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Massive explosion rocks SpaceX Texas facility, Starship engine in flames (interestingengineering.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 7 months ago (4 children)

NASA successfully launched Artemis 1 first try.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago

A disposable rocket at $4 billion dollars a pop, if not more. They built one rocket, they may build a second and maybe even a third. Eventually.

SpaceX is not building a rocket, they are building a rocket factory. A factory that will mass-produce fully reusable rockets.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Different philosophy. Play it safe and analyze everything extensively to make sure you don't have a PR nightmare. That leads to less aggressive designs and longer schedules, but looks better for the public and Congress.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

And they don’t even have a goal of more than one launch a year and billions of dollars per launch. Artemis is the same old flag waving BS: do it once to say you’re first, then lose interest.

Starship’s goals of reusability, frequent launches, order of magnitude cost reductions can be the foundation of the next jump in space industry/exploration

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

DEFINITELY not first try. I was there in their first try... and second... Still didn't see it launch.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

At a greater cost than every starship built to date combined...

Congrats?

I expect they'll be able to launch 2, perhaps even 3 more Artemis rockets before the program is cancelled and the rocket architecture abandoned due to unreasonable cost.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Where's your evidence proving exactly how much Starship has cost in total? Or wait, maybe you are just making bullshit up because you have no idea how much it has actually cost them because they don't disclose that information like NASA does.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (1 children)

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/03/thursdays-starship-flight-provided-a-glimpse-into-a-future-of-abundant-access-to-space/

SpaceX can likely build and launch a fully expendable version of Starship for about $100 million. Most of that money is in the booster, with its 33 engines. So once Super Heavy becomes reusable, you can probably cut manufacturing costs down to about $30 million per launch.

This means that, within a year or so, SpaceX will have a rocket that costs about $30 million and lifts 100 to 150 metric tons to low-Earth orbit.

Bluntly, this is absurd.

For fun, we could compare that to some existing rockets. NASA's Space Launch System, for example, can lift up to 95 tons to low-Earth orbit. That's nearly as much as Starship. But it costs $2.2 billion per launch, plus additional ground systems fees. So it's almost a factor of 100 times more expensive for less throw weight. Also, the SLS rocket can fly once per year at most.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

likely

probably

Where is the "exactly" that I asked about?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

The starship is built out in the open, the whole world can watch. Because of that, there are pretty good estimates for how much construction costs. If you take the more pessimistic estimates, my statement would still hold true.

Also, as a reminder, even without knowing exact numbers you can still make some ballpark assertions with confidence. For example, Jupiter has the mass of more than a dozens earths. I could look up the actual number, but I can be pretty damn sure it's more than twelve.