It’s their 7th launch and they’re still fighting issues with keeping the fuel where it should be. Elon has successfully created a machine that can kill any number of astronauts in sub-orbit and land to do it all over again. How is anyone not getting this? I’ll never forgive him for taking back intellect on space travel to the 1950’s .
Wikipedia tells me the Saturn V development cost, in 2023 dollars, was about 50 billion. Starship, as of 2023, cost about five billion.
These are test flights. They are done to find problems. They will fail. It’s a totally different approach to the Apollo program.
Saturn V was that expensive because the sheer volume of calculations that had to be done were done BY HUMAN BEINGS. Electronic computers weren’t up to the task. Salaries were a huge expense item because computers (in the original sense of the word) liked to be paid.
SpaceX has the advantage of having computers literally four orders of magnitude more powerful in every one of their engineer’s pockets. Plus computers far more powerful than those available at a very low price. Calculations that took thousands of person-days (daily!), with the commensurate salaries of the people doing them, are now done in seconds.
There is simply no excuse—beyond the toxic “move fast and break things” ethos of modern “tech”—for constantly having rockets blow up in this day and age. The simulations and static test analyses and such that were once such an expensive chore are orders (note the plural) of magnitude cheaper today than they were in the 1960s.
It’s just incompetence and arrogance.
Also I note with interest that from inception (1962) to first full stack flight (which was also the first flight of any component) was only five years.
Starship was officially announced in 2012 and its first flight (of sorts, if you call "spinning out of control until it disassembled itself a “flight”) was in 2023.
ELEVEN FUCKING YEARS and SpaceX still hadn’t made a surviving launch. For reference, eleven years after the Saturn V was started, the Saturn V had made 13 flights, all successful, doing its final flight that year boosting Skylab into LEO. (You know, that place that SpaceX hasn’t even yet put an empty Starship into.)
(P.S. Even at 50,000,000 dollars that’s less than 1/8 of the Apartheid Manchild’s net worth.)
They literally are blowing up rockets like there is no tomorrow and call it “a process”, and then there are guys like you who literally believe that crap.
SpaceX still hasn’t been able to come to even 10% of what the Saturn V has done, and they have the knowledge of the Saturn V, they have computational power that is beyond what the Saturn V Engineers could even dream of, they have the newer and better materials, they have the newer and better construction method, they have all the countless advantages that the Saturn V engineers didn’t have.
And what do they do? Blow up a launch pad because adding a flame diverter would be too expensive. Blow up a banana over the Indian ocean. Blow up rocket after rocket, and APPLAUDE AND CHEER, like WTF? They set goals of *getting off the launchpad, anything else is extra"
This is what billions of tax payer dollars has given you, the guy who will be in charge of government efficiency, lol
Meanwhile there is blue origin too and oh look, no boom! It. Just. Worked.
elon musk is a scammer