Honestly, my main takeaway from this testing and Falcon 9 dev has been that we should be doing a whole lot more of that than we have been, at least until there are human passengers. The contrast in rate of progress with eg SLS is stunning.
We knew this since watching how much the Russians got done in the time they had for the resources. Put the engineers together with the manufactures, build often, test more.
There's a key difference though, Starship is intended to carry people. The correct comparison for this isn't landing Falcon 9 boosters, it's landing crew capsules.
Starship is a more capable upper stage then Crew Capsule, part of which means that it can launch itself (at least suborbital). They aren't trying to qualify these prototypes as human-rated, they have to finish the design work first!
For this pase of testing it's much more accurate to compare to Falcon 9 than Crew Capsule.
Oh come on, the Dragon capsule brings people back to the ground, not the first stage booster and it's landing these things that is the issue so far, not launching them.
All I am saying is that this vehicle, in it's final qualified form, will be landing human beings on the deck back here on Earth. That's the objective, so it's viability and reliability needs to be considered in that context.
For an F9 first stage a failure rate of 1/10 is fine. One out of 20 is outstanding. For Starship, these things are intended to carry a hundred paying passengers or more. The failure rate needs to be lower than 1 in a thousand. Much lower.
I mostly agree with you, but I'm not sure on why you're focusing human passenger safety on this at this early development stage, as if it's somehow a reasonable thing to focus on.
Launching these things IS the issue so far, by far the main objective of these tests. Landing them would be nice, but the primary objectives are to launch the whole thing (in particular including aero surfaces and multiple engines, as compared to previous prototypes) and test the various novel maneauvres that they are attempting. That almost all the objectives are being met in these tests is a testament to how good SpaceX is getting at launching flying water tanks, and how hard the entire flight profile is to achieve (launch, belly flop, landing flip, landing).
In the anticipated human-rated version of Starship safety will be immensely important, but this is nowhere near being that thing! This was only the second prototype that even started to look like 'Starship'. We have no idea what a human-rated version would loook like, and a human-rated Starship is definitely not the objective of these tests.
The Starship prototypes they are testing at the moment are much much much closer to a Falcon 9 than a capsule. Specifically the systems and processes they are testing all have fairly direct parallels in Falcon 9, and almost no correspondence to a capsule. For example, Falcon 9 and Starship both have: super chilled propellent tanks, multiple large rocket engines, active flight control systems, engine relight, active aero surfaces, and powered landing. Starship and the capsule both have... heatshields?
Human passenger safety will be immensely important for Starship, but to focus on it at this stage of development would be immensely premature.
I suppose that’s fair, but I think public perception might be a bit different. The public aren’t used to watching prototype jet airliners crashing in flames on runways, so some people are going to be concerned about it.
Completely agree, and the messaging is really hard to get right.
They are doing these dramatic tests out in the open which sure gets a lot of attention, but there is a real risk of reputation damage or fodder in the hands of their competitors lobbyists.
I don't know a good way to resolve that, but I certainly prefer the current approach and trust that anyone who really cares about the safety will be able to understand what's important about these tests and what isn't.
Even on the crappy morning news here, where they certainly gave a lot of airtime to the fireball, they had an expert on who focused on what the test was aiming to achieve. There certainly was no focus on the idea that Starship is intended to eventually carry passengers (even though they mentioned it alongside stock renders of Starship going to mars and the moon).
Interesting point, the image of a bunch of these blowing up in testing might loom large in people's minds once it starts carrying people, even if they rationally know it's had a much better safety record since then.
Unfortunately it seems like traditional aerospace now has a very big lever to pull to get SpaceX shut down: public opinion following the reasoning "rocket go boom. go boom bad. rocket bad".
Or actually the other way around - what will be in the news, another successful Atlas V or Ariane 5 or a nice big powerful explosion during a test flight ? That can bring a lot of interest from people not to mention disseminate the news about Starship far and wide.
The way to make them more reliable is not to put human passengers while increasing the iteration rate and manufacturing speed.
The two ways I heard to get really reliable products is to get good at manufacturing them reliably at scale or be really slow and really careful in making them one at a time.
Well. Yes. It appears to be a fully functioning launch vehicle and just as reusable as its predecessors, don’t see much downside in making the landings more “interesting”. When they work out the dynamics of it then they really have something that will revolutionize launches
