Starship Flight 5: Pessimism Defeated

After much wrangling with federal regulators, SpaceX finally got their booster catch attempt - and, incredibly, nailed it first time.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

- Richard Feynman

When Richard Feynman added these words to the Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, he was summing up a criticism of the internal culture at NASA which had enabled that disaster. It was a harsh lesson that needed to be learned, of how little reality cares for our belief in our capabilities.

What is not often understood, though, is that this principle works in reverse as well.

There is an intense negative PR machine working against SpaceX, in signficant part due to hostility towards Elon Musk. Culture warriors and polemicists determined to tarnish all work associated with the man, as well as competitors in the industry and armchair engineers on the Internet constantly try to spread doubt about Starship. But none of what these critics say matters, at all, because as Feynman pointed out - the final and only arbiter is nature itself. And today, nature rendered it’s verdict on Starship booster catch:

As several SpaceX engineers recounted, even they were skeptical when Musk first made the decision to dispense with heavy landing legs and simply catch the booster. As much as the idea defies our common sense, seemed to the intuition of even trained engineers to be a non-starter, the physics and engineering of it all lined up. Just get the booster to the right point in space with low or zero velocity, close the arms and let the support pins attach to them. And now we have had to realign our intuitions about what is possible to match what has been proven to work.

This breakthrough couldn’t have come at a better moment either.

A Critical Time

SpaceX are under pressure from NASA to deliver their human landing system for the first Artemis surface mission, currently scheduled for the end of 2026. There are multiple reasons to doubt this date, but SpaceX certainly wouldn’t want to catch any of the blame for holding it up.

This mission requires demonstrating on-orbit cryogenic propellant transfers between ships - probably around 8-9 flights are needed per mission, but its hard to calculate without knowing the dry mass of the lander which is substantially lighter without the heat shield and aerodynamic surfaces. It also requires a full test of the landing and ascent before NASA will risk a crew. To get this demo done next year, SpaceX will have to more than double their flight rate, and not have any serious setbacks.

On top of the Artemis commitments, Elon Musk wants to send 5 ships to Mars in the 2026 window, which if fully laden would require 35 flights of Starship. He has set a target for 1000 launches in 2028. It is hard to see how such an aggressive timeline has much tolerance for delays. The 2026 window is close to the end of the year, but its not that far away - and clashes with the nominal date for Artemis III, adding even more schedule pressure. NASA must come first, given their financial contribution to the development program.

The pad changes required between flight 1 and flight 2 meant a gap of 212 days between those flights. If a serious problem were to cause a comparable delay, it would eat up about 30% of the time between now and the start of the next Mars window. The new launch towers coming online mean that damage to a pad wouldn’t necessarily cause such a long delay in the future - but they may well need all of their pads under construction up and running to achieve the target.

When Musk publicly demands of his team incredible cadences of Starship in the very near future, he isn’t just being brash - that urgency really is needed right now. Starship is several years late relative to its initial timeline, and the clock is ticking.

Next Steps

There don’t appear to be any items with the flight that the FAA requires an investigation of, and in part due to the Flight 5 delays the hardware for Flight 6 is in a fairly advanced state of readiness. If the long pole is thus turning around the launchpad, then the gap between flights 5 and 6 is a good estimate for how long this will likely take. We can see how many launch sites are being constructed, so just multiply that by the cadence each one would be able to achieve.

A gap of less than a month, with 3 sites would enable the 35 launches needed to send 5 ships to Mars in 2026. Today’s incredible achievement means that this projection, which I found hard to believe, suddenly looks a lot more likely. Reality didn’t care much for my pessimism, it seems.

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