[btilly]

No, rockets have not proven their reliability. Reliability is something that gets developed through volume of operations combined with a safety and feedback procedure that slowly catches ever rarer problems. And then gets proven through an even larger volume of successes. Airplanes have gone through that learning curve, rockets have not.

There have been around 6000 orbital launches, in total. That's across all countries, all companies, and all time. This is simply insufficient volume to learn how to do it safely. When airplanes were at a similar level of maturity they crashed regularly for every reason from mechanical failure to the fact that people didn't know how to fly into a cloud and not fall out of the sky. (It turns out that in about 15 minutes the inner ear gets confused and you're almost certainly trapped in a spiral if you don't have the right instruments.)

Judging from their public comments, SpaceX is hoping to get 3 launches per day from each Starship, and is hoping to produce hundreds of starships per year. Which means that after a few years, they intend to get to more orbital launches per day than we have had orbital launches in all of human history.

If they do so, there is every reason to believe that they will learn how to make rockets safer. Not by a factor of 5 or 10 because they have good engineers. But to the level of, say, car travel. Because they will develop the volume of operations that will let them find the things that go wrong one flight out of 10,000.

(It will take rockets a long time to get to the volume of operations that enables them to match airplanes. But in the long run there is no reason that rockets can't become that good.)

[sonofhans]

> (It will take rockets a long time to get to the volume of operations that enables them to match airplanes. But in the long run there is no reason that rockets can't become that good.)

You know, I've read about easy rocket transportation in science fiction for decades. I'm reading _The Man in the High Castle_ to my son now, and it's an example of this.

But I honestly have trouble buying it, and I'd love if you could tell me why you believe it.

For one thing, it will take ages. I'm having trouble finding good numbers, but I think a reasonable SWAG is that there have been on the order of 100 million airplane flights in human history. Rockets have decades of catchup.

And rockets have an inherently worse failure mode. Many airplanes that fail during flight can still land. I don't think this is true of rockets. Failures are vastly more likely to be catastrophic. Is it possible to ameliorate this at all?

[madamelic]

We have had commercial flights for 80 years. We have had commercial rockets for 0 years.

The same arguments could've been made for train travel against planes at first. In my opinion, rockets are likely safer than planes in a non-fuel incident since they are built to have parachutes and other safety devices built in from the beginning beyond just gliding with the hopes rudders and flaps aren't affected.

Below a few thousand feet (if I recall), both rockets and planes have similar risks in my opinion. The most deadly planes crashes are in the first or last few minutes of the flight when they have the least altitude and speed to figure out a plan; similarly, if an incident occurs with a rocket in the first 90 seconds, there is a good chance of high fatalities.

Maybe I would argue that rockets _could_ be safer since they will spend less time in this dangerous altitude but I am neither an aerospace engineer nor a rocket scientist.

[btilly]

Fundamentally with a machine, if it goes right it works. It is just a question of making sure that it goes right often enough. Planes have the advantage that there are more ways for them to fix things that go wrong. Rockets have the advantage of being simpler so less can go wrong. If we had equal experience in both, it isn't obvious which would be safer.

And yes, it is possible to make rockets safer. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_escape_system for one of the ways. But there are limits. If you're next to something that decides to explode, that explosion is a problem.

[Gene_Parmesan]

> Judging from their public comments, SpaceX is hoping to get 3 launches per day from each Starship, and is hoping to produce hundreds of starships per year. Which means that after a few years, they intend to get to more orbital launches per day than we have had orbital launches in all of human history.

This sort of talk has always seemed to be really infeasible to the point of being nonsensical. What could possibly drive the need for 6000 orbital launches per day? Where are the fuel resources going to come from?

This sort of pie-in-the-sky thinking I don't find motivating at all, I just find it to be so excessive that I have no choice but to immediately dismiss it.

The double-standard with eco-consciousness gets me too. Green cars, green home power, green everything... but 6000 orbital launches per day. What?

I'm not trying to be a SpaceX hater - although I admit to being very sick of the Musk fanboyism - I just genuinely don't understand where these claims are coming from.

[btilly]

SpaceX is operating on the theory that if you build it, they will come.

That said, rapid delivery of materials from one spot on Earth to another is inherently valuable. I'm sure that most of their flights will actually be suborbital instead. As in point to point travel between two places on Earth. The ability to do transcontinental trips in an average of 30 minutes is of interest to a lot of people, and doing so with physical packages is acceptable at higher risk than doing so with humans.