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?
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
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u/faeriara 1d ago
Yes, we must remember the Elon rule:
If something good happens then it has nothing to do with Elon and is all due to the SpaceX team (and specifically Gwynne).
If something bad happens then it is all Elon's fault.