> I don't really see a reason to believe that Starship will ever achieve the goals that were declared for it.

If you consider declared goals for Starship to be too hard (I assume not impossible), what aspect makes them that hard?

And since we talk about the Moon here, not stated goals of using Starships for Mars flights - what part of the Starship design makes it hard to believe that Starships may in next few years be regularly used for flights to the Moon?

I'm curious what it is which makes it so hard to believe.

▲

coderjames an hour ago | parent | next [-]

For me its the commodities.

I grant that SpaceX engineers are smart people and can figure out how to make Starship and Superheavy reliable and reusable.

But if they have to launch 10-14 times in order to get the propellant to the LEO depot in order to fuel the Lunar Starship, can we actually deliver that many launches worth of LOX and LNG to the launch pads in the timeframe needed to prevent it all from boiling off once in orbit before Lunar Starship can get there, get refueled and head to the moon? I don't know the answer to that, and to me that seems like the hard problem.

▲

cjtrowbridge an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

All of SapaceX rockets waste close to half their payload capacity on extra fuel for landing, extra equipment for landing, and they still have a 100% failure rate on every super-heavy launch they've ever attempted. SpaceX has blown up more rockets in the last year than NASA has in its entire history. NASA's super heavy rockets have been working successfully since 1967. NASA did build the first single-stage-to-orbit rockets that also successfully landed, but it immediately realized that was a huge waste of resources. Instead, they put parachutes on rockets and then refurbished them instead. So NASA gets double the payload capacity for free. The boosters currently strapped to the SLS that's about to go to the Moon are the same ones that previously took space shuttles to orbit in the 90s. NASA has been to the Moon and Mars; SpaceX has never made it to either, and just last week Elon said they've officially given up on going to Mars, and they're hoping to make it to Moon in another decade instead. NASA is going next month. SpaceX is just vaporware being run by a drug addict whose only goal is to sell it to the public markets before the house of cards comes down.

	▲	platybubsy an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It would be great to have some actual numbers. How did reuse work out for Falcon 9? How much does the reused boosters for SLS cost? What's the cost and performance of an expendable Starship vs SLS?
	▲	allenrb 12 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Wow, you have absolutely and shockingly little knowledge about any of this, do you? I’m disgusted with Musk and can still see that SpaceX is the best thing going right now. Why do Starship launches explode? Because SpaceX is pushing the envelope in multiple directions at once. Why is SLS “reliable”? Because it’s doing absolutely nothing new whatsoever, and doing it at an appalling cost in dollars and time.
	▲	mavhc 41 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Going to Mars takes about the same delta-v as the moon. SpaceX launches 80% of the world's mass to orbit, they probably know what they're doing. Starship is an extremely hard problem, and their aim is to reduce cost of getting mass to orbit by another 10x after Falcon 9 did the same. Falcon 9 needs about 4% of fuel to land on a ship, 14% to return to launchpad Why would you say they've had 100% failure rate? What did you think the reason was to launch and how did it fail?