I am not an engineer. But these starships keep blowing up. Getting them to work and become reusable is unclear and if not the stock will crater. The Mars scenario is sci-fi.
NASA was once a huge source of innovation. I remember the Space Race, Sputnik, the Mercury and Apollo projects and putting men ( they were just men back then) on the moon. So hats off to NASA. but they did not have the budget or the incentives or the culture to accelerate launch economics nor create a dynamic commercial industry. The private sector were basically government contractors. Musk to his credit turned that on its head and took a huge hunk of people and know how out of NASA and create an iterative innovation cycle. When he got the Falcons to land on pads and achieve reusability that changed everything. So hats of to SpaceX.
But
I remember when we built and launched the Webb Space telescope and a friend of mine in the satellite industry who built for NASA said there were around 300 points of failure on the launch. If any one of those 300 things did not happen almost perfectly, they would lose the mission.
So, so much of SpaceX plans rest on the Starship working, at scale and being reusable like the Falcon. That is what gives them the 10x order of magnitude cost benefit. Without it and it does not work. Elon was on the brink of failure in SpaceX before. He had one last launch he could pay for. If it failed, he failed. It succeeded.
i watched the last two Starship launches. Nice pyrotechnics.
we will see. People are now betting $2 Trillion on it working.
I am not an engineer. But these starships keep blowing up. Getting them to work and become reusable is unclear and if not the stock will crater. The Mars scenario is sci-fi.
Not blowing up is good. But the SpaceX business and innovation model is different than NASA's. Which is why launch costs have collapsed.
NASA was once a huge source of innovation. I remember the Space Race, Sputnik, the Mercury and Apollo projects and putting men ( they were just men back then) on the moon. So hats off to NASA. but they did not have the budget or the incentives or the culture to accelerate launch economics nor create a dynamic commercial industry. The private sector were basically government contractors. Musk to his credit turned that on its head and took a huge hunk of people and know how out of NASA and create an iterative innovation cycle. When he got the Falcons to land on pads and achieve reusability that changed everything. So hats of to SpaceX.
But
I remember when we built and launched the Webb Space telescope and a friend of mine in the satellite industry who built for NASA said there were around 300 points of failure on the launch. If any one of those 300 things did not happen almost perfectly, they would lose the mission.
So, so much of SpaceX plans rest on the Starship working, at scale and being reusable like the Falcon. That is what gives them the 10x order of magnitude cost benefit. Without it and it does not work. Elon was on the brink of failure in SpaceX before. He had one last launch he could pay for. If it failed, he failed. It succeeded.
i watched the last two Starship launches. Nice pyrotechnics.
we will see. People are now betting $2 Trillion on it working.