I agree that SLS is not an efficient project by any stretch of the imagination, and they have their own problems. I don't really see a reason to believe that Starship will ever achieve the goals that were declared for it. In particular, their plan for how to achieve the Moon mission, requiring an unclear number of missions to fuel a single flight in orbit.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
Even if Starship completely fails, SLS is a pointless and ludicrously expensive dead end. Terminating it is the only logical thing to do.
The whole moon thing is a pointless and ludicrously expensive dead end. But if one wants to do it, one should choose between the working approaches.
Orion is actually pointless, I don't understand why the mission goals are valuable. Partial success would be meaningless. Success is meaningless.
Starship in contrast has a variety of meaningful objectives. Even if Starship only achieves proving that cryogenic fuel transfer in LEO is possible that's a valuable mission goal in and of itself.
If you really think "the whole moon thing is pointless" NASA is pointless.
NASA does not seem to be constituted to be able to engage in a coherent manned space program of actual value. It's a long standing systemic issue.
They are great at pretending to deliver value, but there's no "there" there.
Might as well get some ROI out of it though.
IMO the Blue Origin hate was overhyped. They're clearly the only ones who know what they're doing. NASA and SpaceX both are way in over their heads.
[dead]
You don't have long to wait to see an obvious reason, the first v3 starship is in preflight testing right now.
And do you think the this next launch will deploy actual satellites in orbit around the Moon? If not, I still don't see why you'd compare it to SLS's current success. Or do you think this will deploy 100 tons to orbit for less than $10/ton, or fly to Mars, since these are the stated goals for Starship?
Do you think perhaps you should give SpaceX as much time as NASA has had for SLS to fail at its goals before complaining that SpaceX’s system in testing isn’t accomplishing all of its goals?