Technology

All I’m gonna say is that ULAs Vulcan flew for the first time last month, and performed perfectly.

Blue origin developed the engines for Vulcan, and they performed perfectly.

Starship has had 2 test flights that they’ve had to backtrack and spin as “successful” because they cleared the pad. This is supposed to be a human rated launch vehicle, and it took SpaceX a few minutes on the second launch to even notice that the fucking thing blew up on the edge of space.

I don’t really care how reliable the falcon is, when they haven’t seemed to apply a single thing they learned from it to Starship.

Starship is supposed to put the next humans on the moon. They got the contract because they quoted to NASA that they could do it cheaper than anybody else. They’ve now blown up 2 test vehicles, and failed to demonstrate a single example of any of the new technologies they need in order for the Starship lander to work.

Likely due to this, the next moon landing has been pushed back a year, and likely will keep slipping until NASA grows the balls to pull the contract from SpaceX and give it to a company with more realistic development strategies.

As much as I am annoyed by the time table slip, What I really, really don’t want to see is the first people to land on the moon in 50 years crashing and burning because of Elon’s cartoon rocket. Or getting trapped on the surface because the stupid fucking elevator gets jammed due to moon dust. Or getting all the way out to the moon, only to discover the dammed turbo pumped engines won’t spool up after sitting in space for a week. Or if the thing will be capable of getting to the moon, we’ve never transferred cryogenic fuels in space before, and it’s going to take over a dozen of these transfers to fuel the starship for the landing.

My point is that there’s 2 primary mantras when it comes to human space flight, and we’ve learned them through blood and sacrifice: Keep It Simple Stupid, and Failure is Not an Option. Starship, and SpaceX in general, fundamentally does not follow these. It’s already an over complicated and unproven design, and their whole design strategy is that blowing up is a success. That is unacceptable and contrary to developing a vehicle that is supposed to work 100% of the time while it’s 240,000 miles away. If you don’t design with those 2 goals in mind, you will get people killed, and we will have the very first bodies off of earth.

To end this, I want to talk about some of the procedures that Apollo had. If they were going to leave the moon, and the ascent engine wouldn’t light, they still had options. Option 1 was to exit the lander, and flip a switch that would release a blade to cut safety wires that prevent the engine from lighting accidentally. If that didn’t work, they had a literal pair of bolt cutters, and would go in and cut the safety wires and bolts by hand before coming in and opening the valves for the fuel, which would light itself. Ask yourself what those emergency procedures look like on starship. Ask yourself what the procedure is if those engines won’t light, or the elevator jams with people on the surface, or any of the other dozen things that can go wrong and kill you in space.