zlacker

>Specifically: Starship makes no economic sense.

Starship can replace Falcon 9 and probably be cheaper, if fully reusable, so more profitable. So at least some economic sense is there already.

>>weregi+(OP)
No, that's not how any of this works. Try to think for a moment why we still overwhelmingly use non-jumbo jets for aviation in a world where jumbo jets exist.

>>weregi+(OP)
I have noticed that there are two radically different approaches to assessing Starship.

One is based on boring old analysis, hard numbers, and, worst of all, continually updating the analysis as more information (e.g., Raptor’s severe expectations vs reality shortfall) becomes available. People who use this approach don’t seem to have an opinion of Starship that is trending upward.

The other approach seems to be based on vibes, and trusting that Starship will meet its original design goals despite the fact that no rocket project has ever come close to such an achievement. If there’s ever any introspection about why Starship should be the exceptional project that actually does meet its performance goals, the conclusion tends to be something about how Starship is special because it’s being developed by a private company. And I’ve noticed that, if the conversation does get to this point, you can send it in all sorts of unpredictable and fascinating directions by saying words like “OTRAG” and “Conestoga.”

>>kibwen+Ub
Not to mention that making the upper stage and payload fairing much bigger and heavier juat so you can recover them is not an automatic win. You can recover it, but you’ve also made it much more expensive in the first place. And the booster needs to be bigger, heavier and more expensive, too.

It’s not an automatic deal breaker, of course. Falcon 9 is obviously a promising success. But Starship is also working with some new challenges that Falcon 9 didn’t have to worry about.

Many of these stem from design compromises that were forced by Starship’s secondary goal of being capable of a trip to Mars. In that respect, it very much resembles another major project to produce a heavy launch vehicle with a reusable combination payload fairing and upper stage that is also capable of carrying a human crew: the Space Shuttle.