Spacex's Giant Starship Mars Rocket Nails Critical 10th Test Flight

SLS is also a pretty weird design due to reusing Shuttle components for a completely different kind of launcher. This saves development costs (maybe) by using existing stuff that has already been developed, but the unsuitability of those components for this system increases per-launch costs. Once NASA runs out of old Shuttle engines, manufacturing new ones is going to cost $100 million apiece if not more, and each launch needs four of them. It was OK for Shuttle engines to be expensive since they were supposed to be amortized over hundreds of flights (and in practice were actually amortized across at least tens of flights) but now they’re being used in expendable launches. If Starship even comes remotely close to its goals, an entire launch will cost less than a single SLS engine.

This represents less than 0.5% of the total U.S. federal budget, though it’s one of the most visible and impactful science agencies

That said, it would be interesting to have someone really knowledgeable go over what it is that Artemis has and Saturn V didn't, and then break them down and assign each an approximate proportion of the cost delta.

Yes the mission profile is more complex, but that complexity can mostly be settled before the astronauts launch on their mission.

NASA seems to think it is a viable plan which is why they selected SpaceX to execute that part of the mission.

Taking longer at lower cost is a great trade-off for Starship but wasn't for Saturn V. The main driver for Saturn V was the space race against the Soviet Union. Economic interests played a very small role. It was all about being first and compensating for the Sputnik shock.

Starship has considerably fewer moving parts. And googling 'evolution of raptor engines' gives you some pretty stark images on how simpler things look, in principle.

First, the time frames are way off. Development of the Falcon 9 took ~5 years (2005 to 2010). The first reused booster came much later (2017?).

Second, Starship is much more expensive for each launch attempt than Falcon 9 ever was.

Third, Starship is significantly more complicated technology-wise, being methane based. There are reasons to do this but it then requires cooling both propellants (instead of just liquid oxygen and RP-1 ie kerosene with the Falcon 9(.

Fourth, Starship has to compete with somethingg Falcon 9 never did: Falcon 9. Falcon 9 is now the most succcessful and cheapest launch platform in history. It is the reliable workhorse of the industry and relatively cheap to launch. Its reuse is proven.

Fifth, the market for Starship is unproven. We can compare it to other launch systems for heavy payloads, most notably the Falcon Heavy, which I believe has only had ~12 launches in almost a decade (compared to the 100+ Falcon 9 launches every year).

You could argue SpaceX will steer customers to Starship but there'll be other competitors (to the Falcon 9) by then.

Lastly, Starship is still so far from being human-rated. So much of the needed tech (eg refuelling in orbit) hasn't even begun testing yet. I can easily see this taking another decade at least.

It's privately own, might as well learn as much as possible with each dollar spent.

That's the advantage of being privately owned. "Vibes" (hah) don't matter. Public opinion doesn't matter. What matters is executing on your vision / goals. And they're doing that.

The fact that they're bringing in loads of cash from Starlink surely helps. They haven't had the need to raise money in a while, now.

There's a lot more eyes on them now a days, and Musk is much more well known, so it creates a lot more drama - but they've done the exact same process with everything. They even published a montage of failures [1] on the way to their first successful landing 'back in the day.' It was fiery, but mostly peaceful. They didn't even hit a shark!

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ

They planned a test that would subject various components to stress levels outside of the normal mission profile. The various specific failures that resulted from that may be within expectations but not necessarily planned.

In engineering you want to know that a design will not just succeed at its rated limit, but have some margin percentage of safety above that. To measure that margin often involves destructive tests.

SpaceX's development methods differ a bit from more traditional rocket development by performing some of these potentially destructive tests with full-scale articles in real flight scenarios as part of an iterative process.

It's a different apporach to say the Apollo program, where they did heavy up-front analysis, at the expense of cost-efficiency, speed, and innovation. They had one-shot for a flight, otherwise that's several $bn up in flames.

Even with the last few mishaps, it's an approach that seems to be working. If you look at Starship and Falcon's journey in comparison to SLS and Blue Origin, they have done so much in such a short timespan.