It worked for them for a long time, until it didn't with Starship.
> ... the entire project is optimised to fleece as much money from the US taxpayer as possible, and as such, that is all it will ever do.
But it is already failing now, Musk has apparently many years to live, so how could he hope to escape accountability? OTOH, if the locus of the fleecing is actually a cabal of highly-paid but unknown managers within SpaceX, they would have reason to keep the cash flowing as long as possible.
> Well, developing a Starship like this would expose that making a fully reusable rocket with even a barely usable payload to space is impossible. Musk knows this: Falcon 9 was initially meant to be fully reusable until he discovered that the useful payload would be zero. That was his iterative design telling him Starship was impossible over a decade ago, as just making the rocket larger won’t solve this!
The author clearly isn't very knowledgeable about rocket design. Rockets do not scale linearly. While some lessons can be learned with scale models, other lessons simply have to be learned with a full scale test, which is why all rockets get full scale tests. This is also why small amateur rockets are incapable of achieving orbit, no matter how small the payload. Conversely, making rockets bigger does increase payload.
Further, Starship isn't simply a bigger Falcon 9, and Falcon 9 was not designed from the beginning to be fully reusable. Falcon 9, like Falcon 1, was designed to be fully expendable. SpaceX's original plan was to focus on low cost, mass producible rockets. When this didn't work out as planned, they pivoted to reusability. There was a concept video showing 100% reusability (as well as dragon capsule flyback and propulsive landing), but no serious effort at ever actually achieving that. The booster was the only thing they tried to make work, and they did several serious redesigns to first add landing legs and then optimize the booster for flyback.
Starship was from the ground up designed to be fully reusable, and its design is very different - it uses different, higher performance propellant, it uses larger engines with a different thermodynamic cycle, it is made from different structural materials, it lands by a different method. Of course lessons learned from Falcon 9 were incorporated, and you can clearly see some of that legacy for example in the control fins, but this includes learned lessons about the limitations of the Falcon 9's design that they needed to shed. The idea that Falcon 9 proves Starship can't work is asinine, by that logic why would we ever try to improve upon things if we couldn't achieve it with an earlier version that was never designed to do so?
> Simple. Musk isn’t an engineer and doesn’t understand iterative design, and now SpaceX and NASA are facing a sunk cost fallacy.
> You never achieve iterative design with a full-scale prototype. It is incredibly wasteful and can lead you down several problematic and dead-end solutions. I used to engineer high-speed boats — another weight- and safety-sensitive engineering field. We would always conduct scale model tests of every aspect of design, iteratively changing it as we went so that when we did build the full-scale version, we were solving the problems of scale, not design and scale simultaneously.
This isn't iterative design. This is waterfall. It's progressing linearly through stages without going back to incorporate lessons learned. Yes, it is cheaper to work out all the bugs on scale prototypes than full scale tests, just as it would be cheaper still to get it right the first time at the design stage, but that doesn't mean it's a good project management strategy. What SpaceX did quite successfully with its Falcon 9 development is iterative design.
For example, Musk's obsession with colonising on Mars is troubling when you hear what scientists have to say about it. Musk tends to talk about it as if Earth is already lost.
So, how many decisions by the wealthy and gullible (or downright stupid, orange) politicians are driven by science fiction and vibes?
He is pushing the idea using all techniques. This one is like propaganda, dismiss unwanted facts, repeat good sounding short wanted statements. Colonizing Mars would make him _the_ _king_. Single person who controls it all.
IMHO, the right way to do colonization is to start with bases build by robots before humans arrive. Technologies can be first tested on Moon, then used on Mars. With AI explosion it's possible. Same way automatic bases can be build on big Jupiter/Saturn moons
Wouldn't more load act as a dampener, at least for the vehicle if not the fuel system itself?
Is fuel flow constant or variable? I would naively guess constant, more-or-less, in which case lessening the load merely means it reaches the target velocity sooner--same vibration magnitudes (or more if reduced dampening), just for a shorter amount of time.
Opening line of the post kind of sums up the bias in this.
Honestly don’t think someone with this amount of vitriol can come to any conclusions that don’t support his desire to see SpaceX fail.
vannevar•6mo ago
LorenPechtel•6mo ago
Fundamentally, that energy must go somewhere. You plunge in steeper and you get a higher peak but lower total, but no matter what you do it's an awful lot of heat that you have to keep away from the cargo. Belly flop is good for increasing drag, "works" quite well with Kerbals (just don't look at the core temperature of the capsule!), but Kerbin is an awful lot more forgiving about the fire than Earth is.
I had thought they would have considered the basic numbers long before now, but apparently they did not.
However, the booster seems to work. Scrap Starship, build an upsized version of the Falcon 9 upper stage and put it on top of the booster. Still better in the heavy lift department than anything out there.
vannevar•6mo ago