▲ | grapesodaaaaa 5 days ago | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
My personal estimates are similar. For anyone that followed Falcon 9 development (from the first Falcon 1 launches), it’s really similar. I remember boom after boom until one day they cracked the problem and reusable boosters became the status quo. I got tingles when the first booster landed on the drone ship, because I knew access to space had just changed in a fundamental way. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
▲ | jmyeet 5 days ago | parent [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Comparing Falcon 9 to Starship is a dangerous mistake. First, the time frames are way off. Development of the Falcon 9 took ~5 years (2005 to 2010). The first reused booster came much later (2017?). Second, Starship is much more expensive for each launch attempt than Falcon 9 ever was. Third, Starship is significantly more complicated technology-wise, being methane based. There are reasons to do this but it then requires cooling both propellants (instead of just liquid oxygen and RP-1 ie kerosene with the Falcon 9(. Fourth, Starship has to compete with somethingg Falcon 9 never did: Falcon 9. Falcon 9 is now the most succcessful and cheapest launch platform in history. It is the reliable workhorse of the industry and relatively cheap to launch. Its reuse is proven. Fifth, the market for Starship is unproven. We can compare it to other launch systems for heavy payloads, most notably the Falcon Heavy, which I believe has only had ~12 launches in almost a decade (compared to the 100+ Falcon 9 launches every year). You could argue SpaceX will steer customers to Starship but there'll be other competitors (to the Falcon 9) by then. Lastly, Starship is still so far from being human-rated. So much of the needed tech (eg refuelling in orbit) hasn't even begun testing yet. I can easily see this taking another decade at least. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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