The airline industry, for all of its faults, is multiple orders of magnitude safer than rockets. Perhaps rocket based vehicles are the future, but rocket failures must first become drastically more rare or at least less prone to everyone dying onboard in the case of a failure to be used in lieu of traditional airplanes.
Rockets - https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/8566/what-is-the-s...
2020 Airline safety - https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-airlines-safety/aviation-...
There have been around 6000 orbital launches, in total. That's across all countries, all companies, and all time. This is simply insufficient volume to learn how to do it safely. When airplanes were at a similar level of maturity they crashed regularly for every reason from mechanical failure to the fact that people didn't know how to fly into a cloud and not fall out of the sky. (It turns out that in about 15 minutes the inner ear gets confused and you're almost certainly trapped in a spiral if you don't have the right instruments.)
Judging from their public comments, SpaceX is hoping to get 3 launches per day from each Starship, and is hoping to produce hundreds of starships per year. Which means that after a few years, they intend to get to more orbital launches per day than we have had orbital launches in all of human history.
If they do so, there is every reason to believe that they will learn how to make rockets safer. Not by a factor of 5 or 10 because they have good engineers. But to the level of, say, car travel. Because they will develop the volume of operations that will let them find the things that go wrong one flight out of 10,000.
(It will take rockets a long time to get to the volume of operations that enables them to match airplanes. But in the long run there is no reason that rockets can't become that good.)
You know, I've read about easy rocket transportation in science fiction for decades. I'm reading _The Man in the High Castle_ to my son now, and it's an example of this.
But I honestly have trouble buying it, and I'd love if you could tell me why you believe it.
For one thing, it will take ages. I'm having trouble finding good numbers, but I think a reasonable SWAG is that there have been on the order of 100 million airplane flights in human history. Rockets have decades of catchup.
And rockets have an inherently worse failure mode. Many airplanes that fail during flight can still land. I don't think this is true of rockets. Failures are vastly more likely to be catastrophic. Is it possible to ameliorate this at all?
The same arguments could've been made for train travel against planes at first. In my opinion, rockets are likely safer than planes in a non-fuel incident since they are built to have parachutes and other safety devices built in from the beginning beyond just gliding with the hopes rudders and flaps aren't affected.
Below a few thousand feet (if I recall), both rockets and planes have similar risks in my opinion. The most deadly planes crashes are in the first or last few minutes of the flight when they have the least altitude and speed to figure out a plan; similarly, if an incident occurs with a rocket in the first 90 seconds, there is a good chance of high fatalities.
Maybe I would argue that rockets _could_ be safer since they will spend less time in this dangerous altitude but I am neither an aerospace engineer nor a rocket scientist.
And yes, it is possible to make rockets safer. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_escape_system for one of the ways. But there are limits. If you're next to something that decides to explode, that explosion is a problem.
This sort of talk has always seemed to be really infeasible to the point of being nonsensical. What could possibly drive the need for 6000 orbital launches per day? Where are the fuel resources going to come from?
This sort of pie-in-the-sky thinking I don't find motivating at all, I just find it to be so excessive that I have no choice but to immediately dismiss it.
The double-standard with eco-consciousness gets me too. Green cars, green home power, green everything... but 6000 orbital launches per day. What?
I'm not trying to be a SpaceX hater - although I admit to being very sick of the Musk fanboyism - I just genuinely don't understand where these claims are coming from.
That said, rapid delivery of materials from one spot on Earth to another is inherently valuable. I'm sure that most of their flights will actually be suborbital instead. As in point to point travel between two places on Earth. The ability to do transcontinental trips in an average of 30 minutes is of interest to a lot of people, and doing so with physical packages is acceptable at higher risk than doing so with humans.
You see, there are those very top notch and quite a bit complex raptor engines powering it, but modern efficient jet engines are also pretty complex. The rest is basically "just" two cans of propelant and some very basic cold gas thrusters and big but simple aerosurfaces.
Also while indeed the energies Starship needs to handle at any given time are much bigger, it needs to handle them for minutes at a time (launch, landing) versus an airliner fighting air resistance and 10 different types of weather during a 12 hour transcontinental flight. Not to mention passenger and crew amenities you dont need to lug with you with a ~30 minute hop time.
Rocket engines also have their own oxidizer on board so FOD ingestion or birdstrike is not an issue.
And for launch and landing you need an isolated but rather simple and small area compared to the many kilometers of runways, taxiways and other airport infrastructure.
Lastly they run on liquid oxygen & methane, which might be actually cheaper and easier to get than jet grade kerosene, at least over time.
So indeed, Starship definitely is rocket science but it also does not have many pain points of modern airliners.
Wings are also way simpler than rockets.
You also have way more time to try to fix or workaround issues.
Reliability wise, airplanes will always be much better than rockets, especially if you include a propulsive landing.
Still, Starship does not really need an airport for emergency landing - anything reasonably level will very quickly become a landing pad once the raptors get going for landing.
Also as for wings - those seem very complex to me on a modern airliner - flaps, spoilers, ailerons, wingless, integral fuel tanks, etc. In comparison to that starship is a lightweight water tower with a couple metal barn doors attached - much simpler structure with far less moving parts.
For instance, you cannot have a single failure (whatever its probability) that leads to a catastrophic condition. Meaning, for every component and at every moment, you have to assume the component fails and still have to ensure you don't kill your passengers.
You might want to look at the early days of airplane safety, not the 2020 numbers. Look up reliablity learning curve, safety comes from doing a huge volume of flights. All existing rockets have a small number of flights
EDIT: am a SpaceX shareholder and I’ve met with Elon more than once, so not sure what you mean by parasocial
Reminds me of the "All Birds are Cats" sketch by Clarke and Dave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIl1VuGTk3g (Relevant bit starts at 51s)
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Do you know what is the actual limiting factor in train speed? It's not energy, or friction - we can make really fast trains. No, the limiting factor is radius of curvature needed to maintain confort while turning.
Otherwise, we can already make maglev trains that go 600+km/h, for cheaper than the hyperloop, and without the awful design flaws. But you'd need to destroy a lot of property to do so, so pretty much no one is interested outside of China.
No. Its flaws make the vacuum tunnel version entirely unfeasible. Therefore not a good idea. The non-vacuum version is just a tunnel – Musk doesn't get to call that a "Hyperloop" just because he put Teslas in it.
> the flaws are actually solvables
No. But we don't have to have that debate. We can just sit back, and relax, and our lord and savior Elon Musk will solve the solvables. Then I promise to be the first in line to sing his praises and ride the Hyperloop when the problems are solved. (Hint: they won't be).
Can we please stop praising Musk for things he says he will do? Why does this man get to promise all kinds of shit, and harvest the praise immediately?
The tiny amount of work being accomplished for the ludicrous amount of fuel being used is just silly.
Even compares Starship and airplane.
Also, the article is full of baloney, like assuming rocket fuel will be made using renewable energy - it won't, because it's magnitudes cheaper to just extract it from fossil fuels, and if it was viable you could do the same for airplanes, but at an even lower cost.
Also the methane used by Starship could be synthetised possibly used captured CO2 if you had enough power available for that.
SpaceX can only do what they do because there is no human pilot on those test flights. I know that the Navy pilots argued and argued that you need a human on board but is that really true, or did that end up destroying the space program by making the cost of failure so impossibly high?
1. the science hadn't been fully developed ahead of time
2. he would have had a harder time getting other people on board with his idea -- he would have been labelled a complete crackpot
3. governments may have not have been so willing to allow him to do it
So pretty much, not before computers were good enough to autonomously land, so at best the 2000s.
Friction stir welding was invented in 1991. Full flow staged combustion was tried out in the 1960s. GPS was available 1993. Not sure how much computing power it needs.
SpaceX was founded in 2002.
So no. That is not the reason. Try again.
Starship will be better for international flights (30 minutes to anywhere), and Boom Supersonic for shorter flights
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqE-ultsWt0
EDIT: Willing to make a bet with naysayers, email in profile (just fixed it, thanks)