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First Shuttle orbited astronauts and successfully recovered all intended components. Every Saturn 5 was successful, the 3rd flight sent a crew to lunar orbit,
by EncomLab 2y ago
First Shuttle orbited astronauts and successfully recovered all intended components. Every Saturn 5 was successful, the 3rd flight sent a crew to lunar orbit, and the 6th put a crew on the moon.
To date a Starship has yet to be recovered after flight - and those launched are effectively boilerplate as they have carried no cargo (other than a banana) and have none of the systems in place to support a crew.
Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure - but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land.
- nicky0 2y ago> To date, no Starship has been recovered after flight. This is irrelevant, as none of the flights included any plans to recover the Starship. The objective for each flight has been to dump the vehicle in the sea at the target zone.
- bboygravity 2y agoSo what does a rocket company need to do to be imrpessive in your eyes?
- Over2Chars 2y agoIt needs to give him a job :-)
- hooli_gan 2y agoA Mars cargo mission, according to the timeline spacex set for themselves. https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-F2HFqsVkiZc/YT9bPpXSKDI/AAAAAAAAGJM/eni8UpAmZ3Iu1L-0Q5Kdu9gRkEZ6HmTmQCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/SpaceX+Starship+timeline+%25282021.06%2529+by+Ryan+MacDonald_infographic.jpg https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-F2HFqsVkiZc/YT9bPpXSKDI/AAAAAAAAG...
- pms 2y agoThank you. This needs to be emphasized more.
- pclmulqdq 2y agoA lot of people have been shitting on SLS for being too expensive over the last 5 years, but it's worth noting that the Artemis program has been completely fucked due to SpaceX massively missing its milestones on Starship. So many people believe that Elon Musk is going to bring humanity back to the Moon, but he is largely the reason that humanity is not back on the moon already. The GAO put out a report on this a few months ago, pointing out the failures of SpaceX here (including massive cost overruns) much more than the supposed cost overruns of SLS. Incidentally, after this GAO report came out, Elon Musk became very interested in being in charge of managing "government waste."
- ceejayoz 2y agoThis is a very partial telling of the current situation. Orion is delayed due to a heat shield issue: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis/nasa-identifies-cause-of-artemis-i-orion-heat-shield-char-loss/ https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis/nasa-identifies-cause-... The first SLS launch was six years behind and massively over budget. Lunar Gateway is almost certainly getting delayed. None of these programs rely on SpaceX in any way thus far.
- pclmulqdq 2y agoThere was no heat shield issue, it was investigated and the resolved: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/artemis/nasa-delays-artemis-2-moon-mission-to-april-2026-artemis-3-lunar-landing-to-mid-2027 https://www.space.com/space-exploration/artemis/nasa-delays-... There is an issue with another dependency for Artemis 2 and 3, though - Starship is nowhere near where it needs to be.
- ceejayoz 2y ago"There was no heat shield issue" and "it was investigated and resolved" cannot both be true. There was a heat shield issue; they investigated for two years, and it has caused a delay. Artemis II has no Starship dependency. It's entirely SLS/Orion. Your own article agrees with me: > Artemis 2 likely would've been delayed by a year or so, to late 2026, had a heat-shield replacement been required, NASA officials said today. But the mission team still needs more time than originally envisioned to get Orion up to crew-carrying speed, explaining the roughly six-month push. > "The heat shield was installed in June 2023, and the root cause investigation took place in parallel to other assembly and testing activities to preserve as much schedule as possible."
- Mistletoe 2y agoAh Elon time strikes again.
- tsimionescu 2y agoMaybe match some achievements from 60 years ago, like having a rocket that can put someone on the moon, back when the largest supercomputer in the space program had less FLOPS than my watch.
- jve 2y agoDecreasing price of a launch by multiple orders of magnitude and increased cadence is also an achievement that hasn't been achieved previously.
- tsimionescu 2y agoIncreased launch cadence is an operational achievement, not an engineering one. And I'm not so sure that they actually decreased price to launch all that much. First of all, it's definitely not "several orders of magnitude", the best numbers quoted are maybe half price or so for a Falcon 9 compared to another contemporary rocket. And by my understanding, the US government at least is paying about as much for Falcon 9 as it was for a Soyuz to bring an astronaut to the ISS, at least.
- jve 2y agoI was comparing to the achievements of 60 years ago when they put people on the moon :) They are working towards that in a sustainable manner.
- senordevnyc 2y agoSo…not something they achieved?
- inemesitaffia 2y agoNASA pays both Boeing and SpaceX less than Soyuz was.
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
- pelagicAustral 2y agoGo to the moon, land a rover, wander about, come back with everyone alive... should be easy right?, I mean, it's already been done... RIGHT????
- rco8786 2y agoWe'll have to get to parity with what we were doing 50-60 years ago. The reusability is awesome, of course. More of that! And also, still gotta get the basics right. Oxygen/fuel leaks aren't a great look (spoken as a not rocket scientist).
- christophilus 2y agoI will say, though, that booster catch is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.
- EncomLab 2y agoYes- very impressive feat of engineering.
- Over2Chars 2y agoI think wandering in the desert is done because there is a promised land. Yes, it doesn't mean that it exists. But if you don't wander, you'll never find out. You gotta believe
- fernandotakai 2y ago>Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure - but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land. i guess you didn't follow the falcon 9 failures right? here's two minutes of failures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ and guess what? they finally got it right and now falcon 9 is not only extremely reliable but quite cheap for everyone. NASA (with the shuttle and saturn V) had a completely different idea on rocket development (and blue origin seems to follow their mindset), which is fine. but to say that this is "failure fetish" when spacex has an amazing track record is just hating for the sake of hating. i would recommend, if you have the time, the book liftoff, by eric berger https://www.amazon.com/Liftoff-Desperate-Early-Launched-SpaceX/dp/0062979973 https://www.amazon.com/Liftoff-Desperate-Early-Launched-Spac... -- it was the book that opened my eyes to why spacex works like they do.
- computerex 2y agoSpaceX’s track record is too fetishized by the Musk fanboys. Falcon 9 has some weird Demi god status even though the launch vehicle is no different than the competitor like Soyuz.
- blendergeek 2y agoPart of why it has "weird Demi god status" is that it is not only so reliable but also so cheap. Soyuz is not reusable. Falcon 9 is. That is why Falcon 9 is so celebrated. No other rocket company or state-sponsored space agency comes close to its track record of cheap, reliable, reusable rockets.
- TrapLord_Rhodo 2y agoSoyuz? an expendable rocket with 40% less payload capacity? How is that a competitor to falcon 9? More like a competitor to rocketlab's current generation.
- pieix 2y agoI might have missed it, but I’ve never seen a Soyuz booster fly twice, let alone 25 times.
- jve 2y agoApollo WAS an impressive achievement Starship IS an impressive achievement while they speed up development process with real-world hard data New Glenn IS an impressive achievement while taking their time to develop a vehicle that reached the orbit on first time Per wiki on Apollo > Landing humans on the Moon by the end of 1969 required the most sudden burst of technological creativity, and the largest commitment of resources ($25 billion; $182 billion in 2023 US dollars)[22] ever made by any nation in peacetime. At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities.[23] Different budget, different number of people working on this stuff and different mindset. Actually the Apollo program was also iterative and it paid off.
- tsimionescu 2y agoThe Apollo program was inventing all of this technology, and using only extremely rudimentary computers, still doing many calculations with slide rulers. SpaceX has all of the Apollo program's work to build on, and computers that could do all the computing work that the Apollo program ever made, in total, in probably a few minutes.
- throw5959 2y agoSpaceX is inventing quite a lot, there's more areas where they started greenfield than where they got help.
- tsimionescu 2y agoThey are inventing a little, but the basics of rocket flight are now well understood. You can get a university (probably post grad) course on it. And nothing that they are doing is all that revolutionary, definitely not compared to what Apollo did (going from airplanes and ballistic missiles to orbital space flight and then Moon missions). Consider that even reusable self-landings boosters were being worked on in the 90s, before funding was cut off. And for expandable rockets, virtually all rockets designed and launched in the last few decades have successfully accomplished their first ever flight, launching some kind of payload to orbit.
- onion2k 2y agoThe shuttle programme was signed off in 1972, had it's first flight in 1977, and it's first crewed flight in 1981. Starship has been going for 5 years (albeit on the back of lots of other SpaceX work.) It's getting to orbit in the same time that Shuttle took to 'fly' on the back of a 747. A few lost ships is a pretty small price to pay for going twice as fast on delivery.
- me_me_me 2y agoOh wow a company in 2020s is compared to company in 70s. Wow nice benchmark. We are going to be good as guys from 50 years ago. Imagine Mercedes said it, or Intel or anyone. They would be a laughing stock.
- skirge 2y agocompare the cost
- esotericimpl 2y ago[dead]
- TypingOutBugs 2y ago> First Shuttle orbited astronauts and successfully recovered all intended components. There were 16 taxi and flight tests with Enterprise before the launch in 1981 (Approach and Landing Tests - Enterprise) where the first 8 were uncrewed. Just saying there were prior test flights using it. There was something like 4 years of testing before the proper launch.
- make_it_sure 2y agoyou are quite stupid or purposely ignore Falcon 9
- esotericimpl 2y ago[dead]
- skirge 2y agopractically infinite resources and "classified" failures
- notjustanymike 2y agoI mean, yeah, it's a lot easier to build a rocket that only goes up.
- philipwhiuk 2y agoCongratulations for neatly excluding Apollo 1, Columbia and Challenger's crews, may their memories rest heavy on your conscience. Your supposed excellent programs killed people.
- wolf550e 2y agoNASA put people on the first flight of the shuttle to space, which turned out after the fact to have 1 in 12 chance of killing the crew. Can't do that in 2025. https://x.com/eager_space/status/1879291376418120184 https://x.com/eager_space/status/1879291376418120184
- snakeyjake 2y ago>Every Saturn 5 was successful >Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure Subassemblies that made up Saturn V went through several hundred (inflation adjusted) billion dollars' worth of iterative failure before the Apollo program was announced. The only reason it WAS announced was all of the iterative failure that had been paying off. The day JFK uttered "shall go to the moon in this deck-aid", the F-1 engine had already been exploding and failing for three years. My memory is hazy, from a brown bag I went to at work 15 years ago, but they blew up around 50 F-1s before one worked right. And while the Saturn isn't an upgraded Jupiter it is EXTREMELY closely related to Jupiter and Jupiter had a shit-ton of failures before they got it right, turned around, and used all of that knowledge to build Saturn.
- pfannkuchen 2y agoIt’s pretty weird to get any engineering thing right on the first test, no? The entire development strategy would have to be based around that goal. I think the standard engineering strategy would be to test early and often. I hadn’t thought about it before, but, especially during the Cold War, the US government had a big incentive to appear infallible that SpaceX doesn’t have. Are we sure there weren’t more tests in secret? USG also has access to huge tracts of land that is off limits, and rocket tests are easily ‘national security issue’ enough to justify being conducted in secret. Just a thought.
- 1970-01-01 2y agoApollo 6 (2nd Satun V launch) was "less than nominal" and warranted a congressional hearing. It did succeed, but luck played a part. George Mueller declared later that Apollo 6 was a failure for NASA. https://web.archive.org/web/20080120112115/http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4204/ch20-2.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080120112115/http://www.hq.nas... https://web.archive.org/web/20080227133401/http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4204/ch20-3.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080227133401/http://www.hq.nas...
- geetee 2y agoMusk derangement syndrome
- DrBazza 2y ago> Every Saturn 5 was successful On the other hand every Russian N1 wasn’t. Rocketry is hard. It’s seems proven that if you’re a government space agency it’s even harder.
- bradgessler 2y ago> Every Saturn 5 was successful Do you not count the Saturn 1B rocket capsule that caught on fire on the pad and burnt the Apollo 1 astronauts alive? What about Apollo 13? > but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land The "promise land" in this analogy is visible past the desert. What's not known is what route to get there. In your tortured analogy, the people who "are really fetishizing iterative failure" are not doing that; they're fetishizing the fact that the person walking through this desert is trying, and if they hit a barrier, they iterate and try again until they reach the promise land. Along the way they are accomplishing what was once thought to be impossible.
- EncomLab 2y agoThe command module fire had zero to do with the Saturn V. Apollo 13 again was the command and service module, and in that case the crew was "returned safely to the Earth".
- jiggawatts 2y agoAs others have pointed out: Compare the budgets. That “first success” was actually on the back of a long series of related rockets with technology and engines inherited from a huge missile program. Those NASA eggheads didn’t start from zero on a shoestring budget and make things work on the first try! The Saturn V was just a stretched version of the Saturn series of rockets. These all cost hundreds of billions in today’s money to develop! Second, they’re not “the same thing”. A single-use piece of technology has very different design constraints and engineering considerations as a reusable piece of technology. A single-use weapon is a bomb. A reusable weapon is a sword. Just because you can shove a fuse into some explosives doesn’t mean you can forge a sword that won’t shatter on first use. An equivalent example from space technology are explosive bolts. NASA uses them extensively, SpaceX never does… because they’re not reusable and not up-front testable. They’re expensive too. So instead they iterated (and iterated!) on vacuum-rated actuators that can serve the same role. This is a non-trivial exercise that resulted in a few RUDs. This is why NASA didn’t even try! It’s harder and not needed if reusability was a non-goal.
- ugh123 2y agoRight. Those are fair comparisons /s
- yokoprime 2y agoYou have to look past "failures" and rather look at development time. SpaceX has a radically different approach to development, more alike to software. While somewhat wasteful with regards to material, it seems to be working rather well. Also f*k Elon.