It's pretty remarkable progress. Slowly but surely, they're getting it done. I predict they'll have a full working version by 2027. By 2028, they'll have regular reusable flights.
My personal estimates are similar. For anyone that followed Falcon 9 development (from the first Falcon 1 launches), it’s really similar. I remember boom after boom until one day they cracked the problem and reusable boosters became the status quo.
I got tingles when the first booster landed on the drone ship, because I knew access to space had just changed in a fundamental way.
Comparing Falcon 9 to Starship is a dangerous mistake.
First, the time frames are way off. Development of the Falcon 9 took ~5 years (2005 to 2010). The first reused booster came much later (2017?).
Second, Starship is much more expensive for each launch attempt than Falcon 9 ever was.
Third, Starship is significantly more complicated technology-wise, being methane based. There are reasons to do this but it then requires cooling both propellants (instead of just liquid oxygen and RP-1 ie kerosene with the Falcon 9(.
Fourth, Starship has to compete with somethingg Falcon 9 never did: Falcon 9. Falcon 9 is now the most succcessful and cheapest launch platform in history. It is the reliable workhorse of the industry and relatively cheap to launch. Its reuse is proven.
Fifth, the market for Starship is unproven. We can compare it to other launch systems for heavy payloads, most notably the Falcon Heavy, which I believe has only had ~12 launches in almost a decade (compared to the 100+ Falcon 9 launches every year).
You could argue SpaceX will steer customers to Starship but there'll be other competitors (to the Falcon 9) by then.
Lastly, Starship is still so far from being human-rated. So much of the needed tech (eg refuelling in orbit) hasn't even begun testing yet. I can easily see this taking another decade at least.
> Second, Starship is much more expensive for each launch attempt than Falcon 9 ever was
They are already reusing boosters, so it might already be cheaper than F9 before booster reuse. Once they start reusing the ships, it will be cheaper than F9 with booster reuse because F9 has to build a new second stage each launch.
> Fifth, the market for Starship is unproven
The market for Starship is proven by SpaceX itself. The Starship can add 20x the Starlink network capacity per launch as F9. There are currently around 100 Starlink launches per year, so the market couldn't be more proven.
> Second, Starship is much more expensive for each launch attempt than Falcon 9 ever was.
The launch cost of a Starship today is high, especially if you include development costs, but Musk's goal is a marginal launch cost of ~$1M. A Falcon 9's launch price is ~$70M; Musk claims a "best case" marginal Falcon 9 launch costs ~$15M.
Yeah if those numbers are even in the correct order of magnitude Starlink will become a literal money printer. Any commercial or government launch contracts will be cherries on top. Bezos will be our only hope for affordable satellite internet.
It’s worth mentioning that one of the reasons the cadence is so high for Starlink is because customers buy the boosters, and they can be re-used for many Starlink launches.
Is it though? I'm not knowledgeable on this at all, but it _seems_ like Space X is blowing up a lot more expensive equipment compared to NASA back in the space race days. Genuinely curious how it compares and how true my outsider impression is.
It's not as expensive as it looks, Starship plus booster costs around 100 million. A Saturn V Apollo mission cost 185 million in 1969 which, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V#Cost, would now be a bit less than a billion dollars.
Also, SpaceX is not building rockets, they are building a rocket factory. If they succeed they will have lowered the cost of putting stuff into space by an order of magnitude. The potential rewards are huge.
Yes but at this point the upper stage is barely a spaceship. Mostly an empty shell. And they have spent $10 billion so far on something that barely flies.
R&D and prototyping is an up-front expense. Amortization over many units spreads out the costs to long term profitability. Does SpaceX have that kind of time, though? A prospective global depression would dry up the capital for funding Starship development.
There's more of a production line when building Starships, with modern mechanised tooling - much of it computerised and 100% repeatable. There's been at least 10 so far, vs only 15 Saturn V, 3 of which were ground tested.
There's absolutely loads being done for the first time here. Not least of which: running this r&d off commercial contracts instead of directly off taxpayer money.
Apollo also invented, funded and productized a lot of modern embedded computing and computer manufacturing, to keep in our lane here. Obviously SpaceX has access to a very different tech environment that yes, Apollo helped push forward.
Manufacturing the Apollo Guidance Computer (which wasn't in the rocket per-se, but was wired up to it and could fly the rocket in certain scenarios) alone consumed around 40% of the US' entire IC production capacity at the time.
Whenever we talk about space flight, this movie quote comes to mind: "You know we're sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder."
Starship has considerably fewer moving parts. And googling 'evolution of raptor engines' gives you some pretty stark images on how simpler things look, in principle.