[ben_w]

> They are moving faster than anyone in aerospace has ever moved before, but SpaceX is still accelerating faster than that. By the time they catch up, the game will have again changed.

That was a believable pitch up to around 2020 or so.

In 2018 they announced they were going to send a private crewed mission around the moon in 2023. Now we have the benefit of hindsight, it's 2026 and the vessel they were going to use has not yet had one circularised orbit.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but at this point Starship development is currently going slower than both the historical analogs, the Saturn V and the Space Shuttle.

[adastra22]

That has been how Elon always operates. It’s “green lights to Malibu” timeline estimation. He does it for a reason.

[ben_w]

That much has always been obvious, however (1) note final paragraph, and (2) the stock price estimates (both SpaceX and Tesla) are also based on "green lights to Malibu" degrees of optimism.

[rsynnott]

I mean, given the pyrotechnics, the most obvious historical analog is the N1.

[ben_w]

Perhaps, and good suggestion regardless, but the Soviet leadership was so adverse to negative publicity that it's hard to be sure how happy they were with hardware-rich testing.

Throwing cheap rockets into the air until they don't explode worked fine for Falcon; but given how long it's taking, I'm not sure it's working okay for Starship, and I'm now completely convinced that this is a *terrible* way to make something that's supposed to land on Mars, refuel, and return.

[rsynnott]

The whole thing really does feel like a bit of a repeat of the N1 in the sense that it seems to be a “lash loads of relatively small engines together and see what happens” effort, though the N1 was abandoned quickly. I did wonder about this when I saw they were planning on using like 30 engines, because, well, N1, but I was assured that it was different this time.

[ben_w]

Likewise, though I figured they'd solved the "engines are a bit explode-y" with the Falcon 9 and Heavy.

Turned out not, and also that handling re-entry was much much harder than the Space Shuttle (and Buran) had made it seem.

Is this category of launch vehicle just that hard, or did Musk aggravate just enough of the competent engineers and lose just enough talent to grab defeat from the jaws of victory? Timeline's about right for the latter, but I could easily believe the former.

[rsynnott]

Thing about N1 and starship is they have _loads_ of small engines; lots of complex plumbing and vibrations. Falcon 9 has a more sensible number.

On re-entry, Buran re-entered once. You can’t read much into that. The shuttle did about a hundred times, but exploded doing it once and had a number of near misses. One reason it was killed off was that making re-entry safe was considered to be impossible. I think it’d be fair to say that re-entry for large objects remains an unsolved problem.