The Starship Launch Yesterday Was Not A Failure!!!

 A Clarification On The Starship Launch

    

      We did not have a failure this morning. The Starship has 32 engines and generates 16.9 million pounds of thrust. In comparison, the NASA SLS hit a little over 8 million pounds of thrust. It was Starship’s first test flight. There was a great fear that it would blow up on the launch pad causing massive property damage and possibly fatalities. (Those in the aerospace business call this a RUD). When the booster lifted off smoothly and climbed high in the sky, it was a great success. SpaceX will need to make some adjustments to make the next flight a full success and take it into orbit. It will be a couple of years to get it to the point of carrying humans.

 

     Elon Musk and Russia

 

   When Elon made his first fortune with PayPal in the 1990s, he decided to get into the space business. He went to Russia and attempted to purchase three surplus Russian ICBMs to turn them into space launch rockets for satellites and the like. The Russians did not take Elon’s offer seriously. They rejected his offer and, shall we say, laughed him out of Russia.

   Elon came back from Russia offended and determined to build his own rockets. SpaceX was born. Elon, like me, has great admiration for Russian rocket engineering. He decided to take Russian rocket engineering and make it better. The Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy boosters, and his Merlin and Raptor engines are based on Russian designs and better. His Dragon space capsule is far superior to the Russian Soyuz.

    When Elon went to work on a super powerful booster, his inspiration was the Russian N-1 rocket. This 1960s rocket was the Soviet competitor to the Saturn 5 rocket. It was an incredible rocket that at the time was the most powerful rocket ever built on Earth (Over 10 million pounds of thrust.). If the Soviets had not quit due to internal squabbling, they would have created a super lift rocket. They would have put cosmonauts on the moon. Four launch attempts were made with the N-1 rocket.  Each was a spectacular failure. One failure produced an explosion roughly equivalent to the detonation of a small tactical nuclear warhead. Up to 300 Soviet military personnel and civilians were killed in this blast. (To this day, the Russians are wary about releasing the actual death toll.) There was massive property damage.

    Elon was determined to build an improved N-1 rocket that was superior to what the Soviets had created. Starship is the N-1 rocket reborn much better than the original N-1. On the first launch Thursday, it cleared the launch pad and soared into space in a way that the N-1 booster never did. Starship will be reusable and far cheaper than the N-1 was.

     Starship was produced without giant government resources normally associated with the development of such a giant rocket. For example, the Apollo program that put American astronauts on the moon employed 400,000 skilled men and women. The US government spent roughly $265 billion in 1965 dollars to make this happen. With adjustments and inflation that is roughly $2.53 trillion dollars in 2023 dollars. Elon’s Starship Program which will take humans to the moon, Mars, and out to the outer planets was produced at a tiny fraction of the cost of a government program.