But it would also be nowhere near the kind of rapid reusability that Musk has been promising and that the insane valuation (even at the current rate) of SpaceX is based on.
Actually, most of the valuation of SpaceX now is tied up in Grok, thanks to Felon merging xAI into it for shell-game accounting reasons.
A lot of it is based in the “data center in space” idea, which is entirely unproven.
I think spelling it fElon is more readable :)
And yet no one approaches the reusability SpaceX has already demonstrated with existing rockets - something like 35 launches/landings with a single rocket.
I’m talking about rapid reusability of both stages. With Falcon 9, only the booster gets reused.
I’m still stuck wondering how cheap a Raptor is and how low they could get the cost of a disposable Starship upper stage without wings or a heat shield
The record is up to 36!
I could see the Starship story playing out like the ramp up to Falcon 9 first stage reuse, where they start with a few launches per booster with significant refurb time, then keep making block upgrades to speed it up and extend the lifespan.
When they initially said they were using tiles I was like “wtf this is the space shuttle all over again”. The original design did not call for that, they thought the use of stainless steel (with water cooling?) would be enough IIRC.
Venting fuel through pores in the steel to provide an air cushion was one of the original steel version shielding pitches
It was called transpirational cooling and it would have required 50kg/s of coolant for 5+ minutes of reentry heating i.e. 15 000 kg of spare methane or water which acts as dead weight that could have been payload. An ablative heat shield literally weighs half that at least not counting the transpirational piping and pumps and sensors .etc that balloon the 15 tons even higher.
There’s a reason NASA and the USSR never seriously considered actively cooled heat shields and instead let ablation do the cooling.
