I have a question about the general principle behind Starship's design, and I figured people on here would probably be best qualified to answer/disucss it. Why the vertical landing system for Earth variants of the Starship? I understand that the ultimate goal is operations to Mars, and so glider designs are out of the question there, but doesn't the general Starship design stand to be (for Earth operations) everything the Space Shuttle wasn't? It's liquid fueled, mounted on top of its booster, has a reusable heat shield, and even aerodynamic surfaces for control. The failures experienced by STS-51L, STS-107, and even the near-misses of STS-27R and STS-93 simply aren't possible with the Starship stack (SRB failure, insulation strikes, SSME pin ejection). It's not even like it's restricted to the delta-winged shape of the Shuttle, which was dictated by long-range glide capability demanded by USAF and consequently involved longer re-entries. I can't imagine that a powered landing is somehow less complicated or safer than landing on a runway, and certainly doesn't seem safer for human operations. The possibility for a launch-abort system is, as I understand it, about the same as the Shuttle. I understand people are generally okay with that because of the rarity of their use/success. Maybe launch refurbishment costs are the reason? The Shuttle was of course notoriously expensive to refit and launch, but I wonder how Starship can be different with such a complex landing system. Maybe they see it as not worth it since Falcon Heavy can already deliver large payloads and Crew Dragon can deliver people separately for the kinds of work I'm describing. I wonder if the engineers have discussed this publicly.

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What is the main reason behind SpaceX/Elons success. At first i thought that maybe it’s the vision Elon gives to the company or the trial by fire method he uses. I couldn’t decide the central theme behind the success so i thought of asking the people.

Here’s some i think might be the central ones.

Vision - a dream / a glorious purpose to achieve e.g get to mars

Trial by fire method - just do it / whatever it takes / no regrets e.g rapid prototyping

A pathway - a realistic strategy/ an actually executable battle plan / an achievable path to success e.g simplification of rocket construction

Delegation - Putting the right person in charge / merit based promotion e.g Gwen shotwell for company, trump for politics, water tank construction company to build first prototype of starship

Gambling - to risk / go against uneven odds e.g keeping both tesla and SpaceX on the verge of bankruptcy

business plan - to create supply and demand / using the formula to success from other businesses e.g create demand of rocket flight through starlink rather than wait on nasa funds or investors

Innovation - to think outside the box / create a new product e.g reusable rockets, first electric car

What do you think is the real winner behind SpaceX/ Elon??

I think Trial by fire!!

Edit:- His drive and hard work

       Money 

Curious if anyone can point to any documentation discussing the max x-wind speeds allowable for a Falcon 9 drone ship landing? Wondering if it's pretty strong since a lot of the time there's heavy wind at sea but they don't seem to scrub very often for that reason.

Right now everyone is super excited about Starship. It's the next big thing (literally and figuratively) and it promises a major paradigm shift in how spaceflight works. It will take launch cadence from a few hundred per year to maybe a few hundred per month.

That cadence presents a problem though. Starship is LOUD. Even if you've only seen it on video, you can tell how insanely loud it is. Just look at all the shockwaves hitting clouds as it passes them.

I fear the biggest obstacle to Starship might be the same kind of NIMBYs who currently bitch about airports, race tracks, and shooting ranges. This has led to significant restrictions on airports in the name of noise abatement, but we have also lost hundreds of airports, race tracks, and shooting ranges across the country because people successfully pestered the local government enough to get them outright shut down.

SpaceX has done a bit of groundwork here in trying to talk about "how cool" sonic booms are and trying to spin that narrative to their favor. Sonic booms are one very small part of the noise associated with Starship operations.

My fear is once the novelty wears off, there will be a lot of noise complaints. Even at established launch facilities like KSC and VSFB there might be enough people complaining that it would cause restrictions on operations.

Airplane and jet engine manufacturers have done a lot of work over the past several decades to reduce the noise of those machines, but I don't know what can be done with rockets. If Starship flies as frequently as SpaceX is hoping, they're almost certainly going to have to do something to mitigate the noise, so what can be done?

Or am I making something out of nothing here?

He’s recently

If I got this straight the only technical reason to keep SLS around even though it needs a fully functionally HLS is that a crewed starship launcher is expected to take much longer to develop?

Okay, assuming SLS works perfectly its still completely unusable to build up or maintain a presence on the Moon or am I looking at this wrong? So the only thing we're going to get out of it is the possibility of symbolically revisiting (since we've already been there and there are still kinks to work on in the system) the moon at an earlier date. And then we leave. Is that it? Am I missing something?

To build up a permanent presence we're going to have to wait for a full starship/like system anyway right? So what does the SLS really get us? The whole driving force behind this is we're afraid the Chinese will get there before us. But without a similar system to starship they can't do anything either. Except symbolically claim land with a human instead of a robot then also leave.

So lets just go with the hypothetical that they beat us to 2nd place moon landing due to SLS being scrapped and land there a few times. And I guess by physically planting a flag they make a slightly stronger symbolic claim on a couple of places. Does that really matter? Can't we just finish the system that really matters to actually exert control over the lunar surface and build a permanent colony on those couple of spots they claimed if we really really wanted to? Or are we going by Age of Discovery video game rules and if you plant a flag somewhere you own it indisputably no matter what and so we must get there as quickly as possible just in case China claims the only two or three good real estate parcels on the moon?

What ever happened to the mobile gantry for falcon 9 and falcon heavy? Lots of talk in 2020. But as far as I can find(20 minutes of scrolling through articles) there’s been no news about it. And no construction. So what happened? Is it abandoned? Is it gonna happen? Is it no longer needed? What happened?

May be silly, however I'd really want to know why this is the case.

So I watched the falcon launch tonight (11-26-24) and we stumbled upon a nice little spot in Florida called manatee observation deck. There was no one else there and had a fantastic view of the launch and was pretty close. We could feel the sound as it was launching once it reached us which was when it was about 30seconds from 1st stage separation.

I’m a web designer so I thought it’d be cool to turn all the starship and booster stats into something more fun and visual. I’m not an expert so if I got anything wrong let me know and I’ll correct it.

View on desktop for the most cinematic experience.

🔗Live Link: https://missionmars.peachworlds.com

So I was thinking last night about the old Seti League where people converted old C-Band satellite dishes into small home radio telescopes and contributed to the SETI data. The thought I had was what if each Starlink satellite had a small radio telescope built into its back facing away from Earth? That would continuously cover a large portion of the sky and have a built in data stream back to Earth.

Just one of those thoughts you have right before you fall asleep...

Booster 1080 was last flown for Starlink 6-69 on Nov 11 2024. Previous Record was 21 days between flights for a booster 1065 back in April 2022.

Starship launch cadence experience curve as of 25 Nov 2025

Here's the latest Wright's Law prediction for upcoming Starship launches. Despite the regulatory delay for IFT-5, the trend line agrees fairly well with recent rumors about preparations for IFT-7. The current learning rate is a 52% reduction in time between launches for every doubling of total number of launches -- nearly the same as the 2020-2024 Falcon 9 learning rate of 57%. For what it's worth, the current Starship trend predicts 13 launches in 2025, and 39 for 2026. Of course regulatory delays, technical setbacks, and propellant supply chain limitations all may reduce the launch cadence significantly. That said, Gwynne's recent prediction of 400 launches in 4 years is not unreasonable -- at this pace 400 is reached by August 2028.

Like is there a identifying mark on each Dragon that is unique?

Did anybody pick up on how the booster exploded on the water? The top methane tank was the one that popped. The detonation was a conflagration rather than an explosion and it did so above ground. The boosters lox tank was intact and had to be filled with holes for whatever purpose. This bodes very well for the health of the zero stage launch mount on a booster hitting the ground nearby. I’m posting because I think this point has been missed by the community.