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Disclaimer: Fuck Elon Musk and all the shady shit he's been pulling off.
That said, this is one of the most impressive things I've ever seen in terms of the potential it holds to shape the future.
Up until 5 short years ago we had:
This was all built on top of the incredible engineering of NASA, but this one launch today has all of the above ticked.
This is like making the first aeroplane that's able to land and be flown again. SpaceX uses this example as well, like, imagine how expensive any plane ticket would have to be if you had to build a brand new A380 every single time people wanted to fly and then crashing it into the sea.
Going to space is EXPENSIVE. If this program succeeds it will both massively reduce the cost to space and spin off hundreds of companies looking to do the same in various ways.
Look at any new rocket currently in development, they all include some level of reusability in the design and that's all thanks to the incredible engineers of SpaceX paving the way, first with Falcon 9 and now with Starship.
We're talking industrial revolution levels of progress and new frontiers in our lifetimes, which is very, very exciting.
I hate Musk and his personal everything, but Like SpaceX. However, when people gush about reusability, they seem to forget the 135 Space Shuttle missions (2 fatal failures , yes.). All done with 5 vehicles. Yes expensive etc, but truly amazing.
Also, I really don’t find anything SpaceX is doing revolutionary. Impressive? Yes, but it’s essentially incremental engineering, made possible by ginormous funding, including NASA money, and a private company doing things that NASA can-t politically afford.
Imagine NASA crashing 4 Shuttles before getting landing right. There’d be no NASA by now.
The Space Shuttle missions did not recycle the rockets, not to mention that the SpaceX missions were rated super-heavy: Only Apollo has done this before in America.
You think they didn’t?
The Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs) from shuttle launched were recycled. They parachuted into the ocean after being jettisoned and were recovered and refused. They just didn't land themselves. The external fuel tank was not reused.
There was an extensive amount of refurbishment required to re-use the SRBs. Not to mention they had to be physically recovered, and salt water certainly made the process more complicated.
The shuttle itself needed each of its heat shield tiles replaced, which due to the shape of the shuttle were all unique.
The fuel tank was not reused.
The shuttle was meant to be a leap forward in rocket reusability, but it didn’t really pan out that way. There’s good reason the program was scrapped and not replaced with another space plane.
The Starship booster has the potential to launch multiple times per day. The only refurbishment period is how long it takes to refuel it.
Agreed. As I mentioned elsewhere, Falcon 9 is still revolutionary, but I was just clarifying that the SRBs were recycled, as that is sometimes forgotten.
TIL, thanks. That’s just a small part of the rocket though
Between the orbiter (reused), the boosters (reused), and the external fuel tank (not reused), which parts are not "just a small part" (in terms of technology/complexity/cost, not physical size)?
I take the part about "a small part" back as that's a misleading term for what I meant: The Super Heavy booster is much bigger in both technology/complexity and physical size and has many more parts than the old space shuttle rockets as it needs to carry the weight of two space shuttle orbiters. Plus, spaceplane is weird.
Remember, unless we're talking about Enterprise, "space shuttle rockets" includes the orbiter itself. The orbiter's main engines were where all that fuel from the external tank was going, after all! From that perspective, I would argue that the main "space shuttle rocket" was definitely much more complex than the Super Heavy booster, because the crew stuff, cargo stuff, spaceplane stuff, etc. was integrated into it.
I feel like your criticism of the shuttle system being less reusable than advertised might have been more applicable if we were talking about the Soviet Buran (which indeed used expendable Energia rockets to reach orbit), not NASA's shuttles.
I was under the impression that a "rocket" does not include the payload. Now that I search it up, I am not sure what to call that part.
Sure, I think you're totally correct... if the part with the engine is separable from the part with the payload. But with the Space Shuttle, that isn't the case unless you're limiting yourself to talking about the SRBs. The orbiter is a spaceplane and that makes it weird, but its main engines are rocket engines (as opposed to a hybrid ramjet or something) and it launches vertically, so I think it's still fair to also call it a rocket.
Or as another example, consider the problem scaled aaaaaaaall the way down to something like this:
Is the whole thing a "rocket," or does that only describe the bottom half and it's called something else from the payload bay up?
In my impression, the payload includes the entire spacecraft, none of which is part of the rocket.