I’m glad I finally wrote my piece a little while back regarding the failures of Starship, because on June 6th, the day after the launch of Starliner, Starship flight 4 happened. I watched it live in so far as I had the audio of YouTuber Thunderf00t’s live coverage going while I worked, and to say it was a rough one would be an understatement.
Rough, but still something I would consider a success.
I’ll admit, looking at footage of that massive booster launching is fucking awesome. It is the most powerful booster yet flown, so naturally I will appreciate it as a machine and especially as a rocket, but as a usable and practical system paired with the Starliner spacecraft? No. Not yet, if ever.
This missing was truly a bare-bones test. While they of course wanted to test the Superheavy booster and the Starship spacecraft, the only real goals were to have something survive. With a bit of a rough launch (at least one engine going out on the superheavy just after launch) and engine failures on the Starship combined with noticable structural damage on both the booster and Starship suffering some damage on re-entry I was quite surprised that both Starliner and Superheavy successfully made some kind of soft landings in the Gulf of Mexico and the Indian Ocean, respectively.
That, was really it though. There weren’t fuel transfer test, opening and closings of payload bay doors, engine firings during the suborbital period, or anything else of the sort. It was just a step above a boilerplate flight, which is fine, but that would be what the first flight test should have been — not the 4th, after they had already tried the above mentioned steps in a previous flight. It was, for lack of a better phrasing, quite the conservative mission plan, but hey, it was as far as I’m concerned a success. That’s 1 out of 4.
For contrast, by the 4th Saturn V launch we had already flown crews twice — the first manned flight, Apollo 8, orbiting the Moon, and the second letting us test the Lunar Module in low-earth orbit. Apollo 4 and 6 were uncrewed Saturn V test, and while Apollo 6 was quite rough in its own right, it was deemed a success, and NASA were confident enough to fly people on the next Saturn V (Apollo 8.)
Compared to Starliner, we’re in a completely different world. 4 flights in and this thing has, in a very basic form, limped into a suborbital trajectory. It’s quite simply nowhere near ready for a crew and is just as behind as people want to attack Starliner for being, if not more by some measurement.
….and this thing is supposed to sit in low Earth orbit for 12 fueling missions before it can go to the Moon? When the Saturn V could just send the Apollo CSM/LM stack to the Moon on its own? It was designed that way specifically because the idea of a multiple-refuel process on orbit was deemed impractical, not just with 60’s technology but in general.
It’s not that I want to be pessimistic, I’m just looking at things as they are and, as always, calling out issues as I see them. There is a lot of money that could be spent by NASA proper that is instead funneled into SpaceX for this and other programs, and I just don’t see the return in value on this as ever being a thing. Beyond that, though, I equally can’t stand the cult surrounding SpaceX and their operations and find the entire culture as it exists damaging to not just discourse of space and rocketry, but the actual future of humanity in space.
That’s another rant, one I’ve made several times before. Just, understand that while I do think the Superheavy booster is damned awesome, and Starliner is a neat concept, that to me it just seems like a half-assed blend of the Space Shuttle and Saturn V that isn’t useful for anything yet except looking cool and one out of 4 times not turning into a source of free scrap metal.
That’s that. I just wanted to go on record as saying, good job. I mean that.