It will go to the moon in a couple of years and supposedly to Mars after that. In both cases at regular frequency.
I hate the founder but love what the company is doing...now if we could only fund NASA substantially more.
Starship Was Doomed From The Beginning The fatal flaw SpaceX can't overcome. Will Lockett Mar 11, 2025 Photo by nader saremi on Unsplash Musk’s impotent attempts to get his giant shiny phallus to work are the perfect metaphor for the man. Indeed, Starship seemed promising at first if you didn’t ask too many questions. But, after back-to-back failures and having never come close to completing its design brief (including actually landing Starship and making the spacecraft fully reusable), as well as a litany of painful design flaws, such as only being able to take 50% of its promised payload capacity to orbit, many are starting to question the viability of this idiotic machine and its “iterative design process.”. And so they should. Indeed, with the most recent launch failure as context, it becomes evident that Starship was doomed from the get-go and that SpaceX might never be able to rectify this mess. Why? Well, for a start, the past two launches (tests 7 and 8) seemed to fail for the exact same reason. Like the launch back in January, the latest launch initially went well, with the Super Heavy Booster separating, landing safely, and taking Starship into a suborbital space trajectory. But once in space, that’s where all the problems began. Both tests failed when an uncontrollable fire broke out in the aft section, taking out rocket engines, severing communications, and triggering a self-destruct sequence. SpaceX recently announced that the fire in the January launch was caused by vibrations breaking fuel lines, causing a giant leak, which is a pathetic excuse (read more here). In the aftermath of the most recent mishap, SpaceX announced it was caused by “an energetic event in the aft portion of Starship [that] resulted in the loss of several Raptor engines.” Yeah… It sounds suspiciously like SpaceX failed to fix the weak fuel line issue. So much for “iterative design.” In fact, I know they didn’t. SpaceX constructs Starships well ahead of time, as they take months to build. This means that the most recent launch couldn’t have had its design optimised to resolve the issues shown in January’s failure. And their payload shows this. The January test had a dummy cargo equivalent to 10 Starlink V2 satellites, weighing only eight tonnes or 8% of its designed payload. Meanwhile, the most recent test had just half of this in a transparent attempt to reduce vibration by reducing the load to spare the obviously flawed fuel system, which obviously didn’t work. However, this is only true in the short term. The Starships SpaceX will build from here on will have this issue fixed. Right? Well, no. These tests were the first launches of Starship Version 2 (Block 2). This iteration is longer to accommodate more propellant, has smaller forward flaps to ensure they don’t fail during landing, and has a redesigned fuel line system. The previous version of Starship had major fuel delivery issues, causing engines to fail repeatedly, and SpaceX has made the situation worse by trying to solve this problem in the long term! This is the complete opposite of iterative design, and despite what Musk says, it’s a gargantuan setback (read more here). But why has SpaceX failed to solve this problem? Well, it’s because of the bane of any rocket scientist: physics. Landing the Super Heavy Booster is a far, far easier task than landing the Starship from orbit. The Super Heavy Booster weighs 160 tonnes dry, doesn’t make it to space, and its peak speed is only roughly 4,600 mph. Meanwhile, Starship has a dry mass of around 150 tonnes, makes it to space, and reaches an orbital speed of at least 17,500 mph. This means that during landing, Starship has over 13.57 times the kinetic energy of the Booster! And that doesn’t account for the fact that Starship carries significantly more propellant during landing than the Booster. All that energy has to go somewhere, and managing that is one hell of an engineering challenge. On top of that, Starship’s landing is also far more complex, as it has to reenter the atmosphere at those speeds. Not only does this process present significant aerodynamic challenges, but it also exposes Starship to enough heat energy to literally melt every gram of steel it is made from. Okay, so what does that have to do with Starship’s repeated failures? One word: weight... https://www.planetearthandbeyond.co/p/starship-was-doomed-from-the-beginning
Are you familiar with the Falcon 9 program, specifically how it started and where it is now? The highlight reel video of failures from the early launches is very long and quite laughable. The methodology for both Falcon 9 and Starship is to fail and improve, repeatedly and rapidly. It's a total paradigm switch from how rocketry was done previously, which is why SpaceX has no problem videoing the bad with the good.
Yes, I should have elaborated because I'm frustrated with this rocket and it's 'iterative' design philosophy not the entire company.
He is trolling. The metric hasn't changed. Some people do not under basic math or accounting. Consider SpaceX is making billions when all other companies have always been in the red. Starlink is incredibly profitable. This is no different than Google spending billions in fail ventures. It's part of R&D and growth. How many protypes fail in other industries before they get it right? 10? 100? 1000's?
I'm not people Reusable Rockets were always on the horizon The next logical step NOW! I did not see them Landing a Rocket vertically being something to strive for but its cool Rocket River
The landing direction is the same - Having the Rockets land on wheels Rocket River Apologies I thought that would have been obvious since horizontal landing was the opposite of the vertical landing
I'm not nearly as interested in space exploration as you are, and don't want to sidetrack the discussion as I don't have much of anything to add, and have to admit that was my thought as well. However, in doing a quick bit of research on the history of reusable rockets, I did come across the tidbit below from a company involved in the space industry... Space Shuttle, the first Reusable Rocket The history of rocket reusability starts with the Space Shuttle, the most famous rocket of all time; everyone knows about this one, even people outside the space industry. In my opinion, the most memorable moment of the Space Shuttle flight is the landing; watching the landing of an aircraft that is coming back from space is incredible! And, in fact, the innovation of the Space Shuttle is precisely its reusability. But let’s dig deeper! The Space Shuttle — which launched for the first time on April 12th, 1981 — is a rocket composed of an external tank, with two side solid boosters, and an orbiter, which is its spaceplane component. The only part not recovered after a launch was the external tank. Instead, the solid rocket boosters landed in the ocean with the help of parachutes; after their splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean, NASA recovered, examined, refurbished, and reused these boosters. The orbiter, as I mentioned before, landed as an airplane after its mission in space. https://impulso.space/tools/blog/posts/reusable-rockets ^Food for thought
I left out most of the Government stuff. Musk Takes Stephen Miller’s Wife—as Trump Aide Rage Tweets Elon Musk is officially making his exit from the federal government, and it appears he is taking one of President Donald Trump’s top aides with him. Katie Miller, a top adviser and spokesperson for the Department of Government Efficiency at the White House is headed out to work for the tech billionaire, according to CNN. It’s prompted rumors to swirl across the internet that there’s trouble in West Wing paradise. Miller is married to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller who on Wednesday fired off a lengthy post on X over Musk criticizing Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.”... ...His wife has not commented on her departure from the Trump administration, but she has posted and reposted about Musk, his AI company, SpaceX, and DOGE on X in the past 24 hours. The Millers were married in February 2020 at the Trump Hotel just blocks away from the White House during the president’s first term. Trump was in attendance. Together they have three children. The couple was first introduced in 2018 by a mutual friend despite having already spoken on the phone multiple times because of work, according to their wedding announcement. During the first Trump administration, Katie Miller worked for the Department of Homeland Security and later as press secretary for Vice President Mike Pence. When Musk moved to Washington, he was often spotted with his young son X. He’s been married three times and has fathered at least 14 children. While several of the tech billionaires’ companies are based out of California, Musk has made Central Texas the base for his business empire.
