I don't understand why Elon insists on re-inventing the wheel when we know how to deal with rockets this size. The Saturn V was similar in size and power, the launch pad at Cape Canaveral is still standing, just build a copy.

Super Heavy has more than double the thrust of Saturn V, how is that similar?

Starship is all about finding ways to whittle down margins from the status quo

I mean challenging the “well known” engineering orthodoxies like rockets landing being almost impossible and not worth doing seem to have worked out ok for him?

I love it when people take one small issue and point out how stupid he’s being, yet ignore how by challenging every point of engineering on rockets he’s almost at the point of making a mars transportation system possible.

Rockets landing was never considered impossible, NASA even built and tested several such vehicles long ago. What was determined is that is is not economically viable which even SpaceX has started to realize on some launches where they ditch the landing in order to be able to carry more payload.

The launch pad at Cape Canaveral may not be exactly what Starship needs but it would be a good start. Like flame trenches and placing the fuel storage tanks far enough away from the launch pad.

What was stopping any other launch system from sending fuel tanks to LEO and beyond?

Probably not a whole lot technically. By now we could have had several fuel tanks in Mars orbit and a few on the ground, rather than all those orbiters and ground vehicles.

Trade-offs.

Doesn't look like my tone came across correctly.

I agree with you.

They obviously took a calculated risk. If they never took any risks they wouldn't be where they are today. It's easy to criticize in hindsight, but you win some you lose some.

In Boca Chica, underground water is too high AFAIK. Any trench system would risk being flooded.

They had done static fires at half thrust, equaling the thrust Saturn V produces without issue.

Why spend hundreds of millions or in the case of Saturn V billions on a governmentally overspecced launchpad when a launch mount and a concrete pad would do just fine?

Manned space exploration is hard to "overspec." It is risky af under the best circumstances. This illustrates a conflict in Starship design goals: Big enough to colonize Mars but cheap enough to lunch Starlink satellites. Might not be reconcilable.

Rather, it is incredibly easy to overspec. Everything is important and then you get SLS like costs. Compare to Falcon 9 which took a similar path to Starship and today works beautifully for human launches.

Take the SLS crawler looking to cost $1 - $1.5B. What a waste of resources.

https://spacenews.com/nasa-audit-reveals-massive-overruns-in...

Apollo cost 2.5% of USA's entire GDP, every year, for ten years. Space exploration is insanely expensive. It is unclear if the requirements of space exploration can be met while making a rocket intended to be at least 5X cheaper per kilogram to orbit.

Trying to meet wildly divergent, even contradictory goals, is a good way to build a doomed project. Now add schedule pressure to remain the sole vendor for a lunar lander and you get bad project management decisions.

Spacex have already succeeded with Falcon 9? Starship is the next magnitude in cost reduction following the same formula.

I am not doubting that Falcon 9 is a great success. It took 6 years of attempts to reliably land the Falcon 9 first stage, at some cost to capacity. The second stage is not recoverable and it appears unlikely it ever will be.

"...following the same formula" of rapid iteration is what they are doing. It worked well for learning how to fabricate a giant rocket out of stainless steel. That formula is bumping up against the cost of iteration. They're trying an Agile-ish approach to making the biggest ever rocket when Agile might be insufficient to, for example, make car software at VW Group.

He's got many reasons. Some of them are probably not good reasons. If the project fails, it's a good bet some of the reasons are in conflict. Also, some reasons drive bad decision making as the project proceeds. This is just a big, vivid example of how many projects die:

1. Not giving up project goals or specs when they start to look dubious

2. Sticking with cheap (in time, money, or both) solutions when more-reliable solutions might be called for

3. Letting sunk costs drive bad decisions about the above and other project related decisions

In this case there are unpleasant downstream effects of making safer decisions: Starship might not be the Moon lander Artemis 3 should rely on. All changes made in Boca Chica will have to be retrofitted to Kennedy Space Center.

Lastly, Musk has made pronouncements about Starlink's viability resting on Starship. That could be hyperbole, but Starlink needs 30-100X more subscribers to become a first tier telecom provider, and it can't support that many without the planned constellation of tens of thousands of full-size second-generation satellites.