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Definitely not a good look and Elon isn't even apologizing
Definitely not a good look and Elon isn't even apologizing
NASA & World Space Exploration...News, Views, Photos & videos
- Thread starter bd popeye
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I feel like we are going to see a period of review over this. This is different from the other failures which were generally localized to the launch site or landing site.
Maybe SpaceX will move away from Starship after this failure and go for a more traditional upper stage layout? It seems like the booster section is reliable and performing well. I don't know why you need this crazy complex upper stage instead of a more traditional design. I think a more traditional design would likely allow a greater lift capacity to LEO along with probably better prospects for a lunar mission.
I have never understood the obsession with a manned mission to Mars without first perfecting Lunar operations. I think SpaceX should have built a LEO / Lunar focused super rocket first, then transitioned to some sort of Mars vehicle. I think the next phase is going to be increasingly more capable upper stages, particularly nuclear, which will allow for greater time on station along with maneuverability.
They better not review for too long. Artemis III is on for 2027, or else the US ain't getting boots on lunar this side of 2030.
I don't think SpaceX will reconsider their choice. He is like "I do it my way, or I don't do it at all." And reason below.
Actually Starship isn't much more radical from the Shuttle. They only differ in vertical landing instead of horizontal landing and the accompanied smaller range of manuver. Their core objective is fully reusable, especially the more challenging reusable orbital stage. The starship is essentially shuttle removing the wings and landing gears. A small difference is the staging where starship has a bigger tank and acts as a full 2nd stage and payload structure, while shuttle's main engines act as 2nd stage and uses OMS to go from suborbit like a partial 2nd stage. From this view, Starship is just continuing NASA's footstep since the 1980s, although NASA moved to conventional approach, the idea continued. So I guess the idea is quite popular in US space industry, not just Elon Musk.
For the lunar mission reaching moon before China, it is too late to change anything.
Yes, I agree with you that a more traditional approach is more reliable and quicker in principle and in China's case, but SLS proves opposite in the US.
It seems that US including SpaceX have been over ambitious in their objectives and planning. What you suggested is exactly what China has been doing. However, if US followed your suggestion, they will be at best doing something equal to China, that is not acceptable as Obama once put it.
Overall, I predict US will push even harder on the current approach/solution even if that means higher risk. They will only backdown if the risk is too high even for them to accept, this means accepting defeat in moon race. In short, they have gone too far to turn around.
I think the worst nightmare scenario that NASA should strive to avoid is the prospect of astronauts stranded on the moon because the Starship toppled over or the engines fail to reignite to lift back off the surface. The more they rush, the less time they have to prepare for contingencies. Also, the SpaceX methodology, that is to do adopt an agile approach to development, doesn't provide much comfort when you are quarter of a million miles from Earth.
There is massive sunk cost associated with acquiring tooling and infrastructure for their current design: 9m diameter (10+ is better for all sorts of reasons), that unorthodox upper stage, among other things.
Best to just press on. I think eventually the vehicle will work.
Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander acts as bit of a hedge. It is a more conventional design but still uses unproven orbital refueling of cryo fuels.
Elon doesn't really care about the Starship HLS contract. Worst comes to worst he gets a slap on the wrist for failing a government contract. The vehicle is clearly built as a Starlink deployer, it's not efficient for Artemis.
He's also trying to influence the new Admin to make drastic changes to Artemis
Turks & Caicos is a British Overseas Territory. This means war, Mr. Musk!
Visually steel and aluminum don't look that different, but if you run the numbers through rocket equation, especially for the upper stage, you'll get a better appreciation of just big a difference 3.3x higher specific strength of 7075 aluminum makes.
You're right they've sunk too much into this design to go back, but the fact that v2 needed to increase upper stage fuel by 25% at expense of payload bay volume (as opposed to stretch which adds more steel), and still can only manage 20 tons suborbital on v1 booster, already demonstrated they're dealing with a set of predictable problems they really don't want to talk about.
Also keep in mind you can't just stack more and more mass without increasing diameter or change fuel, at some point you'll reach the physics limit of engine chamber pressure with a given fuel chemistry. Right now they're basically betting everything on Raptor 3 and Starship v3, and even then I would not be surprised if final performance is not much different than Long March 10, and achieved after Long March 10
As for Blue Orgin, New Glen is a properly engineered rocket, certainly better than Starship, but its LEO lift is half of LM10, and it's GTO / TLI performance is actually lower than LM5, i.e. it wouldn't even be able to launch Chang'e 5 at 8,200 kg to TLI... Yeah they're betting on in-orbit fuel depot too, but counting on it to pull off manned lunar mission is asking a lot.
Now keep in mind China's lunar mission only needs 2x LM10 launches, while every American mission needs at least 5 launches if not close to 20 (if v3 works) for Starship. Right now they're still telling themselves they're ahead because China doesn't say much, but at some point they'll realize they won't make it, then the funding and planning enviroment will become a lot different.
Musk Tweeting they should just go to Mars first could be the begining of that mental shift.
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