Say what you will about Elon Musk – his rockets are terrific
How a 1987 article foresaw the new ultra-huge SpaceX Starship
Intro: I’ve taken a couple potshots at Starship, Elon Musk’s gigantic exploding rocket, which just became zero-for-three on test flights.
A reader wrote to advise me I should look up a 1987 article about rocketry, which said NASA had lost its way by pursuing expensive max-tech. If we want to get serious about space, the article said, we should build very large but mechanically simple rockets that use steel and low-cost fuels, rather than the exotic materials and advanced propellants NASA favors.
Published 15 years before Musk founded SpaceX, the article called for a new type of rocket: the very kind SpaceX now flies. I found the analysis persuasive. Plus it was by a smart guy – me.
Based on my own 1987 advice, I am switching sides, to become an advocate of Musk’s gigantic booster: officially Starship, known around SpaceX as Big Fucking Rocket.
If you’ve been asking yourself, “When will I see a Substack about rocket science?” the answer is, today!
In the early days of rocketry, advances came quickly. It was just 12 years from America’s first attempt to launch a tiny satellite, in 1957 – the rocket exploded a few feet above the pad – to Neil Armstrong walking on the moon.
The Vanguard, Redstone, Atlas, Titan and Saturn rocket families were developed quickly, with different engineering and fuel choices. Back then Soviet Union developed new rocket families quickly too.
As the Apollo program wound down, there was debate about what sort of launchers to build next. Anyone who’d watched stages of the magnificent Saturn V moon rocket crash into the sea and sink wondered why spacecraft could not be reusable – like in Buck Rogers! Political momentum began to build for the space shuttle program, centered on a winged vehicle that lands on a runway for reuse.
The space shuttle would be possible only with max tech – lightweight components, liquid hydrogen propellant. Design criteria would be maximum performance/minimum weight, the design criteria used for jet fighters. The result would be very expensive, but, the United States government was paying.
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