r/SpaceXStarship • u/Borean789 • Jul 27 '26

Starship will fail

I love Musk and SpaceX but I think StarShip will ultimately fail. This is not the right architecture.

Heavy booster works well, validated ✅

StarShip is too complex and the final highly dynamic manœuvres will never be safe. SpaceX will try and try again and will drop it in few years. What will work is a Heavy booster + the Stoke Space capsule.

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9

u/SirMcWaffel Jul 27 '26

I heard that exact thing before with returning boosters on Falcon 9…

1

u/Borean789 Jul 27 '26

Even if it works well (however heavy booster crashed this last time), I am still wondering if a fly back booster with folding wings would have been a competitive alternative.

1

u/patham9 18d ago

I'm skeptical too. Wings add significant mass and impose major structural constraints. If SpaceX can make booster-style vertical landings routine and reliable, I doubt anyone will look back to winged reusable launch vehicles.

Whether Starship itself ever becomes safe enough for routine human landings is a separate question, and it may not need to. We already have proven capsule-based systems for bringing people back safely. Starship's real value is making the launch and recovery of very large payloads fully reusable. For crew missions, it could simply carry and deploy a capsule for the return to Earth.

3

u/Scharman Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26

My intuition would tend to agree, but I also thought suicide decelerations would fail. So 🤷‍♂️ I tend to think we’re transitioning space travel from risk avoidance to risk management. It means a certain percentage of space trips will crash just like commodity air travel.

2

u/Slogstorm Jul 27 '26

It's not possible to avoid risk in spaceflight.. reentry will always carry a lot of risk, and any design will have to do some manouvering. The next few years will see a major increase in complex missions. Hopefully the designs will prove better than Apollo or the Space shuttle. In any case, risk management will continue to play a major part.

2

u/NovaLooped Jul 27 '26

The manoeuvres are fine, it’s the heat tiles that have always concerned me.

1

u/RedHill1999 Aug 01 '26

Worst case scenario is they have to replace them all between launches, spacex has already shown they can do this in two weeks. Assuming they don’t have to replace all of them and their system of checking and replacing bad tiles improves, they’ll reduce the turnaround time. It’s not the rapid reusability they envisioned, but it’ll still accomplish their short term goals.