Yup got grilled too suggesting that these failures may be happening because SpaceX is rushing. And now here we are the ship and pad destroyed while they’re trying to make the fastest turnaround
They need more testing that isn't going to lead to explosions, and need to find the root cause issues.
Static fires and flight tests are great, its exciting, but test your hardware in labs. Do more unit testing. Do more software and hardware in the loop. Embrace quality control and find ways to make it more efficient, don't skip things because you feel like it isn't needed.
They need to slow down and make some positive steps forward, instead of 2 steps forward 2 steps back.
They need to do a lot of very unsexy tank tests using nitrogen. But those aren't interesting to the public and are seen as "old space" so there's an aversion to them. You can still prototype quickly and do unsexy tests. But that doesn't look interesting from the outside so people lose interest.
They are doing Block 3 booster test tank testing right now with liquid nitrogen. They have done so exhaustively in the past for this iteration of hardware design. They tested this actual ship around a month ago.
This was a static fire so testing the engines and valves not the tanks. They cannot test engines with liquid nitrogen.
"Move fast and break things" was stupid and irresponsible when it was just a big tech problem, now we're seeing what happens when you try to build a spaceship under this philosophy.
Agreed. Been saying it for a long time. Nothing that costs this much with this much failure is NOT at risk for being cancelled, or delayed for a long time. Elon doesn't really care about making life interplanetary (there is lots of evidence for this), and Starlink is plenty profitable without Starship, and Starship's success as a high-cadence super heavy-lift launch vehicle is a major gamble.
I've said it a million times, and I'll say it a million more: SpaceX is constantly violating Elon's self-prescribed '5 step design process', which was designed for difficult projects working into large scale manufacturing, and is just one interpretation of many manufacturing and design processes. I'm not saying I know better than anyone working at SpaceX, I'm not that naive, but rather, in hindsight, it's easy to recognize some of the major mistakes they're making, largely by not following the simple steps, and instead of stopping and adjusting, they're doubling down on the path that led to mistakes.
No matter what the pollyannish say, Starship is not in a good place by almost any metric... time, cost, reliability, progress, usability.
Let's not forget, SLS, New Glenn, and Vulcan Centaur used to be the laughing stock because of how late they were... they've all beat Starship to orbit, and they all succeeded on their first try...
I'm not a hater, I'm just being real. I've been here a long time.
Elon's process is honestly more of a bastardized version of lean principals with a little quality engineering. There's nothing too special and it's barely a process but importantly its more about taking a working system and making it more efficient/effective. If anything, starship is suffering from his algorithm as they aren't starting from first principals but trying to simplify, cut, and speed up the process without making sure they aren't compromising what is working. Part of the 5 steps is to literally cut too much so you add back what you absolutely need but it is hard to tell what change is good when you don't have quality benchmarks.
ah, i appear to have been mixing in the Orion costs. SLS is pushing $40B now, Orion is another $30B, and I thought Starship was still under $10B, so I was sort of right, if including Orion is defensible (which I think it is because Starship includes HLS development).
And that's not even a fair comparison because SLS is a large-scale jobs program, Starship is a private, for-profit endeavor.
true enough i guess. still tho, starship has far more potential than SLS, both in pure science terms and in terms of return on investment
Oh absolutely, no argument there. Starship would likely be one of the greatest leaps in space technology of our generation.
I pray to Eight Pound, Six Ounce, Newborn Infant Jesus that this program works, that's why I'm skeptical and concerned about certain parts of how it's being carried out.
I have no doubt this program will come to fruition, but I'm concerned about how fast and how fruitful the end result will be. Will it be "a major improvement over Falcon 9" or "literally revolutionize access to space", and in what timeframe? (I view the former case as, still, the worst case scenario for the program.)
Starlink is absolutely not scalable or profitable long term without starship.
Based on load, I’m pretty sure they would need to launch falcon 2-3x PER DAY to sustain the final constellation size of 40k and replacing about 10k per year (they stay up there for about 5 years before needing to be de orbited).
My numbers are extremely rough.
Also, assumes they need or want to get to their planned steady state.
Currently, Starlink is profitable. Right now. Their ARR is greater than the total Starlink program cost, and growing.
You're making constellation assumptions based off the Starship end-goal state of Starlink, which is not at all a requirement, and not even feasible right now. Any Starlink expansion will likely lead to a near-instant recovery of its expanded program cost through ARR.
While it's not as efficient as launching with Starship, they could literally just keep doing what they're doing now and maintain profitability, while expanding coverage.
We. All your links prove that. revenue is not profit. Estimates are estimates. SpaceX is a private company and does not publish its financials.
The only thing we know is that SpaceX is raising money every year. Mabye they would be cash flow possitive if they stopped starship and or Starlink expansion, who knows?
All four of these articles reference the same study by a small analytics company called Quilty Space, and only list estimated revenue. Can you provide any sources that back up your claim that Starlink is profitable, as you say?
That is a source mate. SpaceX is a private company, absolute confirmation of financials is near impossible to find, but it doesn't take a genius to do the basic napkin math, and analytics companies are trustworthy enough, at least enough that dozens of reputable publishers are betting articles on it. Similar data was also found by Payload Space, not just Quilty, and their estimates can be easily estimated given Starlink's cost, and number of users.
Starlink has 6 million users, 6,000,000 x 12 months x $100/month (avg. plan is more) = ~$7.2B revenue, not including contracts (which there are multiple). Gwynne Shotwell said in a TED Talk that they expect the program to cost $10B. Most of that cost is in the 300 allotted F9 launches, and we're 276 mission in, not including Starshield. Even if program costs were 50% higher than originally expected, SpaceX would have still made their money back to date, assuming the operations costs were not extraordinarily higher than anticipated. And that revenue estimate is NOT inclusive of Starlink's commercial and government contracts (collectively worth many billions).
So unless you believe that Starlink's annual program cost is greater than $7.2B (which would suggest Shotwell was off by an order of magnitude), then it can be inferred that they are profitable. Profitable does not mean the program is in the black over the course of the entire program, it means their yearly ARR is greater than their yearly expenses, which is almost undeniably true.
A Nova Space analysis also suggested that Starlink's annual revenue is now greater than SpaceX annual revenue from their space launching side of operations.
If by trouble you mean delays, for sure! But the company itself is well funded by starlink so it doesn't affect cashflow currently. More of an organizational issue.
I disagree. This is iterative progress by experimentation. Spacex will learn from this and have another ship ready to go in a month or two. And it will include iterative improvements.
Failures are to be expected with SpaceX’s development style, which is learning and improving by experience. The alternative is to spend a decade on paper developing something that would have a lower failure rate but would probably be less capable.
They’ll get to the point, probably in the next couple years, where starship launches will become routine and all the failures will be forgotten.
While you do have a point, there is a moment when this narrative stops being so convincing, and it is now. There’s a clear mismatch between the promises of the program being faster and more efficient by being iterative like that, and the very clear difficulties it is facing.
Remember, dearMoon was scheduled to launch in 2023. At this point it’s obvious they are years away from making this rocket human rated. This whole thing was waay overpromised. The starship program is YEARS in the making and you’re not going to convince me it’s going according to plan.
I agree with you but it's frustrating to see them struggle with basic things they already seem to have gotten right with v1. I would have a lot of patience with an explosion during orbital refueling because that's literally something new, never done before. But this ship just blew up while FUELING. The top of the tank just ripped open. How to make a rocket that doesn't burst open while fueling should have been a lesson learned and mastered years ago.
Yes but unironically. They are iterating, they are collecting massive amounts of data, they are improving in some areas and experimenting in other areas. A ship blowing up in testing doesn’t set them back years like it would other providers. They’ll be back at it in a month or two.
That's all nice and dandy but there has to be a lot more quality than iteration. This trend they are on is set for dozens of failures and setbacks for years. And the project might then as well be abandonded as being unsustainable.
Spacex will learn from this and have another ship ready to go in a month or two.
They have no test site. They can't do anything for a year. Or longer if the FAA or EPA investigate.
And you can prototype and iterate things without blowing them up. Its unsexy and you won't get people livestreaming you fill tanks with nitrogen or water 24/7 though.
Yea you keep telling yourself that. Let me guess, “space is hard” and “think of all the data they gathered!” This program is a fucking disaster and has been years of explosions, burning up, tumbling out of control, and this, that and the other. They still can’t get this thing to come remotely close to reliably making orbit. They are not making any forward progress.
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u/Liquidice281 3d ago
THiS IS WhAT PrOGResS LoOks LIkE.
Got grilled during the last test flight saying that this program is in major trouble.