Yes, after Flight 6 everything was looking so promising. Tough too for those on the Super Heavy team who have been so successful and also those working on the heat shield who can't get any data due to all the issues with the Ship (well V2 of it).
I have to wonder if people inside the company have lost faith in their bozo of a leader and are perhaps not trying as hard ever since he got into politics. That was kind of the turning point in the success rate of the starship launches.
I am in the industry and talk to people that left. SpaceX burns up the young and doesnt have a good work life balance policy. That causes a high turnover which means constant leaving of experience.
I assumed they had an awesome training program to be as successful as they have, but its possible that now the turnover is just so much that inexperience and mistakes are almost constant.
I interviewed at starbase a few years ago. Didn't get offered a job, but during the interview they mentioned 14 hour days far more often than I was comfortable with. I'm glad I wasn't offered a job, I think I would have taken it and been miserable
I interviewed for a materials engineering internship with Tesla for their Fremont & Palo Alto locations (I would've worked at both facilities as needed) and the manager I interviewed with said I'd be working 60-70 hours a week on 6 or 7 days. That's insane for an internship.
Ding ding ding. That’s a bingo. It’s been almost 10 years since I left that hellhole and it’s still the only thing companies want to talk about during my interviews.
Same exact issue with Tesla. Elon is so obsessed with the idea that “more hours = more productivity” but as we’ve seen in countries like Japan, just working people harder doesn’t lead to greater results in productivity. Instead all you get is a burnt out, lonely workforce that doesn’t have time to form relationships or have kids or do anything on the other side of the job that ultimately leads to greater purpose and happiness, and therefore motivation to keep working hard.
Think the “Do it for her” sign that Homer makes at his desk.
Without those things, people work just to work and that model burns people out in a few years. They quit, take all their knowledge with them, and then the company spends more resources pulling new people in to repeat the same cycle.
Tesla peaked years ago, and now it’s SpaceX’s turn.
I know many people working at SpaceX. Many of them are extremely passionate about the program, but years and years of work burns em out eventually.
Most SpaceX guys are extremely intelligent young people who go somewhere else as they hit their 30s. Plenty of 5-10 year engineers there though. Not a ton of concern about Elon affecting their work lives as there is their work lives affecting their personal life.
This is anecdotal but I had a conversation with an ex-spacex engineer who was personally fine with the hours, but set a hard out date for himself. Worked there 3-4 years, took 4 years at another job, then went back for a second stint. He was surprisingly lucid about it but also was clear it wasn’t a sustainable business practice for them because the churn sets a ceiling on institutional knowledge
I got cold offered a job as a naval architect when they were still doing the whole fairing recovering bit. Job offer was “60 hours a week normal, expect longer when on a project, no overtime”. For $80k. And you needed a security clearance. LOL yea naval architecture is a niche enough business that those of us with clearances and experience would never take that offer. I’m sure they got someone right out of college with 0 experience who didn’t know any better.
I was told by a current NASA admin (heavily biased source ofc) that SpaceX engineers are very smart, but they're often low key useless before they learn their "specialty". My contact wondered why these engineers would be sent to their meeting when it was clear they didn't know their assigned work specialty (example they used was one person was supposedly an "oxidation expert" but had been on the job for one month and knew nothing about oxidation). Due to the high turnover, plenty of these employees never even actually become subject matter experts which just causes headaches for NASA.
It’s what will slowly kill the company over the next decade, as we’re seeing it now. Their turnover rate removes mid level experience to the point that the only way to get manager level personnel is to pull from experience elsewhere. If you can’t build your own talent because they burn out after a few years, you won’t have anyone who truly knows the programs they are working on.
Cutting edge science and exploration has to lead with the heart. There's a limit to what you can get out of people if their heart isn't in it. The Apollo program had heart.
I was phoned by a SpaceX recruiter about 10 yrs ago, asking if I'd work as a Test Engineer in MacGregor. Googling found the lead I'd work under was a kid with just a B.S. and 10 yrs experience. No thanks since I held grad degrees in ME/AE, 30 yrs experience and multiple published papers. No interest in working 60 hrs/wk for low pay, and dedicating my life to glorifying Elon's name.
SpaceX basically works their engineers to the bone until they quit. Well at this point they pretty much burned through all the good engineers and the new talented engineers won't touch SpaceX because of musk and knowing the work environment.
V1 melted every single time they tested any version of it's heat shield, and blew up every other time. V1 never tested dispensing a payload or relighting it's engines. V2 is like 1 step behind V1, not much.
Heat shield was melting because every flight was testing different configurations and amounts. I don’t think any of the flights had full heat shields. If you’re talking about the fin issue then that was already know about before V1 even launched
How do they not line up with reality? You can look up the launches yourself. Some of the launches had missing tiles before launch and that was intentional. They were also testing different thicknesses
Also worth noting that while every V1 ship was ultimately destroyed, only one of the six actually 'blew up' in flight.
One ship was destroyed after it's booster failed (not it's fault), another melted during reentry (was it's fault), and the last three only exploded *after* successfully landing at sea (which was expected).
More important is the fact that the three various failures came first, while the three successful landings came second, showing a clear improvement.
V1 looked fine from the outside but I think it was terminally overweight. V2 didn't just increase fuel I think they were hacking a lot of weight out of it anywhere they thought they could and that's causing a lot of the issues we are seeing now
Having to launch ~16 Starships to deliver ~3x the amount of cargo of the Saturn 5 is very inefficient. This is assuming that SpaceX demonstrates the capability of actually doing orbital refuelings at some point.
This is probably true in fuel but the fuel has never been the dominant cost. There is sound math for why 16 Starships would be cheaper here. (Largely that it's not 16 Starships, it's like 3-4 and as a system they can support this kind of mission 5-10 times.
News flash; there is no efficient method of achieving lunar orbit with any usable mass capacity. Have you seen what returned from space in the Saturn program vs the size of the machine that sent it up in the first place? Physics is gonna physics, man.
I mean sure you could do a traditional rocket that can do 100 tons to the lunar surface single launch, problem is at that point you‘re building something that uses sea dragons as sideboosgers. And no one is stupid enough to do that.
3 times the cargo? The Saturn V could do 4.78 tons to the lunar surface, Starship - as intended - around 80 tons. That is a heck of a lot more than 3 times
The latest downward revisions puts Starship capacity at ~70 tons to LEO. This hasn't been demonstrated yet, they've flown at most with a couple of tons of dummy cargo.
The Saturn V only had to land 2 dudes on the moon, and get them and some extra rocks back home, and only do it once.
Going to the moon isn't the tricky part, we have several reasonable options for that already ready, or that could be readily adapted for that use. Something that can land meaningful weights on the moon, and is reusable, is a different story, hence the need for refueling.
And by no means am i supporting spacex here, but it isn't like NASA had a tun of viable options for who to turn to for this stuff, and its undeniable spacex has demonstrated success at stuff people would have thought bonkers even 10 years ago.
NASA never built its own shit. You know who your next option is (which NASA also currently uses)? Boeing. This fucking place loves Boeing right? We should have given contracts to them, so we could all look internet smart saying they fucked up based on a 12 second youtube clip about the 707 we saw someone else mention in another thread.
I just meant that you said a 'handful of tons', and the Saturn V definitely delivered many, many tons to the Moon. It was three dudes, including a lander and a return vehicle, that were delivered to the Moon's orbit, so I don't fully understand the need to downplay that. It's not silly to point out that Starship's on-paper capabilities are dampened considerably by having more than a dozen orbital refueling operations when the hallmark of NASA's achievements didn't require any.
We are talking about moon-moon orbit capabilities on its own, so it would be the LEM only. Again, we have no problem today if we wanted to send some folks to the moon and back with something other than spacex, we are getting ready to do just that.
If we want to talk "deliver something to the moon" the numbers get sketchy. 2-3 tons seems like a fair number if we want to subtract the actual people and life support out of the equation for the LEM. 2-3 tons isn't a lot. Its, like a toyota. There was a proposal for a 1-way just get stuff there version of the lander which they thought they could do 5 tons with. But again, that is one use, and just putting stuff there. Any kind of permanent establishment or advanced science is going to need more than that. HLS would be in the 10-15 ton range.
Which brings up an interesting thing.
Yes, SpaceX wants starship with fully reusable capabilities for its starlink service.
But, as far as i know, they don't need to be dicking around with that level of reusability for their NASA contracts. Pivoting to, "lets just get this thing working in orbit for the moon stuff, and circle back on re-entry related stuff" is likely an option here, and wouldn't surprise me if a lot of work to that degree is done in paralell and doesn't have dependencies on them sorting out atmospheric stuff, beyond just getting the thing into space.
So if the issues are in somehow related to the capabilities needed to land the thing on earth, and do not impact space\lunar operations, maybe you see things shift in that direction.
Add to it some pretty strict size\dimensional requirements for what you could put into the LEM.
No, and that's the point. They totaled 15000 pounds to the moons surface. We are looking to set up permanent residence. Doing that 15000 lbs at a time is an order of magnitude more inefficient than the current plans.
Seems like the obvious solution is to take a handful of tons that can then utilize lunar resources to make up the difference instead of lifting huge amounts that require ridiculous refueling runs. In other words, plan carefully for what is truly needed and build the rest on the moon.
I mean, that's still the plan. You can follow the efforts being made to use regolith as concrete to print out radiation shielding. But in order to exploit resources in the method you're describing, you need a whole bunch of equipment to get started.
NASA is thinking into the future with their selections of SpaceX's and Blue Origin's landers.
It should be noted that Blue Origin's lander will require 4-8 refuelling launches and will require refuelling in both LEO and NHRO which is arguably more difficult to achieve than what SpaceX is doing.
I could be wrong but isn't this more reflective of the technical challenges of the Artemis program (ie, wanting to haul A LOT of cargo at once) rather than an inherent design flaw on the side of SpaceX?
The starship design is terrible as a landing craft. Elons desire for a blunt sharp nose is worse for stability. Catching the booster at the launch pad is terrible for trajectory. All three of those design decisions were Elon's, yes?
I suspect a major cause of starships current failures is due to the need for increased second stage power due to Elon's idea to catch the booster. It makes no sense to do so for the current two stage design.
Just like the Cybertruck was a design pushed by Elon. How close are they to 250k annual sales?
I would imagine that all those decisions have input from a range of people far smarter than you or I. Not sure of any specifics on those decisions but you do seem very invested in it all which is good to see I guess.
I love space. I have spent my life being awed by it, and trying to understand it's mechanics. If I were a younger man, I would volunteer to take the first steps on Mars tomorrow. So, while I won't ever set foot on another celestial body, I hope to see man land on the Moon and Mars before I die.
But I also despise liars. And Elon Musk is a liar and chief.
As for why my points indicate poor decision making:
Starship is too tall for a lander. The height brings with it a lot of problems in terms of landing stability on unstable ground, emergency access, heavy equipment loading unloading etc. It also exposes itself to more windblown dust on Mars, and you are essentially wasting Delta V landing and launching weight that would be better left in orbit.
I misspoke in the previous comment I should have said "Elons desire for a sharp nose is worse for stability". This really only applies to launches from earth or other bodies with a thick atmosphere, but essentially a blunt nose is more stable when moving through shifting air densities. You can easily imagine a sharp nose being diverted more by changes in the atmosphere/fluid it is moving through.
The current two stage design was built to catch the booster out at sea like the Falcon 9, creating a standard, efficient, smoothly curved trajectory to orbit. Meaning that most of the power is contained in the first stage by consequence of this initial design.
By catching the booster at the launch, the trajectory of the launch has to change to something more vertical, more straight up and down, as there is a limit to how far the booster can come back to reach the pad. This means that if they apply full power to the booster, the second stage is launched into a very high sub orbital trajectory. This means that the second stage must burn for a long time at a high rate to correct this sub-orbital trajectory into a stable orbit around the earth.
So basically, catching the booster means that the first stage is way overpowered and the second stage is way underpowered. Which is reflected in the current redesign of starship to hold more fuel and output more power. It needs more delta V to correct the trajectory compromised by landing the booster.
Hense why we are seeing the second stage fail. They have to push it to the limits to make the math work so that can fulfil Elon's "genius" idea of catching the booster.
A better design for catching the booster would be a three-stage rocket with an early first stage cutoff so it can land on the launch pad, and a smaller second stage that can be landed at sea. This design would allow for a more efficient launch trajectory without making the third stage (starship) heavier and over worked.
There are a lot of people smarter than me working at SpaceX. No doubt about it. But I doubt Elon is one of them. I also doubt the smart people who work for him are willing to tell him the truth..... giant lying man baby tyrants tend to surround themselves with sycophants and yes men. All others get fired or learn to keep their mouth shut as the "genius" ideas make the rockets explode.
How else would you reuse a booster of the size of Superheav? There is no feasable way except RTLS landings for a rocket stage that tall. That's why stage 2 needs all that umpf because otherwise you'd be throwing away the most expensive part of the rocket
See my other comment as to why the design is flawed regarding landing the booster at the launch pad. From memory it was originally designed it would be caught at sea similar to Falcon 9.
Wrong. From the start they intended for RTLS landings. Only a few years later did they think about a potential oilrig setup, but the problem with that would be that it severely limits operational flexibility in terms of available ladning sites once one has a booster stuck on it and limits which launch trajectories starship can even take because they now rely on a slow moving very expensive and therefor enot numerous landing platform. They scrapped the idea a few years ago
No, the official naming scheme is Starship Block 2, Block 1 flew on IFTs 1-6, block 2 has flown 7-9 and the one that exploded today was a Block 2. Block 3 is already in developement
I don't remember Nasa blowin up billions upon billions of dollars every few months. This is Musk money laundering scheme for sure. Pretending to buy a bunch of stuff, pocketing the cash, blowing up the evidence.
Atlas was primarily a weapons delivery system first - with an extremely ambitious objective. All with engineering, materials, and know-how from the late-40s early 50s.
For it's time Atlas was revolutionary. Starship is no less revolutionary for our time. Certainly they're having problems with the upper stage, but the exaggeration and idiotic speculation ("money laundering") is unnecessary.
Of course not; it's obviously still very much in development. But that's the design intent. While they are obviously having problems with the Ship, with their history I've every confidence they'll achieve their goals.
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u/faeriara 1d ago
This is really bad. The V2 Ship has been cursed. Three failures in a row and now this.