And to think, it wasn’t that long ago competitors we still using old Russian engines for their domestic rockets. Brilliant work to get back to leadership in this domain.
The Russians were really good at aerospace. It's a testament to their engineering that it took this long to advance past where they were in the 1970s. I love this video describing the development from the Russian RD270 all the way to Raptor: https://x.com/Erdayastronaut/status/1204179086823825408.
The Russians beat us to all but the last milestone: first object in space, first human in space, first probe to land on the moon, and first probe to photograph the far side of the moon. The Russians would have beat us to the moon landing if the head of their space program hadn’t died on the home stretch of the space race.
New Glenn's engines are quite a bit less efficient than those at SpaceX. Lower chamber pressures, lower thrust:weight ratio, and they're partial flow staged combustion.
I assume BO will increase their performance over time, but for now they company is about a decade behind SpaceX.
That doesn't make the BE-4 not impressive. It isn't a full flow staged combustion engine like Raptor, but it's still a highly efficient, high thrust, relightable and deeply throttleable rocket engine. These things don't often come in the same package when it comes to rocket engines.
Spacex's work is out there ( and I am grateful for the excitement that generates ) but BO work in the shadows, surprising us sometimes with major advances.
They’re amazing too. That’s my point. The legacy launch providers were doing zero innovation, limping along shuttle era designs and literally buying the most critical parts from our biggest competitor. The people who hate Elon have no concept how revolutionary the Merlin engine was given this context. It doesn’t matter if SpaceX is successful or not, they revived the entire US space industry. That’s what matters.
The framing was BS. "I protest being groped without consent by this one guy". "Oh, which other goateed, gold-chain wearing pervert would you rather do it?"
Wow, similar sentiments about this being a throw back. I’d rather roll my own almost everything these days, may not be as good, but certainly won’t be targeted exploited broadly.
Many years ago. Maybe 2005 to 2015? I had a friend who used cpanel to run a web hosting company. He made quite a bit of money doing that. He was not a programmer, but he could setup up wordpress and install plugins. I remember asking him once if he was worried he would get hacked and then lose control of his servers? Lose his customers?
He said he was worried but he had backups upon backups. I saw him restore a bunch of websites once, using cpanel, and I thought it is an amazing little bit of software with all of the click a button to setup many different things (like WAF). A real time saver and provides some guidance if you are not a unix-internet guru.
It's so much further advanced than anything anyone else is working on, does it really need to be on schedule? I feel like "on schedule" only pertains to non-research-intensive projects.
More bigger != more advanced != more economical != more sensical
And anyway yes there are programs that are dependent on Starship working on a schedule. If it doesn't work on schedule, those programs will advance without it and the Starship program will eventually fail.
SpaceX has had 165 launches in 2025 (although admittedly 75% of those were for Starlink...) Obviously bigger isn't more economical or sensical, and most cases are served just fine with the Falcons, but there are cases we need the big boy for, and it's good that someone is working on it and has made so much progress.
Obviously a semblance of a schedule is good to have, but realistically, that's not really how research works. Look at James Webb telescope, it was originally scheduled for 2007, and ended up launching 14 years later. It's still an amazing piece of engineer/science, and it's amazing that it's up there now, even if it was very late to it. It's much better to be late and successful than early and failing.
> but there are cases we need the big boy for, and it's good that someone is working on it and has made so much progress.
I am taking issue with this claim. Are there cases where the cost/benefit actually come out favorably for Starship as it is actually turning out? Are they cases anyone should actually care about beyond sci-fi fantasies (i.e. not "colonize Mars")?
Sure, I have crappy mobile reception a lot of times on my travels, so I'll be the first when finally Starship can launch satellites with antennas big enough so that my mobile phone can directly be used for internet access.
There are so many individual features in this program that have never been done or even attempted before. That's "Advanced" in my book. Yes, they attached it to an overly ambitious program that is rife with delays (and hubris) but the program started on its own, is the best path to making the 2028 landing happen (it won't), and on its own is incredible.
The alternative to Starship needs to solve many of the same problem and is from a less proven company. If they can do it, great but I don't think its more likely.
I'm perfectly comfortable with not landing 100t of material on either the moon or Mars. Have yet to hear any compelling argument for why we should except that ermygoerrdd sci-fi!!!11!!
Ok I misunderstood your argument. The fact is, its the governments planned to build a base. If your opinion is that instead we should build a base at the bottom of the ocean, you are correct, Starship is not a good engineering solution.
In fact, anything not in space wouldn't be ideal.
But that's a political choice, and Moon base is what NASA and congress are working towards.
Starship is going for a fully reusable upper stage. Google "second system syndrome." This is engineering by fiat. It could easily take another 10 years for upper stage reusability to be demonstrated, and another 10 to make it reliable. And that's generous because it implies that other problems like in orbit refueling will get solved in parallel. How many starship problems have actually been solved in parallel?
I became a starship skeptic because I thought the project management was bullshit. Nothing I've seen changes in my mind about that.
I hate the typical "second system syndrome" nonsense. People always only use that for things that fail, while in reality plenty of second systems are good, technically and/or commercially.
Starship has come as close to landing an upper stage as its possible on water, and from orbital velocity. That's already a huge accomplishment and the landing on land has also been demonstrated.
Problems are constantly being worked on in parallel. Transferring fuel between tanks in the Ship is literally something already tested and that's a big part of the validation of inter-ship fuel transfer. There was even a NASA contract about exactly that. There is parallel work on the launch site, ship the booster and the interior (this is just less visible but its being worked on as we can see from the contract).
Orbital refueling can continually be worked on even if some ships fail landings.
> It could easily take another 10 years for upper stage reusability
Or it could take less ...
And even so, if we ever want a serious moon base, an architecture like that is required. The tiny BlueOrigin lander might be ok for flags and footprints but not to deploy serious infrastructure.
The assertion that something like starship is required for a moon base is wild. Why would anyone want to have to rely on a rocket that needs multiple refueling missions before it can even start to go to the moon?
The whole starship project is the wrong way to get to the wrong goal.
Do the math on how much cargo and volume a moon base requires and then get back to me. Starship is big enough for crew to live in for extend period. Trying to do that with many smaller landers will require MORE launches for the same payload to the moon.
Do the math and you will see the same, its obvious once you think about it. Even most the smaller lander need refueling.
And if you actually think its viable to do Apollo style where we put everything on a single stack and land on the moon like that and build a base that way, you need to get your head examined.
On schedule pertains to anything where extraordinary schedule claims are unnecessarily made. Nobody would have to think about a schedule in this context if somebody did not regularly make bold schedule claims.
I like this abstraction. If the baker says “I could sell 10x more if only I had shoes that allowed me to bake faster” then the cobbler says, “split the growth with me and I’ll craft you all the shoes you want.”
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