Starship Will Simply Never Work

The 7 Deadly Sins of Starship

Photo by nader saremi on Unsplash

Starship Will Simply Never Work

The Seven Deadly Sins of Starship.

A collective cheer echoed throughout the internet on the sixth of March as yet another Starship spectacularly exploded across the Caribbean sky. Some of this derision came from the understandable backlash to the newly outed Nazi-sympathising billionaire neo-fascist goon at the head of SpaceX, but a surprising amount came from a chorus of disgruntled engineers, physics teachers, and people with common sense. You see, SpaceX’s plans for Starship are demonstrably stupid. In fact, their plans are so stupid in such a variety of ways that a lot of us, myself included, struggle to see the big picture and articulate why this moronic giant phallus will never work. I want to correct that oversight with this article. So, come with me as I lay out in glorious detail the Seven Deadly Sins of Starship and why this project is destined for the scrap heap.

Deadly Sin №1: Thrust.

Starship is meant to be a heavy-launch vehicle with a payload capacity of at least 100 tonnes to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). This specification is critical to every contract Starship has received. However, Musk has previously stated that, because of issues with thrust, Starship can only take 40–50 tonnes to LEO. That is actually less than their already operational Falcon Heavy! Okay, so what is going on here? Well, it seems Musk massively overestimated how much thrust their rocket engines can actually produce. This is not surprising; the figures he previously claimed were next to impossible. However, SpaceX also has to throttle back the engines on Starship, as they keep failing due to their proximity to the other engines, causing excessive heat and vibrations.

Musk claimed that this reduced thrust cut the payload by just over 50%. But the only payloads Starship has ever carried were eight tonnes and four tonnes during the most recent seventh and eighth test flights. These Starships exploded due to excessive vibrations causing giant fuel leaks. So, right now, it seems even that tiny payload is too much stress for the engines, and Starship can’t actually take any payload to orbit. As such, Musk’s 40–50 tonne figure is either a lie, or he stated the figure for how much payload Starship can take to orbit if the final stage (Starship, not the Super Heavy Booster) is expended. So, for the sake of appeasing the Musk fans, I will assume Starship can take 45 tonnes to orbit for the rest of the article.

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Deadly Sin №2, Safety Factor.

A safety factor is an engineering term. It means designing something to take more stress than it is predicted to. Say, I want to design a crane hook to carry 10 tonnes with a safety factor of 5, well then I would design it to take 50 tonnes of load. As you can imagine, developing things with a higher safety factor almost always increases weight.

This is a significant problem for Starship. As past tests have shown, the engines, heat shields and landing systems must be designed with a far higher safety factor, as they all fail even in sub-design conditions. But, doing this will increase the vehicle’s weight, massively reducing its already shrinking payload capacity and rendering Starship useless.

This is why Musk has introduced new versions of Starship. Tests 7 and 8 were the first tests of the 2nd version. It is longer than 1st version to accommodate more propellant (likely to make up for reduced thrust during landing) and had redesigned the fuel lines to be more robust (which obviously didn’t work as that is what failed). But, and this is hilarious, SpaceX is going to somehow make a 3rd version that is significantly longer than the second, with somehow 68% more thrust, and magically weigh less than the 2nd version. These numbers seem to be plucked out of thin air and are not backed up by any of the test flights or physics, for that matter. The only way SpaceX can even try to achieve this is by reducing the safety factor even further than it already is, rendering the rocket totally unreliable.

So, in short, SpaceX can’t build a Starship to specifications without making it too fragile for reliable, safe space flight.

Deadly Sin №3, human space flight certification.

Most of Starship’s contracts are to take Humans to the Lunar surface, return to Earth, and land safely with the crew onboard. But Starship can’t be rated for human space flight. Firstly, it is exploding mid-flight far too often. But, even after 8 test flights, Starship has failed to land its final stage from space even once. This is not surprising to anyone paying attention. 3% of Falcon 9 booster landings still result in failure to this day. But, unlike the Falcon 9 booster, which stays in the atmosphere and whose speed peaks at 4,500 mph, during landing, Starship has to reenter the atmosphere at 17,500 mph while carrying significantly more weight! So, not only does it have exponentially more challenging aerodynamics, but it also has to deal with literally hundreds of times more kinetic energy than the Falcon 9 booster. This is also why landing the Starship’s 1st stage (Super Heavy Booster) is not that impressive, as it has 72 times less kinetic energy than Starship and doesn’t leave the atmosphere (read more here).

But, managing Starship’s gargantuan kinetic energy while dealing with reentry aerodynamics and ensuring a safe landing is orders of magnitude harder than any landing SpaceX has ever done, and even the easier landings it does do are not reliable enough to land humans from space this way. Starships have no landing abort system, so to be certified for human space flight, they need to be able to land safely from orbit over 99% of the time, and all the evidence points to that being totally impossible.

This has no quick fix. Starship is lightyears away from ever reaching human space flight certification, leaving most of its contracts and the nearly $3 billion NASA poured into Starship for them totally stranded.

Okay, but at least Starship is a cheap launch vehicle, right? Ha! Not at all.

Deadly Sin №4, price.