Jorge Stolfi
Score sheet of Elon Musk's "fully reusable, Moon/Mars capable" Starship to date:
Full test launches: 7
First stage recoveries: 2
Insertions into orbit: 0
Tons of payload to orbit: 0
Second stage de-orbits: 0
Second stage recoveries: 0
Fuel transfers in orbit: 0
Moon flybys: 0
Moon landings: 0
Moon lif-offs: 0
Returns from Moon: 0
Crewed flights: 0
I will leave to others the sheet of Bezos's new Glenn and NASA's SLS.
Jorge Stolfi
But Elon is not trying to do those things because his team knows that they just cannot do them. It is pretty clear by now that Starship V1 cannot take a single pound of payload to the lowest low earth orbit. Will V2 and V3 will fare any better? We have only Elon's promises for that...
Elon received some 4 billion US$ from the gov to develop Starship. THAT is the number one should compare to the cost of the SLS.
Simply Simon
@JorgeStolfi I also think Elon Musk is a raging dickhead who isn't half as smart as he thinks he is, but the reason it's had all those 0s is because they weren't trying to do those things. Not because Musk is an arrogant ass and they failed.
If you did want to score NG & SLS - NG has 0 first stage recoveries, and SLS costs about as much for its one mission as SpaceX has dumped into the Indian Ocean on tests.
Jorge Stolfi
But the cost/result ratio is $10B/1 for the SLS, $4B/0 for Starship...
Simply Simon
@JorgeStolfi OK, in that case, the last per-launch figure I can find puts SLS at $4.1B *per launch* and we know they kept escalating from there. So, SpaceX is still ahead.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/03/nasa-inspector-general-says-sls-costs-are-unsustainable/
Jorge Stolfi
The Falcon part of SpaceX is entirely separated from the Starship program, and is run by competent rocket engineers, not by Elon. (I read somewhere that he cannot even set foot there, because it launches military satellites and he does not have security clearance.)
The Starship program is devoted to implementing Elon's paper napkin idea of a rocket -- which is the rocket version of a Cybertruck. Or, better, of the Boring Company tunnels.
Simply Simon
@JorgeStolfi Only if you define "result" as "a bunch of things they have explicitly not attempted to do yet". If I define "result" as "land on the moon" then the SLS is $10B/0.
The ONLY thing the SLS has achieved out of your list of Starship not-achieveds is a moon flyby and it is not designed to EVER achieve many of them. Everyone said SpaceX would never be able to reuse a booster. They've now done it over 400 times. Starship will eventually do all those things, and cheaper than SLS.
Jorge Stolfi
The goal of the SLS was to send a crewed capsule to Moon orbit and bring it back. It achieved that result on the first launch, except that there was no crew in the capsule. Just normal NASA performance.
The goal of Starship was to take 100 tons of payload to LEO, fly a crew to the Moon, land on the Moon, lift off, return to Earth. And then go to Mars etc. There is no reason to believe that it will ever be able to do any of those things.
Jorge Stolfi
By the way, the Space Shuttle reused the solid boosters; only the external fuel tank was discarded. As for returning a rocket on its own to the launch site, I suppose you know about NASA's DC-XA (30 years ago): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X. The project was cancelled because of internal politicking and lack of $50 million...
Jorge Stolfi
Also, $4 billion is only what *NASA* gave Elon to delvelop the Starship. No one knows how much money was spent on it from other sources.
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