The falcon 9 is an amazing launch vehicle, I’ll give them that.

But starship reeks of Elon saying some dumb shit and forcing employees to implement it.

The booster is just a falcon booster but 3 times bigger and with higher performance engines, so that makes sense as long as they have a fucking flame diverter like every other big launch vehicle. But starship itself is insane for a human rated launch vehicle. A single piece second stage with no launch abort system. If you manage to survive the flight and get back for the landing burn, you have to rely on engines that will have ignited multiple times, and pray to whatever god you feel exists in that moment that the engines will work the whole way down. If, and right now it’s a big if, you touch down, there is a 30% chance based on test flights that the vehicle will set itself on fire. During that fire, your only option for getting off before a detonation is to get on a fucking elevator and lower yourself slowly towards the engines, where the fire is.

They want to land this on the moon, 240,000 miles away from the nearest fire truck, landing pads, mechanics, and fuel tanks. Oh and it’s supposed to be ready by December 2025 for the first moon landing since the 70s.

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. We know how to have reliable engines in space. We know how to design landers and crew capsules that are easy to exit and have limited failure points. None of this knowledge is being used to design starship/HLS for the moon mission. This thing is going to get people killed, I guarantee it. And once we kill the first people on or near the moon, we’re gonna be done with moon missions for another 50 years. Failure is not an option here. Probably the biggest issue I have with musk at spaceX is that they don’t believe in that philosophy. To spaceX, failure is a success. The starship test flight was supposed to be a suborbital flight, and it blew up after about 5 minutes, and they cheered. Everyone talked about how much data they were gonna get. Like they should need data from a real test flight to design a launch vehicle. They’ve been doing launches to orbit for over 10 years, they know how to do it. But somehow failing to complete the mission objective was seen as a success on a test flight for the vehicle that’s supposed to land people on the moon in 2 years.