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Spacex team’s Starship partially melts during renterty of test flight 4, makes soft splash down anyway. (youtu.be)

submitted 5 months ago by sonori@beehaw.org to c/space@beehaw.org

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Evidently the joints on the flaps still need a little work into not letting gases through, but it seemed to still have enough actuation to keep the spacecraft stable until the engines took over for the landing burn.

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[–] Lem453@lemmy.ca 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I think the biggest thing you're not taking into account is the amount hardware they have compared to anyone else.

Of course Apollo would be shut down if they were loosing Saturn Vs left and right. Each of those is 1.2 billion in 2019 dollars and they launched 13 of them I'm total. They are way to valuable.

The total estimate cost to date for the entire starship program is 5 billion and they have built around 30 starships. They already have another one ready to go now, only reason to not launch right away is because it needs upgrades based on the data they just collected.

You're also assuming that with more time and analysis they could predict things they have just discovered from a real launch. No man made object of this size has ever made a controlled entry back to earth. Not by a long shot.

Closest is space shuttle which had lots of issues that couldn't be fixed because each launch was so expensive it had to carry real payload (and people) and changes to human flight hardware is near impossible.

The main thing that's different here is that the cost of a launch is way less than the cost of a year of lab testing and still not knowing the answer because it's never been done before. That's the hardest paradigm shift to accept and is true only of SpaceX and no one else right now until they go full force into reusable rockets.

[–] BastingChemina 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It is estimated that currently each starship launch is cost around $90 million, and should be around $10 million once the program is more mature.

Source

For comparison each SLS launch is estimated to be around $4.1 billions. This cost not include development.

So a Starship launch is around 40 to 400 time cheaper than the SLS for similar capacity in LEO.

[–] Lem453@lemmy.ca 5 points 5 months ago

The Apollo compairaon above is even more ridiculous when you consider that starship made it to orbit and could've deployed a payload. The part that 'failed' was the soft landing and even that didn't fail. Only reuse failed.

Every Saturn v that was launched is currently sitting at the bottom of the ocean.

Taking shots at starship for failing even though Saturn v didn't even attempt the same mission parameters makes no sense.

Starship will have likely had 100+ missions before putting a human on it. Would you rather fly on something that's proven itself 100 times or something that is flying for the first time?