Originally Posted by
Larry in TN
After watching the Starship test launches, we saw the difference the Starlink downlink can make to launch, orbit, and recovery video coverage. I was surprised by the lack of timeline and informational graphics for the launch. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin do a much better job. That shouldn't have been difficult to do.
Since public perception and enthusiasm is pretty important for manned space programs, it might make sense for them to spend a little more on quality video.
Originally Posted by
Larry in TN
What I find disappointing about SLS is that it is 100% expendable hardware which dramatically increases cost. At the moment, SLS is the only launch system that can launch very large, very heavy payloads on high-energy deep-space trajectories, in a single shot, with the biggest fairing class available so it is what meets the mission requirements today. Starship has the potential to replace SLS, at far lower cost, in the future.
Politics, and the speed of government.
To get SLS approved initially (it has evolved over the years) NASA had to keep some legacy shuttle hardware to preserve shuttle-associated government jobs in key districts. That precluded the clean-sheet design that probably would have been needed to fly the booster back.
Also when it started development, Space X had not demonstrated re-usability on the Falcon 9, and the only commercial launch vehicle remotely in the SLS lift capacity ballpark (Starship) was conceptual.
Today Starship can obviously be reused, but is still in development and not yet man-rated. Falcon 9 has obviously demonstrated re-usability many hundreds of times.
But when SLS kicked off, the established launch industry (NASA, commercial, and DoD) simply did not believe that re-usability was going to practical (it was a very big paradigm shift, visionary in fact).
Europe and China also came up short, and are now scrambling for re-usability as well to avoid getting caught with space economics an order of magnitude behind the US.
Assuming Starship succeeds (probably will, they've demonstrated most of the really hard stuff in flight), I'd imagine most manned exploration missions will shift to that over time. Even if Starship isn't perfectly optimized for a given mission, the fact that you get to use it again in many cases makes it an obvious economic winner.
Worth noting there are some missions where Starship itself would not be recovered to earth (ex modified versions to land on other planets). The first stage booster should be recovered in most cases, although I guess if you needed every last drop of performance, you could use what would normally be the return fuel and just let it splash in the ocean.