Are you fking serious?
Starship's 9m diameter fairing is the largest in the world by far. It is better at delivering oversized or exceptionally large payload than any rocket developed to date. And so what if payloads are forced to adapt to its design when a fully reusable Starship has two orders of magnitude lower cost per kg to orbit? (And as if payload today are not already forced to be adapted to much less capable launch vehicles.) Currently, SpaceX delivers >90% of all payloads to orbit. Whatever SpaceX does IS THE SPACE LAUNCH INDUSTRY STANDARD.
View attachment 163241Dismissing Starship and SpaceX is like Jai Hinds dismissing J-20. Stop this cringe nonsense.
You are fundamentally ignorant of the technology. Starship’s payload bay is an enclosed design (and what you call a fairing is actually the internal volume of the spacecraft itself). The larger the volume, the more constrained the payload deployment is, as this is limited by the dimensions of the payload bay door.
The real problem with Starship right now is that this storage space is integrated with and inseparable from the second stage. For any payload to be deployed, it must exit through a door. Considering the need for reusability, the current design for the door has a maximum area of approximately 8x6 meters or 8x7 meters. An 8-meter height is roughly the minimum length required to deploy a heavy geosynchronous satellite (which are >6m long).
Furthermore, as a heavy-lift launch vehicle, Starship’s payload bay volume is actually the smallest in its class.
The SLS Block 2 (130t to LEO) has a payload bay volume of 1,800 m³.
The CZ-9 (150t to LEO) is projected to have a payload bay volume of 2,100-2,400 m³, and could even reach 2,800-3,000 m³ for LEO missions.
Let me also tell you this: even the improved Starship, the original v3 version with a height of over 150 meters, would only have a payload bay volume of 1,200-1,400 m³. The latest v4, with a height of only 142 meters, will likely have a volume of just 1,100-1,200 m³. Other variants have even smaller payload bays than the v1/v2 versions.
In my eyes, Starship is essentially the worst heavy-lift rocket design ever conceived. You don’t understand the requirements of rocket design, which is why you can’t see that Starship is a deformed piece of junk with grotesquely imbalanced metrics. But most of the professionals in China and the U.S. who truly understand aerospace design get it. It’s just that these experts are routinely attacked (by Musk’s fans who use Falcon 9 as a weapon), so they mostly keep quiet now.
If you truly understood spacecraft, you would know that a good design is a synthesis of multiple parameters. Starship only excels in one metric: one-time payload capacity. It also has a good metric for reusability (low cost). All other spacecraft metrics are abysmal to an absurd degree. For example, if there were a metric for payload deployment capability, all currently visible versions of Starship are inferior to Falcon 9. And that is frankly ridiculous.
This is why I say it’s a specialized-purpose rocket, not a general-purpose one. You clearly don’t understand the problems China encountered with the CZ-2/CZ-3 series, where adapting one type of rocket for one class of payload was incredibly inefficient. Just look at Starship now: isn’t it a case where one class of payload requires a specific variant of the rocket?
If you still don’t understand this, I don’t care to elaborate further. I’ll just say that Western de-industrialization has gone on for so long that you’ve forgotten how to evaluate engineering and assess risk. Meanwhile, those of us in China can only chuckle to ourselves while reading the Chinese translations of various Western textbooks from the industrial peak of the 1960s-90s that fill our libraries.
