Why Falcon 9 is Better than Even SpaceX Thought 

It could just keep getting better. I love some of the designs for recoverable second stages, using Super Dracos like the Dragon, grid fins and a heatshield under the Fair Base. They're beautiful spaceships.

Yikes, I agree 100% however I grew up with the "Space Shuttle" and feel the same way about that beauty // I must be getting old.

Wow. Just wow.

@@john_hawley lol that's how time works

@@john_hawley I grew up hearing people saying that they would never put a rocket into space. I am getting old. I enjoyed seeing them all wrong though.

Agreed. The huge leap is to be expected since the whole thing has been dead since the end of the cold war yet we have had all the recent computational and technology advances in the past 20 years in America.

It's the amount of launches compared to others

I concur

wow nice story

Yes! Always the best part! That never gets old!!

Indeed. Never ever gets old

Not to mention the cost of turning around Shuttle in comparison was astronomical.

@@aldunlop4622 I heard it cost $500 million to refurbish the shuttle after each launch.

A better way to do an apples to apples comparison is to consider the most important metric of a launch vehicle, fully/partially/not reusable regardless - mass to orbit per year.

@@BnORailFan On the space shuttles they had to replace all of the heat tiles all around it every single flight.

@@ninetailedfox579121 AFAIK they actually needed to be replaced, but they needed to be at least inspected and possibly reglued BUT they were definitely reused. From a reuse point of view it certainly took as long as just replacing them.

Its gonna be 5+ years after the first successful orbital flight of starship before it matches the reliability of Falcon 9

@@cameronh3260 Probably 10 years to achieve everything Falcon 9 and Heavy can do - including crew, 20t GTO~ while being 3x better from cost per kg perspective than F9

@@alrightydave in 5 years its gonna be 2027 and Nasa expects them to have a man rated lunar starship way before then, and also if they can do 24hr turn around time like they expect to they can do dozens of test launches per year

@@cameronh3260 I think starship will have a turnaround time as good as Falcon 9 eventually in 10 years of 10-20 days but until then we’re gonna have a low cadence as various variants of starship are still actively under development at start of program. Lunar starship HLS is hard but a lot easier to do than crew starship. Lunar starship is not crew starship either. It’s a small lander, not a complex integrated launch, entry and landing system, so it’ll be 10 years before we see crew despite HLS being 5 (for the full sustainable version, the Artemis III one is much more barebones and not final design)

Now we just need the government to get out of the way so starship can get to the real testing.

I'm in Ruskin, FL just south of Tampa - on a clear day you can see launches from there. Yesterday I ran outside to look at the Ax-1 launch but there was too much haze to the east. Bummer. Got back inside to watch the 1st stage landing and I must say, they really improved the video signal relay system, both the 1st stage camera and the camera on the drone ship did not drop out al the way thru landing. Can we just admit that SpaceX has it figured out, that they are not wasting the US taxpayer on operational costs compared to the competition? Why is the US Government holding SpaceX back when it comes to Starship? Is it politics as I suspect? Boeing/ULA/Blue Origin and even NASA (SLS looks like a total waste of money if even if it dose launch successfully) There is a ton of money that and influence politicians and other government agencies.

*Enters Starship*

I feel like the shuttle was more innovative in terms of number of and depth of innovations. But that was basically at the detriment of the system.

@@Block1618 The problem with the shuttle was it was simply too complicated, and suffered from problems which could never fully solved (like the expensive heatshield refurbishment). It could also not launch unmanned, and a proposed unmanned cargo version was never developed. One of the big achievements of the F9 was to make it relatively inexpensive to operate, reliable and partially reusable at the same time.

ignore the saturn V and the shuttle

@@MartinTheGhost Saturn V was a heavy lifter rocket, specially developed for a single purpose (the moon) with launch costs of $ 2 bn in today's money. It was reliable, but not really versatile. Shuttle was quite complicated, killed a crew of 7 every 60 flights and costed around $ 1,6 bn per single launch, and suffered from problems (heat shield, foam strikes on the wings leading edges) which could never been solved.

The terminology wasn't created to be cool.

@@alexdaley7616 the whole countdown process was created to sound cool. And i think what mist is getting at is that landing legs only applied to the LEM and falcon 9. Now new shepard has them too, but weve yet to see them do more than some publicity flights with that craft.

Even more, due to problems with starliner and this war, we would lose the ISS, maybe blue origin in an extent could take the role of SpaceX but be much more delayed. Also, with the failure of falcon 1, tesla probably wouldn't be what it is today, not as aggressive with research and design and maybe they would focus on money much more than they do now and just being an extreme luxury item on a few collections. Also starlink, since the others constellations' ideas only came after starlink. Even if there were other of those, they wouldn't be on time to help in the war in Ukraine. I bet that one last falcon 1 launch, if failed, would cause ripples in human history, specially if starship works out as intended. In future history classes, that launch will probably be regarded as an important historic event, the thing that gave the definitive kick that we needed to the beginning of the space age.

It would better represent the data to swap axes.

Plus because they have a bunch of them anyway, from a process engineering standpoint, that 24 hour option is achieved now anyway. (refurbish time devided by amount of rockets available)

i mean I am sure they could do it in 24 hs if they really needed too. But there is no need for it

@@v44n7 I agree. There’s just no point!

They are from the Culture series of novels

As much as i like musk the idea of strapping three cores together to make a heavy lift rocket is not his invention. the delta IV heavy, is the main example that comes to mind

Except that turned out to not be simple at all! Elon tried at least once to cancel the whole Heavy program. It was much tougher than they expected

I am sure they just replace the ones that are not working well. I don't think they do musical chairs with the engines. More work for them.

They never stay complacent. and always improving it.

Once starship is up and running my impression is they're planning on just retiring Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy entirely (although they will keep doing crew launches with it until Starship is human rated). At this point there is no further development for Falcon 9.

@@danieljensen2626 Y'know, I'm not so sure on that future for the boosters (lets keep the second stages a different discussion). Agreed F9 won't be getting developed further, but that's no reason to retire it once Starship is flying - The boosters are proven reliable, to a point where customers are confident in them, for flights of sensitive payloads, government or corporate, that dependability is worth paying for. I could almost see the F9 boosters being kept flight ready and stored, so special customers can book a launch and have a payload in orbit the day after it's delivered to the Space Coast. Back to the second stages I was commenting about, given they're fueled on the pad and have quick disconnects and mounting points, they wouldn't need to be modified or developed further to use as Orbital Tugs, only possible hardware needed specific to them, would be a capture mount to collect each payload with, and that could be an easy fit on to the current payload mounts,.. Beyond that, just an upload of mission software and a fuel station to park next to. Building such, an orbital refiling platform for the F9 second stages, would be like a first iteration of building the same sort of platform for the fuel carrying Starship to dock to. As mission counts for Starship ramp up, a refilling platform is going to be more useful then just an extended refiller Starship, same goes with a base of operations to swap crews around for the manned versions, swapping from atmospheric capable launch vehicles to space-only transports.

Crew-4 was delayed, because AX-1 was delayed. AX-1 lifted off this morning, Apr 8th to the ISS and Crew-4 is scheduled for April 20th IIRC. So 3 of the 4 Crew Dragon's are planned to be at the ISS this month. Crew-3' Endurance is already there. AX-1 is using Endeavour, and Freedom launches with Crew-4.

@@steveaustin2686 But there won't be the 'overlap' that would have had 3 Crew Dragons there at the same time, which would have been a record setting situation...

@@kevinshumaker3753 Apparently, NASA only uses two docking ports for crewed spacecraft on the ISS, so every time AX-1 was backed up, Crew-4 backed up. Starliner had the same issue when Crew Dragons we're doing the 2 & 3 crew swap and it had to wait for it's attempt to do the OFT-2 flight. Then Starliner got sticky valves. They are trying OFT-2 again in May, but have to wait for Crew-3 to come back first.

Don't forget Dreamchaser launching this year.

You're reminding me of that line from the movie "Close Encounters of The Third Kind": Support Leader: [Looking the returnees] They haven't even aged. Einstein was right. Team Leader: Einstein was probably one of them.

He isn't an alien but can probably channel them or channel Nikolai Tesla

The Falcon Heavy simultaneous booster returns still look like magic. Rocket science is hard, but synchronized rocket sports are art on another level. And hitting the freaking X on the pad!

Yesterday's launch was on a booster with a new record 21 day turnaround, and they said refurbishment took only 9 days

@@SuperSMT Yes! I heard Jessie say that. I knew she'd confirm for me. She's my girl (I wish). I suspect the 9 days will reduce even further.

It's easy to be impressive in PowerPoint.

SpaceX is making good coin, but at the same time they are saving us the taxpayers a ton more coin because their launch costs are so much lower.

@@shannonwoodcock1035 meanwhile imagine the enraged shouting in classic rocketry board rooms. "ELON MUSK MADE THIS IN (A CAVE) A SWAMP! OUT OF (A BOX OF SCRAPS) ROCKET STUFF!

@@shannonwoodcock1035 although all those savings are being spent towards Blue origin and Boeing haha

@@madtech5153 lol

All of it and more are being reinvested in Starship and Starlink

Or RocketLab

@@archer1133 Or Blue Origin, lol just kidding.

They drastically underestimated SpaceX.

@@archer1133 Rocketlab is in a different market . Small sat were you choose your orbit. Small sat on falcon is you will take this orbit Rocketlab is what orbit do you want.

100%. Even Neil Armstrong is on record saying it probably wouldn't work. China is trying their own copycat, but it'll still be a very long time til anything gets anywhere close to them

I am not an expert at all, but I would say probably the majority of the time because the engines are the most important parts. Well that and just general structural stability of the fuel tanks

Yesterday they beat their turnaround record, now just 21 days. And during the webcast, they said only 9 of those days were needed for refurbishment!

Thank you for the kind words! :)

if they start launching 400 starlink satalites a week it will be worth it..... but if you were launching 5 missions a year... then no

Um... the Falcon 9 does have 4 landing legs.......

you're likely right, i don't think their booster fleet is that short. they have a 14 active boosters and 2 more coming on line shortly right now. and their launch cadence is about 1 every 4 days right now. even just 12 boosters would give them 60 or so days between launches without straining their supply of ready boosters.

i swear same