It's so much further advanced than anything anyone else is working on, does it really need to be on schedule? I feel like "on schedule" only pertains to non-research-intensive projects.
More bigger != more advanced != more economical != more sensical
And anyway yes there are programs that are dependent on Starship working on a schedule. If it doesn't work on schedule, those programs will advance without it and the Starship program will eventually fail.
SpaceX has had 165 launches in 2025 (although admittedly 75% of those were for Starlink...) Obviously bigger isn't more economical or sensical, and most cases are served just fine with the Falcons, but there are cases we need the big boy for, and it's good that someone is working on it and has made so much progress.
Obviously a semblance of a schedule is good to have, but realistically, that's not really how research works. Look at James Webb telescope, it was originally scheduled for 2007, and ended up launching 14 years later. It's still an amazing piece of engineer/science, and it's amazing that it's up there now, even if it was very late to it. It's much better to be late and successful than early and failing.
> but there are cases we need the big boy for, and it's good that someone is working on it and has made so much progress.
I am taking issue with this claim. Are there cases where the cost/benefit actually come out favorably for Starship as it is actually turning out? Are they cases anyone should actually care about beyond sci-fi fantasies (i.e. not "colonize Mars")?
There are so many individual features in this program that have never been done or even attempted before. That's "Advanced" in my book. Yes, they attached it to an overly ambitious program that is rife with delays (and hubris) but the program started on its own, is the best path to making the 2028 landing happen (it won't), and on its own is incredible.
On schedule pertains to anything where extraordinary schedule claims are unnecessarily made. Nobody would have to think about a schedule in this context if somebody did not regularly make bold schedule claims.
The issue is cadence. SpaceX is the king of cadence with Falcon 9, but if it takes >10 Starship Tanker launches to get all that excess mass of Starship HLS to the moon... prior to boil-off of the Starship HLS... holy crap, this is really hand wavy.
Even SpaceX will have a really hard time launching ~10 Tankers in the time required. What are the lower and upper bounds of that time required? Nobody knows, but if it's less than many weeks, it's gonna be tough. That's ~weeks of HLS on orbit, getting refueled, with boil-off occurring.
SpaceX has many things correct, except the vehicle size and design, as far as HLS goes.
Shouldn't even be phrased like this. We can cheer for progress without simping so badly that we can't acknowledge failures and missteps.
Space is hard and over promising and under delivering are real possibilities that a hype-person cannot run from. Just moderate the hype and let the engineers cook - is that so hard??
It's a lot more than you might think, and I couldn't find a comprehensive list of the non-spacecraft objects, some of which are hinted at in the first paragraph.
The later Apollo missions (13-17) deliberately crashed their 3rd stages into the moon, in part to provide a signal for the seismometer packages left at each of the landing sites. They hit the moon a little faster than the Falcon 9 2nd stage will hit (2.6km/s vs 2.43km/s for the new one).
What I think is very ironic is that Blue Origin actually beat SpaceX to Mars, after a decade of SpaceX "make life multiplanetary". A few months after Blue Origin did that SpaceX announced now they'll just go to the Moon, no more Mars.
That's not irony, that's shallow thinking. If you want to "make life multiplanetary" you would do it by building a very large, reusable, refillable rocket that can land 100 tons on Mars.
Which is exactly what SpaceX is doing.
[p.s.: The drive to land on the moon makes sense in the context of "how can we fund colonizing Mars?" Starlink funded the initial development of Starship. Musk believes (rightly or wrongly) that data centers in orbit and on the moon can fund the next set of projects.]
Several times the speed of sound? That is meaningless when there is no media for the sound waves.
I think a better unit might be furlongs per fortnight.
> 2.43 kilometers a second, or 1.51 miles a second, or 5,400 miles an hour, or 8,700 kilometers an hour.
> There is, of course, no air and no sound on the Moon, so a "Mach number" doesn't really make sense. But if there were air, the speed would be about Mach 7, seven times the speed of sound.
"If there were air". Air at which temperature though? Th sound of speed, and hence what Mach numbers mean, depends on the temperature of the air. The temperature air would have at the moon's surface? By day or by night? Or the air at Earth's surface? Or at some other altitude?
Well, there is a speed of sound on the moon. Sound does travel through the regolith. If you were standing on the moon you would indeed "hear" this impact as the sound moved up through your feet. It would sound/feel like standing beside a subwoofer.
I still call it sound when I hear things under water. Gas isn't special.
When someone knocks on your door, you still say you heard the sound, even though the pressure wave was transmitted through the solid door material (before then being transmised to the gas in the room). Likewise, we still file a noise complaint when the neighbor is throwing a raging party, even though we are feeling the bass as much as we are hearing it.
And anyway yes there are programs that are dependent on Starship working on a schedule. If it doesn't work on schedule, those programs will advance without it and the Starship program will eventually fail.
Obviously a semblance of a schedule is good to have, but realistically, that's not really how research works. Look at James Webb telescope, it was originally scheduled for 2007, and ended up launching 14 years later. It's still an amazing piece of engineer/science, and it's amazing that it's up there now, even if it was very late to it. It's much better to be late and successful than early and failing.
I am taking issue with this claim. Are there cases where the cost/benefit actually come out favorably for Starship as it is actually turning out? Are they cases anyone should actually care about beyond sci-fi fantasies (i.e. not "colonize Mars")?
How many of those things that have never been done/attempted before sit downstream of poor strategic decisions?
Even SpaceX will have a really hard time launching ~10 Tankers in the time required. What are the lower and upper bounds of that time required? Nobody knows, but if it's less than many weeks, it's gonna be tough. That's ~weeks of HLS on orbit, getting refueled, with boil-off occurring.
SpaceX has many things correct, except the vehicle size and design, as far as HLS goes.
Shouldn't even be phrased like this. We can cheer for progress without simping so badly that we can't acknowledge failures and missteps.
Space is hard and over promising and under delivering are real possibilities that a hype-person cannot run from. Just moderate the hype and let the engineers cook - is that so hard??
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_on_...
It's a lot more than you might think, and I couldn't find a comprehensive list of the non-spacecraft objects, some of which are hinted at in the first paragraph.
All of those impact sites have been located but the last one wasn't pinpointed until 2016: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/moon-mystery-solved-apollo-rock...
ref: https://books.google.ie/books?id=6QAAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA56&lpg=PA...
https://youtu.be/snTaSJk0n_Y?t=48
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-blue-origin-launch-tw...
Falcon Heavy launched a spacecraft that used a Mars gravity assist in 2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyche_(spacecraft) same with the Europa Clipper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Clipper going to Jupiter
Which is exactly what SpaceX is doing.
[p.s.: The drive to land on the moon makes sense in the context of "how can we fund colonizing Mars?" Starlink funded the initial development of Starship. Musk believes (rightly or wrongly) that data centers in orbit and on the moon can fund the next set of projects.]
> 2.43 kilometers a second, or 1.51 miles a second, or 5,400 miles an hour, or 8,700 kilometers an hour.
> There is, of course, no air and no sound on the Moon, so a "Mach number" doesn't really make sense. But if there were air, the speed would be about Mach 7, seven times the speed of sound.
I still call it sound when I hear things under water. Gas isn't special.
When someone knocks on your door, you still say you heard the sound, even though the pressure wave was transmitted through the solid door material (before then being transmised to the gas in the room). Likewise, we still file a noise complaint when the neighbor is throwing a raging party, even though we are feeling the bass as much as we are hearing it.