I’m writing this as I wait for the launch of Starship IFT-4. I watched the launch of the Boeing Starliner yesterday, and today there is another launch, and here we have a stark contrast between the old paradigm and the new. The Starliner was four years late and the launch itself finally occurred after many, many scrubs. The loss of a vehicle, far less a manned vehicle, would be a catastrophe of the first water, and no amount of money, time and effort is spared to ensure that it doesn’t happen.
There was a great deal of breathless commentary, right down to one of the astronauts making a phone call during the preps for boarding the spacecraft, plus complete bios of the astronauts, who are indeed extraordinarily qualified people. The prestige of NASA is such that they can still attract such people, and they are still willing to put up with the delays, the bureaucracy and the fierce competition within the Astronaut Office to actually get a flight.
I am not watching this on the official feed, but rather one of the Youtubers who cover the launches on their own hook, and make a decent living doing so. There is an official feed on X, which I am not on, but the focus is on the test itself. SpaceX manages expectations very carefully. This booster and its second stage are expendable, will be destroyed, and this is expected. So long as they learn from it, it is a success. The various independent commentators who cover the activities of Starbase remind the public of this policy, frequently.
There is a noticeable difference between the approach to the public, too. NASA’s approach, frankly, made me want to check my blood sugars. The determinedly upbeat PR-focused coverage, not to mention frequent mention of how difficult and dangerous spaceflight is, are features of the old paradigm, aimed straight at the politicians who hold NASA’s purse strings. Having been outside the wire in Afghanistan, I am not particularly impressed by that.
As well, SpaceX has quite a few competitors. It has reached the point where an industry is growing very quickly, in the initial stages of becoming viable without government budgets and subsidies. I have seen this before, both in my lifetime and in my study of history. I have seen the rise of the computer revolution. I own a slide rule, which I didn’t buy as an antique but as a working tool. Able Seaman Fletcher couldn’t afford one of these very new, and very expensive, electronic calculators which burned four packs of batteries very fast. As the old saying is, ‘No one gets rich on military pay.’ It’s still true today, if anything more so given the present state of the Canadian military budget.
But, I digress. Further back in history, we have the example of the rise of the railroads. Like the rise of the space industry today, it was quite a time before it became viable, but when it did there were massive fortunes made. The public then, as now, was envious of these capitalists, who had no qualms about displaying their wealth. The people who criticized building railroads into what was then basically uninhabited territory, lacked vision and would be astonished beyond measure at what has grown up in those territories. Canada is a nation from sea to sea because of the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. There was competition. James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railway opened up what is now Washington State, built in stages to build a local economy to be profitable, then probe in further.
So, when I hear the skeptics say, “Industry on the Moon? Ridiculous, never happen!” my reply is “Read history.” History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.
The test itself went spectacularly well. Both stages did their landing manoeuvres flawlessly, slowing right down to walking pace above the ocean surface before splashing down. At this writing, the question is being seriously asked as to whether the Federal Aviation Administration will even bother with a mishap investigation.
Now, what gets less attention than the fire and glory of the liftoff and the successful mission is a shot of the inside of Starfactory, which is turning out Super Heavy boosters and Starships with metronome regularity, incorporating design changes as easily as a hockey player moves from offence to defence. Expending a test vehicle is like expending a round of ammunition. Chamber another.
The Atlas V that launched Starliner was one of the very last of its kind, an expendable one-off, irreplaceable. It was a backup, as well, because the Vulcan Centaur could not be ready in time. Its success was a matter of breath-holding suspense. There had been many problems, mastering which had taken years and a money cost which burned even a billion-dollar corporation.
There is another detail that got very little attention, but which is relevant all the same. There was the casual mention of a glitch in the ground support equipment, which caused a short slip in the countdown until it was rectified. A day at the office, nothing remarkable. Compare that with the failure of a circuit board in the final stages of one of the Starliner’s launch attempts. It was a triple redundant system with voting. The purpose of such setups is to ensure that one failed component is cut out of the loop and the system carries on without breaking step. Didn’t happen. The launch was scrubbed.
The photo at the top of this blog shows one of Starship’s fins burning through in the heat of reentry. The ship survived all the the way down to the ocean and successfully conducted its landing burn, slowing to a dead stop. Robust design, for certain.
It is commonplace to say that today, we saw history being made, and so we did. We also saw another nail in the coffin of the old paradigm, and saw it pushed further into being history in quite another way, old and irrelevant. Whatever its successes or failures, it is unsustainable.
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