I am generalizing but a lot of the space community and certainly a lot of SpaceX fans were deriding the several scrubbed launches of SLS/Artemis. I am not suggesting that it’s the exact same people, and the context for each vehicle is very different.
Nevertheless both the SpaceX and NASA approaches to this are valid engineering approaches.
Whether this particular failed launch is a long term success remains to be seen. If the next 5 Starship launches all explode, maybe the NASA approach of get it right first is the way to go when it comes to space flight.
NASA approach cost 20 billion $ at least and has a per launch cost of 4-5 billion $ going forward. They didn't develop new engines and is mostly based on legacy avionics. There really isn't a comparison in those terms.
If SpaceX spends the next 10 years and another 10 billion $ on Starship. It would still be far superior to SLS.
> maybe the NASA approach of get it right first is the way to go when it comes to space flight.
Again, it has to be pointed out that SLS is not close to the same thing, its a lot of legacy tech.
If SpaceX had to build a large booster auto of Falcon 9 tech they could likely design it to work on the first attempt. As they did with Falcon 9.
But Starship is just a different beast. With NASA methods, it would take multiple decades to get to first test and likely never get there.
> NASA approach cost 20 billion $ at least and has a per launch cost of 4-5 billion $ going forward. They didn't develop new engines and is mostly based on legacy avionics. There really isn't a comparison in those terms.
You're leaning on a lot of hypotheticals and assumptions, right?
Do we even know how much a Starship launch costs? The only cost I can find is Musk saying they'd dropped $2-3B, but that was back in 2019. My point is...how can it not be a comparison when costs may (or, may not) be comparable?
I don't think the reason NASA Is risk-adverse is because of cost - it's because a similar explosion would effectively crash the entire NASA space program.
> You're leaning on a lot of hypotheticals and assumptions, right?
We know how much SLS cost in a lot of detail. Also remember, SLS development, the 20 billion is only to first launch to get to 1B they will likely drop another 10 billion or so and it will likely take until 2030.
We don't know about Starship, but it is far, far less. SpaceX could absolutly not spend 5 billion $ a year on the program.
And the complexity of Starship is in a different dimension.
So Starship for a fact is orders of magnitude cheaper then SLS and orders of magnitude more complex.
I disagree. I would be in favor of canceling SLS and Orion even if Starship doesn't exist.
SLS/Orion is simply the wrong architecture, and the wrong strategy. Independent of Starship or not. I have been arguing this since 2017, long before Starship was relevant.
When the Obama administration cancelled the Constellation program (with its ambitious Ares rockets which were designed reach Mars, unlike SLS), they intended to invest money instead in private companies. However, apparently a few members of the US Congress got worried that valuable "space knowledge" from the Space Shuttle / Constellation companies would get lost, so they funded SLS, and scaled down private space investments for several years. That's as much as I recall from US politics on that topic.
Of course in retrospect it would have been better to just contract private rocket companies, as intended by the Obama administration, even had SpaceX not existed. The loss of Ares rocket knowledge with its cost plus contracts and countless subcontractors wouldn't have been so bad. At the cost of the SLS program probably multiple private companies could have developed heavy launch rockets. But at the time it was apparently much less obvious how cost inefficient the NASA developed rockets really were. Now NASA funds SpaceX for part of Artemis 3, but that's only a small fraction of the money that is still poured into SLS.
Nevertheless both the SpaceX and NASA approaches to this are valid engineering approaches.
Whether this particular failed launch is a long term success remains to be seen. If the next 5 Starship launches all explode, maybe the NASA approach of get it right first is the way to go when it comes to space flight.