If the heat shield holds up then this changes everything. Next step is double catch and re-flying the same ships and catching again, then payloads to orbit become significantly cheaper opening a new era in space flight.
Yeah, I'm eagerly awaiting results from inspection of the heat shield (which hopefully they will disclose). Reflight without refurbishment is the last goal they need to hit before the system can be considered a success. After that, optimizing for increased payload and nailing reliability will be the things to work on. And of course orbital refueling for HLS.
Fuel transfer seems like a trivial problem next to the reusable heat shield. And even if for some weird reason it never works, the program could likely pay for itself just launching Starlink/Starshield with full reuse.
I still remember watching Falcon 9 (Block V, iirc) successfully landing back on land (as opposed to droneships) after deploying Orbcomm OG2 satellites in December 2015 -- almost 11 years ago.
It blew my teen mind.
This day marks a fabulous advancement for the human species.
We went outside in our Orlando office to see the flair up in the sky, and then were looking for the re-entry, by the time we could figure out where it was our coworker said it was already standing upright.
I'll be that guy: they still have to fly it again. That's the real question. Incredible achievement. We got used to landing and caught boosters real quick!
Yes, though not an engineering one. At SpaceX she handles business development, strategy, and ops, though she was trained as an engineer and did it previously in her career. I think this is almost the more impressive feat here, not to diminish the engineering leap.
Definitely a name that won’t be forgotten anytime soon.
I know engineering is about expediency, and price, but I’m still bummed that we aren’t getting ships with landing gear in this or likely the next generation of rockets either.
Seems that the heavier the rocket the more ground clearance to need to self-land, and so you can’t scale up the dragon’s landing system. I don’t think there’s anywhere near enough weight to shave off of the next rocket or enough specific impulse to add to bring the size back down.
Yeah the Starship program isn't about landing on Mars or even going there.
It's about pumping mass into low Earth orbit, partly for commericial, but mostly military purposes such as Golden Dome. Been in the works for decades and finally here. The people who know are very excited.
Starlink is pretty amazing tech which can be used for both good and evil - from enabling reliable communication in disaster zones to letting civilians browse social media from remote locations to communicating with weapons of war.
Every product has the same adoption curve. Early customers pay a premium which pays for building the factories, not just the product. By the time everyone is using them the prices have gotten low enough that the price is informed by supply rather than demand.
SpaceX being their own customer, and a lower priority one, lets them levellize their revenue, which also helps retain staff. And if anyone commoditizes launch systems, they have a hedge against that. However if demand for starlink ever does exceed capacity, the launch side could find their schedules being much more variable.
In software, you see this with priority queues all the time if you know where to look. Someone makes a “low priority” system that soaks up spare capacity. Internal customers become dependent on these systems and then become delay-averse. Meanwhile, other teams also start soaking up that spare capacity, by improved design or feature creep or both. That low priority system becomes starved of resources, and the internal customers start saber rattling. That system gets its own dedicated resources, and now stranded resources climb back to the original levels, if not worse.
Starlink will eventually become the same thing. And I wonder if they will spin it off when that situation arises.
I unfortunately agree. Years ago I realized the Mars talk was just talk when I noticed that Musk and SpaceX were not funding any of the other stuff you’d need to fund if you wanted to “make life multiplanetary.”
Continuing to iterate on self contained biospheres and long term closed cycle life support? (Not a solved problem!) Working on construction techniques for the Moon or Mars? Studies on the dose response curve for gravity, like sponsoring a spin lab for the ISS to at least see if mice can reproduce in 0.3g? Self contained industrial infrastructure leaning heavily on 3D printers? Psychological research on the best way to build interiors and run social units?
Musk could personally fund all of that with little impact on his net worth.
It’s also decades of work. Some of what I listed is harder than the rockets. Better get started if you want to have a settlement on Mars this century.
Nope. Nothing. Just rockets, the a satellite network that is clearly “dual use.” Then Trump 2.0 and lots of “golden dome” (Star Wars 2.0) talk.
It’s not to go to Mars.
I love space and I hugely admire the engineering achievement, but it’s disappointing to learn for this and many other reasons that the people behind it were not the visionaries they pretended to be. They’re just more territorial apes obsessed with ape tribal stuff like race and nationalism and fighting over dirt at the bottom of a gravity well. Small minds with big toys.
I had to read the comment below (from u/modeless) before I realized by landing gear you meant the upright ones. I thought you wanted it to land sideways like a plane. (Arguably doable, though the control systems might add a lot more weight)
The problem with space planes is they are terrible planes, terrible rockets, and feed the egos of pilots.
To be fair to NASA and the astronauts, NASA needed humans who behave like military test pilots. In physiology, in reaction time, in crisis management, in following chain of command. And the armed forces were willing to give them access to known quantities.
We didn’t know how control systems would evolve over the next three decades, but the pilots wanted to pilot, and did not trust the control systems. And the irony of it all is that the Space Race was a proxy war for nuclear armament, so control systems needed to be made autonomous anyway.
Better control systems, wider telemetry, and not worrying about incinerating employees let current generation rocketry iterate faster, and do more fucking around and finding out. We found out twice with the shuttle and it killed the program.
It’s curious how much the upper stage now resembles a space shuttle on a ballistic trajectory instead of a glide angle. Very different landing strategies for those two modes of descent…
It was extremely cool 45+ years ago. But the space race ended, and while government-funded space programs did some fantastic work beyond that (space telescopes and Mars landers), it took capitalism to develop the resuable rocket, then scale it up to Starship proportions.
Er, no. Nothing like it. Grabbed from your bed in the middle of the night, bundled downstairs to watch (grainy) and hear (crackly) weird things on a black-and-white TV, while adults, including strangers, whooped and shouted drunkenly. I understood the Apollo 11 thing only in the days after, through news reports. The live event was as impenetrable to me as a dream. Then again, I was half-asleep and five years old.
I was seven, and I happen to have had a profoundly different experience than you. There was a massive rocket mania and all the kids I knew wanted to see the landing.
Russ Olsen does a great keynote about the life-changing experience for those of us so affected. I happened to be in the audience for this edition and it was something special to be old enough to remember it much as he remembered it.
My grandma was one of the only person with a TV where she lived, half of the town was in her living room, nothing comparable. I bet most people watched this on their toilet seat before scrolling to the next cool thing as if it was nothing
Apparently the booster signaled it didn't have enough fuel to risk it. Either because it consumed more then expected on the way up, or a measurement error potentially.
That's basically what Musk said, yes: that they need to work on both engine performance and performance consistency. He said they'd be cutting off the main engines one second sooner to provide more margin for boost-back.
Amazing that a one-second difference can matter, but those things go through tons of fuel every one of those seconds!
At the last moment the exhaust turned green. That's consistent with the fuel running out, the engines running oxygen rich, and subsequently "engine rich". So I would put my money on actually running out vs a measurement error.
Slight underperformance in the engines resulted in the the booster not reaching where it was supposed to be and the GNC systems automatically aborted to the gulf for safety.
Their risk tolerance would probably be greater if both towers were fully operational. But any damage to the only functional tower during booster catch = an automatic abort to the ship catch one day later, and the ship catch is what was really interesting at this point of development.
The previz imagery of their plans for the Louisiana coast showed pairs of towers dotting the coast. At first I thought they were for alternating the cadence of launches, but now I wonder if one is to catch the booster and the other to catch ship.
landing footage shows exactly why they didn't attempt the tower catch - the final braking burn was engine rich (green tint), it didn't blow up, but there was a respectable chance of it just crashing into the tower running on less than fumes
The goal, as I understand it, is to return the booster with as little fuel as possible at time of catch -- and not run short.
The booster footage indicated to me that its engines turned off, and then the body of the booster imploded, before it touched the ground and then became the expected fireball.
I'm definitely not a rocket scientist, but this series of events leads me to believe that the fuel was absolutely exhausted.
Nice! I wonder how the engineering involved here compares to the engineering behind manufacturing TSMC chips (including ASML machines, Zeiss optics etc.). Which is harder?
As it seems building rockets has historically been a capital intensive business with low profits and limited demand, so there just wasn't much competition in the space industry.
I would say that they're orthogonal except for the requirement for exacting results and standards. Doing anything once is hard. Doing anything repeatably is hard^2.
It's difficult to underline how huge this is. This marks the first time in the history of rocketry that the upper stage of a rocket has returned home from orbit to a safe, upright landing.
(And to preempt the obvious objection: yes, maybe you can call the Space Shuttle an "upper stage of a rocket" if you squint hard enough, but it didn't do upright landings, its external tank was not reusable and even the Shuttle itself was effectively rebuilt from scratch at exorbitant cost each time.)
It's sad to see a lot of media missing the point, eg as I type this BBC is reporting this as "SpaceX successfully catches part of Starship rocket on its return to Earth".
Edit: corrected to note that the SRBs were reusable, but the ET was not.
Whatever you call it, the Shuttle Orbiter wasn’t a complete stage in any case. It needed the external tank, which was never recovered.
SpaceX has now demonstrated all the pieces of a fully reusable launcher. Next comes putting them all together in the same flight, and hopefully demonstrating that the flights can become frequent and cheap. There’s no guarantee of that, but it’s looking good.
> yes, maybe you can call the Space Shuttle an "upper stage of a rocket" if you squint hard enough
Why wouldn't it count? It is not the first time in the history of rocketry that the part that is not the boosters returns home intact.
Sure, you can say "it's the first time in the history of rocketry that it lands upright", but you could also say "it's the first time in the history of rocketry that it is not white".
If you want to say how huge this is, tell me how different it is from landing the boosters. Because from the outside it sure as hell looks very similar.
The Space Shuttle has four parts, namely the Orbiter, the External Tank, and the two SRBs. Only the Orbiter is reusable and actually lands, the rest are jettisoned in flight. (SRBs are recovered, the ET is not.) However, the Orbiter is completely incapable of flight without the other three, so it's not a rocket stage on its own, just part of one.
As for why it's harder to catch Starship than Super Heavy, where do I begin:
* Super Heavy is suborbital, its maximum velocity is far, far less than Starship.
* Super Heavy returns upright. The Starship does the famous but aerodynamically very complex "belly flop" to reduce speed.
* Super Heavy only has two static fins to guide it. Starship has four actively controlled fins that need to survive the extreme forces of launch and re-entry.
> The Space Shuttle has four parts, namely the Orbiter, the External Tank, and the two SRBs. Only the Orbiter is reusable and actually lands, the rest are jettisoned in flight and burn up in the atmosphere.
Thanks, the insights about Super Heavy vs Starship are interesting.
About how "huge" it is, I understand that it is economically huge: Musk will get even richer.
I would be interested in knowing how "huge" it is in terms of engineering. Like, my understanding is that they needed to invent new maths to go to the moon in the 60s. Does SpaceX compare with that, or is it "just" what you can do with a lot of money and powerful computers?
Genuinely interested, even though rocket fans will hate me for not knowing the answer and daring asking. Bring the downvotes!
Notably, they were reusable! Sure, they had to refurbish them, same with the shuttle’s main engines. The only thing they threw away was the external tank which didn’t have any engines.
You don't understand the precision required to catch a 70m tall behemoth when you have Earths atmosphere. It's not even close to bringing a capsule to an approximate area, a small ship somewhere with almost no atmosphere, or even landing a rocket on a pad (which we've only had since Falcon 9)
Do you want more cool stuff like James Webb in orbit? Fully reusable huge rockets like Starship is how you get them there.
Also, remember how JWST had to do that incredibly complex and fiddly in-orbit expansion and alignment to fit together the mirror after launch? If Starship had been available at the time, this would have been far easier, since Starship has twice the diameter (four times the area) of the Ariane rocket they used to launch it.
Besides that I really really wished it wouldn't be Elon Musk, i'm looking forward to cheaper stuff so its easier to send science stuff up. Don't get me wrong at all.
But it feels like hyperbole.
Pure technically speaking, if you can fly a rocket up and control it properly, whats the crazy thing flying a rocket back down and controlling it?
Or do you see it more like a milestone seeing?
And for me, it still feels like if Elon Musk tries his Dataenter 'idea' and really sneds up everyday a Starship, we will lose a lot of control as normal humans whats going on in space and what will happen to our atmosphere.
To pick just one achievement among many, the Raptor engines on the Starship are literally revolutionary. First ever full-flow staged combustion engine, designed for both extreme reliability and cheap mass production, even the fuel they use (methalox) had never been tried at this scale.
> Pure technically speaking, if you can fly a rocket up and control it properly, whats the crazy thing flying a rocket back down and controlling it?
You are absolutely right. Same thing about just putting a battery and some motors to make a car like RC car! Same about 48v/replacing canbus. Same thing about putting some satellites on orbit for internet! Same for mobile service! Same about if humans can use eyes to drive, computers should be able to using cameras! All _simple_ things, obvious in retrospect.
Yet one man is marching forward, poking his nose in industries he does not belong, and still almost always coming on top.
Makes you wonder why existing incumbents can't do these "simple" things.
I think the main challenge is really the heat shielding. That is the part that is so different from the takeoff. And it actually remains to be seen if that is good enough for repeated rapid reuse.
What actually is the point of all this? I'm not trying to be a snarky contrarian, I've never had any interest whatsoever in space, star trek, "what's out there?", so I genuinely don't get it.
I'm not trashing people's interests, obviously I am the odd man out in not giving a damn, I just don't see what we're trying to achieve when there are so many issues we can't even figure out on earth.
Well considering we gave SpaceX a contract to get us to the moon and for that to happen it needs to do something ridiculous like 20+ in orbit refueling yeah it's a pretty important thing to criticize.
If you don’t get it, nothing anyone says is going to convince you otherwise.
The people who “had an interest” in pursuing the unknown built the entire modern world that you exist in, since so many things have some connection back to the space program, including ironically the very device you’re using to express your opinion. So it’s probably worth paying them a little respect.
This is the most powerful rocket ever constructed. It has the largest possible payload. The James Webb is tiny compared to what is possible. No other rocket can do that. End of. Please stop. You are embarrassing yourself.
Just to be clear: James Webb was build and designed with nanometer aligned optical system, has to be cooled down while being at L2, can't be serviced and repaired and it was only enough money there to build it once and took 5 years of building and 25 years of planning.
It is an achievement, i'm not disagreeing with it.
I'm disagreeing with the level of it.
I'm also disappointed that we celebrate this and ignore that the richest man on the planet is also involved in reducing usability of starlink in a real war were real humans are dying. And his involvment in USAID, DOGE and co.
So take your complaint to govt. Also, nobody is stopping you from using starlink-alternatives.com . In fact, since you hate him, that's what you should do.
> since so many things have some connection back to the space program, including ironically the very device you’re using to express your opinion.
Well there you go. I did not know that. And yet, instead of saying, "The space program is useful because of X and Y, it's pretty cool actually, I recommend book Z about it.", I get replies that I am a lost cause who doesn't respect scientists.
Unreal. I could have a more balanced conversation with a Muslim imam about religious beliefs.
Perhaps you don't have any clue that earth and it's inhabitants are very, very likely to be the only one, - - or, of the very few planets in our known universe, with such a sequence of events over millions if not billions of years that allow us to be living beings, evolving - - while out in space is a vacuum, intense radiation, no oxygen, no food or water for many hundreds if not thousands of light years distance away. Incredibly few of our species grasps this fact and actually appreciates it ...
These people are completely useless. They would never come out of the cave or the forest. They'd sit in the village they were born in forever never knowing what is beyond the horizon. Never tasting the fruits of the universe forever content with only what they can see only to be wiped out by a random virus or errant rock from the sky. I am so so thankful for the engineers, scientists, and literally every junior dev at SpaceX right now.
> damn, I just don't see what we're trying to achieve when there are so many issues we can't even figure out on earth
Earth issues are mostly coordination problems. Space issues are technological problems. Elon Musk has been very successful at solving technological problems: electric vehicles, space flight, mind-machine interfaces.
It makes sense that people like him who can solve technological problems point their attention and substantial agency to the things that their unique skills place them in a position to solve.
The Elon Musk of coordination does not currently exist. One must imagine that the kind of person or school of people who instituted NATO and the US-Japan MDA and turned our one-time enemies into our staunchest allies were people of such caliber but there’s no one I know today who qualifies for that.
Musk definitely has mastered firm-level coordination but clearly national coordination (let alone international coordination) is a problem beyond even him. His teams nearly religiously point the same way, and they have achieved wonders. It is truly remarkable what these people have done. Good for them, and I’m glad to see them at it!
Elon Musk is not the person building any of it. Not EVs, Space Flight or mind-machine interfaces.
He is reckless and ignorant and yes it works for some of his stuff and it doesn't work for others.
His ignorance alone in DOGE probably killed children and humans. Don't get me wrong, US of America doesn't has to pay for aid around the planet even if they contribute massivly to climate change and consumes a lot of resources importet around the planet, but his abrupt cancelation and involvment in USAID killed chilrden and humans.
Do we also ignore everything else if you list up things which are only positive? Like Boring company? Solar city? Buying Twitter and manipulating democracy around the planet? Doing an Ad tour in front of the White House and disrespecting anyone else who can't buy themselves next to Trump?
Thank you for the well thought out reply. I will try to do better to understand the larger technological breakthroughs of space flight as a key development in how things modernize on earth itself
I mean, you need to get money from somewhere to fund your dreams.
If it's datacenters in space then let be it. They are pretty cool as well. It seems a lot of people don't like them on Earth.
That remains to be determined. The math with blackbody radiation cooling borderline works. So they may be cool, but whether it is enough ...
But I don't think we will see success before the craziness down here has settled down and they don't face the political headwinds they currently do. And I don't think that they can compete with ground based per unit cost no matter what kind of black magic they do.
That ship has sailed since the first rockets were used to launch bombs and incendiaries somewhere in China, a long time ago. Hammers can be used to build and to kill. Knives cut wood as well as flesh. Humans are belligerent primates whether we want it or not, changing that isn't something even all humanities faculties in the world can manage nor any ideologue intent on creating the New Soviet Man or Übermensch or transhumanist. Fortunately there tend to be more people intent on doing 'good' things with technology than 'bad', where 'good' can also include defending against those doing 'bad' things even though that is a thin line to walk.
I am not a cynic, but a realist. It is easy to do things when you put a ton of money towards the effort so I find this nothing special. Maybe when I was a child these things would fascinate me, but they are just engineering.
So, what would amaze me? Ending homelessness in the United States. Because that takes more than money. I would like to swap the "passion" or engineering for the "compassion" of ending suffering. Very easy to shape and change material things, very hard to change the heart.
The people you want to share your excitement might be suffering under the same separation of wealth that made this landing possible. (Yet there is little talk that they failed to catch the booster and it exploded).
ofc a comment like that would get downvoted by investors and technologists, but yes i agree, if you have enough imagination and money, almost anything in engineering is eventually possible. that same imagination and money is rarely spent on making the experience of living beings who are suffering nicer. but we dont live in a 1D world and all people need a win, engineering nerds included.
You don't need private people/companies or more taxes for that. US has enough resources to do it already. Maybe you should go ask your politicians, better yet, ask your friends/neighbors/yourself if you are ready to take the drastic steps necessary to solve that.
Thank you for for making this comment. It helped me realize in myself what's changed over the last few years.
I grew up reading Zubrin's The Case for Mars, The Martian, and October Sky. I went to space camp at NASA, and as a 14 year old I sent an angry email to NASA when I learned of the early ISS decommission date(they later extended the lifespan several times, and I like to think I was the reason ;) ).
I followed Bigelow Aerospace in the 2000s doing the only interesting commercial work in space, and afterwards became amongst the first online SpaceX fanboys, long before they ever landed a merlin engine.
I studied hard in school with a passion of going to Embry-Riddle to learn to build rockets - though I ultimately chose a software path in life instead, I stayed an enormous space fanboy over the 2010s, frequenting the SpaceX subreddit and catching every launch and landing stream I could live.
I've cried watching so many rocket landings. The spirit of human endeavor is god damn BEAUTIFUL to me.
I want to point my finger and say that everything else changed. The Internet became what it is. Elon Musk showed his true colors. Software Engineering became middle management.
But the truth is that I've changed.
I care about the people wealth disparity hurts more than I do about us getting our perfect vision of the future now now NOW.
The faster we pump this machine, the louder the Earth is SCREAMING.
The world is on fire, and we're covering it in data centers with the goal of building artificial machines for strip-mining humanity of the very competency in engineering that has given us so much joy.
We're caught up in a race to the bottom and without diverting our path I have to wonder if this starship landing will be one of the last great human-driven engineering achievements before we lose the ability to do so ourselves.
I don't think the answer is to swap the passion for engineering with compassion, as I think they can both live happily together, but I hear where that desire is coming from.
It's coming from a place of love.
And when the last tree has fallen, we may find that we cannot eat money.
All I want are bigger and more cleverly located space telescopes, a couple of more probes and orbiters around other planets and asteroids, and I want those Mars samples that Percy has been pooping over the Mars surface returned to Earth and studied in a lab. And maybe a probe to Alpha Centauri or exo-planet viewers that use the Sun’s gravitational lensing in the next 5 or 6 decades.
I think the concept for the Alpha Centauri probes uses solar sails and externally fired lasers[1]. The exo-planet viewer concept also proposes solar sails.
In orbit refueling is likely next year. The goal is to have two shots at a moon landing in 2028.
And a nuclear ion rocket scheduled for 2028 as well.
The current NASA administrator is doing a good job getting rid of all the things keeping NASA from doing things. (And at least after Artemis II, both parties in congress seemed to be on his side.)
> Why is Space-X undervalued because they can catch a rocketship?
The market values SpaceX over multiple areas of the business and their future plans and it isn't just this event which they have proven to accomplish.
> You do understand that a company needs to have a business case equivilient to its valuation right?
Nope. That is not how this works nor how investors see it. It is about their total addressable market (TAM) which SpaceX can capture over everyone else. So here are some more further questions:
1) Who is paying SpaceX for the compute that they have?
2) How quick is SpaceX building their data centers to support their customers?
3) How many people use Starlink as their primary internet provider?
You understand that almost all of where SpaceX businesses can expand into those areas and grow into that valuation and higher?
> Our whole planet sends 1000-2000t of payload into space, most of it is now starlink.
Your point is?
So who else can catch and reuse a rocketship to frequently deploy satellites into space in a very short period of time? (Don't say Blue Origin.)
1) Anthropic because Elon Musk bought too much Compute and doesn't need it for his own AI proudct. In parallel Neoclouds are building up the same compute and its more like a negative sign that they got lucky
2) ? I don't understand what you mean. Are we now talking about Datacenters for others or the space thing?
3) probably below 8 million. 10 Million customer overall, plenty as an alternative or for camping etc.
Amazon Leo is an alternative. But for sure Space-X started a race to the bottom (china, blue origin and co) so they have to start moving and use their first mover advantage.
My point is, that Space-X is already responsible for the most amount of payload which gets send into space. We as a whole planet don't have that much payload and Space-X made it alot cheaper to send payload up.
So were is the 1 Trillion evaluation? Btw. its currently at 1.89T
Launch itself isn't super profitable and doesn't have a very big TAM, especially if you carefully treat the TAM as a present value and discount future cash flows. Also, at least by my personal guesswork, Starlink alone shouldn't get close to a $1 trillion valuation. It seems like the current valuation is based on people's guesses about the likelihood that space data centers pan out in a big way.
You could go to LinkedIn and look at people in the:
* structures
* propulsion
* avionics
* flight software
departments, because they all work together to make this happen, along with support from IT/SRE. The person most responsible for ensuring that it happens is Lars Blackmore[1], who was also the Responsible Engineer in charge of making sure Falcon 9 landed successfully
He's actively holding the program back at this point. Top engineers in this industry are increasingly reluctant to join a company with a such a toxic culture and public reputation tainted by musk.
Kind of crazy to reduce the hardware on ship so much and move so much complexity to the ground. This can really only happen in a situation where anybody can throw out any dumb idea, because if you suggested this 20 years ago people would think you are an idiot.
That's...the point. You can hire commercial welders to work on the ground side and build everything out once, cheaply.
The issue with the shuttle era was that they needed huge teams of specialized technicians to refurbish the insanely complex orbiter after every mission.
If we ever get sufficiently improved materials science for heat shields and engines there's still always a possibility of returning to the SSTO space plane concept. That would allow a more austere launch and recovery environment, but given current limitations this is the local maxima.
von Braun just wanted to build rockets. He was a Nazi, yes, and he did Nazi things, but he would have been (and was) just as loyal to any other country that let him build rockets.
Reusable stages is very neat, but seems a little crazy to pay the tyranny of the rocket equation twice. I heard one person say that carrying fuel to land over the whole flight means it takes 23x more launches to get an equivalent payload to orbit.
Using modern technology, couldn't disposable first stages be produced much more cheaply than during the space race?
How much of modern manufacturing disposable booster's cost would be fuel vs metal?
OP, this is probably the source of the confusion. Some people are claiming that SpaceX will need 20+ refueling launches for human lunar landings. However, that's a very different claim than reusable rockets requiring 23x more launches just to carry the same amount of payload to Earth orbit.
It's not paying it twice. The rocket equation is about the ratio of the wet and dry mass, so for an expendable rocket you're always limited by the fact that there's an upper stage (and for the second stage the payload etc).
This is why SpaceX cares more about TWR for their engines than traditional rockets did. It goes from making a negligible difference to a huge component of how much fuel they need to keep for landing.
It doesn't take the same amount of fuel to land as it does to lift.
Speaking as a Kerbal Space program playing, internet commentor, It's probably <1% of the fuel to briefly counteract terminal velocity as it is to lift off and reach space.
"I heard one person say that carrying fuel to land over the whole flight means it takes 23x more launches to get an equivalent payload to orbit."
I don't think that this is the case when using the atmosphere to shed most of your velocity, which is what we do when landing on Earth. Propulsive braking would be another story, but you can avoid that on bodies that do have some atmosphere. In our proximity, only the Moon and Mercury would need propulsive braking, but Moon's gravity is low and Mercury is hard to visit anyway.
That said, once you use the atmosphere to cushion what is basically a fall, the weight of the necessary heat shield comes to the equation too.
How is it twice? Braking on the way down doesn't take nearly as much fuel as lift off so the "tyranny of the rocket equation" should be paid only once.
The 23x more launches figure comes from HLS (Nasa sponsored mission to the moon). They may well change the configuration of that anyway, but if you want to refuel in orbit, that's what it costs. It's hard to get fuel to orbit (or any sort of payload). Previous Moon missions haven't refueled anything, but they couldn't return anything heavy from the moon's surface, the vehicle got smaller and smaller as it went and many parts were left behind, so it's not comparable. You can be sure if it's cheaper to somehow do this mission with expendable boosters, they'll think about doing that.
On a normal mission just to earth orbit, there is one booster and one starship, and reusing the booster is more a question of why not save some money for a little more propellant use? The reususable booster doesn't contribute much extra weight, it uses little propellant for boostback and landing.
The booster also doesn't go all the way and you need a booster if you're going to reach orbit (due to that equation), so it doesn't take much to make it reusable. So all in all, why not make it reusable if you can? What would you save from using expendable ones?
It costs less, but it is not free. The stages need to be designed to come back and that adds weight. Additionally you need some fuel, it is not all air breaking.
And every bit of weight is really bad, because of the rocket equation.
Without internal figures no one can say what is ultimately financially better. Especially now that the development is a sunken cost.
That 23x number is trivially refuted simply by looking at the fact that this flight delivered 52 tons of cargo to orbit. Could a similarly sized expendable rocket like the Saturn V deliver 1196 tons?
If the fuel (+ oxidizer) ends up costing as much as 1% of the cost of launching a conventional single-use rocket then the people behind it will be very happy. That means that their rocket (+ cost of ground facilities + all the people prepping the rocket and monitoring the launch) is very cheap.
The fuel (+ oxidizer) is basically free compared to all the other costs.
"The booster’s primary objective on Flight 15 will be executing a successful launch, ascent, stage separation, boostback burn, and return to the launch site for catch. This will be the first return and catch attempt for a Super Heavy V3 booster." [1]
If the heat shield holds up then this changes everything. Next step is double catch and re-flying the same ships and catching again, then payloads to orbit become significantly cheaper opening a new era in space flight.
Yeah, I'm eagerly awaiting results from inspection of the heat shield (which hopefully they will disclose). Reflight without refurbishment is the last goal they need to hit before the system can be considered a success. After that, optimizing for increased payload and nailing reliability will be the things to work on. And of course orbital refueling for HLS.
This changes nothing, in space fuel transfer between ships is the make it or break it.
Even without enabling missions requiring refuelling this is still a huge step change in orbital capabilities.
Fuel transfer seems like a trivial problem next to the reusable heat shield. And even if for some weird reason it never works, the program could likely pay for itself just launching Starlink/Starshield with full reuse.
plenty of use cases were fuel transfer is not needed.
Fuel transfer isn't needed to launch to LEO at much lower cost.
Insane achievement! It is the dawn of a new era! One that has been 10+ years in the making.
I still remember watching Falcon 9 (Block V, iirc) successfully landing back on land (as opposed to droneships) after deploying Orbcomm OG2 satellites in December 2015 -- almost 11 years ago.
It blew my teen mind.
This day marks a fabulous advancement for the human species.
We went outside in our Orlando office to see the flair up in the sky, and then were looking for the re-entry, by the time we could figure out where it was our coworker said it was already standing upright.
I'll be that guy: they still have to fly it again. That's the real question. Incredible achievement. We got used to landing and caught boosters real quick!
I like that they wrote "dont panic" on the fuselage above the s42 badge
And so few will get it
It’s a foundational book for many people.
Then they can look it up and be part of today's lucky 10000.
It’s sold over 20 million copies. I think a few people might get it.
Adams is still very widely read. Also, digital watches are still a pretty neat idea.
Did it carry a towel?
If this makes even me want to go study engineering I know it will inspire millions of youngsters into making the future we all want. Bravo!
The engineering of this is just bind boggling awesome. The culmination of so many fields, so many factors, to this. Congrats!!!
It is. It's a great achievement for Gwynne Shotwell.
Yes, though not an engineering one. At SpaceX she handles business development, strategy, and ops, though she was trained as an engineer and did it previously in her career. I think this is almost the more impressive feat here, not to diminish the engineering leap.
Definitely a name that won’t be forgotten anytime soon.
> bind boggling
mind bottling
Watched it with my 5 year old daughter (3 year old son was sadly uninterested), and we were both cheering and high fiving. Very exciting.
So precise it was almost boring - incredible work. Kudos.
Congratulations to the steely eyed missile men and women of SpaceX.
I wonder if John Aaron was watching. Or Gene Kranz. Both are still alive.
They surely would have been watching. Unless that wasn't an option :-)
I know engineering is about expediency, and price, but I’m still bummed that we aren’t getting ships with landing gear in this or likely the next generation of rockets either.
Seems that the heavier the rocket the more ground clearance to need to self-land, and so you can’t scale up the dragon’s landing system. I don’t think there’s anywhere near enough weight to shave off of the next rocket or enough specific impulse to add to bring the size back down.
Starship HLS has landing gear. For Earth landings everything is so marginal that the weight penalty of landing gear is too high.
Yeah the Starship program isn't about landing on Mars or even going there.
It's about pumping mass into low Earth orbit, partly for commericial, but mostly military purposes such as Golden Dome. Been in the works for decades and finally here. The people who know are very excited.
Starlink is pretty amazing tech which can be used for both good and evil - from enabling reliable communication in disaster zones to letting civilians browse social media from remote locations to communicating with weapons of war.
> to communicating with weapons of war
You could say the same thing for terrestrial internet. Not trying to be contradictory, I just find this a very interesting ethical topic.
Yeah but Starlink also intends to put weapons ONBOARD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...
Every product has the same adoption curve. Early customers pay a premium which pays for building the factories, not just the product. By the time everyone is using them the prices have gotten low enough that the price is informed by supply rather than demand.
SpaceX being their own customer, and a lower priority one, lets them levellize their revenue, which also helps retain staff. And if anyone commoditizes launch systems, they have a hedge against that. However if demand for starlink ever does exceed capacity, the launch side could find their schedules being much more variable.
In software, you see this with priority queues all the time if you know where to look. Someone makes a “low priority” system that soaks up spare capacity. Internal customers become dependent on these systems and then become delay-averse. Meanwhile, other teams also start soaking up that spare capacity, by improved design or feature creep or both. That low priority system becomes starved of resources, and the internal customers start saber rattling. That system gets its own dedicated resources, and now stranded resources climb back to the original levels, if not worse.
Starlink will eventually become the same thing. And I wonder if they will spin it off when that situation arises.
I unfortunately agree. Years ago I realized the Mars talk was just talk when I noticed that Musk and SpaceX were not funding any of the other stuff you’d need to fund if you wanted to “make life multiplanetary.”
Continuing to iterate on self contained biospheres and long term closed cycle life support? (Not a solved problem!) Working on construction techniques for the Moon or Mars? Studies on the dose response curve for gravity, like sponsoring a spin lab for the ISS to at least see if mice can reproduce in 0.3g? Self contained industrial infrastructure leaning heavily on 3D printers? Psychological research on the best way to build interiors and run social units?
Musk could personally fund all of that with little impact on his net worth.
It’s also decades of work. Some of what I listed is harder than the rockets. Better get started if you want to have a settlement on Mars this century.
Nope. Nothing. Just rockets, the a satellite network that is clearly “dual use.” Then Trump 2.0 and lots of “golden dome” (Star Wars 2.0) talk.
It’s not to go to Mars.
I love space and I hugely admire the engineering achievement, but it’s disappointing to learn for this and many other reasons that the people behind it were not the visionaries they pretended to be. They’re just more territorial apes obsessed with ape tribal stuff like race and nationalism and fighting over dirt at the bottom of a gravity well. Small minds with big toys.
I had to read the comment below (from u/modeless) before I realized by landing gear you meant the upright ones. I thought you wanted it to land sideways like a plane. (Arguably doable, though the control systems might add a lot more weight)
The problem with space planes is they are terrible planes, terrible rockets, and feed the egos of pilots.
To be fair to NASA and the astronauts, NASA needed humans who behave like military test pilots. In physiology, in reaction time, in crisis management, in following chain of command. And the armed forces were willing to give them access to known quantities.
We didn’t know how control systems would evolve over the next three decades, but the pilots wanted to pilot, and did not trust the control systems. And the irony of it all is that the Space Race was a proxy war for nuclear armament, so control systems needed to be made autonomous anyway.
Better control systems, wider telemetry, and not worrying about incinerating employees let current generation rocketry iterate faster, and do more fucking around and finding out. We found out twice with the shuttle and it killed the program.
It’s curious how much the upper stage now resembles a space shuttle on a ballistic trajectory instead of a glide angle. Very different landing strategies for those two modes of descent…
The space shuttle orbiter definitely had a lot more cool factor.
It was extremely cool 45+ years ago. But the space race ended, and while government-funded space programs did some fantastic work beyond that (space telescopes and Mars landers), it took capitalism to develop the resuable rocket, then scale it up to Starship proportions.
I imagine this is what it was like to witness Apollo 11 55 years ago.
Er, no. Nothing like it. Grabbed from your bed in the middle of the night, bundled downstairs to watch (grainy) and hear (crackly) weird things on a black-and-white TV, while adults, including strangers, whooped and shouted drunkenly. I understood the Apollo 11 thing only in the days after, through news reports. The live event was as impenetrable to me as a dream. Then again, I was half-asleep and five years old.
I was seven, and I happen to have had a profoundly different experience than you. There was a massive rocket mania and all the kids I knew wanted to see the landing.
Russ Olsen does a great keynote about the life-changing experience for those of us so affected. I happened to be in the audience for this edition and it was something special to be old enough to remember it much as he remembered it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMZBA7KHnHQ
My grandma was one of the only person with a TV where she lived, half of the town was in her living room, nothing comparable. I bet most people watched this on their toilet seat before scrolling to the next cool thing as if it was nothing
Do we know why they didn't try to catch the booster?
Apparently the booster signaled it didn't have enough fuel to risk it. Either because it consumed more then expected on the way up, or a measurement error potentially.
I heard somewhere the engine efficiency is still somewhat variable so they burned more fuel than anticipated.
That's basically what Musk said, yes: that they need to work on both engine performance and performance consistency. He said they'd be cutting off the main engines one second sooner to provide more margin for boost-back.
Amazing that a one-second difference can matter, but those things go through tons of fuel every one of those seconds!
At the last moment the exhaust turned green. That's consistent with the fuel running out, the engines running oxygen rich, and subsequently "engine rich". So I would put my money on actually running out vs a measurement error.
Two reasons floating around. 1.)They lost communication with tower 2.)They ran out of fuel for safe land.
source: Scott Manley https://youtube.com/shorts/m2oGDCvDmdE?si=0AlX8sgHDihXCED6
Slight underperformance in the engines resulted in the the booster not reaching where it was supposed to be and the GNC systems automatically aborted to the gulf for safety.
"Slightly low on fuel."
If I understand correctly, the margin was tight enough not to take the risk of damaging the tower.
And if the landing footage is any indication, it sure looks like they would have made the catch anyway if they'd gone for it.
Their risk tolerance would probably be greater if both towers were fully operational. But any damage to the only functional tower during booster catch = an automatic abort to the ship catch one day later, and the ship catch is what was really interesting at this point of development.
The previz imagery of their plans for the Louisiana coast showed pairs of towers dotting the coast. At first I thought they were for alternating the cadence of launches, but now I wonder if one is to catch the booster and the other to catch ship.
landing footage shows exactly why they didn't attempt the tower catch - the final braking burn was engine rich (green tint), it didn't blow up, but there was a respectable chance of it just crashing into the tower running on less than fumes
The goal, as I understand it, is to return the booster with as little fuel as possible at time of catch -- and not run short.
The booster footage indicated to me that its engines turned off, and then the body of the booster imploded, before it touched the ground and then became the expected fireball.
I'm definitely not a rocket scientist, but this series of events leads me to believe that the fuel was absolutely exhausted.
Sounds like the final boom was intentional from control
Perhaps it was, and if so: It occurred subsequent to the implosion.
(In case that distinction is missed, I do mean "implode" as the antonym of "explode".)
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2121648438144024943
booster was low on fuel, plus no mood of risking tower with boom, boosters are cheaper than towers.
Cool. And people thought he wrote this himself!
Do we know what sea life just died as the booster exploded? What are the impacts to the Texas Gulf when a booster detonates into the ocean?
Holy ship, it was picture perfect capture!
This is absolutely incredible!! I can’t wrap my head around this.
We witnessed history today
That was incredible to watch!
Huge congratulations to the team.
Ah man I just missed it. The live feed is just stock footage. Any links to the catch?
Last few minutes here:
https://x.com/spacex/status/2121316300702056595
https://youtu.be/jHlpfNSpBmw?t=3233
Damned impressive.
Nice! I wonder how the engineering involved here compares to the engineering behind manufacturing TSMC chips (including ASML machines, Zeiss optics etc.). Which is harder?
As it seems building rockets has historically been a capital intensive business with low profits and limited demand, so there just wasn't much competition in the space industry.
Chips are harder.
I would say that they're orthogonal except for the requirement for exacting results and standards. Doing anything once is hard. Doing anything repeatably is hard^2.
Many countries are capable of space flight & deploying satellites.
Only a few companies in the world can manage the top-tier fab processes for modern chips.
Only one company in the world has successfully caught a rocket.
It's hard to directly compare, safe to say they are 2 of the pinnacle examples of modern human engineering.
> Only one company in the world has successfully caught a rocket.
China did that too.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/10/china/china-reusable-rock...
That was incredible impressive, what a feat of engineering!
You can see a plane passing underneath it at video timestamp 22:44:43!
The heat shield looks very good. Excited to see how much work it will take to fly this again. I'm in awe. I like the future sometimes.
Seemed to me two tiles were missing, including one right in the center of the ship's belly, but no hull damage.
Best thing ever built and it works!!!
The most amazing thing i've seen in a while.
Holy cow.
It's crazy how far you have to scroll to even see this on the front page of NYT.
Maybe people have bigger problems ? War, cost of living crisis etc ?
i wonder how much fuel was left over after landing? What is their safety margin in seconds of burn remaining?
Probably 2 to 3 seconds max? You pay a massive penalty for carrying any extra fuel.
It's difficult to underline how huge this is. This marks the first time in the history of rocketry that the upper stage of a rocket has returned home from orbit to a safe, upright landing.
(And to preempt the obvious objection: yes, maybe you can call the Space Shuttle an "upper stage of a rocket" if you squint hard enough, but it didn't do upright landings, its external tank was not reusable and even the Shuttle itself was effectively rebuilt from scratch at exorbitant cost each time.)
It's sad to see a lot of media missing the point, eg as I type this BBC is reporting this as "SpaceX successfully catches part of Starship rocket on its return to Earth".
Edit: corrected to note that the SRBs were reusable, but the ET was not.
Whatever you call it, the Shuttle Orbiter wasn’t a complete stage in any case. It needed the external tank, which was never recovered.
SpaceX has now demonstrated all the pieces of a fully reusable launcher. Next comes putting them all together in the same flight, and hopefully demonstrating that the flights can become frequent and cheap. There’s no guarantee of that, but it’s looking good.
> yes, maybe you can call the Space Shuttle an "upper stage of a rocket" if you squint hard enough
Why wouldn't it count? It is not the first time in the history of rocketry that the part that is not the boosters returns home intact.
Sure, you can say "it's the first time in the history of rocketry that it lands upright", but you could also say "it's the first time in the history of rocketry that it is not white".
If you want to say how huge this is, tell me how different it is from landing the boosters. Because from the outside it sure as hell looks very similar.
The Space Shuttle has four parts, namely the Orbiter, the External Tank, and the two SRBs. Only the Orbiter is reusable and actually lands, the rest are jettisoned in flight. (SRBs are recovered, the ET is not.) However, the Orbiter is completely incapable of flight without the other three, so it's not a rocket stage on its own, just part of one.
As for why it's harder to catch Starship than Super Heavy, where do I begin:
* Super Heavy is suborbital, its maximum velocity is far, far less than Starship.
* Super Heavy returns upright. The Starship does the famous but aerodynamically very complex "belly flop" to reduce speed.
* Super Heavy only has two static fins to guide it. Starship has four actively controlled fins that need to survive the extreme forces of launch and re-entry.
> The Space Shuttle has four parts, namely the Orbiter, the External Tank, and the two SRBs. Only the Orbiter is reusable and actually lands, the rest are jettisoned in flight and burn up in the atmosphere.
Nitpick- the SRBs were also recovered and reused
Right you are, corrected.
Thanks, the insights about Super Heavy vs Starship are interesting.
About how "huge" it is, I understand that it is economically huge: Musk will get even richer.
I would be interested in knowing how "huge" it is in terms of engineering. Like, my understanding is that they needed to invent new maths to go to the moon in the 60s. Does SpaceX compare with that, or is it "just" what you can do with a lot of money and powerful computers?
Genuinely interested, even though rocket fans will hate me for not knowing the answer and daring asking. Bring the downvotes!
> none of its boosters were reusable
Notably, they were reusable! Sure, they had to refurbish them, same with the shuttle’s main engines. The only thing they threw away was the external tank which didn’t have any engines.
> none of its boosters were reusable
The SRBs of the shuttle landed by parachute and were recovered from the water and reused
You know what was huge? James Webb telescope.
Look its cool to see a catch like this, it doesn't necessarly feels that difficult tbh?
And I just don't get it? Is it cool to watch? yes, but whats the endgoal besides reducing costs for starlink and military stuff?
> it doesn't necessarly feels that difficult tbh?
Are you for real?
?! We know how to send rockets up, we know how to send them back to earth. We know how to stabilize a rocket. I mean we fly them for ages?!
'that difficult'
Look at projects like James Webb telescope.
You don't understand the precision required to catch a 70m tall behemoth when you have Earths atmosphere. It's not even close to bringing a capsule to an approximate area, a small ship somewhere with almost no atmosphere, or even landing a rocket on a pad (which we've only had since Falcon 9)
But others are also working on it and showed they can do it too?
Do you want more cool stuff like James Webb in orbit? Fully reusable huge rockets like Starship is how you get them there.
Also, remember how JWST had to do that incredibly complex and fiddly in-orbit expansion and alignment to fit together the mirror after launch? If Starship had been available at the time, this would have been far easier, since Starship has twice the diameter (four times the area) of the Ariane rocket they used to launch it.
Besides that I really really wished it wouldn't be Elon Musk, i'm looking forward to cheaper stuff so its easier to send science stuff up. Don't get me wrong at all.
But it feels like hyperbole.
Pure technically speaking, if you can fly a rocket up and control it properly, whats the crazy thing flying a rocket back down and controlling it?
Or do you see it more like a milestone seeing?
And for me, it still feels like if Elon Musk tries his Dataenter 'idea' and really sneds up everyday a Starship, we will lose a lot of control as normal humans whats going on in space and what will happen to our atmosphere.
> Pure technically speaking, if you can fly a rocket up and control it properly, whats the crazy thing flying a rocket back down and controlling it?
It only took the entire existence of humanity to reach this point.
I'm not willing to hand-wave that away as some kind of technologically-obvious conclusion.
"It only took the entire existence of humanity to reach this point." as everything else.
EUV required genuine new engineering for an example.
To pick just one achievement among many, the Raptor engines on the Starship are literally revolutionary. First ever full-flow staged combustion engine, designed for both extreme reliability and cheap mass production, even the fuel they use (methalox) had never been tried at this scale.
> Pure technically speaking, if you can fly a rocket up and control it properly, whats the crazy thing flying a rocket back down and controlling it?
You are absolutely right. Same thing about just putting a battery and some motors to make a car like RC car! Same about 48v/replacing canbus. Same thing about putting some satellites on orbit for internet! Same for mobile service! Same about if humans can use eyes to drive, computers should be able to using cameras! All _simple_ things, obvious in retrospect.
Yet one man is marching forward, poking his nose in industries he does not belong, and still almost always coming on top.
Makes you wonder why existing incumbents can't do these "simple" things.
One man who got money, has money and a cult following.
Of course he is flexible enough mentally and ignorant enough to disrupt markets, sure and for this he got rich.
But why does every Musk follower ignore all the bad things he leaves in his march forward?
All the humans around the Space-X 'city'?
Kids and Humans affected by USAID and DOGE?
His lying around everything he promised to people?
I think the main challenge is really the heat shielding. That is the part that is so different from the takeoff. And it actually remains to be seen if that is good enough for repeated rapid reuse.
Can Starship get to L2?
Don't forget the X37
It's very impressive
Magical era. What a feat!
Feels good.
Legendary ♥
SpaceX made me watch engineering feats live on stream. I love it!
How many years until the next milestones?
- in orbit refueling
- moon landing
- Mars rendez-vous
- Mars landing
- humans on Mars
Nah, the game is to put data centers in space. Plus the Space Force dreams.
Launches, Starlink, military provide cash. SpaceX needs to be profitable at least to some extent.
What actually is the point of all this? I'm not trying to be a snarky contrarian, I've never had any interest whatsoever in space, star trek, "what's out there?", so I genuinely don't get it.
I'm not trashing people's interests, obviously I am the odd man out in not giving a damn, I just don't see what we're trying to achieve when there are so many issues we can't even figure out on earth.
Well considering we gave SpaceX a contract to get us to the moon and for that to happen it needs to do something ridiculous like 20+ in orbit refueling yeah it's a pretty important thing to criticize.
If you don’t get it, nothing anyone says is going to convince you otherwise.
The people who “had an interest” in pursuing the unknown built the entire modern world that you exist in, since so many things have some connection back to the space program, including ironically the very device you’re using to express your opinion. So it’s probably worth paying them a little respect.
So we did the moon landing btw.
Shouldn't you be able to articulate a proper answer without any issues?
Is it an engineering feat? Yes.
But i would bet James Webb Telescope and Moon landing were a lot bigger?!
A single one of these Starship's payloads can deliver a telescope approximately 20-25x larger than the James Webb Telescope.
Okaaayyy? We still were able to send James Webb up without a Starship?
Soooo?!
Its cheaper okay, we can send up bigger things good but the comment stated
"So it’s probably worth paying them a little respect."
It sounds like i get down to my knee for Space-X and i still don't get it
This is the most powerful rocket ever constructed. It has the largest possible payload. The James Webb is tiny compared to what is possible. No other rocket can do that. End of. Please stop. You are embarrassing yourself.
Ah I see a fanboy.
Okay I get it, discussion useless.
Just to be clear: James Webb was build and designed with nanometer aligned optical system, has to be cooled down while being at L2, can't be serviced and repaired and it was only enough money there to build it once and took 5 years of building and 25 years of planning.
A rocket is an engineering joke inc omparision.
That's why a car salesman could build it with fraction of cost while nasa sucking on thumb and spending 100x more money to launch anything. Cool
It is an achievement, i'm not disagreeing with it.
I'm disagreeing with the level of it.
I'm also disappointed that we celebrate this and ignore that the richest man on the planet is also involved in reducing usability of starlink in a real war were real humans are dying. And his involvment in USAID, DOGE and co.
Starshield is govt controlled.
Starlink is not allowed for offensive usage.
So take your complaint to govt. Also, nobody is stopping you from using starlink-alternatives.com . In fact, since you hate him, that's what you should do.
With Starship, it will cost about $70-90 to put 1kg of payload into orbit.
That will open vast new opportunities for space-based researh and services.
For example a university that has to pay at least $50k to launch a research cubesat today will be able to do it for about $2k.
> since so many things have some connection back to the space program, including ironically the very device you’re using to express your opinion.
Well there you go. I did not know that. And yet, instead of saying, "The space program is useful because of X and Y, it's pretty cool actually, I recommend book Z about it.", I get replies that I am a lost cause who doesn't respect scientists.
Unreal. I could have a more balanced conversation with a Muslim imam about religious beliefs.
Perhaps you don't have any clue that earth and it's inhabitants are very, very likely to be the only one, - - or, of the very few planets in our known universe, with such a sequence of events over millions if not billions of years that allow us to be living beings, evolving - - while out in space is a vacuum, intense radiation, no oxygen, no food or water for many hundreds if not thousands of light years distance away. Incredibly few of our species grasps this fact and actually appreciates it ...
These people are completely useless. They would never come out of the cave or the forest. They'd sit in the village they were born in forever never knowing what is beyond the horizon. Never tasting the fruits of the universe forever content with only what they can see only to be wiped out by a random virus or errant rock from the sky. I am so so thankful for the engineers, scientists, and literally every junior dev at SpaceX right now.
What's the point of heating sand - we barely have enough food to feed our pre-industrial society.
> damn, I just don't see what we're trying to achieve when there are so many issues we can't even figure out on earth
Earth issues are mostly coordination problems. Space issues are technological problems. Elon Musk has been very successful at solving technological problems: electric vehicles, space flight, mind-machine interfaces.
It makes sense that people like him who can solve technological problems point their attention and substantial agency to the things that their unique skills place them in a position to solve.
The Elon Musk of coordination does not currently exist. One must imagine that the kind of person or school of people who instituted NATO and the US-Japan MDA and turned our one-time enemies into our staunchest allies were people of such caliber but there’s no one I know today who qualifies for that.
Musk definitely has mastered firm-level coordination but clearly national coordination (let alone international coordination) is a problem beyond even him. His teams nearly religiously point the same way, and they have achieved wonders. It is truly remarkable what these people have done. Good for them, and I’m glad to see them at it!
Elon Musk is not the person building any of it. Not EVs, Space Flight or mind-machine interfaces.
He is reckless and ignorant and yes it works for some of his stuff and it doesn't work for others.
His ignorance alone in DOGE probably killed children and humans. Don't get me wrong, US of America doesn't has to pay for aid around the planet even if they contribute massivly to climate change and consumes a lot of resources importet around the planet, but his abrupt cancelation and involvment in USAID killed chilrden and humans.
Do we also ignore everything else if you list up things which are only positive? Like Boring company? Solar city? Buying Twitter and manipulating democracy around the planet? Doing an Ad tour in front of the White House and disrespecting anyone else who can't buy themselves next to Trump?
Thank you for the well thought out reply. I will try to do better to understand the larger technological breakthroughs of space flight as a key development in how things modernize on earth itself
I mean, you need to get money from somewhere to fund your dreams. If it's datacenters in space then let be it. They are pretty cool as well. It seems a lot of people don't like them on Earth.
>They are pretty cool as well.
That remains to be determined. The math with blackbody radiation cooling borderline works. So they may be cool, but whether it is enough ...
But I don't think we will see success before the craziness down here has settled down and they don't face the political headwinds they currently do. And I don't think that they can compete with ground based per unit cost no matter what kind of black magic they do.
It's important to be able to set aside cynicism, even if for a single hour, to enjoy technological achievements like this.
It is important to recognize what technology will be used for and demand it won‘t be used for evil.
The implied claim being "datacenters are evil"?!
s/evil/a scam/
That ship has sailed since the V2 rocket.
Since the rock and the stick.
That ship has sailed since the first rockets were used to launch bombs and incendiaries somewhere in China, a long time ago. Hammers can be used to build and to kill. Knives cut wood as well as flesh. Humans are belligerent primates whether we want it or not, changing that isn't something even all humanities faculties in the world can manage nor any ideologue intent on creating the New Soviet Man or Übermensch or transhumanist. Fortunately there tend to be more people intent on doing 'good' things with technology than 'bad', where 'good' can also include defending against those doing 'bad' things even though that is a thin line to walk.
Is it? I mean, I’m loving this historic event but if someone wants to remember the stupid parts, what’s wrong with that?
I am not a cynic, but a realist. It is easy to do things when you put a ton of money towards the effort so I find this nothing special. Maybe when I was a child these things would fascinate me, but they are just engineering.
So, what would amaze me? Ending homelessness in the United States. Because that takes more than money. I would like to swap the "passion" or engineering for the "compassion" of ending suffering. Very easy to shape and change material things, very hard to change the heart.
The people you want to share your excitement might be suffering under the same separation of wealth that made this landing possible. (Yet there is little talk that they failed to catch the booster and it exploded).
ofc a comment like that would get downvoted by investors and technologists, but yes i agree, if you have enough imagination and money, almost anything in engineering is eventually possible. that same imagination and money is rarely spent on making the experience of living beings who are suffering nicer. but we dont live in a 1D world and all people need a win, engineering nerds included.
Semaglutide will likely help on the homelessness front, both directly and by helping us understand deep drives better in general.
Musk's Neuralink is ironically likely to help on the psychiatric disorder side.
Just Send More Money™ is not likely to help (as you recognize). Neither is "compassion".
And a $25,000 EV will alleviate the auto crisis in Americ- wait a minute...!
> Ending homelessness in the United States
You don't need private people/companies or more taxes for that. US has enough resources to do it already. Maybe you should go ask your politicians, better yet, ask your friends/neighbors/yourself if you are ready to take the drastic steps necessary to solve that.
Well to start off, I am homeless, so I can’t really ask myself for help with that.
But imagine engineering hearts so that we did not have to ask?
Thank you for for making this comment. It helped me realize in myself what's changed over the last few years.
I grew up reading Zubrin's The Case for Mars, The Martian, and October Sky. I went to space camp at NASA, and as a 14 year old I sent an angry email to NASA when I learned of the early ISS decommission date(they later extended the lifespan several times, and I like to think I was the reason ;) ).
I followed Bigelow Aerospace in the 2000s doing the only interesting commercial work in space, and afterwards became amongst the first online SpaceX fanboys, long before they ever landed a merlin engine.
I studied hard in school with a passion of going to Embry-Riddle to learn to build rockets - though I ultimately chose a software path in life instead, I stayed an enormous space fanboy over the 2010s, frequenting the SpaceX subreddit and catching every launch and landing stream I could live.
I've cried watching so many rocket landings. The spirit of human endeavor is god damn BEAUTIFUL to me.
I want to point my finger and say that everything else changed. The Internet became what it is. Elon Musk showed his true colors. Software Engineering became middle management.
But the truth is that I've changed.
I care about the people wealth disparity hurts more than I do about us getting our perfect vision of the future now now NOW.
The faster we pump this machine, the louder the Earth is SCREAMING.
The world is on fire, and we're covering it in data centers with the goal of building artificial machines for strip-mining humanity of the very competency in engineering that has given us so much joy.
We're caught up in a race to the bottom and without diverting our path I have to wonder if this starship landing will be one of the last great human-driven engineering achievements before we lose the ability to do so ourselves.
I don't think the answer is to swap the passion for engineering with compassion, as I think they can both live happily together, but I hear where that desire is coming from.
It's coming from a place of love.
And when the last tree has fallen, we may find that we cannot eat money.
May love fill this place.
All I want are bigger and more cleverly located space telescopes, a couple of more probes and orbiters around other planets and asteroids, and I want those Mars samples that Percy has been pooping over the Mars surface returned to Earth and studied in a lab. And maybe a probe to Alpha Centauri or exo-planet viewers that use the Sun’s gravitational lensing in the next 5 or 6 decades.
We will need nuclear propulsion for a lot of that, but the good news is that it has already been built and demonstrated back in the 70s.
edit: Rate limited so adding link to interview the reply mentions here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujfF_SnxvZQ
And NASA is working on it again! Isaacman talked about it in a recent interview with Everyday Astronaut.
I think the concept for the Alpha Centauri probes uses solar sails and externally fired lasers[1]. The exo-planet viewer concept also proposes solar sails.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2069_Alpha_Centauri_mission
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens
I don't know how long it will take, but I'll be here watching you seethe as they hit each one and you post another list.
yes exactly
“Full flow engines can’t be made!”
“Okay, they can, but the engines are too complex and expensive!”
“Okay, they can be made much simpler and cheaper, but they’re not powerful enough!”
“Okay, they’re powerful enough but the heat shield won’t work!”
“Okay, it works, but catching a rocket is impractical!”
“Okay, catching a rocket is practical, but…” <—- we are here.
Coming up next:
"They'll never be able to re-use the ship"
"They can re-use it, but it's not economical".
"They can re-use it economically but can't be fast enough"
"They can re-use it economically and fast back to back...but look at the amount of environmental damage!"
"They can't generate enough power to fix the damage"
"They generated enough power to undo environmental damages but ruined the sky"
...
Those exploration dreams can only exist via the bankrolling of government contracts and riding bubbles.
Google is only able to fund Waymo, Quantum Computing, etc because of their questionably moral ads cash cow.
That's your reaction to watching this? Pretty sad.
In orbit refueling is likely next year. The goal is to have two shots at a moon landing in 2028.
And a nuclear ion rocket scheduled for 2028 as well.
The current NASA administrator is doing a good job getting rid of all the things keeping NASA from doing things. (And at least after Artemis II, both parties in congress seemed to be on his side.)
What was the issue that delayed Issacman's nomination/confirmation? Why was his nomination withdrawn and then renominated?
This is exactly the most impressive feat of engineering I have ever seen.
Only catching both the booster and the rocket would top this one. But the rocket only being caught is still impressive regardless.
SpaceX below $1T is criminally undervalued.
Well, both booster and ship catches have been demonstrated now.
Did they catch both of them in this mission?
It was meant to be a dual catch of the booster and the rocketship and only the rocketship itself was caught.
Catching both of them in another mission would top this one.
... especially if they reuse either part.
Why is Space-X undervalued because they can catch a rocketship?
You do understand that a company needs to have a business case equivilient to its valuation right?
Going to Moon only costs money, going to Mars only costs money.
Our whole planet sends 1000-2000t of payload into space, most of it is now starlink.
> Why is Space-X undervalued because they can catch a rocketship?
The market values SpaceX over multiple areas of the business and their future plans and it isn't just this event which they have proven to accomplish.
> You do understand that a company needs to have a business case equivilient to its valuation right?
Nope. That is not how this works nor how investors see it. It is about their total addressable market (TAM) which SpaceX can capture over everyone else. So here are some more further questions:
1) Who is paying SpaceX for the compute that they have?
2) How quick is SpaceX building their data centers to support their customers?
3) How many people use Starlink as their primary internet provider?
You understand that almost all of where SpaceX businesses can expand into those areas and grow into that valuation and higher?
> Our whole planet sends 1000-2000t of payload into space, most of it is now starlink.
Your point is?
So who else can catch and reuse a rocketship to frequently deploy satellites into space in a very short period of time? (Don't say Blue Origin.)
1) Anthropic because Elon Musk bought too much Compute and doesn't need it for his own AI proudct. In parallel Neoclouds are building up the same compute and its more like a negative sign that they got lucky
2) ? I don't understand what you mean. Are we now talking about Datacenters for others or the space thing?
3) probably below 8 million. 10 Million customer overall, plenty as an alternative or for camping etc.
Amazon Leo is an alternative. But for sure Space-X started a race to the bottom (china, blue origin and co) so they have to start moving and use their first mover advantage.
My point is, that Space-X is already responsible for the most amount of payload which gets send into space. We as a whole planet don't have that much payload and Space-X made it alot cheaper to send payload up.
So were is the 1 Trillion evaluation? Btw. its currently at 1.89T
Don't you think the US government is very likely to put restrictions on what other countries can use SpaceX services for?
SpaceX below $1T is criminally undervalued.
Launch itself isn't super profitable and doesn't have a very big TAM, especially if you carefully treat the TAM as a present value and discount future cash flows. Also, at least by my personal guesswork, Starlink alone shouldn't get close to a $1 trillion valuation. It seems like the current valuation is based on people's guesses about the likelihood that space data centers pan out in a big way.
Damn, that looked smooth and glorious. This is how I'd like the future to be.
bet they used lidar
(let's see who gets the joke)
seriously though, do we know the names of the engineers who made this possible or is it a secret?
You could go to LinkedIn and look at people in the:
* structures
* propulsion
* avionics
* flight software
departments, because they all work together to make this happen, along with support from IT/SRE. The person most responsible for ensuring that it happens is Lars Blackmore[1], who was also the Responsible Engineer in charge of making sure Falcon 9 landed successfully
[1] - https://linkedin.com/in/lars-blackmore-78a237
New tech tree unlocked for humanity.
Congrats to the engineers.
(But lose the bastard at the top, OK?)
He's actively holding the program back at this point. Top engineers in this industry are increasingly reluctant to join a company with a such a toxic culture and public reputation tainted by musk.
If a carsales man can do it, you can too. Go on. Open up your own SpaceY and do better. I'm sure all the top engineers will flock to yours.
Kind of crazy to reduce the hardware on ship so much and move so much complexity to the ground. This can really only happen in a situation where anybody can throw out any dumb idea, because if you suggested this 20 years ago people would think you are an idiot.
What do you mean? Reducing the complexity of the drive doesn't mean moving anything to ground?
Or do i miss something?
That's...the point. You can hire commercial welders to work on the ground side and build everything out once, cheaply.
The issue with the shuttle era was that they needed huge teams of specialized technicians to refurbish the insanely complex orbiter after every mission.
If we ever get sufficiently improved materials science for heat shields and engines there's still always a possibility of returning to the SSTO space plane concept. That would allow a more austere launch and recovery environment, but given current limitations this is the local maxima.
From Wernher von Braun to Elon Musk... It seems we're living in a Mel Brooks movie (with the funny parts removed).
von Braun just wanted to build rockets. He was a Nazi, yes, and he did Nazi things, but he would have been (and was) just as loyal to any other country that let him build rockets.
Musk, OTOH... joke's on us, he's into that shit.
perfect. hyperbole failure moment
This achievement likely changes the course of life in this solar system.
What?
Why?
Are suddenly aliens on the moon or mars and now because its cheaper to send stuff there, its now suddenly economically worthwhile to do so?
The course of human life, now much closer to Mars colonization, thanks to reusable launch being so much cheaper than expendable.
Mars colonization doesn't make sense though. You can't colonize a planet which is not self sufficient and depends on planet earth.
If you do'nt 'fix' earth why fixing up mars?
I hope they can make significant progress before the socialists take over. They were practically begging for launch permits under Biden.
Impressive how reliable they've made those engines!
It's just mostly newtonian physics ... nice job but not that impressive. With the right investments we could have done this decades ago.
I want you to comment on the first commercial fusion reactor too, please
A+ hacker news comment
Reusable stages is very neat, but seems a little crazy to pay the tyranny of the rocket equation twice. I heard one person say that carrying fuel to land over the whole flight means it takes 23x more launches to get an equivalent payload to orbit.
Using modern technology, couldn't disposable first stages be produced much more cheaply than during the space race?
How much of modern manufacturing disposable booster's cost would be fuel vs metal?
Fuel is so much cheaper than ships.
But you need more ship to carry that fuel, which is exactly what the tyranny of the rocket equation refers to.
Correct. Economics still work out pretty solidly in favor of reuse.
I heard one person say that carrying fuel to land over the whole flight means it takes 23x more launches to get an equivalent payload to orbit.
I recommend talking with people who know more about spaceflight.
Starship HLS is estimated to require 22 refueling launches to support 1 moon mission.
How is that even relevant? The Starship HLS launch won’t be landing the upper stage.
Without knowing how much it would take in expendable configuration, that doesn’t imply that it takes 23 times as many launches
OP, this is probably the source of the confusion. Some people are claiming that SpaceX will need 20+ refueling launches for human lunar landings. However, that's a very different claim than reusable rockets requiring 23x more launches just to carry the same amount of payload to Earth orbit.
> I recommend talking with people who know more about spaceflight.
Yes, because asking on HN if such people would be willing to answer obviously gets you downvotes and comments like this.
It's not paying it twice. The rocket equation is about the ratio of the wet and dry mass, so for an expendable rocket you're always limited by the fact that there's an upper stage (and for the second stage the payload etc).
This is why SpaceX cares more about TWR for their engines than traditional rockets did. It goes from making a negligible difference to a huge component of how much fuel they need to keep for landing.
Those numbers don't make sense.
It doesn't take the same amount of fuel to land as it does to lift.
Speaking as a Kerbal Space program playing, internet commentor, It's probably <1% of the fuel to briefly counteract terminal velocity as it is to lift off and reach space.
They use the atmosphere to brake, not fuel.
"I heard one person say that carrying fuel to land over the whole flight means it takes 23x more launches to get an equivalent payload to orbit."
I don't think that this is the case when using the atmosphere to shed most of your velocity, which is what we do when landing on Earth. Propulsive braking would be another story, but you can avoid that on bodies that do have some atmosphere. In our proximity, only the Moon and Mercury would need propulsive braking, but Moon's gravity is low and Mercury is hard to visit anyway.
That said, once you use the atmosphere to cushion what is basically a fall, the weight of the necessary heat shield comes to the equation too.
How is it twice? Braking on the way down doesn't take nearly as much fuel as lift off so the "tyranny of the rocket equation" should be paid only once.
This seems a little confused.
The 23x more launches figure comes from HLS (Nasa sponsored mission to the moon). They may well change the configuration of that anyway, but if you want to refuel in orbit, that's what it costs. It's hard to get fuel to orbit (or any sort of payload). Previous Moon missions haven't refueled anything, but they couldn't return anything heavy from the moon's surface, the vehicle got smaller and smaller as it went and many parts were left behind, so it's not comparable. You can be sure if it's cheaper to somehow do this mission with expendable boosters, they'll think about doing that.
On a normal mission just to earth orbit, there is one booster and one starship, and reusing the booster is more a question of why not save some money for a little more propellant use? The reususable booster doesn't contribute much extra weight, it uses little propellant for boostback and landing.
The booster also doesn't go all the way and you need a booster if you're going to reach orbit (due to that equation), so it doesn't take much to make it reusable. So all in all, why not make it reusable if you can? What would you save from using expendable ones?
This claim doesn't make sense to me, you need most of the fuel to escape gravity. Coming back is almost free.
It costs less, but it is not free. The stages need to be designed to come back and that adds weight. Additionally you need some fuel, it is not all air breaking. And every bit of weight is really bad, because of the rocket equation.
Without internal figures no one can say what is ultimately financially better. Especially now that the development is a sunken cost.
That 23x number is trivially refuted simply by looking at the fact that this flight delivered 52 tons of cargo to orbit. Could a similarly sized expendable rocket like the Saturn V deliver 1196 tons?
That's like saying we shouldn't reuse airplanes after one flight because you'd have to fly it 23 times to have it pay for that reuse.
That's still 1000x cheaper than... building a new airplane every flight.
And anyway those numbers area about moon missions, not low earth orbit.
If the fuel (+ oxidizer) ends up costing as much as 1% of the cost of launching a conventional single-use rocket then the people behind it will be very happy. That means that their rocket (+ cost of ground facilities + all the people prepping the rocket and monitoring the launch) is very cheap.
The fuel (+ oxidizer) is basically free compared to all the other costs.
Do we just look past the failed primary booster objective? (I didn't write the brief)
Edit: Yes, ignore that bit.
Booster catch has been done as has booster re-flight. The only remaining part of the full functionality that has not been proven out is ship reuse.
I see.
"The booster’s primary objective on Flight 15 will be executing a successful launch, ascent, stage separation, boostback burn, and return to the launch site for catch. This will be the first return and catch attempt for a Super Heavy V3 booster." [1]
[1] https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-15
Please go back to reddit