Replies

The Chinese are copying his Starship nearly bolt for bolt even the tower catching thing. Reusable rockets fundamentally changes the planet. It’s only a few hundred thousand in liquid oxygen and liquid methane. When that boosts two hundred tonnes to orbit every other rocket system is obsolete in cost and function.

He could next month make a super sized Falcon 9 already the most successful rocket ever created. Since they caught and can reuse Superheavy that is now an option to do a bigass falcon style two stage rocket. Forget the heat shields and flaps and just weld up tanks, the RCS system and huge fiberglass fairings with 6 raptor already cheap enough to throwaway. You get 150+ tonnes to LEO. The existing falcon 9 second stage is the world’s best kick stage on mass ratio it’s 3900lbs while holding 200,000+ lbs of fuel no other st
Age on earth has those numbers not even Centaur with balloon tanks. They could throw a fully fueled second stage on top of the 6 raptor stage with 25 tonnes of payload on top of that. That falcon based kick stage could then throw that 25 tonnes to solar escape velocity as in any destination in the sol system no other rocket on earth could do that. A first stage reusable Superheavy plus disposable second and kick stage is a beast of rocket and they could do that next month if they choose too. Starship already reached orbital velocity its stable if there was no need for recovery just dump fairings and let the kick stage and payload fly at apogee while the disposable starship stage reenters down range. All the pieces of that system have been proven one test flight to test the fairing dump and kick stage separation. You lose 6 raptor and one Merlin in that case plus cheap steel and aluminum tanks.

The falcon already keeps the first stage and tosses the second. Merlin is so cheap they just threw 27 of them away for the ESA and made a profit charging one fourth what anyone else would have for boosting Europa Clipper, hint there were only two other rockets with the payload to do it. Three if Delta heavy still flew at 600 million vs 150 million for a falcon heavy. SLS could have done it for a billion, the ESA has Ariane 6 well over 400 million and not enough throw weight to do that mission. Vulcan Centuar in it’s largest config could barely do it and yeah no way no how for $150 million try 500 or more. Starship is being targeted at $10 million each for 150 tonnes of payload no one can touch that. Raptor 3 has more thrust than RS25 is lighter by a good amount and costs $1 million or less each vs 140 million each for a RS25 new as per the govt contract. Remember SLS throws four to six RS25 away every launch. So yeah Starship makes every other system obsolete in cost and function people who think otherwise are going to eat hella amounts of crow.