News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on SpaceX test flight of Starship SN-5 [video]. Parent comment

Re:SpaceX test flight of Starship SN-5 [video] by njarboe on Wednesday August 05, 2020 @12:48PM (#24062853)
SpaceX needs $kg to orbit to be much lower for their Mars plans to be possible. It is planning on their starship and superheavy rocket combo to bring down current launch costs by a factor of around 100 in the long term. A factor of two improvement in costs is not interesting to them.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:SpaceX test flight of Starship SN-5 [video] by Someone on Thursday August 06, 2020 @12:30PM (#24072539)
Most of the time, you get an improvement by a factor of 100 not by two of a factor of 10, but by hundreds of a factor close to 1.

I think they would be very happy to get a factor of 2 in one step. It would only 7 such steps to get that factor of 100.

Having said that, they aren’t aiming for the most modern rocket technology as that implies “less well tested”, and will be less reliable. They’re building T-34s, not Tiger tanks.

[ Parent | on HN ]