Disclaimer: Fuck Elon Musk and all the shady shit he’s been pulling off.

That said, this is one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen in terms of the potential it holds to shape the future.

Up until 5 short years ago we had:

• No main booster recovery
• No rocket nearly as powerful as this one
• No successful flight of a full-flow stage engine
• Nobody even considering the catch with chopsticks thing
• No private company testing super heavy lift vehicles (BO is about to enter the chat as well)
• No push for reusability at all

This was all built on top of the incredible engineering of NASA, but this one launch today has all of the above ticked.

This is like making the first aeroplane that’s able to land and be flown again. SpaceX uses this example as well, like, imagine how expensive any plane ticket would have to be if you had to build a brand new A380 every single time people wanted to fly and then crashing it into the sea.

Going to space is EXPENSIVE. If this program succeeds it will both massively reduce the cost to space and spin off hundreds of companies looking to do the same in various ways.

Look at any new rocket currently in development, they all include some level of reusability in the design and that’s all thanks to the incredible engineers of SpaceX paving the way, first with Falcon 9 and now with Starship.

We’re talking industrial revolution levels of progress and new frontiers in our lifetimes, which is very, very exciting.

My guy they just caught an object falling from space using a pair of giant chopsticks

Because they are impressive in the way NASA was. Which is the problem - we should be doing this as a nation and not subsidizing whatever a billionaire fancies at the moment.

I hate Elon just as much as the next guy, but pretending that this wasn’t a marvel of engineering is really disingenuous. People with intelligence beyond my comprehension made that a reality, and just because the company had his face on it, it doesn’t make it any less impressive

I’ve seen so many people grudgingly pretending what they saw wasn’t one of the coolest fucking things they’ve seen all year all because they hate Musk. Like, you know he’s not personally involved in the design or manufacture of these things right? By all accounts he’s more of a hindrance and these amazing fears of engineering have been accomplished despite him, not because of him.

I personally don’t really care how big of a douche Musk is, as long as he’s willing to fund these kinds of things.

SpaceX is not run by Elon and he’s kept from being involved closely by a buffer of people that keep him from getting too close to making any “elon” level changes.

SpaceX is successful despite Musk, not because of. And the woman who runs it knows that and keeps Musk away from any important decisions or impacts.

So the stuff they’re doing is legit, cool aerospace stuff.

It’s just not something Musk should take credit for. He does/will. But he shouldn’t. He’s a hack.

If you ignore Musk for a moment, it is impressive. Maybe not every launch (I wasn’t even aware of another one), but a company that’s actually pushing for more space exploration. That’s cool beans.

There are a few things that are different from what NASA has done in the past:

1. SpaceX Rocket is the most powerful rocket ever, surpassing everything that NASA or anyone else has ever done.

2. they are landing the rockets, with the aim of being able to recover them. If you skip the technicality that SpaceX first stage is suborbital but is part of an orbital launcher, that makes SpaceX the only entity who has achieved that, with some comparison to the Space Shuttle and Buran, though both were losing significant sections of the initial launcher, with very difficult repairs once on the ground.

3. the cost of the launcher. In terms of capabilities, NASA’s SLS is probably close to Starship. However, it costs around $2B/launch, and nothing is recoverable. Starship is meant for low cost. It is estimated that the current hardware + propellant for a single launch is under $100M. With reusability, a cost per launch under $10M is achievable in the mid term (10 years I would say) once the R&D has been paid ($1.4B/year at the moment, I would guess the whole development for Starship will be $10-20B, so same if not less than SLS).

4. the aim for high speed reusability - SpaceX aim is to launch as much as possible, as fast as possible, with the same hardware. While it is a bit early to understand how successful they will be (Elon was saying a launch every 1hr, which seem to be very optimistic, I would bet 6-12hrs to be more achievable). That was NASA’s original goal for the Space Shuttle, and they failed that.

5. finally, orbital refueling means you have a single vehicle that can basically go anywhere in the inner solar system without much issues, and minimal cost.

Also, what gets people excited are the prospects of what this enables. A 10-100x decrease in the access to orbit changes completely the space economics and opens a lot of possibilities. This means going to the Moon is a lot simpler because now you don’t need to reduce the mass of everything. This makes engineering way easier as you do not need to optimise everything to death, which tends to increase costs exponentially. And as for Mars, Starship is what makes having a meaningful colony there possible. Doing an Apollo like mission on Mars would have been possible for decades, but at a significant price for not much to show for. With cheap launch, you can just keep sending hardware there.

NASA, nor anyone else, has done this before. I’m not sure what you’re referring to when you say NASA did this already.

Wait, when did NASA land a fully reusable rocket like fucking Buck Rogers?

Then do it again, but capture it with the freakin’ launch tower?

When did NASA even have a reusable rocket? Oh, the shuttle, the bastardized money pit for NSA/NRO/Air Force, that appears to have been designed to orbit a surveillance satellite chassis, which most people know as Hubble (it’s one of many, this one being used to surveil the universe, instead of the earth).

And the shuttle was a quasi-reusable orbiter, not a rocket.

What you’re asking is akin to: why are people impressed by the airplane? We’ve already reached the Americas and India by boat.

SpaceX, and others actually are not advancing science per se, but are greatly improving/optimising the engineering so that it can be used in cheaper ways by others.

There’s also the issue that after the moon landing we didn’t really improve that much and much of the knowledge faded

Have you seen their boosters land? It very much IS impressive. They basically made reusable rockets viable, which is a huge step for more affordable space flight.

Also their raptor engine is a marvel of engineering.

For me being impressed with SpaceX is kinda like loving a piece of art even though the creator turned out to be an asshole. Or liking Star Trek, even though Berman was shady af to put it mildly.

What SpaceX does is very impressive from a technical point of view. Even if the rocket never amounts to anything except this one successful test, it’s still amazing they pulled it off. It tickles my engineer brain. And I think it’s worth to honor all the people that made it happen, despite them having to work for Musk. Combine this with what could be in the future and you can hopefully see why people hail this test flight.

Now I still have serious doubts about Starship in the moon program. The on orbit refueling seems very sketchy and unproven at this point. Sure they will get two rockets into orbit, mate them up and transfer some fuel, that’s a given at this point. But how much fuel are we talking? And how fast does the turnaround need to be to prevent losing a lot of it? How many ships and how many launches? Will this completely offset the cheaper launch costs due to reusability? It’s a huge unknown and will push back the moon program to well into the 2030s.

Not a fan, but it generally boils down not to where they can fly but how they differ in other aspects, mainly cost.

SpaceX is currently the world pioneer in heavy reusable rockets, which is another way to say they are the only ones to launch big stuff up there so cheap, and it gets even better.

They are essentially doing the good side of capitalism - making stuff cheaper - applied to space, one of the most expensive industries in the world.

Rapidly reusable orbital launch vehicles were unheard-of until Falcon 9. The Space Shuttle was supposed to fill that role, but NASA, ULA, and government elements have made it a horrid overbuilt pile of feature creep that was, at the same time, the crowning achievement of American aeronautical engineering, which was impossible to refurbish quickly. The same thing that is currently happening to SLS.

Propulsive landing of a first stage booster was an insane idea. Even massive space nerds like Everyday Astronaut were skeptical, and I watched him cream his jeans live when the first booster landed. That alone, the ability to reuse both the structure and the engines of the booster, as opposed to ditching them in the ocean (or in China’s case, on top of villages), has made access to low Earth orbit significantly cheaper, and affordable to underfunded scientific organizations.

That being said, competition is closing in. Rocket Lab (New Zealand) is targetin the same industry with the Neutron rocket (CEO Peter Beck literally ate his hat when the announcement was made) and is experimenting with recovering its smaller Electron rocket using mid-air capture by a helicopter. Astra (USA) is developing a rapidly deployable small orbital launch rocket that can fit inside a standard shipping container. There’s also Jeff Bezos and his massive overcompensation of a dick rocket that can also land propulsively, but not worth discussing.