According to wikipedia, the entire cost of the saturn v project was US$185 million, equivalent to US$33.6 billion today. That's from R&D to all launches

Adding to previous comment, looks like the cost per launch when the system was up and running was ~1billion USD inflation adjusted. I'm going to assume Starship will beat that easily.

How does that matter? It's doing a thing already done nearly 70 years ago but at its own pace.

I bet it will get to the moon cheaper, too, and the Muskonauts will use less expensive lenses than Hasselblads to take photos.

The downvotes here are undeserved.

There is nothing wrong with this question. Zero.

Stop eroding this site's community.

I know it's a similar size to the Saturn V, but something about the Saturn V just seems grander to me. Maybe it's the paint job?

Frankly, it kind of blows my mind what the US pulled off in the late 60's, early 70's with the technology and materials of the time.

It's pretty remarkable progress. Slowly but surely, they're getting it done. I predict they'll have a full working version by 2027. By 2028, they'll have regular reusable flights.

Yes, although it was stated before the flight that they were intentionally flying with some heat tiles removed and with a more aggressive profile to test some outer limits.

I think this launch showed they were very robust. Engines went out on booster and ship which they can compensate for. A small explosion and a half melted fin didn't seem to affect the splashdown sequence or target.

The explosion was unexpected and (as far as I know at the moment) unexplained, but they flew the mission at the edge of the envelope, and with a variety of different materials/missing bits on purpose, to better understand where the edge is. Everything that happened (maybe even including the explosion, we'll see in the final analysis) was, as far as we know, within the plan.

The biggest can't-miss milestone was the flawless engine restart. That gives them the go-ahead to hit orbit on the next flight.

> And we could see pretty significant damage on one of the fin

They specifically said they're testing lighter fins to see how much they would hold. Let's not invent problems when it's an experiment that was clearly stated.

For Starlink deploys (or other commercial launches) re-entry isn't too critical. Starship is still an order of magnitude cheaper than other launch vehicles even without Stage 2 re-use.

They'll need a higher bar for Artemis but frankly Starship is not the only critical bottleneck there and it's not SpaceX's main financial driver.

I view it differently. The ship not only survived, but also accomplished all of its mission objectives despite those issues. What this shows is that it has remarkable resilience, which is a really important considering the types of forces it will be subject to during future missions.

They compromised the ship to study failures of that nature.

The damage was visible long before the explosion, during ascent (not sure if anyone has explained how it happened). Though your point still stands.

I was very surprised that that flap still held up during the stress testing on atmospheric re-entry.

Nah, they nailed it.

go and do better dumb fuck

Fin damage isn't ideal, but even if they had to replace the fins every flight, the cost would be quite low in comparison to replacing the entire second stage, which is necessary on the Falcon 9.

I would say they nailed it based on achieving all the objectives they stated before the launch.

I wouldn't expect that on the next flight.

One option is they can run it again with the data gained from missing tiles etc. and see if there is an improvement.

They could also do a similar flight but with an actual orbital insertion and de-orbit if they are confident in the odds of success of the de-orbit burn.

Landing the ship at the launch site means overflying land and potentially populated areas, so I think they're going to want to demonstrate successful control, re-entry, and landing from orbit a few times before attempting that.

Probably the same as 10, but with SHB catch.

They're probably gonna keep wasting ships until they've got the exact limits of their capability established.

I know it seems counterintuitive to everyone who grew up in the era of the space shuttle, but the ship is the cheap part, the giant booster is the expensive part.

The ship has a way longer cycle time so starship unit costs are going to dominate fleet construction cost despite being the cheaper unit so knowing exactly how hard you can run them is very valuable information it's worth gleaning by wasting some units early on.

The money is in Starlink, so maybe they'll want to make orbit having demonstrated successful relights and payload door operation?

They only have one more shipv2 right now. The next ones are shipv3. So my guess is that a ship catch doesn't make sense, since they're changing the architecture on the next ones. Would make sense to continue with limit finding (it's a disposable launch anyway, old gear) on things that carry over (i.e. thermal protection, ablative materials, crazy angles, etc)

One interesting point is if they actually go for orbit. It would take just a few more seconds to reach something like 200+km / 100km, a place where they could deploy some v3 Starlinks and gather data from the launch (i.e. vibrations, health, dinging on the door, etc). It would be a test where they get more data that's transferable to the new architecture, and relatively low risk of getting stuck in orbit. (low perigee would mean eventual re-entry anyway, hopefully over the ocean) The sats can probably raise themselves from there.

Maybe. But also as the founder and largest shareholder is someone willing to funnel money in to far-right causes across Europe, it's really hard to root for the company as a whole.

Advancing human scientific progress, but at what cost?

This is something I am finding myself wrestling with a lot right now.

On the one hand I am a major space nerd and I see the value of what SpaceX is doing. Especially with it really seeming like no one is anywhere near their level. What kind of scientific advancements will be possible once this thing can be used normally and launches like this become commonplace.

But at the same time it is impossible to ignore the Elon situation. And that also directly relates to Trump as well. We are in this bonkers situation where he helped get a largely anti-science administration in power and yet also runs one of the companies that will help science.

It does raise serious questions about whether or not there will be limitations on what types of science can be done. Will they have some line in the sand and say they won't launch satellites that do "X", like maybe monitor climate change.

I think maybe rooting for them to fail is a bit much, but I am sure as hell hoping that someone else can catch up. But in the mean time I will celebrate these achievements cautiously. Recognizing the amazing work that the engineers at SpaceX have put into this, because they do deserve a lot of credit for that.

Socialize the adoration, privatize the benefits. Should peasants be proud of their kings palace?

Wernher von Braun had the incredible achievement of shooting the first rocket up to space - the V2.

Thanks to the intelligence and hard work of the countless smart and hard-working people he pushed the boundaries of what is possible for humanity.

Still, I find it hard to accept we should compartmentalize and not think about who those rockets were built for and with what purpose.

I think it’s completely reasonable to be terrified that _that_ man is going to dominate the gravity well.

I mostly hope that Blue Origin will be a worthy competitor.

For me what this shows that the most important thing for a CEO to be successful is to have money, a vison (no matter how unrealistic or unnecessary) and a cult personality. Nothing else matters. Also it shows that with enough virtual money (I.e.: massively overblown Tesla stock) you can do just about anything.