty dismal compared to 10 years ago. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1960812698037518540/photo/1
Its payload is currently only .6% of its total mass & growth keeps getting pushed to the right. The thinking is any nonzero payload with full & rapid reuse is better than any disposable upper stage. The mass of the heat shield & structural reinforcement seem to be the surprises. It’s pretty melted with a .6% payload fraction. Expendable rockets hit 4%.
Experts living in thought land without having all the data/facts but making authoritative claims. My money is on SpaceX here. At least I have a good idea what Lion does for a living now!