The Shuttle was cheaper per ton-to-orbit than Starship though. A fair bit more expensive than Falcon still.
Evidence: the Shuttle actually brought more than 0 grams into orbit, Starship gets a divide by zero error.
The Starship is in development. The Shuttle is retired. Assuming that SpaceX doesn’t decide to can Starship before operational flights begin, make this comparison again when it’s retired.
Yeah if it ever gets to that point we can revisit the comparison.
Not a single space shuttle exploded during development.
Two did during the 135 operations.
So spaceship is already behind on development. Let’s see how operations works out.
NASA is funded with tax money and failures mean they get called in front of Congress like a child who sharpied the brand new tv. They don’t have the luxury of failure, so they over-analyze and over-engineer everything, to the point that everything they build is reasonably expected to work on the first try.
SpaceX doesn’t have that restriction and so they’re free to blow up as much stuff as they need to. How many Falcons failed along the way to building the safest, highest flight cadence launch vehicle in history?
Having the kabooms before going into production is better than having them afterwards. Obviously the jury is very much out on Starship. Personally I’m not at all optimistic about it. But comparing the current development problems with the shuttle disasters isn’t really fair.
Well single use solid fuel rockets would be much cheaper per kg of mass sent into space.
If that were true, why does the tech pipeline seem to go from solid propellant, to liquid propellant, to cryogenic propellant? Almost every spacefaring country and company seems to go down this path.
They obviously don’t know what they’re doing, ffs.
/s
Better control when used in missiles.
This was more-or-less the Soviet strategy, and it worked pretty well. And of course the shuttle used solid boosters too.
I think computerization is changing the math though. Advanced fuels save weight, and being able to land and retrieve the motors is huge.
Well, what actual percentage of the cost of the rocket is the motor and what actual percentage is the fuel?
It depends on the rocket, but the propellant is almost always negligible compared to the cost of the rocket itself:
- Falcon 9: ~0.7%
- Space Shuttle: ~1%
- Ariane 5: ~2.5%
Usually congressmen dictate what designs and materials NASA needs to use their budget on. There’s a reason the SLS is sometimes dubbed the “Senate Launch System.”
