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Starship Is In Deep Trouble
It’s a death trap.
It’s 2018: Corona is just a weird beer, #MeToo has finally taken down Weinstein, and Elon Musk has just announced to the world that he is on track to put humans on Mars in 2024 with Starship. 2024 came and went, and Starship is barely a functional rocket, let alone able to take us to another planet. Indeed, the Starship is facing some significant issues, like its payload to LEO being less than half what was promised, and its current price per kg to LEO being higher than the 58-year-old Saturn V (read more here). But these issues aren’t necessarily dealbreakers for Starship. What is a dealbreaker is its safety, as Starship’s entire M.O. is to significantly scale up human space flight, and Starship is set to be an utter death trap. Allow me to explain.
SpaceX recently lost a Falcon 9 booster. Upon landing on the floating platform, a fire inside the rocket forced one of the landing legs to fail, causing it to tip over and be “lost.” SpaceX hasn’t confirmed whether it exploded or sank into the ocean.
Falcon 9 is SpaceX’s workhorse. It is a semi-reusable rocket, with its first stage, also known as the booster, being able to safely land and launch again. This reduced the cost of launches, making Falcon 9 the most popular route to space. It has operated for nearly 15 years, launched 458 times, and has a launch…
