Why Starship Is The Holy Grail For SpaceX

If Starship actually works, the USA will have such an advantage in space technology. One that other countries can't hope to match for decades.

People see the prototypes blow up and think FAIL! That's right, failure is the teacher, understanding failure leads to success. That's why SpaceX iterates so fast. With the "rapid unscheduled disassembly" of the first high altitude prototype, Elon responded, "That's OK, we got the data we needed."

Thanks CNBC, for giving Elon and the SpaceX crew the credit they deserve! 🚀🌎

If StarShip really works it WILL be the holy grail of all society

Tesla, SpaceX, Musk, and all of his talents are a blessing to this country. Hats off to the guy for working tirelessly on all of these World-changing projects.

2:47 current configurations of Starship have 6 engines, not 7. 3 Sea-level optimized Raptor engines and 3 vacuum optimized Raptors. SpaceX has also considered switching to a 9 engine Starship with 3 more vacuum optimized engines in the future.

I hope everyone understands it how important SpaceX's and Elon's mission is by now. Very excited about the future!

Big respect for CNBC making this great video about starship and spacex, using Elon’s clips to talk for himself very good decision. Using simplified rocket engine models to explain the science. Very impressed

I think that one of the best side effects of starship is that it will force others to adapt or perish in this new paradigm of space activity.

I really want to see Elon and spacex make it. It’s refreshing seeing someone get government funding actually meeting deadlines and pushing the envelope unlike the old guard like Boeing that always milk the government for everything they can and always behind schedule. Elon’s pace alone is admirable

Starship will revolutionize human space capabilities, we will have the era of space exploration before Starship and after Starship.

A few hundred years ago it would take months to travel across the oceans and they never would’ve thought that we’d be flying in planes like we do now. And I feel the same way about space travel.

It is so funny to see old media companies not understanding that fail fast fail early is a paradigm that helps development way more than the old school NASA style development where you spend an eternity designing, creating tests to proof that the thing is within spec, spending another eternity on building the thing testing all the way before we can even think about flying anything. The time that SpaceX spend on the development of Starship puts the SLS to shame, not only has it been way cheaper it also has been moving way quicker than NASA could ever dream of. Sure some ships went bang on landing which was kind of expected, its not a problem as it helps the teams designing and building the thing figure out where the problems are so they can be solved way faster than you could if you designed everything for years and years without ever how the things work together in the real world. Compare Starliner with Dragon capsules, SLS with Starship and overal SpaceX with any government funded rocket development outfit and you will see that the fail fast fail early way of working is way better and a lot more economical than the old school design it all on paper solution. Unfortunately most journalists have never worked a day in their lives and see anything that goes bang as a setback and a failure where in the real world any engineer will tell you that as long as it is affordable and safe to do so testing the real thing in the real world will provide so many more insights and design clues than yet another design review and another group of big brains trying to poke holes in your design ever could. But for that you would actually have to understand how things are build and designed in the modern world which is so far away from the old media journalists world that you get these kinds of frankly dumb reports about setbacks and failures which is the exact opposite of what we where actually seeing.

While it looks like others have corrected some of the errors in this video, some things to think about for how Starship will really change things: 1. You mention the revolution coming with Starlink. Starlink can do so much. Rural broadband. Mobile broadband. Broadband on airliners. Broadband on ships. I think we may see the ground based black box where we can see why an airliner crashed without retrieving a physical black box. We may see an airliner bailed out of an emergency with ground crews accessing high bandwidth data from an airliner in real time. We may see drones with Starlink access beaming around gigapixel resolution video streams. We are already seeing Starlink helping in the Ukraine. We will see Starlink used to talk to other spacecraft. If you have ever worked on a space project or paid attention to one, they usually have limited windows to talk to ground stations and bandwidth is only so much. Starlink can remove those limits with super high bandwidth space based laser communication and distributed radio to multiple ground stations when the bandwidth is needed. The deep space network could go to laser based and relay through Starlink to get to the ground. I mean any rural home, any RV / trailer, any plane, ship, spacecraft, etc could be integrated into the Starlink network and there would be great advantages of doing it. This is huge. Their main competitor, Oneweb, was launching on Russian rockets and that is not a viable solution anymore. You can't just switch to another rocket at the 11th hour to get the rest of the constellation up. SpaceX makes the rockets it launches Starlink on, so they are good. 2. Another point missed with Starship and Starlink is Elon Musk said that Starship will be launching Starlink V2 where right now Falcon 9 is launching Starlink V1.5. He specifically said that Falcon 9 is not capable of launching Starlink V2 at all. Starlink V2 after talking with the experts is likely to be large, chunky satellites with vastly better brute capability over Starlink V1.5. There isn't a whole lot of new magic expected with Starlink V2, but when something is designed around a launcher, especially around a big launcher like Starship, you can't just move that to a different rocket. There are actually a lot of reasons and it is not just sheer size that will be an issue. There are other things like vibrations, G-loadings, and communication with the launcher. At this the war in Ukraine has led to delays in the Starlink V2 program. Hopefully Starlink V2 will be ready for battle when it flies as this is just the reality we face moving forward unfortunately. 3. You mention a new space station with Starship. While NASA hasn't really considered Starship for space station building, which is unfortunate, the maximal thing you may be able to do with Starship and 42 Raptor 2 engines getting you into orbit is possibly a 300+ tonne space station all in one go. As you mention, doing a whole space station in a single launch is vastly more cost effective than many smaller launchers and there are actually many reasons for this such as labor costs (astronauts building things in space is astronomically expensive while building things on the ground by people who drive their personal vehicles into work is far cheaper) and economies of scale of one big pressure vessel over many small pressure vessels linked together through bulky docking ports. (Surface area is a square factor while volume is a cubic factor.) There is a big performance hit for flying Starship back to Earth, which is why no second stage has been recovered to date. Having a stripped down Starship bottom half fly a giant space station that also acts as a fairing with no plans to fly that Starship bottom half back, maybe instead refill it for a one way deep space mission, frees up a lot of mass budget. Also flying SuperHeavy to an ocean based platform instead of doing a boost back to the launch tower frees up a lot of mass budget. Raptor 2 with a 42 or even 45 engine configuration and stretched tanks would be able to move a huge amount of mass to orbit. When you put it all together, this is how I end up with a 300+ tonne space station to orbit all in one go. 4. Space based manufacturing. One place in particular where Starship can change things is ZBLAN fiber. So while Starlink changes how we communicate looking up, ZBLAN fiber will revolutionize how we communicate on the ground. It can be used to move vastly more data over much greater distances without regeneration. This is especially important for deep sea cables as instead of having a few strands as that is all you can get the amplifiers for built into the cable, you can have hundreds or even thousands of strands go across oceans in a single cable, each carrying a bunch of channels somewhat dictated by the length of the cable as there is a V curve across the spectrum dictating which channels will go the farthest, so when you start going really far, the outer channels can no longer make it. But still you are talking 10x the distance with no repeaters over existing fibers made on Earth. This gets into if you want to say span the Pacific Ocean, instead of building the cables to have power lines and signal amplifiers built in, you build a large underwater container to host a vast array of amplification gear for hundreds or even thousands of fibers and then build an ocean current or geothermal renewable power system to get the power in-situ to run that underwater station. Maybe you also have a facility in Hawaii. But still with each facility thousands of km apart, it is easier to justify these underwater facilities and harder to justify building power and amplifiers into the cables directly. Even if you ship power in the cable, it could support 10x the fibers as the repeaters can be spaced 10x further apart, thus requiring 1/10th the power. There are probably many other places where space based manufacturing can take place with Starship cost economies. 5. Space based biomed. There are lots of things that are hard to do in gravity. Biomed seems like a place where there is a lot of stuff we will struggle to get the right thing to build on Earth, but in a micro-gravity environment, we can get the right mixing and reactions to happen to make things basically impossible to make on Earth, at least in a manner suitable for mass production. The above ZBLAN fiber is a perfect example of something that can't be made on Earth because things just don't mix right in gravity. Also in biomed, there is a lot of stuff where it may be possible to do it on Earth, but we just figure it out for making something at an industrial scale in space first, so that is what we end up doing. Pills can be really expensive as it is, so good profit margins can be had by manufacturing it in space and then bringing it back down as long as space provides an advantage you don't have on Earth. 6. We can get a lot of space based science done with Starship. No longer do you spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get something light and small enough to fit into an existing expensive launcher and it to its destination. Instead just use what you already have for the most part designed quickly to fairly standard engineering designs and launch it up. Instead of say decades of trying to get a JWST telescope right for a one time launch and zero servicing ever, you send up a much bigger telescope on Starship built a lot more like how you would build a ground based telescope today in terms of engineering difficulty. Ground based telescopes are designed and built much faster and more cheaply than say a JWST telescope while at the same time being much larger, just limited by atmospheric interference, except this thing will be going into space where there is no atmospheric interference, making it a far more capable instrument. Then with Starship you plan for servicing over time over and over again on a regular schedule. So incrementally improve the telescope over time and fix any problems that came up because the focus was more on getting it done quickly with the understanding it would be serviced later than take an eternity trying to get it just right because if even the slightest isn't absolutely perfect, the telescope project will either be all for not or break prematurely and that will be it, just another piece of space debris. 7. Just as a bit of a catch all, there is really a lot you can do with Starship once it is flying with the promised cost efficiencies and ability to land and reuse the vehicles. It may not be the only thing we fly, especially as space is vast and chemical engines are relatively inefficient, but we can't really think about this until we have a cost effective way of getting into orbit. Starship is that key to getting into orbit to enable the rest. Even in sub-orbital flights, Starship can be interesting and possibly a game changer.

Wow this is excellent. So excited for the future of SpaceX. As a through and through NASA lover, I’m beginning to love SpaceX’s mission too. How I wish my Grandpa was still here to see it’s success. 🖤 💫 🚀

They are working very hard to deliver the prototype. I honestly hope the Starship do reach orbit and do re-enter atmosphere. This would really be a seminal moment for Space exploration. I have some doubts of technical nature, like how the body of the booster and the ship can resist to the acoustic energy produced by 30+ Raptor 2 engines. Or if the thermal shield do resist to the heat of reentry. SpaceX has been able to hire and train some of the best rocket propulsion scientists, so they will likely able to solve these challenges...

WOW CNBS with something truthful related to Elon. Its a FUD miracle!

Really good overview for the general public IMO. I think you've done an excellent job of hitting the major technical points without exceeding layperson understanding.

Falcon 9 is the holy grail of rockets so far No one is even close

These prequel episodes of “The Expanse” are getting really good!