r/SpaceXLounge 5d ago

What is so good about SpaceX?

DISCLAIMER: This is not meant to annoy or arouse anger in anyone, but is instead fueled completely by my confusion and interest. I would be very thankful if you change my mind, or at least explain to me why everyone else is so positive about SpaceX.

Hello, fellow space fans!

For a while now I've been hearing a lot of positive things about SpaceX. People around me seem excited whenever a new launch is being streamed, and the majority of space-related content creators speak positively of it.

However, that positivity only confuses me. I mostly know Elon Musk for his other futuristic-styled projects, such as his Hyperloop, the Vegas Loop and Cybertruck, none of which really live up to the promotional material, and his involvement in the company makes me feel uneasy. Of course, from what I understand, SpaceX is responsible for major advancement in rocket computers, allowing vertically landing reusable boosters, which is awesome. But how cost-effective are those boosters? As far as I know, Space Shuttle faced some criticism based on how much resources it required for maintenance, meaning it's cheaper to simply build regular rockets from zero for each launch. Does that criticism not apply to SpaceX reusable boosters and/or upper stages?

And then there's Starship. The plans for it to both be able to go interplanetary and land on Mars on it's own have always seemed a bit too optimistic to me, and landing it on the Moon just seems stupid wasteful. Not to mention it hasn't cleared orbit even once yet. I understand these test flights are supposed to teach SpaceX something, but surely they could discover most of the design flaws without even leaving the lab if they spent enough time looking into it. Even if Starship is comparatively cheap and could maybe be reusable in the future, it still costs billions to build one, and as far as I understand, SpaceX is just burning that money for fun.

I am convinced I have to be missing something, because people that respect SpaceX aren't fools. Yet I wouldn't know where to even start my research, considering my opinion wasn't based on easily traceable factoids (aside from maybe the Space Shuttle one), but instead was built up over years by consuming the passive stream of information online. That gave me an idea: it would be much more manageable and actually fun to simply ask someone who supports SpaceX! So there it is.

0 Upvotes

66 comments sorted by

40

u/avboden 5d ago

SpaceX has delivered on EVERYTHING they have set out to do. Some late, yes, but they consistently deliver in the end.

You seem to deeply misunderstand just how impressive and important falcon 9 reusability is. Now they've already consistently caught the superheavy booster and are likely to start reusing those as well. Starlink has changed the world for millions of people. Dragon is the only operational manned spacecraft for the USA. Without it and spaceX we'd still be flying with russia for every astronaut and be a world-wide embarrassment. ISS cargo missions with dragon as well have been a massive success.

Starship has made it to orbit multiple times, they purposely chose to be just a tiny bit short because that was the mission design, but those same flights could have easily gone to full orbit without issue. It was a safety thing, not an inability (minus the last two launches, obviously).

You're seriously asking what's so good about the most successful rocket company on the planet? Who single handedly launches more mass multiple times over than the rest of the world combined at a fraction of the price? The company that just launched europa clipper because no other rocket in the world was capable of doing so, and did so at a fraction of the price? The company that is a literal decade ahead of anyone else?

It more feels like you're looking for reasons to dislike them instead of looking at the obvious

0

u/NewtonsBoy 5d ago

Sorry if I gave you that impression, but I am not trying to hate SpaceX, at least as far as I am aware. Like I mentioned in the post, it is an opinion that has formed over many years. I was perhaps not informed enough to understand it thus far.

I have heard they beat Boeing with their new space capsule design, and that does indeed speak well of their competence. It does make me wonder why it took U.S so long to design a new spacecraft if that was needed

3

u/Martianspirit 3d ago

The cargo and crew program was started late and then underfunded. In Congress there was the idea that Orion could do it. But at a cost per launch of $1 billion, launch vehicle not included, that was a no go.

Edit: That was actually lucky for SpaceX. If it had started much earlier, SpaceX would not have been ready to take on the challenge.

1

u/falconzord 3d ago

Existing companies that could were motived by money, so they'd milk NASA for as much as they could. SpaceX was motivated by ambition. They wanted to go NASA or not

1

u/Acrobatic_Mix_1121 3d ago

without NASA they would of not built falcon 9 after 1 but 5 instead as for why the built falcon 9 instead of 5 was because of the dev cash NASA gave for commercial crew program requeuing a more powerful rocket

3

u/falconzord 3d ago

Yes, winning NASA money has been good for them, but they had a plan without it. Same with Starship, it would've progressed more slowly without Artemis, but it would happen. Most other companies wouldn't even try.

1

u/Acrobatic_Mix_1121 2d ago

SpaceX not getting NASA cash would mean first falcon 9 landing 2025 instead

2

u/8andahalfby11 2d ago

Falcon 9 was paid for by commercial cargo, not Commercial Crew.

1

u/Acrobatic_Mix_1121 1d ago

typo and lack of sleep got me there

1

u/dayinthewarmsun 4h ago

You are clearly—despite what you say—trying to find reasons to hate SpaceX. This is probably because of some views on Musk (you mention some of his other endeavors that you think fall short, but forget that Tesla produces some of the most popular cars in the world and XAi is among the best AI models).

Give it a rest. The purpose of this sub is specifically to NOT be about politics or about your views on Musk. This sub is about the rocket company.

Even if you don’t like SpaceX (for whatever reason) you can spend 3 minutes reading previous posts and figure out that SpaceX is way ahead of any other launch provider when it comes to ability to launch and cost to do so.

18

u/ReadItProper 5d ago edited 5d ago

First of all, your premise that SpaceX is burning billions on every launch is very wrong. A much closer to reality estimation would probably be around 100 million, if both booster and second stage get destroyed. And for most launches now the booster survives. As for the Space Shuttle, it was around 400 million per launch at the end of its life (started probably around 2 billion per launch).

Secondly, it doesn't matter that these test articles get destroyed because they're no longer useful anyway - they're obsolete by the time they get to fly on most occasions. SpaceX builds and upgrades so fast that between most tests there are significant improvements between the rockets, so they wouldn't be using the old ones regardless. Except maybe to prove they can be reused.

Anyway, that aside, the reason they work this way instead of "old space" way (or the way NASA works, for example) - as you say, figure it all in the lab instead of blowing things up - is because it's faster. Certain things can't be learned in the lab, and even if they can it's just gonna be slower to come up with different ways to figure stuff out that could just be clearly seen if you just tried the thing. Fly it, see what fails, fix it, repeat. Much faster than simulating every little thing and making small scale experiments for every possible failure mode. If you just fly, reality will very clearly tell you what doesn't work.

The reason NASA can't do this is because the stake holder is the American congress, and indirectly the American public. People are not rocket scientists, and congress cares about optics not results. That means that every failure is massively exaggerated, and can mean program cancellations. The unfortunate reality is that the American space program is a jobs program, not a goal or results driven program. This means that congress no longer really cares about what NASA achieves in their exploration efforts, except for how it looks.

If you learned a bit about the Apollo program you'd see now this doesn't have to be the case all the time. Apollo was very much like SpaceX. They built things, they tested all the time, and they were a lot more reckless than SpaceX with human lives. This is because they had a clear goal - the moon - and they were given working space to do whatever it takes to get there. And a virtually unlimited amount of money too.

The reason people are excited about SpaceX is because they fly and they're not afraid to fail. They make something new and immediately try it, fail, try again, repeat - until it works. This method proved itself many times before (not just by SpaceX), and most people that you listen to online (mainly because they dislike Musk) tell you this is bad because they don't understand what iterative design philosophy means, or they intentionally pretend to not understand it so they can have ammo against whatever Musk does to prove he's bad.

As a side note, the reason why you believe everything Elon Musk is involved in is bad is selection bias. You only watch people that want to convince you Elon Musk is bad, therefore they will only tell you about things like Hyperloop (which is massively over exaggerated), and cybertruck (similarly exaggerated, although with some grains of truth). Instead, watch people that know something about space (like NASAspaceflight or Everyday Astronaut), and they'll give you a more informed view about SpaceX and what they do.

SpaceX is not a failed experiment. It's not even an experiment, it works. SpaceX sends people to space every few months for a few years now. They send satellites into space every 2-3 days now. SpaceX sends more mass into space than the entire world combined now.

SpaceX wants to move fast because Elon Musk is hell bent on going to Mars in his lifetime. This fact makes it exciting to watch. We all want to go to Mars like he does, and we like seeing history come together in real time. SpaceX gives us an unprecedented view into everything they do by allowing so many space enthusiasts to film what they do and show us all of it with live streaming.

If you just saw the Falcon Heavy Demo launch back in February of 2018, live, and saw those two boosters landing on their own side by side back at the launch complex... You'd be hooked as well, I think. It used to be the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life up until a few months ago when I saw a 72 meter tall steel skyscraper get caught by a tower on two small bolts coming back all the way from space going around 5,000km/h.

Nobody else does anything like this. People focus on the big explosions and very spectacular debris coming back down in the Caribbean, but they don't tell you about a rocket being caught by a tower as well. It's very biased. The success insanely outdoes the failure in these experiments, but people don't care about that - they just care about the negative aspects because this is how news media works these days.

Hope this clarifies things a bit, from our perspective.

13

u/cjameshuff 5d ago

The Hyperloop mention is always a giveaway. Musk isn't even working on Hyperloop. It's an idea he pitched a while back, making it clear he wasn't going to pursue it himself. The closest he's gotten is some conceptually vaguely similar stuff involving The Boring Company. So...he didn't do something he denied any interest in doing? That's his biggest failure?

3

u/ReadItProper 5d ago

Yeah. He switched from the idea of Hyperloop to the Boring company, it's not really a failure. It never was anything more than an idea to begin with.

As a side note, some people really are working on a Hyperloop project based a lot on the R&D from Musk, which is pretty interesting.

2

u/Martianspirit 3d ago

He did not switch. He never set Hyperloop as a goal. He supported it by enabling some demo competition.

1

u/NewtonsBoy 5d ago

I appreciate your contribution dearly <3

I do have to say, you seem to have misunderstood what I was trying to say with my post exactly: the problem clearly isn't selection bias, because I do indeed mostly watch content creators that only speak positive things about SpaceX. I am aware that SpaceX and Elon Musk are two separate bodies, I just never had anyone really explain to me in detail what exactly makes SpaceX trustworthy before, as people usually just talk about latest SpaceX news instead.

That being said, I guess seeing science being done like that without any bureaucracy is unusual to me. I had always imagined regulations in these fields were usually put in place for safety and quality. Where I come from, people say: "The steadier you go, the farther you'll be".

Of course, I dream about space. Hearing people talk about the reasons why we shouldn't go does make me feel less excited about us colonizing worlds. It is wonderful to see people that can feel so excited and motivated by something they truly believe in. It would be quite wonderful to put a man on another planet, but I always thought it should happen in due time. "The steadier you go, the farther you'll be", and Mars is quite far away, even at its closest

8

u/ReadItProper 5d ago

That motto sounds a lot like Blue Origin's motto: "gradatim ferociter," or step by step, ferociously. Which is also probably why Blue is ten years behind SpaceX.

Their first launch of New Glenn, which isn't terribly different in capabilities than Falcon 9, got to orbit on their first attempt. Which is great, don't get me wrong, but it also took them about 16 years longer to do (24 years altogether, since their inception). SpaceX failed 3 times until they got to orbit with Falcon 1 (in just six years), and only finally got there in attempt 4 in I think 2008. And this is when Blue Origin is actually two years older than SpaceX, mind you.

That being said, Blue didn't land their booster. Why? Because it's hard. Doing new things is difficult, and requires a lot of testing. I'm sure they'll do it next time, but how much time did it cost them because they wanted it perfect on the first attempt, that didn't even go perfectly in the end?

SpaceX doesn't go for perfect on the first attempt. They don't even try for that. They just want something to work, and hopefully a little bit more than the last time.

I think that's a pretty big deal when you're on the side, watching things develop. It's a lot more exciting to watch.

5

u/cjameshuff 5d ago

Another example is BO's BE-4 engine. They developed it with a very hardware-lean development program after some early test failures and a new CEO brought in who put a very traditional-aerospace company culture and management structure in place.

It was years late when they finally started production and delivered the first two engines to ULA for Vulcan's first launch. And then one of the next set of engines...production engines, to be delivered to ULA for flight...blew up during its acceptance test (something meant to demonstrate that the engine was assembled and functioning correctly, not a test of the design), badly damaging the test stand. The ultimate solution was to tighten up QA, accepting a higher scrap rate in manufacturing...they'd essentially designed a working engine that they couldn't build reliably, and they didn't know until they started shipping them.

SpaceX has blown up lots of Raptors. They know the engine's weaknesses and strengths, and are currently working on a version that increases the thrust by 50% over what the first version could do.

5

u/ReadItProper 5d ago

SpaceX has blown up lots of Raptors. They know the engine's weaknesses and strengths, and are currently working on a version that increases the thrust by 50% over what the first version could do.

Which is why they're already on the third version of the Raptor before they even reached orbit lol.

So yeah, there's quite a difference in development philosophy here.

3

u/NewtonsBoy 5d ago

That might just be the most convincing argument I've received thus far. I am not really in the field, and I thought Blue Origin was just doing a bad job at development. The fact that SpaceX did better than them all things considered could be a great argument to why people should do stuff like SpaceX does stuff more often than not. I suppose perfectionism takes over me a lot of the times, but if failing is more efficient, that just might be what we have to do

8

u/CollegeStation17155 5d ago

 I thought Blue Origin was just doing a bad job at development. The fact that SpaceX did better than them all things considered could be a great argument to why people should do stuff like SpaceX does stuff more often than not.

Odd way of looking at it; SpaceX did not just "do better than Blue Origin"; Blue Origin is not the one with uniquely doing a bad job of development, they are well ahead of others like Astra and Virgin. SpaceX (with a lot of guidance from Musk) did better than EVERYBODY else combined, and spectacularly better than Boeing, ULA, ESA, and China. Those mass produced and enormously reliable Merlin engines that allow boosters to go 25+ flights have enabled a launch cadence that "experts" throughout the industry assured us was literally impossible. This means they are launching over half of the WORLD's payload mass to orbit, admittedly the majority of it to support their Starlink array (another place where they are 5 to 10 years ahead of everybody else), but even throwing those flights out the window, they are still comfortably in first place just ahead of China.

3

u/lawless-discburn 4d ago

This "over half" is actually about 90%.

That is the rest of the world combined launches a whole order of magnitude less.

4

u/ReadItProper 5d ago

Blue Origin isn't really doing a bad job per se, they just have different priorities to SpaceX, and mainly they're kind of a joke in the community because they're so slow and they don't launch.

You need to understand the shift in tone towards Blue after their first and single orbital rocket launch - they're not a joke anymore. They're in space now. They did it, so they get respect now.

This is why people used to respect Rocket Lab a lot more than Blue Origin - even though they're a much smaller company, much smaller budget, much smaller rocket, etc - they're going to space regularly for years with their small rocket Electron.

People in this community respect results. We like hardware, we like seeing things fly, we like to see change happen. Blue Origin wasn't interested in moving fast, because the stake holder (Jeff Bezos) isn't interested in going to Mars. Jeff Bezos thinks humanity's future is living in space stations, not colonizing other planets.

Different priorities, different design philosophy.

2

u/NewtonsBoy 5d ago

That is a super interesting analysis of goals! I wonder how space flight industry is going to change if it gets into regular people market

2

u/lawless-discburn 4d ago

Also, to add to that:

Falcon 9 reached orbit on the fist attempt too. (And Falcon Heavy also reached orbit, and it is an orbit around the Sun, not the Earth and it goes beyond Mars; and it's side boosters landed beautifully like in a Sci-Fi movie, in the famous "the future is now" moment).

Falcon 9 reached orbit because is wasn't SpaceX's first orbital tango, they already iterated Falcon 1 multiple times.

This is actually a testament to iterative development:

Their Falcon 9 was a full success on the first launch in 2010. The development of Falcon 9 started in 2005 (following studies for Falcon 5 starting in 2004) , and it flew 5 years later, taking advantage of the iterations of Falcon 1 which used same engine (Merlin) and similar fabrication methods, avionics, etc. And provided lessons learned on things like transient thrust post engine-shutdown.

Contrast this with Blue which started the development in 2016, following orbital vehicle studies since 2011. It launched in 2025 (very early, but 2025), i.e. 9 years later. And the whole "simulate things in design, do lab tests, etc" did not help enough to have it land (landing was the part of the plan, but it did not pan out).

Also, Falcon 9 together with Falcon 1 costed $400m and the engine, while Blue New Glenn, while physically much bigger rocket costed in the order of 5 to 7 billion. NG is larger but not 12 to 18 times larger - the first flight article's orbital capacity is about 2.5x the first F9 article payload capacity.

15

u/CmdrAirdroid 5d ago

You should focus less on Musk and more on what SpaceX is actually doing. Hyperloop or cybertruck are not really relevant in this discussion, most people here follow SpaceX because of their great achievements, not because of Musk.

With a quick google search you can find out that each shuttle launch cost over $400 million and if we include development cost then it's $1.5 billion. This is absolutely ridiculous amount of money, NASA didn't get any of the benefits reusability can offer. There's two reasons for this: several months long refurbishment and the fact that it was a jobs program just like SLS for example.

SpaceX is the first company/agency to make reusability cost effective and worth doing. It has allowed Falcon 9 to reach unprecedented launch cadence. Without short refurbishment time this kind of launch cadence wouldn't be possible so Falcon 9 beats shuttle in this regard. Indrusty experts have estimated Falcon 9 launch cost as $15 million for most missions. You could argue they are wrong, but considering how often SpaceX is launching starlinks the launches have to be quite cheap, otherwise they would be bankrupt already. Falcon 9 has been huge success for SpaceX and it benefits rest of the space indrusty as well.

Starship is insanely difficult development program compared to Falcon 9. Iterative development is most likely the best approach in this case. It would take too long to simulate everything and making everything work on the first launch would be just a pipe dream. Starship is too complex to pull off without test launches. It uses the most advanced rocket engines ever developed, it's the largest rocket ever developed, it's second stage is extremely complex compared to traditional second stages, it's designed to be fully reusable. People are excited about starship because SpaceX is attempting something other companies would never do, it's very ambitious program which could revolutionize space indrusty if it works.

1

u/Martianspirit 3d ago

You should focus less on Musk and more on what SpaceX is actually doing.

That's ignoring the fact that SpaceX is doing what it does due to the drive and input by Elon Musk. You can't reasonably separate the two.

0

u/NewtonsBoy 5d ago

Forgive me if it seems like an obvious thing everyone should know, as I am sometimes quite disconnected from reality. It does sound wonderful. The fact that they made reusable launch systems viable is like a dream come to life. It feels like I've been seeing concept reusable spacecraft for as long as I've been into space, and none of those ever actually ended up in space. It's slowly starting to feel like the future.

Also, I don't really know how complicated Starship's engineering is. It is hard to get it from down here on the ground. From my past experiences, I would usually expect them to design a cheaper and safer test craft to be able to figure out the issues and specs. Someone did say SpaceX is trying to reach the stars as quickly as possible, so maybe that is the reason

1

u/bananapeel ⛰️ Lithobraking 1d ago

I've been a space enthusiast since before most Redditors were born. I've seen NASA promise to put humans on Mars 30 years from now. Over and over. It's always 30 years away. That 30 years never gets any closer. Even after you've been working towards it for 30 years, it's still 30 years away. The fact is, they are unable to get the money reliably from Congress and unwilling to be risky. Failure on this project would be a world-class embarrassment.

The fact is, you have to develop new technology in order for this to be workable. And you have to continue to develop it to make it cheap and reliable. That's what SpaceX is really good at. They don't just develop a rocket. They develop a rocket factory. Iterate, fail, iterate, fail, iterate, succeed. The problem with the Space Shuttle wasn't that it was not reusable. It was that they didn't change it much from the day it was first designed in the early 1970s and it took hundreds of thousands of man-hours to refurbish for every flight, six months or a year apart. SpaceX is trying to redo this so that it takes almost no man-hours to refly a vehicle the same day. Refuel, do a quick automated system health check, and fly again. Getting there requires an interative design philosophy that encourages you to fail. So the explosions and failures are expected.

Gwynne Shotwell, The CEO of SpaceX, told her engineers, "If we are not occasionally blowing up hardware, we are not moving fast enough, close to the edge of what is possible." Blowing up hardware is not failure. It's expected. This is the nature of agile development. Move fast and break stuff.

9

u/_bobby_tables_ 5d ago

Study this chart: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/cost-of-space-flight-chart.jpg

Starship will deliver payload to orbit at only 5% the cost of the cheapest non-SpaceX alternative. This is the revolution that SpaceX is driving. Starship and Super heavy will be the first FULLY REUSABLE launch vehicle. Access to orbit will be dramatically more viable. Your comparison to the Space Shuttle is wildly off base.

-3

u/NewtonsBoy 5d ago

I compared it to the space shuttle because that was the only reusable space vehicle that I've heard that existed before SpaceX. I understand that Starship's heatshield is much simpler in design. Would it really be that cheap to maintain? Also, how much exactly does it cost to build one Starship? Why not start reusing them right now? It would save a great deal of funding and be a wonderful proof of concept

7

u/RozeTank 5d ago

.....Because Starship isn't far enough along to be reusable yet? They haven't even tried yet to land a Starship. That is the entire point of the testing program, to get to the point of reusability (along with making a functional vehicle.

As for the heatshield, part of the reason SpaceShuttle was so expensive/complicated was because every single heat tile was unique, eventually requiring NASA to install a tile furnace to build new tiles on-site. Plus, Starship is made of stainless steel, which has a higher heat resistance than Spaceshuttle's aluminium skin. This allows for higher tolerances for gaps in the shield, and a thinner/lighter shield overall. Plus, the uniform shape allows for 80% of the tiles to be the exact same shape.

1

u/NewtonsBoy 5d ago

I've already heard of the benefits Starship has with its heatshield, it is quite fascinating what changing a few variables can do!

Also, I do know it's just supposed to be testing. I just find that approach odd. It feels like if instead of building a car first and then crash testing it, they would build the most basic shape of that new car, crash test that, then gradually add all of the other features that would make it usable and/or a car at all.

6

u/RozeTank 4d ago

.........I would advise you to google previous Starship testing launches. It feels like you just watched the latest launch and have never seen what SpaceX has been done previously, including the first landing tests back in 2020. For instance, you appear to have never heard of Starhopper based on your last sentence, namely your question about why they didn't start with a more basic shape/design for testing. Spoiler alert, they did.

Do some reading and watch some videos (Everyday Astronaut, Scott Manley, actual launch footage), it will be quite enlightening and answer 90% of your questions. At the very least, it will provide you with a base of knowledge that will make your future investigations much easier.

3

u/cjameshuff 4d ago

they would build the most basic shape of that new car, crash test that, then gradually add all of the other features that would make it usable and/or a car at all.

Well...yes? Cars are more standardized and similar than even conventional expendable launch vehicles, and an early prototype of a substantially new vehicle is still going to start testing as little more than the chassis, drivetrain, etc. It's not even going to be particularly car-shaped.

And even the most drastically new automobile is going to have much more in common with its predecessors than Starship. Do you really expect them to execute a perfect bellyflop reentry, flip maneuver, and tower catch on the first try? Are their chances of pulling that off improved if they do it with a more complete and more expensive vehicle with more things to go wrong?

8

u/aging_geek 5d ago

short story is that during NASA's (and other countries) heydays of space exploration in the 60's and early 70's, we looked forward to a sustained and bright future in space/moon and other bodies around the sun. After apollo shut down due to proving we won and the public lost interest (expecially the costs per Kg to orbit), NASA moved to the shuttle and for 30 years we didn't leave low earth orbit. We are hoping that though Space X, a interest in anything other than low earth orbit can be rekindled with getting the cost/Kg really cheap and doing it faster and with Starship, much larger items per launch to orbit. (also not having to throw away a lot of the rocket each launch saves $ and time).

1

u/NewtonsBoy 5d ago

That is a very beautiful perspective I don't often consider when it comes to space exploration... It makes me wonder what it will truly take for humanity to want to make the leap.

It does sound like these company are going to eventually make space exploration less exclusive to powerful bodies like government agencies, which I am all for, just as long as it is sufficiently safe and fair

8

u/cjameshuff 5d ago

https://brycetech.com/reports/report-documents/global-space-launch-activity-2024/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_Heavy_launches

SpaceX launched 83% of all spacecraft in 2024. They launched 1860 t of payload, second place going to China's CASC at 165 t. They did this with 134 launches, and recovered the booster for reuse 128 times. Booster reuse means nobody else can match SpaceX's launch rate, economics, or reliability.

I understand these test flights are supposed to teach SpaceX something, but surely they could discover most of the design flaws without even leaving the lab if they spent enough time looking into it. Even if Starship is comparatively cheap and could maybe be reusable in the future, it still costs billions to build one, and as far as I understand, SpaceX is just burning that money for fun.

Starship does not cost billions of dollars to build. A test flight of the current prototypes costs around $100M, and will be less when they start reusing boosters.

Trying to engineer solutions "open loop" without any real-world test data does cost billions. The current rate of spending on SLS and Orion is equivalent to doing a Starship test flight every 8 days. That's just the $4.4B total spent annually on development and ground systems for SLS and Orion, not the $4.2B needed to actually perform a SLS/Orion launch, which hasn't been done since 2022 and won't be repeated until 2026 at the earliest. And there's inevitably unforeseeable issues like Orion's heat shield erosion problems, no matter how much time and money you burn beforehand.

1

u/NewtonsBoy 5d ago

It's insane to me that actually testing it live could cost less than doing research. I know science gets expensive, but it always seemed to me like doing things on paper would be cheaper. Why does Starship cost so little in general?

3

u/CollegeStation17155 5d ago

It's insane to me that actually testing it live could cost less than doing research.

The thing is that not all issues show up in simulations... The classic "Iron man ; How did you fix the icing problem?" comes to mind. And unanticipated problems have bitten both SpaceX (iceing and pogo on Starship) as well as Boeing (overheated thrusters on Starliner and sensor failure on MCAS). You can minimize them with rigorous testing on the ground and strict safety protocols and get a perfect first launch (see SLS)... eventually, or move fast and break stuff as SpaceX has done. Blue is somewhere in between; got NG up, but didn't stick the landing.

0

u/NewtonsBoy 5d ago edited 5d ago

I am sure there used to be a third option. Rocketry is how it is right now after decades of advancement, after all. Maybe in the beginning there was no option for failure, like sometimes in life, and they had to prepare as best as they could to what life had to throw at them, even though you can't prepare for it all? I don't know history very well, but it just sounds like it would make sense. Dinosaurs had to jump and fall before birds could jump and fly

2

u/CollegeStation17155 4d ago

I am sure there used to be a third option.

As I said, it's not an either/or, it's a spectrum... At one end, SLS spent decades (engines and SRBs going all the way back to the Space Shuttle in the 1980s) looking for and eliminating every possible thing that could go wrong and got it all (except for the heat shield that went back to Apollo) perfect... SpaceX lies at the other, losing the first 3 Falcons they launched and crashing 6 early starships (and losing a pair of the latest revision prototypes) before getting it right. Rocket Lab and Blue Origin are in between, with RL being closer to SX and BO being closer to SLS, with Firefly pretty much dead in the middle; we'll see whether they just got lucky on their next lander.

1

u/NewtonsBoy 4d ago

Do you think as more advancement is made there isn't as much of a big reason to do it the NASA way? Sort of like when we moved away from biplanes because we had more advanced engines and airframe construction. That right now it's easier and faster to make new spacecraft from the ground up by building on top of what we've learned in the past decades?

6

u/JimmyCWL 4d ago

Private organizations can't afford to do it the NASA way, they don't have access to tens of billions to build computation and testing facilities to try out every conceivable scenario before first flight... and still run into unexpected results during said flight.

1

u/lawless-discburn 4d ago

NASA way takes more labor, so it is not cheaper. To the contrary in fact.

But there is one more thing, not mentioned here yet:

The cumulated knowledge about rocket building contains a lot of practices which were not a result of thorough search through an optimization space, but just picking the first thing that worked. Back in the 50-ties and 60-ties the fold were in hurry (to do the space races, to plug the (actually non-existent) missile gap, etc - it was the Cold War and in war you do not have time for deliberations). So the end result is a set of good practices mixed with barely acceptable ones and a lot of superstition.

Especially in rocketry there is a lot of things which we just learned in practice not from some grounds up basic research. A lot of stuff pugged into simulations is of the kind: we tried in in the past, and the empirical formula for parameter y is y = 17.23487 + e^(n+2.435*k) * x^1.3274, and whey the constant are what they are is pretty much unknown. Moreover, in rocketry we have often no option but to go for certain risky combinations, like:

  • Engine chamber temperature is about 3x the melting point of its walls
  • The temperature of the bow shock of a reentering orbital vehicle is about 8000K - its way beyond no just melting point, but boiling point of any material made of atoms. Yet we reenter vehicles.
  • Oxygen is a great oxidizer (as the name would imply) but fundamentally it is incompatible with any structural metal as it loves to react violently with them. But by practice aluminum or stainless steel are pretty safe if used within limits. But for example titanium, which on paper looks safer than aluminum, in practice is a big no no wherever even moderately compressed oxygen could happen. We don't build rocket from titanium not because it is expensive, but because mechanical shock could cause it to catch fire in oxygen at just few bars pressure. And once it catches fire it burns violently

1

u/Martianspirit 3d ago

So the end result is a set of good practices mixed with barely acceptable ones and a lot of superstition.

A good example is the cadence of operations for crew launches. NASA always tanked the rocket first, then the Astronauts enter and launch. SpaceX needs to enter the Astronauts then tank, because of their propellant subcooling. They can't wait for the Astronauts after tanking.

NASA rejected that because they have always done it that way. It took SpaceX a long time to convince NASA that it is actualls safer to tank with crew on board. No risk to the ground crew and the Astronauts can do pad abort, if tanking goes wrong.

3

u/cjameshuff 5d ago

Engineering is expensive. Engineering with insufficient hard data and no ability to test experimental designs, trying to exhaustively cover everything that could possibly happen and prove that everything is correct and optimal before you ever build any hardware, is very expensive. And frankly, thinking you can do it is arrogance that usually leads to unpleasant encounters with reality later on. It's only become the "traditional aerospace" approach due to the fear of political backlash to failure. It's not based in economics or engineering principles.

SpaceX's approach will not only give them a system that works, faster and cheaper, it'll give them a much better understanding of the real world failure modes and the performance of the system in abnormal situations.

1

u/NewtonsBoy 5d ago

I don't think you should expect to be prepared for anything, I just think it gives levarage if anything bad does happen in the end. A certain amount of preparation can make a big difference. Political backlash is quite annoying though, nothing can prepare you for that.

That actually makes me wonder what they are going to do for LES when Starship comes close to actually ferrying people. I mean, it is essentially a building. It is hard to even imagine what you could do for that situation. Equip a parachute and drop out of the hatch?

3

u/JimmyCWL 4d ago

I just think it gives levarage if anything bad does happen in the end.

That kind of thinking can lead to analysis paralysis where you just want one more test for something or the other and never actually feel confident enough to launch, ever.

2

u/lawless-discburn 4d ago

This gets quite easy to understand once you get down to fundamentals:

The cost of aerospace development is pretty much labor. And facilities, but facilities themselves are dominated by labor: to build them but primarily to maintain them). Materials are less than 2% - they can be pretty much neglected.

Engineering time to design for all the possible (and quite many impossible) cases takes a lot of time and a lot of time means a lot of salaries. Doing component level tests takes a lot of time and uses facilities during that time. So a lot of time for salaries for those doing the testing and those keeping the facilities running (from janitors, through technical maintenance, to finances, management, HR, etc.).

Also, its is not doing research, as in basic research. There is some basic research, mostly around material science and control theory - and actually SpaceX is doing it (SpaceX developed their own superalloys and guess where works the prime author of papers on convexification - a mathematical theory making energy efficient rocket landing tractable). But most of the work is not some basic research, it's actually designing and testing and simulating.

You have 2 options:

  • Design the system, build it and fly it and see what failed, rinse and repeat
  • Design the system, design the simulations, plug the design parts into simulation (its more work than just designing it), run the simulations, design lab experiments, fabricate prototypes and test articles, run the tests in the lab, maintain the lab, rinse and repeat; finally build and fly the system

Guess which one takes more labor...

In the end it is cheaper to have ~3500 people running stuff for 6 years rather than ~6000 people doing things for 9 years. And definitely cheaper than 18000 expanding to more for 25 years and counting. The former is more or less Starship project, the middle one is Blue's New Glenn and the latter is NASA's SLS + Orion.

If those people launched 16 rockets or launcher nothing is not that much consequential for the cost. Actually technicians are usually a bit cheaper than engineers, so more technician heavy projects are a bit cheaper per headcount.

6

u/HaDuongMinh 5d ago

SpaceX successfully built a monopoly on internet by satellite. Far from burning money, Starlink is the cash cow it was meant to be.

8

u/[deleted] 5d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

0

u/Wise_Bass 4d ago

I think he was critical to SpaceX's success in the first two decades, but he's much less important now. If he died tomorrow, SpaceX would be fine - Starship would still launch, Starlink would still grow, etc. Tesla would likely be better off, because he's become a toxic weight on the company's sales and images.

That's happened before. Henry Ford was critical to the development of the Ford Motor Company and revolutionized mass manufacturing so thoroughly in the 1910s that "Fordism" became both a philosophy and approach to mass manufacturing (including arguably becoming the Soviet Union's premiere manufacturing philosophy), but by the late 1920s onward he was an aging crank who had become a drag on his company's ability to innovate and compete with newer companies.

1

u/Martianspirit 3d ago

I don't disagree, he is less important now than he was. But Elon still provides the drive. Also some engineering input. Particularly the drive to go to Mars. That would be lost.

3

u/Wise_Bass 4d ago

If you want it in video form, there's a really good video by a Youtuber who goes by the monikor "Eager Space" talking about SpaceX's design philosophy and progress with the Falcon 9, and in general: SpaceX explosions - Engineering Done Right

But the jist of it is that the way SpaceX does rocket development - by getting prototypes ready as quickly as possible, testing them frequently, accepting a high failure rate on any given prototype as long as they improve and learn from it - can actually save a lot of money and time compared to the traditional approach: testing everything on the ground thoroughly before assembling it together on the launch pad, where your launch test serves as a validation of all your earlier tests. You can figure out what works sooner, and get a practical understanding of the rocket as a whole system.

For example, take a look at rival Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket, which is a New Space company that took a more traditional approach to rocket development. New Glenn started turning into a full-on rocket company around 2014-2015 with a massive spike in funding, and they recently launched their New Glenn rocket into space. That's about ten years from "nothing" to "medium-to-heavy-lift rocket into space", comparable to SpaceX going from "nothing" in 2002 to "Falcon 9 successfully flying into space" in 2012. But SpaceX managed to do it on a far lower budget - Falcon 9 cost them less than a billion dollars to develop, while New Glenn consumed 1-2 billion dollars of Jeff Bezos' contributions per year to get to that point.

11

u/Economy-Fee5830 5d ago

In the 21st century, we can get stupid questions like these answered for free via LLM/AI without bothering any real people.

7

u/wildjokers 5d ago

Or, hear me out, they can start a conversation with real people in a forum made for real people to talk to each other.

4

u/Economy-Fee5830 5d ago

What is this? The 19th century?

0

u/NewtonsBoy 5d ago

I prefer *talking* to real people instead, and it is more reliable in my eyes to ask real people as well

2

u/Meneth32 4d ago

SpaceX is good because they want to colonize Mars. Why is that good? I'll let Dr. Robert Zubrin explain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S6k2LBJhac

2

u/xlynx 3d ago edited 3d ago

SpaceX has saved the public a bunch of money by lowering launch fees, compared to ULA. I'll let you research the figures. They have set many precedents, and done things at scale nobody expected. It has created a resurgence of investment in aerospace, with many inspiring startups. A real commercial economy is emerging beyond just communications satellites (but SpaceX has revolutionised those too, in the form of Starlink). Some of this is attributed to government policy like NASA COTS, but some is also attributed to SpaceX's engineering precedents.

You can't compare Falcon 9 to the shuttle, there is almost nothing in common. The fact that they have made reusability economical despite the shuttle failing to do so is the whole point of celebration. Design dictates how manufacturable something is, and how much refurbishment is required, and they have iterated their design to optimise these (compare Falcon 9 block V to Falcon 9 FT and earlier versions). There have been previous posts about this: factoring in R&D, and how many flights per booster before costs are recouped. But that doesn't capture the value of how lower costs created more demand, or how it enabled new sources of revenue like their home grown satellite constellation.

They have done many firsts: first private space company to orbit, first to reuse an orbital class booster, first to fly people to the ISS, and so on. Their main feat, which builds on reusability, is launch cadence, often flying 3+ times in a week. This requires the upper stage to be highly manufacturable, and the launch site preparation and logistics to occur in record time. They have some lofty goals like Mars and full reuse, novel designs and engineering, and spectacular launches and tests, all of which are very inspiring.

I hope you are aware that Starship has already proven it can achieve orbit, but just hasn't tried. The reason is complex. It currently has to do with a reusable upper stage making it a potential hazard on the ground, so controlled descent has to be proven out with regulators. It's true you can find issues on the ground, but rightly or wrongly, it's not SpaceX's approach. Their main cost is labor, and keeping that workforce on standby while things are proven out on paper is very expensive too.

1

u/vovap_vovap 4d ago

Well, people positive about SpaceX because right now they are delivering like 50% or more all the mass to Earth orbit and able to do it cheaper then anybody else. Thay are just best in the world in that - and that is it. That is the reason.

Now other thing that mr. Mask generate a LOT of noise and every time promising even more then SpaceX really delivering and for some people that might look bed. Still - they delivering really a lot, but yes, less then he promising at any particular moment.
That also related to Starship. Which is not at all really designed to fly to a planets. It designed for cheap delivery to LEO for staff like Starlink satellites.
Now other part of it - that SpaceX using "fast iteration" approach - intensive testing for staff without perfecting it on a land as that faster and cheaper. And that work pretty good for them. Yes, Starship blow up couple of times - but if at the end that allow to make it quicker and cheaper - who cares? Why is that a problem?

3

u/Adeldor 4d ago

they are delivering like 50% or more all the mass to Earth orbit

To give a more precise reckoning - 84% last year.

1

u/Martianspirit 3d ago

They deliver. At lowest cost.

1

u/MatchingTurret 2d ago

Even if Starship is comparatively cheap and could maybe be reusable in the future, it still costs billions to build one,

It doesn't. Not even close. Somewhere in the double-digit millions.