First Shuttle orbited astronauts and successfully recovered all intended components. Every Saturn 5 was successful, the 3rd flight sent a crew to lunar orbit, and the 6th put a crew on the moon.
To date a Starship has yet to be recovered after flight - and those launched are effectively boilerplate as they have carried no cargo (other than a banana) and have none of the systems in place to support a crew.
Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure - but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land.
>Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure - but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land.
i guess you didn't follow the falcon 9 failures right? here's two minutes of failures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ
and guess what? they finally got it right and now falcon 9 is not only extremely reliable but quite cheap for everyone.
NASA (with the shuttle and saturn V) had a completely different idea on rocket development (and blue origin seems to follow their mindset), which is fine. but to say that this is "failure fetish" when spacex has an amazing track record is just hating for the sake of hating.
i would recommend, if you have the time, the book liftoff, by eric berger https://www.amazon.com/Liftoff-Desperate-Early-Launched-Spac... -- it was the book that opened my eyes to why spacex works like they do.
SpaceX’s track record is too fetishized by the Musk fanboys. Falcon 9 has some weird Demi god status even though the launch vehicle is no different than the competitor like Soyuz.
I might have missed it, but I’ve never seen a Soyuz booster fly twice, let alone 25 times.
Part of why it has "weird Demi god status" is that it is not only so reliable but also so cheap. Soyuz is not reusable. Falcon 9 is. That is why Falcon 9 is so celebrated. No other rocket company or state-sponsored space agency comes close to its track record of cheap, reliable, reusable rockets.
Soyuz? an expendable rocket with 40% less payload capacity? How is that a competitor to falcon 9? More like a competitor to rocketlab's current generation.
It's been so weird to see people say willfully ignorant shit just because they don't like Elon Musk.
"though the launch vehicle is no different than the competitor like Soyuz"
That is ... so obviously and blatantly untrue. That is like saying that an old wooden biplane from 1917 is not different from Boeing 777.
Apollo WAS an impressive achievement
Starship IS an impressive achievement while they speed up development process with real-world hard data
New Glenn IS an impressive achievement while taking their time to develop a vehicle that reached the orbit on first time
Per wiki on Apollo
> Landing humans on the Moon by the end of 1969 required the most sudden burst of technological creativity, and the largest commitment of resources ($25 billion; $182 billion in 2023 US dollars)[22] ever made by any nation in peacetime. At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities.[23]
Different budget, different number of people working on this stuff and different mindset. Actually the Apollo program was also iterative and it paid off.
The Apollo program was inventing all of this technology, and using only extremely rudimentary computers, still doing many calculations with slide rulers.
SpaceX has all of the Apollo program's work to build on, and computers that could do all the computing work that the Apollo program ever made, in total, in probably a few minutes.
SpaceX is inventing quite a lot, there's more areas where they started greenfield than where they got help.
They are inventing a little, but the basics of rocket flight are now well understood. You can get a university (probably post grad) course on it. And nothing that they are doing is all that revolutionary, definitely not compared to what Apollo did (going from airplanes and ballistic missiles to orbital space flight and then Moon missions).
Consider that even reusable self-landings boosters were being worked on in the 90s, before funding was cut off. And for expandable rockets, virtually all rockets designed and launched in the last few decades have successfully accomplished their first ever flight, launching some kind of payload to orbit.
- "And for expandable rockets, virtually all rockets designed and launched in the last few decades have successfully accomplished their first ever flight,"
That doesn't resonate as true to me.
The first Ariane 5 flight blew up [0]. That Europe's current heavy-lift workhorse with 112 successful launches (including JWST), but the first one blew up.
The first PSLV blew up [1]. That's India's current workhorse with 58 successes, but flight #1 was not successful. Their GSLV did not reach its correct orbit on its first flight either [2], though it didn't blow up.
The first Delta IV Heavy did not blow up, but it failed to reach its correct orbit [3]. That was US' largest launch vehicle for most of the 21st century.
The first Long March 5 failed to reach its correct orbit, and the second one blew up [4]. That's China's current heavy-lift launch vehicle, since 2016.
South Korea's first orbital rocket RUD'd both its first flights, in 2009 and 2010 [5].
Japan's newest orbital rocket was launched in 2023, and that blew up [6].
Rocket Labs' Electron has a current >90% success rate, but the first one blew up [7].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5#Launch_history
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PSLV_launches#Statisti...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_GSLV_launches#Statisti...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_IV_Heavy#Launch_history
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_5
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naro-1#Launch_history
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H3_(rocket)#Launch_history
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Lab_Electron#Launch_sta...
You're right that I exaggerated, sorry about that.
Still, many of these are more successful than Starship:
The first GSLV was still able to deploy a satellite, just in a lower orbit than intended.
The first Delta IV had the same problem, satellite deployed, but in a lower orbit than planned.
The first Long March 5 is classed as a full success on Wikipedia, I couldn't find info there about a failure (the second one did blow up).
The Rocket Labs' Electron did get destroyed. However it was later found that nothing at all was wrong with the vehicle, it was a failure in the ground software, and an identical vehicle successfully carried out its mission 7 months later.
In contrast, the first two Starships blew up completely due to engine issues, and no Starship has deployed even a test payload of some kind to orbit. In fact, until today, none even carried a payload of any kind, they have all been flying empty.
> Still, many of these are more successful than Starship:
Your definition of success doesn't leave room for anomalies. Your mindset seems to be "if you try and it's doesn't turn out perfectly, it's a failure" -- which results in spending tons of time and money iterating behind closed doors (or even worse, trying to model/calculate the whole thing without many test runs), and only unveiling the result when it's "perfect". This approach costs more time and money, and more embarrassment if/when the product fails in public. It also doesn't build a culture of learning a lot from anomalies.
Meanwhile, SpaceX doesn't care about iterating, testing, and failing in public. So they skip all the costly effort of trying too hard not to fail, setting expectations that they get it right the first time, and not learning as much from anomalies.
Anomalies, properly understood, are opportunities to learn and improve -- and never something to be ashamed of. The only true "failures" are to give up because it's too hard, to stop learning from the data that anomalies provide, or to never try in the first place because you're too afraid of anomalies.
- "The first Long March 5 is classed as a full success on Wikipedia, I couldn't find info there about a failure (the second one did blow up)."
The Wikipedia entry describes it as "suboptimal but workable initial orbit", which I interpret as a partial failure (coming from a military entity that's universally opaque about its failings). They're not inclined for language like "partial failure" that we get out of transparent countries—contrast that first Delta IV-H, which also reached a "workable" orbit—just not the intended one.
- "However it was later found that nothing at all was wrong with the vehicle, it was a failure in the ground software, and an identical vehicle successfully carried out its mission 7 months later."
Also true of the Ariane 5 explosion: that was a software bug (unhandled integer overflow) in the flight control unit. The important part isn't whether it's hardware or software, but whether they got it right or not, before launch.
Compare how much money each company spent before the first/second/etc flight. The ENTIRE program has so far cost less than one set of SLS engines - that they took from older rockets without changes.
They have explicitly and publicly chosen to rapidly iterate without spending billions to make sure the first try goes well - it's simply different culture. The first Starship wasn't even something you could actually call a rocket, it was a water tower with a bunch of rocket engines.
They wanted data about the engines and got them - mission 100% accomplished, that's not a failure in any way except for media shock value because "wow such boom". Come on, you call yourself an engineer? Do you not try your software or hardware before 100% completion? You don't have CI with integration and e2e tests? There's no other way to do this cheaply and quickly, you have to try.
Call me when any other company achieves what Falcon9 did, then we can discuss issues of SpaceX engineering culture and how others are better. But they are not, few test flights are not interesting, what's interesting is that they are 10 years ahead of everybody else and offer by far the cheapest and by orders of magnitude most reliable orbital lift service.
Others should stop waiting 10 years before the first flight and accept some risk, the world would be much better by now.
this doesn't even scratch the surface. Slow motion cameras and real time sensors for debugging hardware issues, computer simulations, 3d printing.
Apollo program directors would advocate to start a nuclear war with ussr if they could get hands on that kind of tech.
But also NASA landed two SUVs on mars first try, using skycrane, Full remote. they developed and built mars helicopter/drone (rip). First try. But spaceX gets the glory because... break things??
SpaceX is a boon to NASA. NASA does great work but as they are a government entity they move at a slower pace.
Apollo program was a major achievement, probably the largest in the history of humanity as of yet. But SpaceX definitely should get a credit for "breaking things", or for running agile dev cycle with hardware ("hardware heavy"). Let's just strap engines to a fuel tank and try to fly it. Let's just build a body by welding steel plates together and see what happens. Let's just launch this thing to 20 miles and see if we can make it aerobrake and land it with the engines. Iterate by learning and constantly improving. Nobody done it at that scale as of yet.
(Which of course is only possible if you have the Founding Father with a few billion $$ just laying around)
This seems like a fairly disingenuous comment.
SpaceX gets credit and rightly so because they have achieved things which no national space agency nor private company has ever done before, and done it faster and at a lower budget than anyone has done before.
Every other national space agency and private company had both infinitely more money, time, and engineers than SpaceX did (when founded) yet they were making zero progress on reusable rockets, cheap super heavy lift capacity to orbit, and America had no way of taking their own astronauts to the space station!
Musk (hate him or love him) founded a company from nothing which has exceeded the capabilities of nasa and the us government, the European space agency, and the russian space agency, as well as ULA, Boeing, Lockheed etc.
They have the first rocket ever made which can take payloads to orbit and then be reused. They have the most cost effective rocket ever made for taking loads to orbit. They have reused rockets up to 20 times! They have build the most powerful rocket ever built which is fully reusable. They have built the most efficient and powerful rocket engines ever built before. And they have done it all incredibly quickly starting from nothing.
Oh and they also built a massive internet constellation providing fast and cheap satellite internet to the whole world, saving countless lives and also helping stimulate economies across the world as well as enabling more remote work etc.
So much of what they have done was considered impossible or not economical or not practical or so difficult other countries or companies didn’t even TRY.
So yes. Given their success it’s worth trying to understand their development methodology, which is iterate fast and fail lots and learn lots. Given how much they’ve kicked the shit out of the SLS program in capability and budget and also how they’ve crushed Blue Origin (which started earlier with more budget) who both operate in a more old fashioned way, I would certainly say it’s important to acknowledge they may be doing something right!
The achievements you quote are highly overblown. SpaceX sells capacity to orbit somewhat cheaper than anyone else on the market, but not by some huge margin - half the cost or so, at best.
They also don't have any fully reusable rockets today, and Starship is still probably a year or more from being production-ready. It remains to be seen how reusable Starship will actually be, how long it will take to refurbish and get ready for spaceflight, and how many reentries it can actually take. And it still remains to be seen how much Starship will actually gain from being fully reusable, by the way - landing a rocket costs lots of extra fuel, so it's not a no-brainer that a fully reusable rocket would have a much better cost/kg-to-orbit than a non reusable one. Especially for anything higher than LEO, Starship can't actually carry enough fuel, so it depends on expensive additional launches to refuel in orbit - a maneoveur that will probably take another year or more to finalize, and that greatly increases the cost of a Starship mission beyond LEO.
Finally, Starlink is nice, but it's extremely expensive for most users outside very rich areas of the world, and has in no way had the impact you are claiming. Laying out cable internet is FAR cheaper than satellite internet can ever be, especially in rural areas, so beyond cases where cables and even wireless are completely impossible (ocean, war-torn areas), it doesn't and won't ever have any major impact. I'm also very curious where you got the idea that it "saved countless lives".
>Laying out cable internet is FAR cheaper than satellite internet can ever be, especially in rural areas
considering the US has earmarked hundred of millions of dollars to expand rural internet with nothing to show for it-- I don't know how true this is.
Feels weird to read such comments on HN.
10 years ago people were talking that landing rockets is impossible. Then whether they can be reused. Then whether there is any economical gain doing so.
As for starlink - they have explosive revenue growth. Alot of businesses want one. Planes, ships, trains, military, rural areas, they are actually profiting from the operations and not loosing money and I still have to read comments like that.
Btw ULA reasonable launch price of today is because of SpaceX competition
> ULA was awarded a DoD contract in December 2013 to provide 36 rocket cores for up to 28 launches. The award drew protest from SpaceX, which said the cost of ULA's launches were approximately US$460 million each and proposed a price of US$90 million to provide similar launches.[16] In response, Gass said ULA's average launch price was US$225 million, with future launches as low as US$100 million.
I suspect SpaceX margins are very high and they can fund the starship development. Margins/prices may change as BO reaches reusability.
> 10 years ago people were talking that landing rockets is impossible.
Maybe some. Others had been working on this in the 90s already. Not to mention Spaceshuttle, which achieved these milestones (with a vastly different design) in production.
> Then whether they can be reused. Then whether there is any economical gain doing so.
Reuse is currently partial. The economic advantages have largely failed to materialize, at least to the extent that they were promised.
> Btw ULA reasonable launch price of today is because of SpaceX competition
Why compare to ULA? Look at Ariane 6, or Soyuz-2 - they have similar numbers to Falcon 9. Falcon 9 is 22 800 kg to LEO for $70M. Ariane 6 is 21 500 kg to LEO for $115M. Soyuz-2 is 8600kg to LEO for $35-48M (so about $92-129M for a Falcon 9's worth of cargo). More expensive, but not by some huge margin.
> As for starlink - they have explosive revenue growth. Alot of businesses want one. Planes, ships, trains, military, rural areas, they are actually profiting from the operations and not loosing money and I still have to read comments like that.
This is a completely different take than the previous comment. Sure, it's successful in the developped world in certain industries. This is nothing like "saving countless lives" or "helping stimulate economies across the world", which is what I was responding to.
Your using how much they charge, not how much it costs... You seem to not understand any kind of sales strategy or atleast basic game theory here.
>More expensive, but not by some huge margin.
Obviously no matter what it costs them, they are going to price themselves slightly under the going rate to fill their launch manifest. Also, they get to CHARGE THIS ~20 TIMES PER VEHICLE.
Reuse is cheaper... the fact that you can even begin to contemplate that makes no sense. They lose the upstage with only one engine and they even recover the fairing. The combined cost for RP-1 and LOX is approximately $300,000–$500,000. Relative to total launch cost the fuel cost makes up a tiny fraction (~0.5–1%), which is about $67 million for a Falcon 9 commercial launch.
Also with your calculations you conveniently leave of the super heavy which has a ~$1,500KG per dolar with a ~$97 million price tag carrying ~63,800 kg. Which is a 1/10th of the cost of KG to LEO than their competitors.
The loss of the upper stage is around $10–15 million. This includes the engine, structure, and integration. So by saving that in starship and boosting the payload to 150k KG you get a KG/LEO of 10, where the next nearest competitor is the Proton-M by Khrunichev at 4300. Which puts them in a completely different league of the space shuttles Cost Per kg to LEO of $18,000 to $54,000.
> Your using how much they charge, not how much it costs... You seem to not understand any kind of sales strategy or atleast basic game theory here.
I'm using the only public information about this that we have. The Ariane 6 and Soyuz-2 numbers are also prices and not costs, by the way. We don't know how much Russia or the ESA actually spend per launch, we only know what they are asking others to pay for it.
> Also, they get to CHARGE THIS ~20 TIMES PER VEHICLE.
Don't forget refurbishment costs and fuel costs and R&D amortization.
> Also with your calculations you conveniently leave of the super heavy which has a ~$1,500KG per dolar with a ~$97 million price tag carrying ~63,800 kg. Which is a 1/10th of the cost of KG to LEO than their competitors.
You mean Falcon Heavy here (SuperHeavy is the first stage of Starship, it doesn't carry payload). I left Falcon Heavy out for two reasons.
First and most importantly, it is very rarely used in comparison to Falcon 9 (it was only flown twice in 2024, for example). SpaceX themselves are not using it for their Starlink sattelites, even though that should be the perfect use case for it.
Second, it was never flown with anything close to the nominal payload, at least according to Wikipedia. The highest payload ever flown was ~10k kg to GTO, where it's supposed to support up to 26 700 kg. Note also that the 63 800 kg figure is for an expendable Falcon Heavy - if you want to recover it, it's less than 50 000 kg. Also, the price per launch seems highly optimistic, given that launches in 2024 were actually $152M and $178M, each flying with ~5000 kg, giving a MUCH worse number than what we were looking at.
> The loss of the upper stage is around $10–15 million. This includes the engine, structure, and integration. So by saving that in starship and boosting the payload to 150k KG you get a KG/LEO of 10
These numbers are very likely pure fantasy. Starship development got $3B just from NASA, that you seem to not amortize in any way. If you just look at the costs of the actual rocket construction itself plus fuel, without R&D, the numbers go WAY down for many other rockets as well (including Falcon 9).
so, what your saying is that you admit SpaceX is a world class provider of launch services, but you don't like it cause it's not THAT much better than everything else?
I'm saying that SpaceX is a world-class provider of space launch services, and leads the market on virtually any metric, but they aren't, as some are claiming in this thread, orders(!) of magnitude cheaper than others in the business. I'm just trying to counter balance some of the narrative here that presents SpaceX like some savior almost sent from the future.
It's so convenient for you to live in an imaginary world where spaceX is deceiving everyone and hasn't really achieved anything and it's all just empty hype, right?
Half the cost is not "some huge margin"?!?
So, like, if you found a 50%-off sale on a car, you're telling me you wouldn't test drive it because it's not a very good deal?
What color is the sky in your world?
Given how little we know about the cost structures of any of these space launch systems, yes.
Consider that Russia was charging less per seat to the ISS in 2007, back when they ahd to compete with the Shuttle, then SpaceX is charging NASA today. And not a little less - almost half ($25M in 2007 dollars, $38M in today's dollars, vs SpaceX charging $55M today).
Does this mean that the Soyuz was much cheaper than Falcon 9? Probably not, it just means that there is so much margin on both sides that we can't estimate much.
> They have the first rocket ever made which can take payloads to orbit and then be reused.
The space shuttle did this over 40 years ago. You can argue SpaceX have the first economical one 40 years later, but the second stage isn't reusable. Once they get starship working they might have it.
Their finances aren't public but there is some stuff to go on where we can say Falcon is probably economical despite not recovering the second stage.
This TED talk from Gwynne Shotwell says they will have reuse of starship so dialed in that in 3 years (from now) they will be competitive with commercial airliners and be operating for consumers in production:
https://www.ted.com/talks/gwynne_shotwell_spacex_s_plan_to_f...
To be safe enough for that I would have expected thousands of flawless flights by now. They said in 2020 it was still on track for 2028 but the Dear Moon project was canceled since that last update.
The space shuttle lol?
Are you not considering the fact that the huge external tank and the two SRBs were destroyed every time? Not to mention the insane costs of refurbishing each space shuttle, not the mention the insanely bad safety of the shuttle and the 14 astronauts who died in it!
Space shuttle, while cool, was really, really bad design, bad safety, and totally uneconomical. It was definitely cooler than Soyuz, but Soyuz was cheaper and more safe.
There's a reason the US abandoned space shuttle and had to beg the Russians to use Soyuz to send their astronauts to the space station.
The Shuttle program only failed to recover 4 SRB's out of 270 launched - and 2 of those were on Challenger.
Why should we care what you think if you can't get something that basic right?
Recovering parts that landed in the literal salty ocean and need massive refurbishment to work again isn't really reusable in the same way that Falcon is though really is it? Trying to compare the two is honestly disingenuous.
Calling Space Shuttle to what SpaceX have done really is like comparing chalk and cheese.
Space shuttle cost (inflation adjusted) about 700M per launch(!!). Compared to Falcon 9 (10-20M). Superheavy and starship will start costing maybe 100M and rapidly decrease to maybe 10-20M also, but with more than double the carrying capacity of shuttle as well as in generally being far more capable.
The SRBs could land in the ocean with parachutes and be recovered and refurbished. Shuttle wasn't economical as I mentioned, and definitely the space shuttle wasn't safe.
What you claimed was: "They have the first rocket ever made which can take payloads to orbit and then be reused." That was known as the space shuttle.
The ~$40 million tank was expendable so you are right it wasn't full reuse either. Starship jettisons parts too, I believe the hot staging ring? And the Falcon series throws away the whole upper stage.
Space Shuttle isn't a "rocket" like Falcon 9 is though, it couldnt go to space by itself. So saying its the first reusable rocket is really stretching credibility.
Falson 9 is a one piece rocket, as is Superheavy.
The Space Shuttle got to space with the help of other rockets, tank etc.
And all those other parts were recovered after most flights and re-used after refurbishment on future flights. Since there's no other name than "Space Shuttle" for the whole rocket, it will do. Note that Starhsip is also ambiguous, as it refers both to the entire two stage rocket, but also just stage 2.
> SpaceX gets credit and rightly so because they have achieved things which no national space agency nor private company has ever done before
Such as?
Maybe this will help you see it: https://x.com/dpoddolphinpro/status/1874191808751972447
The whole world combined VS SpaceX has less mass to orbit.
Either whole nations are not interested in that much mass to orbit or they don't have the capability. Or financial means/incentive to compete against that commercial entity.
But they do and at least in China they start to work on reusable rockets and ULA is for sale because they don't have one.
I guess that's an 'achievement'?
What would you consider an achievement then? The point of a rocket is to deliver mass to space.
Nobody credits boeing with a achievement of caring most people in planes. We credit Wright brother with creating first airplane.
Cargo rockets is to elo is an old tech, a participation award for you and your convincing arguments (you and you ilk - producing numerous 'achievements' called 'etc. etc.').
Landing boosters, reducing costs etc etc
Is that it? Landing boosters is not saving money as of now. Because a rocket engine is not a rental bike.
Hmmm I wonder if there was a tech that recovered a spacecraft and tried to reuse it to cut costs... hmmm... no, nothing comes to mind
Also SpaceX is charging Nasa more than russians did when they had monopoly over space flights.
Landing boosters saves money and helps with cadence.
SpaceX is charging NASA less. Even Boeing is charging NASA less than Russia.
> But also NASA landed two SUVs on mars first try, using skycrane, Full remote. they developed and built mars helicopter/drone (rip). First try. But spaceX gets the glory because... break things??
NASA lost a good number of probes in the process of getting the expertise to do that.
And likely quite a few test devices in building out the skycrane.
citation needed
You cant be making shit up and equating a test to blowing up 7 rockets
wtf does that have to do with Curiosity program? All of these are 2+ decades old.
Besides, you make it as if SpaceX couldn't learn from nasa mistakes, not to mention core team of SpaceX are ex-nasa already.
what kind of elon musk logic is that?
> wtf does that have to do with Curiosity program? All of these are 2+ decades old.
That’s 20 years of learning how to design and land things on mars. They wouldn’t have been able to build Curiosity without the past experiences. The Curiosity program itself started in 2002, just a couple years after the missions above.
What people say is that knowledge in the field is extremely hard to transfer, and easily lost. As an example, apparently we are completely unable to rebuild the Space Shuttle and Saturn rocket, even though technology is vastly more advanced today. Each vehicle really is a “program” including all its people and supply chain. This is also something SpaceX is trying to change by building actual production lines for their engines and bodies, not one-off builds.
> What people say is that knowledge in the field is extremely hard to transfer, and easily lost.
So you are saying that Curiosity team had probably not learned anything from those 20 years old programs?
You are literally strengthening my point...
No, that’s about “SpaceX learning from NASA’s past mistakes”. You also don’t seem to get the point that they were 2-year old programs when Curiosity started, so I’ll just leave it here.
SpaceX getting credit for innovating in their own way doesn't mean NASA doesn't get credit for all the great things it has done.
> Every Saturn 5 was successful
Do you not count the Saturn 1B rocket capsule that caught on fire on the pad and burnt the Apollo 1 astronauts alive?
What about Apollo 13?
> but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land
The "promise land" in this analogy is visible past the desert. What's not known is what route to get there.
In your tortured analogy, the people who "are really fetishizing iterative failure" are not doing that; they're fetishizing the fact that the person walking through this desert is trying, and if they hit a barrier, they iterate and try again until they reach the promise land. Along the way they are accomplishing what was once thought to be impossible.
The command module fire had zero to do with the Saturn V. Apollo 13 again was the command and service module, and in that case the crew was "returned safely to the Earth".
Congratulations for neatly excluding Apollo 1, Columbia and Challenger's crews, may their memories rest heavy on your conscience.
Your supposed excellent programs killed people.
NASA put people on the first flight of the shuttle to space, which turned out after the fact to have 1 in 12 chance of killing the crew. Can't do that in 2025.
You have to look past "failures" and rather look at development time. SpaceX has a radically different approach to development, more alike to software. While somewhat wasteful with regards to material, it seems to be working rather well. Also f*k Elon.
Apollo 6 (2nd Satun V launch) was "less than nominal" and warranted a congressional hearing. It did succeed, but luck played a part. George Mueller declared later that Apollo 6 was a failure for NASA.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080120112115/http://www.hq.nas...
https://web.archive.org/web/20080227133401/http://www.hq.nas...
>Every Saturn 5 was successful
>Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure
Subassemblies that made up Saturn V went through several hundred (inflation adjusted) billion dollars' worth of iterative failure before the Apollo program was announced.
The only reason it WAS announced was all of the iterative failure that had been paying off.
The day JFK uttered "shall go to the moon in this deck-aid", the F-1 engine had already been exploding and failing for three years.
My memory is hazy, from a brown bag I went to at work 15 years ago, but they blew up around 50 F-1s before one worked right.
And while the Saturn isn't an upgraded Jupiter it is EXTREMELY closely related to Jupiter and Jupiter had a shit-ton of failures before they got it right, turned around, and used all of that knowledge to build Saturn.
The shuttle programme was signed off in 1972, had it's first flight in 1977, and it's first crewed flight in 1981. Starship has been going for 5 years (albeit on the back of lots of other SpaceX work.) It's getting to orbit in the same time that Shuttle took to 'fly' on the back of a 747. A few lost ships is a pretty small price to pay for going twice as fast on delivery.
It’s pretty weird to get any engineering thing right on the first test, no? The entire development strategy would have to be based around that goal. I think the standard engineering strategy would be to test early and often.
I hadn’t thought about it before, but, especially during the Cold War, the US government had a big incentive to appear infallible that SpaceX doesn’t have. Are we sure there weren’t more tests in secret? USG also has access to huge tracts of land that is off limits, and rocket tests are easily ‘national security issue’ enough to justify being conducted in secret. Just a thought.
So what does a rocket company need to do to be imrpessive in your eyes?
A Mars cargo mission, according to the timeline spacex set for themselves. https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-F2HFqsVkiZc/YT9bPpXSKDI/AAAAAAAAG...
A lot of people have been shitting on SLS for being too expensive over the last 5 years, but it's worth noting that the Artemis program has been completely fucked due to SpaceX massively missing its milestones on Starship. So many people believe that Elon Musk is going to bring humanity back to the Moon, but he is largely the reason that humanity is not back on the moon already.
The GAO put out a report on this a few months ago, pointing out the failures of SpaceX here (including massive cost overruns) much more than the supposed cost overruns of SLS. Incidentally, after this GAO report came out, Elon Musk became very interested in being in charge of managing "government waste."
This is a very partial telling of the current situation.
Orion is delayed due to a heat shield issue: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis/nasa-identifies-cause-...
The first SLS launch was six years behind and massively over budget.
Lunar Gateway is almost certainly getting delayed.
None of these programs rely on SpaceX in any way thus far.
There was no heat shield issue, it was investigated and the resolved: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/artemis/nasa-delays-...
There is an issue with another dependency for Artemis 2 and 3, though - Starship is nowhere near where it needs to be.
"There was no heat shield issue" and "it was investigated and resolved" cannot both be true. There was a heat shield issue; they investigated for two years, and it has caused a delay.
Artemis II has no Starship dependency. It's entirely SLS/Orion.
Your own article agrees with me:
> Artemis 2 likely would've been delayed by a year or so, to late 2026, had a heat-shield replacement been required, NASA officials said today. But the mission team still needs more time than originally envisioned to get Orion up to crew-carrying speed, explaining the roughly six-month push.
> "The heat shield was installed in June 2023, and the root cause investigation took place in parallel to other assembly and testing activities to preserve as much schedule as possible."
Complete nonsense. There are many issues with Artemis timeline.
And of course its completely ridiculous to blame a program that received 2 billion $ and only really started a few years ago, vs things like SLS Orion that have been going for decades and absorbed 50 billion $.
Maybe match some achievements from 60 years ago, like having a rocket that can put someone on the moon, back when the largest supercomputer in the space program had less FLOPS than my watch.
Decreasing price of a launch by multiple orders of magnitude and increased cadence is also an achievement that hasn't been achieved previously.
Increased launch cadence is an operational achievement, not an engineering one.
And I'm not so sure that they actually decreased price to launch all that much. First of all, it's definitely not "several orders of magnitude", the best numbers quoted are maybe half price or so for a Falcon 9 compared to another contemporary rocket. And by my understanding, the US government at least is paying about as much for Falcon 9 as it was for a Soyuz to bring an astronaut to the ISS, at least.
NASA pays both Boeing and SpaceX less than Soyuz was.
According to this [0] article from Business Insider, from 2006 to 2019, per seat costs for NASA from Russia rose from less than $25M ($38M inflation adjusted) to around $81M ($101M inflation adjusted). The cost per seat in 2012, the year after the USA lost crewed space launch capability entirely, was ~$55M ($75M inflation adjusted). According to this [1] article from Reuters, NASA is currently paying Boeing $90M, and SpaceX $55M per seat.
So, NASA today is paying Boeing more than the monopoly prices Russia charged (up to 2016 or so), and paying both of them more than Russia was charging back when they were competing with the Space Shuttle. And it's paying SpaceX about half of the top price it payed Russia per seat, still nowhere close to an order of magnitude in cost savings.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/astronaut-cost-per-soyuz-sea...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/science/boeing-sending-first-astrona...
Less than Soyuz charged them. Soyuz was a very cheap platform to the Russians, but they also understood when they had their customers over a barrel.
I was comparing to the achievements of 60 years ago when they put people on the moon :) They are working towards that in a sustainable manner.
> ...operational achievement, not an engineering one.
How would I distinquish between the two, esp wrt rocketry?
An operational achievement means excellence in building the same vehicle over and over, to the right tolerances, and operating it the same way every time, without fing anything up.
An engineering achievement means excellence in designing a new vehicle, or updating an existing one, or inventing a new procedure, and finding the right tolerances that allow that to be replicated over and over without excess cost.
Aha.
So using some wholly new process, like the continuous innovation involved in casting large parts, how would I separate ops and engr?
Forgive my ignorance. I'm just wondering how Ford's quality circles, or the Toyota Production System would work if ops and engr were treated aa separate silos.
Since we're kibitzing about rockets, I suppose the example above could have been ramping up production of Raptor engines to 1 per day (IIRC), while improving performance and reducing costs. If I wanted to emulate that process, using your methodology, where would I start?
That's a 60billion government program I guess to match the program you need to match that as well, starship is doing what it's doing at a tenth of a cost so far.
Go to the moon, land a rover, wander about, come back with everyone alive... should be easy right?, I mean, it's already been done... RIGHT????
We'll have to get to parity with what we were doing 50-60 years ago.
The reusability is awesome, of course. More of that!
And also, still gotta get the basics right. Oxygen/fuel leaks aren't a great look (spoken as a not rocket scientist).
I will say, though, that booster catch is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.
> Every Saturn 5 was successful
On the other hand every Russian N1 wasn’t.
Rocketry is hard. It’s seems proven that if you’re a government space agency it’s even harder.
> To date, no Starship has been recovered after flight.
This is irrelevant, as none of the flights included any plans to recover the Starship. The objective for each flight has been to dump the vehicle in the sea at the target zone.
As others have pointed out: Compare the budgets.
That “first success” was actually on the back of a long series of related rockets with technology and engines inherited from a huge missile program. Those NASA eggheads didn’t start from zero on a shoestring budget and make things work on the first try! The Saturn V was just a stretched version of the Saturn series of rockets. These all cost hundreds of billions in today’s money to develop!
Second, they’re not “the same thing”. A single-use piece of technology has very different design constraints and engineering considerations as a reusable piece of technology.
A single-use weapon is a bomb. A reusable weapon is a sword. Just because you can shove a fuse into some explosives doesn’t mean you can forge a sword that won’t shatter on first use.
An equivalent example from space technology are explosive bolts. NASA uses them extensively, SpaceX never does… because they’re not reusable and not up-front testable. They’re expensive too. So instead they iterated (and iterated!) on vacuum-rated actuators that can serve the same role. This is a non-trivial exercise that resulted in a few RUDs. This is why NASA didn’t even try! It’s harder and not needed if reusability was a non-goal.
I think wandering in the desert is done because there is a promised land. Yes, it doesn't mean that it exists.
But if you don't wander, you'll never find out. You gotta believe
> First Shuttle orbited astronauts and successfully recovered all intended components.
There were 16 taxi and flight tests with Enterprise before the launch in 1981 (Approach and Landing Tests - Enterprise) where the first 8 were uncrewed. Just saying there were prior test flights using it.
There was something like 4 years of testing before the proper launch.
