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So, reusable is supposed to reduce the cost. But the space shuttle was reusable and it has been shutdown because it was too expensive. What is the differences between the two?


> space shuttle was reusable

SpaceX builds vehicles. The Shuttle was “reusable” because they needed a term between the default for transportation capital expenditures (e.g. trains, planes, cars and ships) and the modified missiles that defined post-War spaceflight. “Reusable” in the Shuttle’s context meant months of specialist overhaul time and the cost of a Falcon 9 launch in SRB booster replacements alone [0].

At the end of the day, in 2010, “the incremental cost per flight of the Space Shuttle was $409 million, or $14,186 per kilogram” [1]. ($591mm and $20,512 in 2024 dollars, respectively [2].) SpaceX’s prices per kg are around $3,170 on Falcon 9 [3] and $1,520 for Falcon Heavy [4]. Starship should bring those costs below $1000.

[0] https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=51959.0

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program

[2] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

[3] https://www.spacex.com/media/Capabilities&Services.pdf LEO

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy LEO, theoretical


> Starship should bring those costs below $1000.

It might even bring the costs below $100/kg.


It might, but it's also at a scale where people can dust off the old plans for orbital rings and ask if this time the economics work out.

(My guess is the economics are fine, but the politics would kill it on earth, so the moon or mars will get one, but that's just an interested amateur opinion).


Once you put something big in the LEO, you'll have to be able to boost its orbit indefinitely, because the orbit will otherwise slowly decay.


If you have the infrastructure to build an orbital ring, you have the infrastructure to keep it supplied too


There is some SciFi story about civilization collapsing and the survivors worrying that the sky will fall on them hidden in there.


Gotta make the individual pieces small enough to mostly burn up completely on rentry.


Term of art for this is "design for demise", i.e. make everything of pieces small enough and materials ablative enough that there's less than 1 in 10k chance that any debris will survive to the surface.

https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Engineering_Techn...


Planned obsolescence but in a good way.


Already exists, Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds. They absolutely trash orbit by planning very badly and over-packing habitats.


Contiguous rings filling an entire orbit don't have much air resistance, and what little they do have is small in comparison to their momentum.

But yes, eventually things decay.


That depends on how high the orbit is. If it is high enough, the decay will take centuries.


The L in LEO means we're talking about orbits that are not very big.


By definition, LEO extends up to 2,000 km. At that altitude orbital lifetimes can exceed 10,000 years.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orbital_Debris_Lifet...


IIRC, above something like geostationary they tend to decay upwards? Though the old orbital ring white paper wasn't suggesting anything like that, this was an alternative to needing to go so high in the first place.

(I may be misremembering or getting confused with a thing specific to tidal locking?)


That is indeed what you get with tidal forces - bodies closer than geostationary orbit lose angular momentum and decay inward, bodies further out steal angular momentum from Earth and move outward.

I suppose the same effect is there with satellites much smaller than the moon, but it would be tiny.


I wonder if they could have an orbit high enough to move away from earth with some kind of drag cables dangling from them into low orbit to counter the outward movement. Would that work?


These orbits have vastly different speeds though. Consider a high geosynchronous orbit vs. something like ISS which goes around the Earth in an hour or two.


but you are towing the cable and you'd only get so far down for the counteraction of force from gravity to pull on the cable. Would speed or friction on a cable be a problem.


You mean something like a skyhook?


Yes but no hook or anchor needed I'd assume. The cable alone in lower orbit would weigh enough to be pulled by gravity.


Presuming it’s in LEO. When and if we ever get around to building these things they probably won’t be in LEO at least not for long. Some of them might not even be constructed from materials launched from Earth.


There are relatively stable orbits over the equator.


How does the orbit or an orbital ring decay?


The main difference is that this is built by a private corporation who can't afford to throw money away, while the Space Shuttle was build by the government, and moreover it had to fulfill a number of conflicting requirements, and commercial profit was not one of them.

But on a more technical level. I think the vertical landing is the main difference. Vertical landing was obviously known and done by NASA, this is how the lunar modules landed on the Moon. But doing it on Earth, with vehicles weighing hundreds of times more, I don't think the world had that technical readiness a few decades ago, when the space shuttle was designed.

And another major difference is the mass manufacturing idea. From the start SpaceX planned for getting to mass manufacture its rockets. The Falcon rockets are much cheaper than any other alternatives even if you remove the reusability.

Then it's the methane burning engines. This was pure old fashioned engineering progress. SpaceX's engines are miracles of rocket engineering. Aside from that, the fuel choice is extremely smart. Methane is better than all other fuels, except for hydrogen. Hydrogen was the fuel of the space shuttle, but it's very tricky to work with. It has very low volumetric density, so the tank of the space shuttle was absolutely humongous. Hydrogen needs to be stored at an absurdly low cryogenic temperature, so this adds to the complexity. And that tank was not reusable, so it adds to the cost.


In order to land as a glider, you'll need wings, landing gear, doors, rudder, stabilizer, flight controls, streamlining, all the structure needed to support it, and a heat shield for all of it. All that complexity has to work reliably, too.

All of that adds tremendous weight, complexity, and cost.


> Methane is better than all other fuels

There are better fuels in terms of Isp and density. They have some downsides such as being corrosive or having highly toxic exhaust.

https://x.com/ToughSf/status/1453391050681327622


Yeah, methane is kind of second best (or worse) in many parameters, but most importantly, it's cheap, abundant, and easily and safely storable and transportable, and it does the job.


Also chosen as it may be possible to synthesize on Mars.


And while not the reason, also on Venus! Venus seems like a very interesting colonization target - gravity almost like on Earth, and there is a place in Venus atmosphere where temperature is around 30 degrees Celsius and pressure is 1 atmosphere (Earth); and human air is a lifting gas in Venus atmosphere. As a bonus, interaction of Venus atmosphere with the Sun produces a magnetic shield.


> temperature is around 30 degrees Celsius and pressure is 1 atmosphere (Earth)

And unbreathable and full of sulphuric acid. You may as well just stay in orbit.


Staying in orbit means risk of catastrophic failure on puncture and doesn't provide access to the heat of lower layers of Venus atmosphere that can be used as energy source or carbon source. You also have to think about heat management - big colony means gigantic radiators. And most importantly no gravity and no magnetic shield - these make Venus imho better colonization target than Mars.

On Venus, a puncture doesn't immediately destroy anything - because of equal pressure on each sides of the balloon wall. You have more than enough time to put on a protective coat and fix it.

And building more living space is much easier + you could source the material (carbon) on site.


I'd be a bit boring in your balloon above Venus though. At least on Mars you could wander around and check out the rocks or something.


You are going to have hundreds of years of fun terraforming Venus... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Venus#/media...


> and commercial profit was not one of them

But it's high cost was the end of it.


Its high cost would (should!) have killed it regardless, but its low reliability was going to be a huge problem too, and arguably it's the lack of reliability that finally killed it.

The high cost should have killed the project before it ever flew, but that's not how governments behave.


What is all this rocketry doing for climate change if they're burning methane? Hopefully it's methane from landfills etc?


I did the math, and the impact is not negligible. One single launch releases the equivalent of 5000 tons of CO2. Elon wants to get to the point where there are thousands of Starships, each doing a few trips to orbits per day. That would be more than one millions launches per year, or more than 5 GT of CO2-equivalent. That's about 10% of the worldwide emissions today.


One million launches per year seems to be adequate trade for 10% global emissions. This level of technology implies we are able to reduce emissions elsewhere.


I think it’s ludicrously optimistic to think that this would substitute for reductions elsewhere. What possible mechanism could reduce 10% of global co2 emissions when many of these launches will be tourists and starlinks?


1 million launches per year implies at least a decade or two of development. There is a lot that can change in that time - for example energy production can move towards renewable and nuclear. Few decades more and we might get fusion too.


I agree with you. I was just stating a fact, not criticizing.


If we actually get to that point, we'll eventually be doing a lot more activity and manufacturing off the Earth where the CO2 emissions don't matter.


Presumably co2 emissions in LEO would end up in the atmosphere though?


The limiting effect for Starship launches won't be CO2 (direct air capture could counter that), it's injection of water into the stratosphere. Ballpark I think the limit would hit at about 100,000 launches/year.


burning methane turns it into much less damaging CO2. They probably get it from Natural Gas that the US produces.


Spacex might be a private company, but this project is funded by NASA, meaning the American taxpayer. Approved by a person whose last act was this approval before leaving NASA and joining Spacex (effectively putting money in their own pocket).

It is also yet to be seen how Starship will ever be profitable (outside of spending government money), who is going to pay for those launches and for what purpose. Other than Starlink, of course.


> this project is funded by NASA

Partially. They have a fixed-price contract to land humans on the Moon, and notably got that contract because they severely undercut the other bids and were the only bid that actually fit within the available budget: they bid $2.94B, while Blue Origin bid $5.99B and Dynetics $9.08B.

That 3 billion is also much less than what they're spending on the project.


With a payload volume of 8m diameter by 22m height you could fit a James Webb size telescope inside with minimal folding. The sunshield (21.2 m by 14.2m) would only need to fold along one axis and the mirror (6.6 m) could be monolithic instead of having to fold, probably only requiring the mounting points for the primary and secondary to be hinged. This shouldn't be discounted because it makes telescope design much simpler and less expensive.

It also allows for launching individual space station modules that have almost the same volume as the entire ISS in one launch.

Their plans for refuelling on orbit with tanker versions of the starship open up the entire solar system to unmanned missions with much shorter timelines and much higher payload size and weight.

The fact the entire system is re-usable will make it both cheaper and faster to use than any other launch system.

All of this combined mean that it won't just be countries and space programs bidding for space on launches, it puts space within reach of many corporations and some private individuals. This isn't conjecture, it's already happening with the Falcon 9. Starship will make it even more accessible.


> With a payload volume of 8m diameter by 22m height you could fit a James Webb size telescope inside with minimal folding.

Of course, that means you could also fit a James Webb-folded telescope except make it a lot bigger :-)


Probably need on-orbit refueling to work for that to happen, but they're working on it.


Just park the starship as the sun shield. Or two starship, or an origami starship that unfolds for more surface area, your own personal sun umbrella made from a starship.


Yes! that too.


> It also allows for launching individual space station modules that have almost the same volume as the entire ISS in one launch.

My favorite related thing is that the Starship itself could serve as a large space or moon station.


> but this project is funded by NASA

About 10% funded by NASA. Starship is a >$10B program; SpaceX is getting $3B for Artemis of which >2/3 is for operational tasks and moon-specific stuff that SpaceX aren't relevant for SpaceX's goals of LEO and Mars.


The Artemis money could evaporate and Starship would still make commercial sense and likely be a successful product.


The federal government smartly invested in SpaceX after being sued by SpaceX to fix rigging (things what the system working looks like).

Now taxpayers have a 10x return on investment.


The problem is that launch costs went down fast but satellite costs haven't gone down as fast and still have long development timelines. The other problem is the market for satellite services hasn't developed as fast as anticipated, except for starlink.


Starlink for all intents and purposes is the market for satellites now. All the other launches are nice to have extras.

Now personally I’m looking forward to NASA, ESA and JAXA to launch outer solar system probes like new horizons but with tons of fuel left in the tank to safely make orbit around there.


Having enough lift capacity to take a shot at putting a pair of telescopes out far enough to exploit solar gravitational lensing to resolve exo-planet surfaces would be a hell of a thing. Orbital refueling would mean we could reasonably build something big enough to be able to boost out that far (would still take decades to arrive).


Isn't that 500 AU out?


Yes, but the trick with getting there is building the vehicle. Time takes care of the rest (you'd do it using ion thrusters).


The whole design process for them is based around launches being expensive and taking a long time to plan. It will be very interesting to see what happens when the whole process gets used to launches being relatively cheap and frequent. No need to spend years making sure the design is perfect and will definitely last a long time if you can launch a new one in a week if you make a mistake.


Starlink is predicted to have something like 6.6B in revenue. SpaceX isn't a rocket company they are an ISP that launches rockets.


Is that long term or this year? Because honestly 6.6B is not a lot for their scale of operations.


That is projections for this year only with a target closer to 10 billion revenue next year.


SpaceX is profitable from that income alone, even allowing for starship development costs.


Things can only be cheap if you mass produce them. That tends to require standardization of components, and inevitably standardized components are a compromise between requirements, where up until now, saving mass was a critical requirement. If you don't have to care nearly so much about mass and volume, then that opens up many avenues for much cheaper standard satellite components.


I'm disappointed that you still can't order ten cubesats from Shenzen Satellite Supply Co via AliExpress.


> Spacex might be a private company, but this project is funded by NASA, meaning the American taxpayer.

So was the space shuttle, so that's not a difference between the launch costs of the two vehicles.


The purpose of funding SpaceX with taxpayer money is to make competitors that can launch rockets to space so that it is cheaper.


Exactly. Private companies like space X would not exist if NASA didn't deliberately make the market for Private space companies. That's what governments do, make markets.


Elon founded SpaceX w/o an expectation of subsidies.


How do you know he didn't lobby for them?


And yet, without the funding for CRS from NASA Spacex would’ve gone broke or at least wouldn have built F9 much much later.


Think of the word ‘reusable’ in this case as less a binary descriptor but more of a scale of reusability.

Yes, both systems are reusable, but there are key differences in the refurbishment of the systems that partly explains the cost difference. It took more labor, resources and time to refurbish the shuttle. Also consider rapid reusability was a stretch goal when it was being designed, but we have come a loooong way since, spacex in particular has had it as a driving competitive differentiator for years now.

Another big difference is that NASA post Cold War was a skilled jobs program, with an incentive to do distributed, high overhead work to appease their bosses (congress), while SpaceX has the opposite.


> Yes, both systems are reusable, but there are key differences in the refurbishment of the systems that partly explains the cost difference. It took more labor, resources and time to refurbish the shuttle.

Starship uses essentially the same ceramic heat shield tiles as the Space Shuttle, so the fact the Shuttle had so much trouble with refurbishment doesn't mean that SpaceX has solved these refurbishment issues with the Starship upper stage.

Though the Starship lower stage, which contains the most expensive engines, doesn't have this problem. Since it doesn't need a heat shield. So partial reusability should be pretty realistic.


Shuttle's tiles were each unique. Starship is mostly clad with identical hexagonal tiles which can be mass produced and eventually refurbished by machine. A robot already welds on the tile fittings.


That was 24,300 unique parts rather than 1!


Now that's an exaggeration


More of an ignorant assumption. I asked ChatGPT now, and got this:

> In terms of shapes, the tiles were not uniform. In fact, there were over 17,000 different shapes used to fit specific areas of the shuttle's body. Each tile had to be individually manufactured and shaped to fit a precise location due to the complex curvature of the shuttle's surface. The unique shapes were necessary to ensure that every part of the shuttle received the proper protection against the extreme temperatures during re-entry.


Please don't cite LLMs for factual questions. They are prone to confabulation. Why not type the question "How many heat shield tiles did the Space Shuttle use?" into Google?

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b&sca_esv=11e08...

This gives a direct answer (24,300) while citing a NASA source.


Since I mentioned I got the info from ChatGPT, people can decide for themselves how much they trust it.

Note that the question here is how many uniquely shaped tiles there was, not the total number.

This is interesting because if you have to manufacture and keep in stock 17,000 separate tile shapes, that will be vastly more expensive than SpaceX who, from what I hear, only uses a singe hex shaped tile everywhere.


SpaceX uses several different shapes for the nose and areas on and around the flap.


The tiles are very similar; the attachment system is very different (a big part of why Shuttle's were a pain to maintain) and Starship's simple shape means most of the tiles are the same (the ridiculous number of SKUs was another factor in Shuttle TPS costs).


Shuttle itself was refurbishable, but not rapidly re-usable. It was also incredibly expensive to build and refurbish. A shuttle launch also utilized boosters that were not re-usable.

Starship is supposed to be (and clearly well on the way to being) fully rapidly re-usable. That means all stages (in this case two) are re-usable, and that the capital and time required to get either stage flight ready again after a flight should be minimal.

Said another way – it is cheaper for SpaceX to build an entirely new Starship + Booster than it was to refurbish a Shuttle between flights, by a factor of about 4x ($90M for a Starship+Booster / $400m for Shuttle refurb).


The boosters for the Shuttle were reusable, but it turned out the cost of refurbishing them was similar if not higher than simply building new ones. Plus it contributed to the Challenger crash, see "Mr. Feynman Goes to Washington", https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3570/1/Feynman.pdf


Economy of scale: starship can be "mass"-produced

Material: stainless steel is much cheaper

Percentage of reusability: boosters of shuttle cannot be reused, maintenance of shuttle itself is also very expensive (heat shields were pricey). whereas the starship stack has higher reuse percentage and allegedly cheaper to maintain.


The shuttle was not even reusable by any modern metric, the main tank was always expended, the boosters had to be recovered, fully disassembled and cleaned.


I'm not even sure the SRM case segments could be easily reused, given the tremendous stress. They were made of a very high strength steel (maraging steel, with a yield stress of something like 250,000 psi) operated with a safety factor of 1.4.


You've got a lot of responses on the difference of reusability, but the shuttle was also more expensive because it had to carry a lot of capabilities with it every time. If you were launching a satellite, you were carrying along the crew compartment and a couple astronauts. If you were bringing a few astronauts to the space station, you brought a cargo bay. And in either circumstance, you brought big wings. Starship can be filled with all cargo. And if you're just changing crew on the ISS, you could... not use Starship and launch a Falcon 9 instead. One of the mission profiles required by the Air Force for the shuttle was that it be able to rendezvous with a satellite, put it in the cargo bay, and return to Earth, all under 2 orbits and along a path that avoided flying over the Soviet Union, which required a rather large turn in-atmosphere to make it back to landing on the west coast.


One of the drivers was the need to Abort Once Around on a polar orbit launch from Vandenberg. The launch site rotates to the east during the orbit so cross range was needed. No such polar orbit launch (abort or otherwise) ever occurred, though.


No one has answered with one of the biggest issues with the shuttle: each one was extremely custom. Every single heat shield tile was unique to a specific position and a specific shuttle. There were probably over a hundred million individual components in the Shuttle, and with many critical ones being custom, the time to refurbish it for a new launch was much longer.

This is in contrast to something like the falcon, which has a very standardized mfg process and components, which allows for really rapid iteration


Massive. The designers of Starship studiously avoided all the problems that made Space Shuttle expensive to refurbish:

a. Cheaper, more durable material (stainless steel).

b. Cheaper, easier to manufacture engines.

c. Easier to use fuel (methane is much "tamer" than hydrogen).

d. Standardized heat shield with much smaller requirements for manual work.


> d. Standardized heat shield with much smaller requirements for manual work.

We'll have to see how it works out.


It is a very daunting problem no doubt, maybe the hardest one, but I also don't doubt that the end form of Starship will require way, way less than 20 000 man-hours per turnaround (as the Space Shuttle required) to refurbish the heat shield. They simply cannot afford that.


The way they are going they can try 5 different ones that fail until they find one that doesn't.

Contrast that to the Space Shuttle which required a human crew to flight test anything.


The Space Shuttle was not fully reusable as the biggest single part, the orange tank, was destroyed every time. But more importantly, the orbiter and boosters needed 2+ months of refurbishment/rebuilding after every flight.

One of the design goals of Starship is for the booster and ship to relaunch with zero refurbishment. To literally land over the launchpad, refuel, and go back to orbit within hours without people even approaching them. The heat shield is the biggest risk to that goal IMO, and we saw today that it definitely sustained serious damage despite improvements. But if they ever get there then per-launch costs will be a tiny fraction of the Shuttle with 6x the payload.


Falcon 9 has already proven that partial reusability is economical. SpaceX has dominated the entire worldwide launch industry and their competitors are nation states with no need to make a profit.

The difference is that they have already proven to be the lowest cost and most reliable launcher due to reuse. This is them lapping the industry with second stage reusability.


Reusability increases costs if you don't reuse often enough.

The shuttle would have been much, much, cheaper per launch if it had flown more often. The expected costs for the shuttle included a range based on how often it flew which turned out to be reasonably accurate. They were much worse at predicting which end of the range they would be flying in. At the rate they ended up flying they had the extra costs of reusability without any of the benefits.

Starship is ludicrously expensive, but still much cheaper than even the best case for the Shuttle, and it has a guaranteed source of launches to help it benefit from resuability.


I’ve read that a shuttle refit after landing was so expensive and time consuming to render it useless…. Feel free to correct if wrong.


The turnaround time for Shuttle was 2-3 months, while building a brand new rocket takes like 1-2 years. Although for the cost of Shuttle, we could have built a whole bunch of expendable rockets, pipelined with a regular launch cadence, and probably also gotten some cost savings through economies of scale.


And, the market projections that indicated there would be enough payloads for large amounts of launches were also basically fraudulent.


SRB and tank were not re-usable. That’s the equivalent of the first stage you just saw getting caught


Shuttle SRB segments were fished from the ocean and refilled.


Yeah but salt water makes it about as difficult as building from scratch.


Then why didn't they stop?


> why didn't they stop?

They did [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_retirement


Beyond the fact that they eventually did quit, the shuttle program was the public face of the US space program, and part of having more than one way to launch military stuff.


The military rapidly gave up on the Shuttle after the first accident. No shuttle was ever launched from the pad on the west coast at Vandenberg (plenty of F9s have been, though.)


SRBs were in fact reusable.


They were but the cost of refurbishment was almost more than just building new boosters. Thats why SLS is currently using Shuttle Derived Boosters but not worrying with reuse.


The Shuttle consisted of the shuttle (orbiter) itself, the external tank (not reusable), and the two boosters which could be reused after ocean recovery. The orbiter itself was slow and expensive to reuse since (among other things) all the heat shield tiles were inspected and 30-100 replaced between each launch. I don't know how much work was done to the engines between launches, but SpaceX's parts and cost reduction on the Raptor engine have to give it an advantage there.

StarShip consists of the Super Heavy booster that we saw "caught" today, and the StarShip (orbiter) itself. Having the booster return to launch site vs requiring ocean recovery should potentially increase cadence and reduce cost of reuse. StarShip is also meant to be reusable, although it remains to be seen how that will pan out. On the previous flight there was burn through from inadequate heat shielding - maybe we'll see an improvement with today's vehicle. I'd expect SpaceX to iteratively arrive at a quicker and more cost effective orbiter reuse procedure than NASA had with the shuttle, but how quick remains to be seen. Of course they are planning many of these to go on one-way trips to Mars rather than being reused.


> The orbiter itself was slow and expensive to reuse since (among other things) all the heat shield tiles were inspected and 30-100 replaced between each launch.

Worth noting that Starship's heat shield is very similar to the one of the Shuttle. They actually got the manufacturing method from NASA.


That's why I remain very skeptical about the easy refurbishing of Starship. Initially, way back around 2016, the plan was to vent liquids to create a cushion around the ship. That sounded more easily reusable.


Yeah. I think they originally planned to use ceramic tiles only for certain spots and still transpiration cooling for the rest. Then they fully switched to ceramic tiles. In an interview with Everyday Astronaut on YouTube, if I recall correctly, Elon Musk said they first believed the ceramic tiles to be lighter.


> What is the differences between the two?

More than 40 years and many lessons learned.

SpaceX took advantage of tech from both the US and Russia, including the experience with the Space Shuttle. They have better computers, better metallurgy, advanced 3D printing and their own experience with the Falcon 9.

There is no guarantee that it will reduce the costs that much, but will all that experience, the chances are success are higher than with the Space Shuttle.

One big issue that isn't talked about much and that SpaceX takes very seriously is simply a lack of demand. There is only so much stuff you want to put in space. Satellites are expensive, and even with disposable rockets, the launch is only a smaller fraction of the cost. It is already a problem with the Falcon 9 as they have a bunch of rockets and not much to do with them. Starlink, orbital refueling, and crazy ideas like earth to earth transport are all ways to address this problem.

It was a problem for the Space Shuttle too, they couldn't achieve the economies of scale they planned it for. It was supposed to fly for routine maintenance missions but it didn't work out.


> lack of demand

What this also means is that if you want to get into the space economy, work on things to do in space, not yet another launch vehicle startup.


the space shuttle was "reusable". It had to be taken apart and meticulously cleaned and tested and basically had to be rebuilt after each flight, in a process called turnaround. SpaceX's rockets are much closer to what you'd consider reusable.


I wonder how much of that difference is because the space shuttle was human rated from the start: F9 eventually got there, but only after plenty of "testing in production" with disposable payloads.

The other big difference, an elephant in the room grade difference I think, is that SpaceX reliability was developed with memories of a reusable vehicle failing mostly due to turnaround costs and risks on everyone's minds. That clearly wasn't the case when the space shuttle was designed, they were the first and enjoyed the privilege of making all the beginner mistakes.


I had an email exchange with Homer Hickam, before SpaceX existed, where I remarked that the shuttle design looked like a giant kludge, and a winged reentry vehicle was a fundamentally bad design, for various reasons which I enumerated elsewhere in this thread.

He emailed back that he agreed with my reasons and had argued that case with NASA in the early stages of the shuttle program.

So NASA was aware of this at the time.


I was under the impression tha they also thought this themselves but got "persuaded" with the prospect of more money if it could handle certain payloads of use for defense?


The case for the Shuttle was so marginal they needed every prospective customer they could get. The military was dragged into it unwillingly, but did give their requirements when forced to commit. They backed out as quickly as possible after the Challenger disaster.


Shuttle was a jobs program just like the SLS is.


Yeah the right word is refurbishable, plus the main tank was not reused and the solid boosters got a salt water bath each launch.


The majority of damage to shuttle's TPS apparently came from foam strikes from the external fuel tank. Superheavy's optimized profile certainly helps here, since there are no large cryogenic tanks hanging ominously over the TPS while being shaken violently by solid rocket boosters.


To answer this oversimplified question with a simple answer, the Space Shuttle couldn't be a more different vehicle than this one. It truly is a comparison between apples and oranges.

Let's start with the fact that it was designed in the 1970's. If you had a Cadillac DeVille from 1970 it would get 8-12 miles per gallon. Just the mere fact that the design is about 70 years old makes that vehicle too expensive to operate, and that's before we even start talking about other issues with the design (performance, safety, reliability, etc).


The main thing is... Space shuttle wasn't all that reusable. It had to be launched with a massive rocket and two massive boosters that just fall into the ocean.


Estimated costs of the fully loaded cost of the shuttle program ended up at $600 million to $1 billion per flight. The refurbishment costs per flight and man hours/staffing were astronomical.

It actually would have been a lot cheaper if they had gone for serialized, mass assembly line production of Saturn V class disposable rockets to launch piece of space stations, satellites and manned missions into low earth orbit.


Early designs of the shuttle were fully reusable. That was quickly dropped due to costs and requirements. The final shuttle design was also unsafe.


The shuttle wasn't fully reusable, just for starters. The boosters were reusable with a lot of refurbishment work. The center tank was expended every time. It was very expensive. Only five shuttles were ever made, which means that no effort was put into automation of production of engines etc., everything was custom, and everything required great care to save the sunk costs.


Starship is supposed to be fully & rapidly reusable. Neither adjective applies to the space shuttle.


The difference is only a small part- the shuttle itself- was reusable. The booster that put it into space was scrapped every time.


The boosters were not (or at least not with the quick turnover and lower costs like the ones from SpaceX)


This is significantly less expensive


Read the article "SpaceX flight Ops"


Manufacture and maintenance contracts for the Shuttle were deliberately spread out across many companies and states, especially in key congressional districts. It was a jobs programme; waste was a feature not a bug.

Same thing for SLS.


More fundamentally, there were contracts. SpaceX does things itself; there's no legal friction internally. This gets back to the "Theory of the Firm" for why firms exist in the first place (transaction costs).

The need to codify what work is to be done in contacts is antithetical to SpaceX's rapid development processes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm


s/contacts/contracts/


Because people are reflexively averse to government spending unless there's a billionaire making profits on the way through thanks to 100 years of academic capture by Austro-libertarian economists.


This is an anti-intellectual conspiracy theory. Mainstream economics no longer operate using schools of thought: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/quxwl5/how_is...


No, if anything it’s an anti intellectual conspiracy




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