Quote:
Originally Posted by cockerpunk
watching the video its pretty clear they had a fuel leak from staging on wards that put the rocket into a spin (thruster), and they tried to slow the spin by moving the fins (lol), but with a spin like they had, there is no chance to do rocket refire test and reentry in any real way. reetntry in this way ... is free as they say lol.
this strategy of launching before working out the basic bugs is really failing them. they had major fuel leaks in the second launch too.
no reason to a lunch a half a billion dollars before you get the hose clamps to seal. no one cares if you can open the doors (lol), if you have holes in the thing and fuel leaking out everywhere so you can't stay on course.
its really quite pathetic, esp when NASA already has orbited the moon with artemis 1 on the SLS. and dont kid yourself, this isnt musk burning his own money up, we paid 3 billion for starship, and its largely gone (over 2 billion spent already), and have nothing to show for it. a fantastic waste of resources. maybe the raptor engines are useful to someone later on ...
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For better or worse, this is how the Soviet Union did their program as well. Plus, when the Starship is reusable it will be a 30 to 50 million per launch of 100t to LEO instead of the 2.2 billion per launch that the SLS is.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/03/thursdays-starship-flight-provided-a-glimpse-into-a-future-of-abundant-access-to-space/
I am not really a fan of Musk, but SpaceX is doing a pretty good job at throwing test articles up there and making progress on each launch.
As they say, Space is hard.