I disagree. If Starship fails, the most likely reason will be technological. Either they can never get the heat shield to be reliable, or they can't get cost down below Falcon 9 (meaning, refurbishment costs are too high).

And if it fails, who will spend billions on a new vehicle?

Stoke Space: They are working on Nova, which is designed for 2nd-stage re-use, and they've got a novel architecture. But they are not well-funded and if Starship fails, it is likely that investor sentiment will shift away from full reusability (you know how investors are). And even if they succeed, their current vehicle can only get 3 tons to orbit. That means each launch must cost less than $1 million to get to the $300/kg target. In contrast, Starship can loft 100 tons, so it can cost up to $30 million per launch and still hit the target.

Blue Origin: They are still working on 1st stage re-use, and even assuming they get that to work next year, they are at least a decade away from testing 2nd stage re-use. And their current designs don't have any of the cost-savings in Starship (like launch-tower catch).

And that's it! There are no other companies seriously working on 2nd-stage reuse.

If Starship fails, there will not be another contender for cheap flights to orbit for decades.

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m4rtink 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

AFAIK there is a bunch of Chinese startups pitching some fully reusable designs and/or ready to clone something that works. There is already some Falcon 9 like first stage reusable booster prototypes in development.

	▲	GMoromisato 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe. There are a few trying 1st-stage reuse. I don't know of anyone actually working on 2nd-stage (beyond concept stage).

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jjk166 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Either they can never get the heat shield to be reliable, or they can't get cost down below Falcon 9 (meaning, refurbishment costs are too high).

There are a lot of other potential technological problems (dozens of engines, stainless steel construction, the belly flop maneuver, etc). Ultimately if Starship would were to fail for technical reasons, it would only indicate the particulars of Starship's implementation don't work. Starship is not the only (or even in my opinion the best) way to achieve full reusability. And partial reusability, which just a few years ago was considered radical, has already been so firmly proven that just about everyone is doing, or trying to do it. The idea of "don't destroy this extremely expensive vehicle after only a single use" won't die for as long as people can see expenses on their books.

If anything, the alternative approach, making a low cost, mass producible rocket has been abandoned, possibly pre-maturely.

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GMoromisato 5 days ago | parent [-]

Rocket Lab tried the alternative: low-cost, mass-produced expendable rockets, and Peter Beck famously ate his hat when they pivoted to reusable.

Partial reusability won't get the cost down to the ~$100/kg range. And it definitely won't do that and still loft ~100 tons to orbit.

Falcon 9 can get 15 tons to LEO for $45 million, and that's already the lowest price on the market. To hit $300/kg they would need to build a 2nd-stage, launch, recover (on a drone-ship) and refurbish for $4.5 million. That's just not going to happen.

There are only two companies that are actively building hardware for 2nd-stage reusability: Blue Origin (which doesn't even have a prototype yet) and Stoke (which has a max 3-ton payload). If Starship fails, we are not getting $300/kg orbital costs for 1-2 decades minimum.

I agree that Starship has lots of other potential technological blockers (although fewer each attempt--I never thought tower-catch would work the first time). But no other designs are even close to fulfilling the promise of low-cost orbital launch.

	▲	jjk166 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Partial reusability won't get the cost down to the ~$100/kg range. I don't see why $100/kg is a particularly important threshold. > Falcon 9 can get 15 tons to LEO for $45 million, and that's already the lowest price on the market. To hit $300/kg they would need to build a 2nd-stage, launch, recover (on a drone-ship) and refurbish for $4.5 million. That's just not going to happen. Falcon 9 reusable is 20 tons to LEO, and the cost SpaceX charges is what customers are willing to pay, not their costs incurred. Before they had reusability, the cost to make a complete, expendable falcon 9 rocket was $50 million. The marginal launch cost for a falcon 9 was approximately ~$15 million in 2020 when they were doing 20% of the launches they're doing now. They are very likely already below $500/kg. Remember this is a system that wasn't initially designed with any level of reusability in mind. A more optimized design that shifted more of the cost to the booster and which was produced at the appropriate scale would almost certainly see a further lower cost. Falcon 9 boosters can fly back to an onshore landing pad, and Starship has already demonstrated landing back on the launch tower itself. > If Starship fails, we are not getting $300/kg orbital costs for 1-2 decades minimum. That's a substantially shifted goalpost. Even if starship succeeds we're still probably more than a decade out from $300/kg orbital costs being a reality. Rockets take a long time to develop, and longer still to mature. SpaceX has been working on Starship for over a decade already. Of course if we assume every rocket currently under development gets cancelled and something new needs to be started from scratch, it will take at least one full rocket development cycle time to bear fruit. But OP was worried that if Starship fails it will cause a loss of faith such that no one even starts working on another attempt for decades.