Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bencoder 1867 days ago
Space Shuttles actually went into orbit. The falcon 9 boosters are sub-orbital.

But I'm hoping that Starship will exceed the space shuttle massively!

1 comments

The Space shuttle SRBs were somewhat re-usable while the external tank (arguably similar to the F9 second stage, except that it was used for the whole flight) was expended. The external tank was ~30,000 kg dry mass and was expended with each launch. The system could deliver ~27500kg to LEO (assuming the SRBs are fully reused which is not entirely accurate).

Falcon 9 FT Block 5 second stage has a dry mass of 4000 kg which is expended. It could deliver ~15,600 kg to LEO with first stage reuse.

The systems are definitely comparable!