SpaceX's Starship megarocket blasted off on its latest test flight, with President-elect Donald Trump joining Elon Musk to witness the spectacle firsthand in the latest sign of their ever-closer ties.
Starship’s upper stage will make a partial orbit of Earth, re-enter the atmosphere and splash down in the Indian Ocean…
Also known as not an orbit, or a suborbital flight / trajectory.
Saying a suborbital flight is a partial orbit is like saying a cessna can partially achieve hypersonic velocities.
NASA is also counting on a specialized version of Starship to ferry astronauts to the lunar surface later this decade under its Artemis program.
There is no public information indicating design on this variant has even begun.
… And Starship+Heavy Booster was supposed to have completed a succesful orbital flight in Q2 2022, per NASA’s contract with SpaceX.
Which it still has not done, in Q4 2024.
If SpaceX somehow completes an orbital flight of this thing in say Q2 2025, and keeps to the originally agreed contract timeline, well thats only 3 years behind schedule.
But this is Musk. Not the best track record on delivering on promises, more of a ‘pray i do not alter the deal further’ kinda vibe, but spoken with all the menacing intimidation of Darth Helmet.
So far he’s gotten a banana to suborbit in this thing.
…
I’ll eat a sock if a SpaceX launcher and lander gets human beings to the moon and back safely by the end of 2030.
Did I forget to mention Musk’s plan for a moon mission requires the Starship Lunar Lander variant to remain in Earth orbit, rendevouz and dock with and refuel from something like 12 or 16 other Starships?
… And there is also no publicly available information indicating actual design of this refuelling system either, just vague cgi concept arts of a plan?
Saying a suborbital flight is a partial orbit is like saying a cessna can partially achieve hypersonic velocities
Starship reached over 26000km/h, it had enough energy to be in orbit if it was in a circular orbit. The orbit was intentionally left eccentric enough that the perigee was within the atmosphere, so that a deorbit burn was not required.
This is a cessna going mach 4.99 and you’re being pedantic enough to say it was not hypersonic.
I agree with the rest of what you say though. As fun as it is to watch, Starship is over budget and behind schedule. Elon has over promised (pronounced “lied to get government subsidies”) on timelines and capabilities so much that it may jeopardize the Artemis program. Which makes me mad.
I fell asleep after making my original comment, but you are correct that the velocities and altitude achieved are indicative of something capable of achieving orbit.
So for that, thank you for the correction.
I will caveat that with: We still have literally no idea what this things LEO payload capacity is.
Up until a few months ago, Musk was saying its 100 tons. Then he says its more like 50 tons, and we’re gonna make Starship+Booster 2 and 3, 2 will be capable of 100 tons, 3 will be even more.
so much that it may jeopardize the Artemis program.
Which means he’s successfully cornered the market and he hasn’t even launched his product yet! What a great billionaire, I’m sure he’s a great fit for a government position.
You’re being pedantic enough to say it was not hypersonic
That’s not what OP was saying at all. He/she was pointing out calling the $100 in your pocket a “partial $1000” is just silly. So instead of saying “partial orbit” , the author should have I stead said “sub-ortial flight”. Their words, not mine - although I do agree. The tendency for journalists to over-exaggerate anybody’s claims is infuriating.
My point is that this flight wasn’t $100 out of $1000. It was $999 out of $1000. If the engines burned for a couple of seconds longer, it would have been a stable orbit. But their intended orbit was eccentric and had a low perigee, so that it would reenter after half an orbit.
Are we talking about the same flight I watched today? It made it through re-entry and made a controlled, powered, soft splash down exactly where it was supposed to.
It was a suborbital flight. They never accelerated to the orbital speed, hence the apogee was ballistic and upon “reentry”, the vehicle only experienced negligible heatup.
A real atmospheric reentry from orbit is the biggest technological challenge in return vehicles, and they still have to do that with Starship
Ehhh, two years late for a rocket isn’t terrible. Space is hard.
But yeah 2030 is an aggressive timeline. I’m shocked NASA didn’t go for an Apollo-style service module and lander that gets assembled in-orbit, launched by Falcon Heavies. That seems like the least crazy architecture and requires very little new technology.
Or…Elon maybe was talking out of his ass when he came up with the original numbers? If he went wildly optimistic on the “if I tell them to do it we’ll do it” attitude it would explain it too.
Yeah, the Starship was severely over-promised from the start, especially the payload capacity. I wish there had been more required demonstrations from the beginning, instead of just using the numbers promised by Musk, who is known to inflate numbers for marketing purposes.
Not to mention the assumption of orbital fuelling working perfectly without even doing any demonstrations at all or pointing to any existing technologies. It’s a very Kerbal Space Program idea but significantly more complex in reality. Especially as now they are planning 5+ refuelling missions per Starship going to the Moon, which is logistically baffling.
They’ve also blown their entire development budget and have received another billion dollars in development funds.
The sheer number of people looking at starship’s delays and cost overruns and not seeing the exact same issues SLS had with Boeing are kind of staggering.
If you think that Starship has the exact same issues that SLS has you’re truly stretching reality. A billion dollars and two years is a TINY cost overrun compared to what they are doing. I know it sounds like a lot but for comparison, SLS costs like $2.5 billion per launch, not including development costs.
For comparison SLS spent about 2 billion in taxpayer money per year in development costs, and in the 4 years since the development contract was awarded to spaceX, they’ve spent around 5 billion in taxpayer money in development costs. (~1.25 billion per year)
For launch comparisons, the SLS can take a payload directly to the moon for 2.2 billion, while the proposed starship launch requires 10-12 refueling launches at ~1-2 million per launch (proposed, but falcon 9 heavy costs like 90 million per launch, so that puts it closer to 900 million-1.1 billion per combined launch)
I don’t think it’s that much of a stretch in reality to question these costs.
I’m a space systems propulsion design engineer by profession. I worked on a project which I will not name that requires on-orbit refuelling. (It’s not this one and I don’t and will never work for Elon Musk).
The technology for in-orbit refuelling doesn’t exist, and there’s a whole lot of new technology required. Remotely docking is akin to self-driving in complexity; don’t forget to factor in the signal delay if you’re in a lunar or translunar orbit. If you make this a crewed activity only, then the problem becomes one of pneumatics. A pressure system that can reliably contain and transfer pressure up to the levels of spacecraft fuel (around 300 psi for liquid, 3000 for gas) repeatedly, in both directions is very, very heavy. The valves are heavy, the tanks are heavy, the control systems are heavy. Too heavy to be considered viable for spaceflight. Even less so for a mission whose payload is “as much transfer fuel as we can possibly get up there”. A huge amount of innovation has to take place before this can become real. As of 2022, when I last worked on this, none of the technology was even being researched, that is to say it was not even at TRL 3. Typically these things take on the order of a decade or so to get to TRL 9, if they are successful and quick.
I’m not saying it’s impossible, I’m saying I’ll be fascinated to see which solutions they come up with, and that I’m sceptical that they do have current solutions which are feasible and useful, rather than something like a one-shot refueling subsystem that weighs 250kg and delivers 15 litres of hydrazine.
I’m a space systems propulsion design engineer by profession. I worked on a project which I will not name that requires on-orbit refuelling. (It’s not this one and I don’t and will never work for Elon Musk).
I’m just an enthusiast so I trust your professional opinion more than my own knowledge.
The technology for in-orbit refuelling doesn’t exist, and there’s a whole lot of new technology required.
I’m assuming your referring to the SpaceX on-orbit refueling of cryogenic propellants requirement, which I agree hasn’t happened yet in history by anyone. However, there is a regular on-orbit refueling of cryogenic propellants for years on a regular basis with Progress spacecraft refueling the 400 liters worth of tanks (860kg of hydrazine) on the ISS for its orbit raising rocket engine located on the Zvezda module of the ISS. Cryogenic propellants would be a whole different animal however.
I’m sceptical that they do have current solutions which are feasible and useful, rather than something like a one-shot refueling subsystem that weighs 250kg and delivers 15 litres of hydrazine.
As this technology is in regular use in space today, I don’t doubt SpaceX could do this, but we agree this doesn’t accomplish anything close to what is needed for the lunar mission SpaceX signed up for.
Don’t forget ESA’s ATV and the NASA RRM for refuelling the ISS. As was the case with launchers for a while, the Europeans and the Americans have beautiful, expensive and awesome solutions, while the Russians just get the job done (often by waiving safety standards)
Anyway, the ISS is a different beast, it’s in LEO and it didn’t need to be launched in one go, so you can send up heavy equipment and integrate it on-orbit, activities which require Gantt charts so autistic that my eyes bleed when I think about them. Starship-to-Starship refuelling would mean sending a single spacecraft up with all the necessary equipment to do propellant transfer, which is what I was thinking of when I wrote my comment, as you say.
Yeah the only stuff I could find about actual orbital refueling was basically some tests with cryogenic fuel pumping on the ISS, which had some fairly serious problems, and a few times that basically a small satellite was refueled / serviced by another small satellite, which yeah as you say, just deliver a tiny amount of hydrazine, an exceptionally less volatile and easier fuel to deal with.
How about hyperloop? Rocket teslas? Sub orbital rockets to transport people “safely” anywhere in the world in 30 mins? Boring co making tunnels 1000 times cheaper?
I could go on for a while but you get the point.
Musk is not just a “pray that I don’t change it more” vibe, he’s a straight up scammer who got lucky.
Also known as not an orbit, or a suborbital flight / trajectory.
Saying a suborbital flight is a partial orbit is like saying a cessna can partially achieve hypersonic velocities.
There is no public information indicating design on this variant has even begun.
… And Starship+Heavy Booster was supposed to have completed a succesful orbital flight in Q2 2022, per NASA’s contract with SpaceX.
Which it still has not done, in Q4 2024.
If SpaceX somehow completes an orbital flight of this thing in say Q2 2025, and keeps to the originally agreed contract timeline, well thats only 3 years behind schedule.
But this is Musk. Not the best track record on delivering on promises, more of a ‘pray i do not alter the deal further’ kinda vibe, but spoken with all the menacing intimidation of Darth Helmet.
So far he’s gotten a banana to suborbit in this thing.
…
I’ll eat a sock if a SpaceX launcher and lander gets human beings to the moon and back safely by the end of 2030.
Did I forget to mention Musk’s plan for a moon mission requires the Starship Lunar Lander variant to remain in Earth orbit, rendevouz and dock with and refuel from something like 12 or 16 other Starships?
… And there is also no publicly available information indicating actual design of this refuelling system either, just vague cgi concept arts of a plan?
I’ll eat two fucking socks.
Starship reached over 26000km/h, it had enough energy to be in orbit if it was in a circular orbit. The orbit was intentionally left eccentric enough that the perigee was within the atmosphere, so that a deorbit burn was not required.
This is a cessna going mach 4.99 and you’re being pedantic enough to say it was not hypersonic.
I agree with the rest of what you say though. As fun as it is to watch, Starship is over budget and behind schedule. Elon has over promised (pronounced “lied to get government subsidies”) on timelines and capabilities so much that it may jeopardize the Artemis program. Which makes me mad.
I fell asleep after making my original comment, but you are correct that the velocities and altitude achieved are indicative of something capable of achieving orbit.
So for that, thank you for the correction.
I will caveat that with: We still have literally no idea what this things LEO payload capacity is.
Up until a few months ago, Musk was saying its 100 tons. Then he says its more like 50 tons, and we’re gonna make Starship+Booster 2 and 3, 2 will be capable of 100 tons, 3 will be even more.
So far its proven payload capacity is ‘banana’.
=/
Which means he’s successfully cornered the market and he hasn’t even launched his product yet! What a great billionaire, I’m sure he’s a great fit for a government position.
That’s not what OP was saying at all. He/she was pointing out calling the $100 in your pocket a “partial $1000” is just silly. So instead of saying “partial orbit” , the author should have I stead said “sub-ortial flight”. Their words, not mine - although I do agree. The tendency for journalists to over-exaggerate anybody’s claims is infuriating.
My point is that this flight wasn’t $100 out of $1000. It was $999 out of $1000. If the engines burned for a couple of seconds longer, it would have been a stable orbit. But their intended orbit was eccentric and had a low perigee, so that it would reenter after half an orbit.
The hardest part of a real orbit is not burning up on re-entry. They skipped that part so far, for their most fragile rocket.
Are we talking about the same flight I watched today? It made it through re-entry and made a controlled, powered, soft splash down exactly where it was supposed to.
It was a suborbital flight. They never accelerated to the orbital speed, hence the apogee was ballistic and upon “reentry”, the vehicle only experienced negligible heatup. A real atmospheric reentry from orbit is the biggest technological challenge in return vehicles, and they still have to do that with Starship
Ehhh, two years late for a rocket isn’t terrible. Space is hard.
But yeah 2030 is an aggressive timeline. I’m shocked NASA didn’t go for an Apollo-style service module and lander that gets assembled in-orbit, launched by Falcon Heavies. That seems like the least crazy architecture and requires very little new technology.
The original timeline NASA gave to SpaceX was to have a successful landing on the moon, with humans, and their safe return, in Q2 2025.
7 months from now.
…
You could theoretically refuel the S-IVb, the Apollo/Saturn V third stage, in LEO, with Falcon Heavies…
…assuming you redesigned both to do refueling in orbit, which has never been accomplished before with huge volumes of cryogenic fuel.
But you could not actually launch even a completely unfueled, completely dry S-IVb with a Falcon Heavy.
The S-IVb is about 22ft in diameter.
The Falcon Heavy’s final ascent rocket is about 12 ft in diameter.
There’s almost certainly no way that would be aerodynamically stable through launch.
The service module and lander are just too wide.
…
NASA did actually award another contract to Blue Origin (Bezos Private Space Program) for an updated, embiggened Apollo style lander.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/05/blue-origin-wins-pivotal-nasa-contract-to-develop-a-second-lunar-lander/
That’s going to be mated to a Locked Martin designed orbiter, and they’ll all launch on the SLS.
… Assuming the SLS does not also fall (further) behind schedule or suffer from quality control problems.
A whole lot of SLS is built by Boeing. Not doing so great in the quality control department lately.
But hey at least one of the things so far has actually completed an uncrewed lunar fly by!
…
To conclude: Yes, Space is indeed hard.
But uh, the last thing Musk said about Starship+Booster is that it will actually have… half… the originally promised payload capacity to LEO.
… and they’re going to making a Starship+Booster 2, that will have the original promised payload, and then a 3rd version that will have even more!
If you have to cut your effective payload capacity in half, thats a whole lot more than quality control problems, its fundamental design mishaps.
Or…Elon maybe was talking out of his ass when he came up with the original numbers? If he went wildly optimistic on the “if I tell them to do it we’ll do it” attitude it would explain it too.
Yeah, the Starship was severely over-promised from the start, especially the payload capacity. I wish there had been more required demonstrations from the beginning, instead of just using the numbers promised by Musk, who is known to inflate numbers for marketing purposes.
Not to mention the assumption of orbital fuelling working perfectly without even doing any demonstrations at all or pointing to any existing technologies. It’s a very Kerbal Space Program idea but significantly more complex in reality. Especially as now they are planning 5+ refuelling missions per Starship going to the Moon, which is logistically baffling.
They’ve also blown their entire development budget and have received another billion dollars in development funds.
The sheer number of people looking at starship’s delays and cost overruns and not seeing the exact same issues SLS had with Boeing are kind of staggering.
If you think that Starship has the exact same issues that SLS has you’re truly stretching reality. A billion dollars and two years is a TINY cost overrun compared to what they are doing. I know it sounds like a lot but for comparison, SLS costs like $2.5 billion per launch, not including development costs.
For comparison SLS spent about 2 billion in taxpayer money per year in development costs, and in the 4 years since the development contract was awarded to spaceX, they’ve spent around 5 billion in taxpayer money in development costs. (~1.25 billion per year)
For launch comparisons, the SLS can take a payload directly to the moon for 2.2 billion, while the proposed starship launch requires 10-12 refueling launches at ~1-2 million per launch (proposed, but falcon 9 heavy costs like 90 million per launch, so that puts it closer to 900 million-1.1 billion per combined launch)
I don’t think it’s that much of a stretch in reality to question these costs.
I’m a space systems propulsion design engineer by profession. I worked on a project which I will not name that requires on-orbit refuelling. (It’s not this one and I don’t and will never work for Elon Musk).
The technology for in-orbit refuelling doesn’t exist, and there’s a whole lot of new technology required. Remotely docking is akin to self-driving in complexity; don’t forget to factor in the signal delay if you’re in a lunar or translunar orbit. If you make this a crewed activity only, then the problem becomes one of pneumatics. A pressure system that can reliably contain and transfer pressure up to the levels of spacecraft fuel (around 300 psi for liquid, 3000 for gas) repeatedly, in both directions is very, very heavy. The valves are heavy, the tanks are heavy, the control systems are heavy. Too heavy to be considered viable for spaceflight. Even less so for a mission whose payload is “as much transfer fuel as we can possibly get up there”. A huge amount of innovation has to take place before this can become real. As of 2022, when I last worked on this, none of the technology was even being researched, that is to say it was not even at TRL 3. Typically these things take on the order of a decade or so to get to TRL 9, if they are successful and quick.
I’m not saying it’s impossible, I’m saying I’ll be fascinated to see which solutions they come up with, and that I’m sceptical that they do have current solutions which are feasible and useful, rather than something like a one-shot refueling subsystem that weighs 250kg and delivers 15 litres of hydrazine.
First, musk is an ass. No defense of him.
Spaceflight, however, is awesome.
I’m just an enthusiast so I trust your professional opinion more than my own knowledge.
I’m assuming your referring to the SpaceX on-orbit refueling of cryogenic propellants requirement, which I agree hasn’t happened yet in history by anyone. However, there is a regular on-orbit refueling of cryogenic propellants for years on a regular basis with Progress spacecraft refueling the 400 liters worth of tanks (860kg of hydrazine) on the ISS for its orbit raising rocket engine located on the Zvezda module of the ISS. Cryogenic propellants would be a whole different animal however.
As this technology is in regular use in space today, I don’t doubt SpaceX could do this, but we agree this doesn’t accomplish anything close to what is needed for the lunar mission SpaceX signed up for.
Don’t forget ESA’s ATV and the NASA RRM for refuelling the ISS. As was the case with launchers for a while, the Europeans and the Americans have beautiful, expensive and awesome solutions, while the Russians just get the job done (often by waiving safety standards)
Anyway, the ISS is a different beast, it’s in LEO and it didn’t need to be launched in one go, so you can send up heavy equipment and integrate it on-orbit, activities which require Gantt charts so autistic that my eyes bleed when I think about them. Starship-to-Starship refuelling would mean sending a single spacecraft up with all the necessary equipment to do propellant transfer, which is what I was thinking of when I wrote my comment, as you say.
I appreciate your expert input!
Yeah the only stuff I could find about actual orbital refueling was basically some tests with cryogenic fuel pumping on the ISS, which had some fairly serious problems, and a few times that basically a small satellite was refueled / serviced by another small satellite, which yeah as you say, just deliver a tiny amount of hydrazine, an exceptionally less volatile and easier fuel to deal with.
Hydrazine isn’t less volatile or easy to deal with. Not unless your point of comparison is that one fluorine test rocket.
Here’s the MSDS on hydrazine: https://nj.gov/health/eoh/rtkweb/documents/fs/1006.pdf
It’s easier to store. Aside from it being the single most hazardous chemical substance known to man, that is
You’ll stay hungry.
How about hyperloop? Rocket teslas? Sub orbital rockets to transport people “safely” anywhere in the world in 30 mins? Boring co making tunnels 1000 times cheaper?
I could go on for a while but you get the point.
Musk is not just a “pray that I don’t change it more” vibe, he’s a straight up scammer who got lucky.
So yet another government contractor with delays and cost overruns getting rich off the American tax dollar being feted by the Right.
Sounds normal.
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I assume China will put somebody on the moon before Musk’s meme rocket gets there.