Credentialed expert consensus: SpaceX Starship will never work

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?