Futurology

Well they also aren't aiming for orbit because they are legally not allowed to do so. Their flight license only allows for suborbital until they can show they can reliably control the craft until touchdown. They don't want something up in orbit that might come down at any random place. With a suborbital path, even if they lose control early (which they have done a couple of times) the crash path will be known. Obviously they select a trajectory with a minimal chance of hitting anything.

Once they show the craft can be controlled reliably, they will get a flight clearance for an orbital attempt. The booster has plenty of delta-V, so no doubt in my mind something will make it up into orbit. No telling what state the ship might be in once it gets there tho and if they can get it down in one piece and on target.

The development plan they chose is especially difficult, because they are changing stuff all the time. This makes it very hard to prove the thing is actually reliable. With a dozen critical changes that might kill the entire vehicle at any time, I expect getting a license would be pretty hard. However with the huge amounts of de-regulation and corruption going on these days, I'm sure Musk will get his license if he wants it.

Yeah, fuck making money sending shit into space for a profit.

All the best businesses pursue billions in debt to work out problems their competitors don't have.

Dont worry though, after the initial capital burn of a few trillion, and the half a billion that Elon steals from the company each year they'll make that money back after just a few decades. Maybe.

I guess one thing we can be sure of is that Elon will make a ton of money before space x goes under, or gets bought out.

Right now they're trying to get the best shield good enough, that and make engines that keep working and don't explode

Also they are making larger changes each flight, intruding new problems as they fix others

The upcoming flight test is expected to perform a stage 2 engine relight to prove it can deorbit itself, it wasn't able to prove that last test flight as stage 1 didn't deliver enough energy so stage 2 spent too much propellant and didn't have enough spare for the relight

How many other rockets have needed more than a dozen sob-orbital flights to work out all of the issues?

Basically anyone who is going 'omg starship is a failure' really has zero understanding of what's going on.

they’re actively aiming for a suborbital trajectory.

Or because they can't?

Musk was 80% confident this issue would be fixed by test flight 3 back in 2023.

On March 17, 2023 -"So I think we've got, hopefully, about an 80% chance of reaching orbit this year," Musk said on March 7 during an interview at the Morgan Stanley Conference. "It'll probably take us a couple more years to achieve full and rapid reusability."

Why is it so important to have a 100% reusable spacecraft when you’ve lost more than a dozen of those “reusable” spacecraft while trying to make it work?

Seriously?

You don't understand why having a fully reusable rocket would be useful, even if it takes awhile to figure out?

Whether NASA should rely on it for the moon at this phase is an entirely separate matter, but humanity figuring out a fully reusable rocket is paramount to any proper space exploration. 12 launches to the moon isn't going to cut it, we've sent hundreds to the ISS alone.

Also, this is the 3rd version of Starship/Super Heavy.

The first version after a few tries was successfully going up and down and landing where they wanted.

The second version (essentially a new rocket) took a few extra tries, but was also mostly successful in that sense.

This 3rd version (also a essentially new rocket) has all the improvements they've learned from the prior two and should be the one they start doing real work with.

They even caught and relaunched one of the boosters on their first attempt, but now they're toying around with different descent patterns and burn patterns to eek out every extra % of performance that they can.

That's not the kind of thing you care about when it's disposable. Does it go up and deliver the payload? Yes? Done. Not, how much performance can we optimize out of this thing before we finalize it and start building thousands of them.

Edit: Just an example of performance gains - SpaceX successfully did hot staging numerous times with the booster being able to land exactly where they wanted. Then they were like, what if we can coax the booster (the size of a sky scraper building) to flip a certain way during hot staging, so we use less fuel overall getting it in the right position after separation? They've only tried this 2-3 times now, with it working at least once (can't remember if it was bad/good/bad or good/bad) but on the last v3 launch it had issues, which they will fix. Did they have to do this? No, what they did for multiple prior launches was working just fine, but because they are trying this out, they will be able to launch more payload per launch now.

First he build a flying tesla by 2016 and then go to the moon by 2024? That man is truly one of a kind.