I understand that SpaceX is able to deliver material goods and personal to the international space station.
I don’t understand why the design to take people to the moon is substantially different, and why it’s failing while getting to low earth orbit.
In: Engineering
SpaceX approaches the challenge of spaceflight completely differently to how, say, NASA does.
When NASA builds a rocket, they play it safe. The SLS rocket is derived from 40 year-old, proven, recycled Spaceshuttle technology, and they spent 15 years designing and building the SLS. And that’s because NASA is funded by the government, so any failure would be seen as a huge misuse of taxpayers money. NASA massively overspends ($2bn+ for every SLS rocket) and takes no risks.
SpaceX on the other hand is funded by private cash. It’s main goal is to get Starship working as fast as possible. And the best way to do this is to build quickly, take big risks, and fix problems as they arise.
The Starship rocket is also very cheap. It costs around $100m per unit (so, literally 20x cheaper that SLS) and it’s built using bleeding edge technology. Because of its private funding and different goals, SpaceX can afford to take risks that NASA would never be able to. And those risks will result in a rocket that is far more advanced, far cheaper, and built far faster, than anything NASA could ever build.
But it’ll probably take a few more explosions to get there.
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