[pclmulqdq]

Nobody has done anything revolutionary and nobody has gotten to space an order of magnitude cheaper. The best estimates of SpaceX's cost advantage per kilo put it at 30-50% better than a Soyuz.

The Starship program so far has soaked up as much money as SLS, and hasn't even left orbit.

[jiggawatts]

They did several revolutionary things with starship:

Full-flow staged combustion metholox engines.

Stainless steel construction.

Biggest rocket to have ever flown.

Highest thrust at launch of any rocket by a factor of two or so.

Live streaming of reentry via a space Internet network.

Etc…

[pclmulqdq]

Those all sound like incremental technology advances to me that have yet to deliver any real advances in capabilities. Which is nice - don't get me wrong - but not exactly worth rolling out the aircraft carrier for.

[jiggawatts]

Someone else in this thread pointed out that Starship could get the ISS built in just 3 launches! It originally took dozens.

Quantity has a quality all of its own.

You should be familiar with this from IT: there’s nothing fundamentally different about the first computer that I’ve ever used to the one I have right now, other than the factor of a million difference in performance!

[pclmulqdq]

Starship today can't launch anything. Saying that it can launch the ISS in 3 launches is what Elon Musk says it can do. I don't trust Elon Musk's word for things until I see what someone does with those words. Generally, he is off by a factor of 10-100 on his promises.

[DarmokJalad1701]

> Starship today can't launch anything

Why not? With the capability demonstrated today, they can just as easily tweak the ascent profile to end up in a stable orbit outside the atmosphere. Their trajectory was suborbital on this flight on purpose.

[satiric]

Well, for one, the payload doors don't work.

[baq]

Full flow methalox is absolutely revolutionary.

[thinkcontext]

> The Starship program so far has soaked up as much money as SLS, and hasn't even left orbit

There's a bit of nuance to what you are claiming here.

SLS cost $11B to develop, which is estimated to be in the neighborhood of what Starship will cost when development is complete. We don't know how much has been spent so far.

A huge difference is that producing and launching an SLS rocket costs over $2B, while SpaceX is estimating $10M for Starship. Now, I don't trust that $10M number, that's what they aspire for it to cost. To do it they need to be able to reuse the stages dozens of times. It could take a long time to achieve that or they might not make it at all. However, $2B+ per launch is a whole 'nother level of expense.