A few years ago I did a post suggesting that Starship skipped a base or two in development. Going for the biggest launcher in history with new engine types, burning a new propellant combination, novel landing techniques, and going for complete reusability all in one shot on vehicle one being an extreme gamble. One of my points being that there was no market appropriate to the projected flight rate and fleet size of Starship not to mention the huge cargo capacity. Second Guessing Starship | Selenian Boondocks
Some of my points have been answered, though not in the manner I expected. The record-breaking IPO was heavily influenced by the projected capabilities of Starship and orbital data centers. Million sat orbital data centers never crossed my mind, or that of anyone else that I know of. That potential market makes more sense than Mars colonization from a business standpoint. Though I know nothing about data centers or their potential profitability, many investors apparently do.
In the Second-Guessing post, I suggested that SpaceX would have been better served by going with a smaller vehicle building on the well-known methods of the Falcon9. Falcon Raptor for that post. The water tower was flying in 2019, and the flip flights by 2021. I suggested then that if they had gone with a Falcon9 layout and operational technique, that vehicle would have been operational and matching Falcon9 tempo by 2022. Falcon9 has flown several hundred times since then.
In 2022, I mentioned that some people were certain that Starship would be operational in a year (2023), while some were saying end of decade. Not to mention those saying never. (Oler, Church) or those projecting a massive ramp up to thousands (Eagleson, David, etc) annually by now. Those of us saying somewhere between the extremes didn’t have much of a following.
With almost 4 years since that post, and with Starship flight 13 scheduled in a few days, I’ll try to make the case for a smaller and simpler precursor vehicle as it relates to Starship and the IPO.
The Raptor engine is the key to Starship success. It has considerably more Isp that Merlin, a thrust/weight at least as good, and burns a cleaner fuel that is also much cheaper than RP1 kerosene. The cleaner is the key point as it should lead to far less maintenance between flights. Cheaper is important, but less so. The higher Isp is good on the vacuum engines compared to Merlin, but really shines on the sea level units with a 50 point jump.
A Falcon9 layout with Raptor engines would necessarily be wider, probably 5-7 meters in diameter. That would allow the height to match some of the Falcon9 access points on the launch towers so that total rebuilds wouldn’t be required. New Glenn class except with an organization that MOVES. With over double the thrust of the Merlins and higher Isp, payloads should be well over double that of the kerosene Falcon9.
The critical thing though is the cleaner operation of the engines. A Raptor Falcon in either RTLS mode or returning on a barge should have turnaround times a fraction that of Falcon9 due to not having soot clean up. Also Raptor supposed to have been designed and built with low maintenance and fast turnaround. Falcon9 has a cadence of over 150 flights a year for the last three years. If Raptor is as good as most of us think, Raptor Falcons would be at double or more of that flight rate.
How does this relate to Starship, data centers and the record-breaking IPO? If the Raptor Falcon (or whatever a proper name would be) were flying hundreds of times per year for the last few years, there would be an experienced team on the ground that knew fast paced methane vehicle operations inside and out. That experience would have been feeding into the development of Starship for the last several years. It seems very likely that Starship would not only be further along but also would have left far less hardware in the deeps of the Gulf and the Indian Ocean. Excess capacity to date could have already tested in orbit refueling, prototype data centers, and a Mars flight or two.
So if you were an investor, wouldn’t you be more impressed with a high flight rate vehicle delivering up to 40 tons a shot on a daily basis and a Starship entering operability already with flight 5 or 6? Or with flight 14 hoping to be the first orbital? And the same company retiring the most successful launch vehicle in history (Falcon9) because it was so much more expensive to operate than the Raptor Falcon?
johnhare
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Is one to assume the notional Falcon Raptor would, like F9, have a disposable upper stage? Such a vehicle would probably be capable of at least modestly better launch economics than F9 and haul more mass per mission, but it would not enable the kinds of launch cadences and aggregate lifted mass numbers SpaceX would need to deploy Starlink, Starlink Mobile and Starmind on the kind of schedule currently intended. And the lunar and Martian projects would still be entirely out of reach.
Such a vehicle would also still be expensive to develop, every dollar of which expense would be one less that could be devoted to Starship-as-we-have-come-to-know-it which would still be necessary to serve SpaceX’s larger plans.
If the notional Falcon Raptor was, instead, to be the completely reusable vehicle Starship is intended to be, just smaller, then there is no obvious reason to expect it to have been developable on any faster a schedule than Starship itself has been while still being sufficiently less capable that the number of launches to accomplish any given purpose would be a rough factor of five times that of full-size Starship.
Things have, indeed, not gone as quickly as I initially expected. At least two solid years of said delay was due to a succession of unforced errors anent ground support equipment – maybe more. If SpaceX can be faulted for anything it would be for not appreciating the difficulty of the Starship GSE project – and civil engineering chores in general – and not moving much earlier toward on-site propellant production.
But, had SpaceX followed the path you describe, I think it would be materially further away from accomplishing any of its Brobdingnagian ambitions than it is right now.
Our disagreements will be informed by reality over the next several years.
This is why I have said that Elon needs to be building SLS type stage-and-a-half craft.
You have written about Gene Meyers and Space Island Group…he and the DIRECT team should have been what Elon invested in.
No flips, no TPS, no Adama maneuvers. Just something to go over foam so empty cores can be wet workshops…floorspace.
No violent maneuvers, so no slosh problems as here:
https://phys.org/news/2026-01-sloshing-liquefied-natural-gas-cargo.html
This is why Falcon works–kerosene in narrow tubes isn’t as bad a slosh hazard.
That is an easier ask than the current TSTO RLV Starship/SuperHeavy that would have been difficult for Boeing at the height of its powers during the 747/Incredibles era
Direct needs agile, SH/SS deserves waterfall.
But you are right, John–Elon tried too much in one go.
I was thinking that a Falcon/Raptor design with a larger diameter could carry physically larger payloads such as the Starlink v3 satellite. There doesn’t seem to be a big enough heavy lift market to justify something like Starship and the added complexity of full reusability has been a big rock in the road. Whatever the design, it needs to have a definable mission. Nearly all of what SpaceX does is launch Starlink sats these days. A bigger than Falcon, smaller than Starship system with an expendable upper stage would accommodate the v3 Starlink birds and have some residual capability to sell to outside entities. It might also be comparable with other systems so there’s confidence to build satellites that will fly on it, yet have alternatives where anybody basing a mission on Starship doesn’t have an alternative and, right now, needs their bird(s) to fit through a Pez dispenser slot.
Has anybody done an analysis on if there is enough propellant manufacturing capability in the US to support the flight rates being bandied about? I’m not seeing it and adding that much capacity for one customer is a massive risk. Especially a customer that isn’t profitable.