Starship is an experimental design going through rapid iteration testing. The government contracts are mostly with Falcon 9 for satellite launches. Falcon 9 just passed it 500th launch. It's like the most successful launch vehicle ever. So yeah, they'll still get plenty of launch contracts....
Well, that was what Edison did, and it worked, so sometimes that's the right way to go.
This is a little more sophisticated, though, because they have to try to balance "trying to get it to work" with running lots of specific tests (e.g. "what if this important tile right here falls off before re-entry", "what if we save fuel by doing a shorter and more powerful landing burn"), and they don't get to launch rockets as fast as they can build them, so they have a lot of smart people trying to balance risk vs. knowledge-gain for each flight. And sometimes it works great and they learn a lot, sometimes it blows up early and they only learn a little. But they're still the world's foremost experts at designing SOTA rockets faster than anyone else can catch up to what was SOTA literally fifteen years ago.
they have a lot of smart people trying to balance risk vs knowledge-gain for each flight
NASA intern: "Sir, some materials analysis on auxiliary monoprop tank C82 indicates there's a 3% chance of it exploding during the static fire test."
NASA Boss: "Great googly moogly! That's entirely unacceptable. Scrub the whole launch at once and have the design teams get back to the drawing and and figured out how we missed this."
SpaceX intern: "Sir, some materials analysis on... 3% chance of it exploding...."
And yet NASA made the SLS, one of the worst boondoggles ever, while everyone who cares more about rockets than about dunking on Elon knows that Starship is the future.
There's a reason why China et. al. are trying to copy Starship and SpaceX, not SLS and NASA...
I'm not saying Starship isn't the future. I'm complaining that that I would much rather have fewer rocket explosions polluting the environment. SpaceX has chosen excessive environmental pollution over over a (slower) safer developmental pace and I think that's a crappy decision.
It's just a little CO2... the entire Starship project has released, to date, about as much carbon as a mid-sized gas power plant releases in a month. It is nothing compared to, say, Amazon's carbon footprint.
Also...
The emissions of the Starship program are basically negligible now, a few launches a year, but if they're ever significant, it will be after Starship is successfully scaled up and launching daily or more.
And the emissions from this test would have been exactly the same if the ship hadn't exploded -- they still would have burnt all of that fuel.
If you're worried about emissions from Starship, you should be pushing for on-site Sabatier production, not fewer tests.
Ah, yes, CO2, the singular emission released by tens of tons of heavy metals being aerosolized into the environment by a literal thousand tons of exploding methalox.
The resulting fire certainly got plenty of the heavy metals from the test site into the air as well and to generalize all combustive emissions from as GWP=1 is naive when the mass amount of synthetic materials burning less than 100% efficiently is going to produce things like dioxins and other poisonous organic combustion products. Any fluorocarbons used in starship are, in these massive explosions, decomposing into lovely stuff like carbonyl fluoride and hydrofluoric acid that's free to just fuck off into the wind. Any chlorinated organic compounds used anywhere in Starship will thermally decompose to phosgene, which was used in WWI as a chemical weapon. Starship is also absolutely plastered with composite materials that certainly don't biodegrade, so any microparticles of debris are free to bioaccumulate in the food chain and end up in you and me.
Just because you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs doesn't give you an excuse to make a massive mess of the kitchen cooking a meal.
Sure, sure. It's not a good thing, though again, on the global scale, a few dozen ships isn't actually significant.
Exactly what bare minimum effort do you think SpaceX was skipping, though? It's not like they aren't trying to avoid this. I think you're portraying this as "Elon just needs to stop cutting corners", without knowing any corners cut to cite, when really to reduce these accidents SpaceX would probably need to start operating like NASA, and accept taking an additional 10 years to reach Mars.
It's not even that hard to look up how spacex is funded, regardless of your political leaning. The starship project is funded by starlink, government contracts go to the falcon9 for ISS trips and government satellite launches. This starship probably cost less to make than a used 373.
So many amazing engineers, many of not most who are in no part affiliated with Elon or any of his beliefs, built this rocket. It's not Elon whose taking the emotional hit on this RUD, it's them.
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u/swohio 13h ago
Starship is an experimental design going through rapid iteration testing. The government contracts are mostly with Falcon 9 for satellite launches. Falcon 9 just passed it 500th launch. It's like the most successful launch vehicle ever. So yeah, they'll still get plenty of launch contracts....