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A comment on Starship is still not understood. Parent comment

Re:Starship is still not understood by panick21_ on Thursday October 28, 2021 @12:26PM (#29027877)
> Those in the industry are pretty cautious about Elon's promises. Back in 2011, SpaceX advertised that the first Falcon heavy flight was going to be in 2013 [0], but the demo flight didn't occur until 2018, with the first launch of an actual payload in 2019.

This is misleading. SpaceX pushed Falcon 9 so much that it actually reached the targeted Falcon Heavy payload years before that. Many early Falcon Heavy costumers launched on Falcon 9.

There was very little market for Falcon Heavy and the main costumer was DoD and their launch was scheduled for pretty late.

The simply didn't work on Falcon Heavy until Falcon 9 was at the end of its evolution and they had figured out re-usability. However the end result was more then double as powerful then the version announced in 2013.

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Re:Starship is still not understood by dr_orpheus on Thursday October 28, 2021 @01:16PM (#29028481)
But what was supposed to be the first launch of the Falcon Heavy (USAF STP-2) was initially scheduled for March 2017. So maybe 2013 to 2019 isn't fair to compare, but 2017 to 2019 is still launching 2 years late.

This is not to say that what SpaceX is doing isn't incredible. But I get frustrated when articles like this take the promises of things like "<$10m per launch, and up to thousands of launches per year" as an absolute truth.

Edit: Had the original contracted launch date for the STP-2 mission wrong

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Re:Starship is still not understood by TeMPOraL on Thursday October 28, 2021 @01:58PM (#29029039)
Conversely, I get kind of frustrated when people take "Elon time" as an argument that SpaceX can't deliver on what it promised. It does deliver. Just a year or three late. Given the amount of transformation they're causing, compared to previous 30 years of developments in space industry, these kinds of delays are irrelevant. It's like considering a million dollar software project a failure just because a couple sprints run a week late.
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Re:Starship is still not understood by panick21_ on Thursday October 28, 2021 @02:09PM (#29029208)
That is fair, but in the space world that is not so much. I mean even if it is 10x more expensive and 3 years later, changing the approach is still needed sooner rather then later.
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