SpaceX is preparing for Starship's 13th test flight. Starship is still experiencing issues during ascent and has yet to successfully launch anything from orbit. This test flight will only be sub-orbital.
Is Starship's design flawed? Is it too heavy to achieve its goals? Rocket development is notoriously time-consuming, but SpaceX promised it had cracked that code.
NASA selected SpaceX's Starship Human Landing System (HLS) to transport astronauts from lunar orbit down to the Moon and back. Starship had a tremendous set of goals to achieve before taking on the Moon. Including mastering space-based & lunar refuelling & becoming a crew-capable craft that can land on the Moon, refuel there, and take off again with people on board.
Does any of this have any chance of happening soon if Starship is more fundamentally flawed and cannot reliably reach orbit with cargo?
SpaceX's 1st Starship test flight since going public is set to launch
Thank you for adding this perspective to the thread.
np, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding of what they're trying to do, and how they're going about it. By no means am I saying they will be successful either, they got a lot of work still ahead of them and some very difficult problems.
I also hink this picture is a great picture as well that showcases it on just one part of the ship
Raptor 1: Works, may have been as far as NASA ever went for the entire moon project if they were in control.
Raptor 2: Okay we've figured out how to optimize some things, lets see how this works and get more data
Raptor 3: Okay we should be able to cost effectively mass produce this version after we work out the kinks.
Internet: They keep having engine problems, Starship is broken!
Edit: For reference, the RS-25 engine that SLS is using, and how the engine works is less complex than the Raptor engine which is the first ever flown full-flow staged-combustion rocket engine. The optimized v3 Raptor engine meanwhile has about 2.25x the thrust/weight capabilities