Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "SpaceX's Supersized Starship Rocket and the Future of Galactic Exploration | Jennifer Heldmann | TED" video.

ACTUALLY ITS NOT - As an aerospace engineer I am disgusted at this PR garbage. TED & TEDx have become a PR organisation for Elon Musk. FYI - Jennifer Heldmann is NOT and aerospace engineer she's a geologist. Has SpaceX done some good? Absolutely. They have literally saved the US manned space program with Crew Dragon and Falcon, but this idiotic hype with Starship needs to stop. Most of its technology is YET to be proven to do anything in space. Most importantly re-fuelling in space is unproven especially at the levels it needs. Just as importantly Saturn 5 could lift a similar payload into Low Earth Orbit and the WITHOUT REFUELLING go tot he moon. Also there was a variant of the Space Shuttle called Shuttle-C which could also lift a similar payload to low earth orbit.
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@JULIAN11. Since you seem interested let me tell you about where NASA went wrong after Apollo. Sorry for the horrible length of this but you do seem interested in understanding the problem, but its a complex problem. The Space shuttle is one of the greatest TECHNICAL achievements ever. They actually made a reusable spaceplane work. It truly was extraordinary, but it was also a horrendous failure that crippled manned space flight for decades and we are still dealing with those effects. Every time it was launched there was 75tons of mass lifted into orbit and accelerated to orbital speed (7km/s or more depending on the orbit). Its payload to vehicle mass ratio was actually very poor. That's a real problem because 75 tons at orbital peed is a lot of kinetic energy and that means a lot of fuel. if you go watch Don Pettit's "Tyranny of the Rocket Equation" you'll see where that leads. Combined with the costs to simply run and maintain the shuttle crippled other programs. Its the main reason we haven't got a moon base. There's a whole bunch of technologies required that are just not ready because the money and resources weren't available to get them ready. I was doing me degree when Challenger happened. I was actually in Florida a few weeks earlier and saw Columbia take off. It was from a distance but still spectacular. After Challenger Kelly Johnson who was lead engineer on things like the SR71 and U2 said "Don't build a replacement." He argued that the shuttle had proven unreliable and the money would be better spent on the "next generation." Even before the accident it was failing on costs and maintenance, but NASA, the USAF and CIA were so invested they had to continue with the shuttle. That also spilled over into the ISS construction costs. The Russians flew Buran once and then looked at it and said never again. One of the main failures was the payload to vehicle ratio. That goes back to Don Pettit's "Tyranny of the Rocket Equation." As rockets get bigger and bigger they need ever increasing structural strength to handle the loads and that adds weight. That means you need even more power and more fuel to lift that extra weight. That's what Don Pettit talks about. As rockets get bigger and bigger they generally do improve in performance and payload ratio. BUT eventually they reach a point where they start getting WORSE. That should have been evident way earlier, because that was the argument Buzz Aldrin won with his Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR) mission profile over Von Braun's Earth Orbit Rendezvous. What Buzz worked out was that with EOR you needed a much bigger vehicle with a lot more mass because it had to do a lot more. It had to fly to the moon, land on the moon and then fly back to earth. That meant more fuel, that meant a heavier rocket with more power and eventually they ended up with a version of the Saturn 5 but with 8-12 engines. The is the mistake BOTH Musk and Bezos have made with their heavy rockets. They are so big the are less efficient NOT more as they claim. The crazy part is NASA wanted small after Apollo. Do you know that when NASA first proposed the shuttle all they wanted was a small efficient vehicle with 2-4 people based on X-15 technology and its purpose was to just get people up and down as efficiently as possible? Most people don't realise the X-15 had at least 3 more variants planned. A 2 seater, a single seat delta wing and a single seat delta powered by a scramjet. This is why I support the Crew Dragon program. It actually proves that NASA was right in the late 60s early 70s. You don't need huge rockets you need rockets that get the job you NEED done. NASA should have either done the X-15 or something like Crew Dragon. Instead the USAF and CIA got involved and they created a monster. In the end it tried to be too many things to different needs. Crew Dragon works because it does 1 thing and does it damn well. Do you know the cost of Soyuz seats ended up at about $90 million while Crew Dragon is 4 seats for $70 million? That's a cost per seat of under $20 million down from over $90M. That's what SpaceX should be shouting from the roof tops. Starship is trying to be too many things. Get into orbit, go to the moon, go to Mars and my favourite replace jets for travelling between cities on Earth. Its similar to the criticisms of other systems like the F35. Its also trying to be too many things and as a result does none of them as well as it might. The A10 Warthog is a good example of being on task. Its good for one thing close air support. It does it so well that its still flying today despite being a 1960s design. The A380 Airbus like the shuttle is an amazing technical achievement but also a failure for all but 1 operator. The father of one of the instructors at my flying club flew them for Singapore airlines. That was circa 2008 and even then they knew it was in trouble. Its not just Starship its the same for New Glenn and some other proposals. Sorry for the lecture.
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As an aerospace engineer I am disgusted at this PR garbage. TED & TEDx have become a PR organisation for Elon Musk. FYI - Jennifer Heldmann is NOT and aerospace engineer she's a geologist. Has SpaceX done some good? Absolutely. They have literally saved the US manned space program with Crew Dragon and Falcon, but this idiotic hype with Starship needs to stop. Most of its technology is YET to be proven to do anything in space. Most importantly re-fuelling in space is unproven especially at the levels it needs. Just as importantly Saturn 5 could lift a similar payload into Low Earth Orbit and the WITHOUT REFUELLING go tot he moon. Also there was a variant of the Space Shuttle called Shuttle-C which could also lift a similar payload to low earth orbit.
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As an aerospace engineer I am disgusted at this PR garbage. TED & TEDx have become a PR organisation for Elon Musk. FYI - Jennifer Heldmann is NOT and aerospace engineer she's a geologist. Has SpaceX done some good? Absolutely. They have literally saved the US manned space program with Crew Dragon and Falcon, but this idiotic hype with Starship needs to stop. Most of its technology is YET to be proven to do anything in space. Most importantly re-fuelling in space is unproven especially at the levels it needs. Just as importantly Saturn 5 could lift a similar payload into Low Earth Orbit and the WITHOUT REFUELLING go tot he moon. Also there was a variant of the Space Shuttle called Shuttle-C which could also lift a similar payload to low earth orbit.
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As an aerospace engineer I am disgusted at this PR garbage. TED & TEDx have become a PR organisation for Elon Musk. FYI - Jennifer Heldmann is NOT and aerospace engineer she's a geologist. Has SpaceX done some good? Absolutely. They have literally saved the US manned space program with Crew Dragon and Falcon, but this idiotic hype with Starship needs to stop. Most of its technology is YET to be proven to do anything in space. Most importantly re-fuelling in space is unproven especially at the levels it needs. Just as importantly Saturn 5 could lift a similar payload into Low Earth Orbit and the WITHOUT REFUELLING go tot he moon. Also there was a variant of the Space Shuttle called Shuttle-C which could also lift a similar payload to low earth orbit.
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@opcn18 Good point but then the people complaining are all "Elon devotees" who think he's going to whisk them all off to Mars.
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@fork9001 Sorry but Shuttle C is in the same class of heavy lift launchers but it is at the bottom end of the scale. To LEO Falcon Heavy 63.8t Shuttle C 77t Starship 100t Saturn V 144t All of the rest are basically below 30t and most not much over 20 like Falcon 9 FTs 22.8t. And almost anything that can get a payload into orbit can also get something to the moon, its a matter of how much.
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@fork9001 Lets get one thing straight starship for the moon is a joke and its an even bigger joke for Mars and its a joke if you think Elon has any grasp of reality. If his garbage about driverless cars, electric trucks and hyperloop weren't enough to convince you he' doesn't know what he's doing then there's nothing to discuss. If you want to know here's the answer. Orbital mechanics relies on velocity and being able to change velocity and we call that delta-V (as in change in velocity). Until we have magic star trek massless propulsion all delta-V will require the burning of fuel or the ejection of mass. As a result of that having ANY vehicle with unnecessary mass is a problem. Buzz Aldrin's Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR) won that argument over Walter Von Braun's Earth Orbit Rendezvous (EOR) in the mod 1960s. It was why Apollo worked. They didn't carry any stuff to and from the moon they didn't need to. Its why as each part of the rocket had done its job it was left behind. With chemical rockets you simply don't have the fuel. Then comes Elon "the inventor of everything" Musk with no training and no understanding and he say's NO. We will go back to EOR with a concept from 1950s sci-fi. Its about as smart as saying we will get rid of all the modern container ships and go back to wooden sailing vessels.
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@JULIAN11. Seriously WHEN DO PEOPLE LIKE YOU STOP lecturing people who are qualified about subjects you are NOT QUALIFIED IN. Its really annoying.
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@heartflame503 Yeah and no amount of smoking whatever it is your smoking will overcome basic science - EVER.
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@jimmaag4274 No I don't work for Boeing and have never worked for Boeing, but I am an aerospace engineer with safety engineering qualifications and what they did with the MAX-8 was one of the most disgusting episodes in engineering history. If you understand what I understand, the MCAS system in that plane was so badly conceived and designed it was only ever going to end up crashing planes. There's nothing new in bad designs in engineering, but we now have so much information and history that we know what to avoid. Boeing didn't simply ignore a few things they ignored EVERYTHING they had learned over decades and the FAA system was so corrupted it didn't pick up the problem, which it should have. Worse, it was driven by a couple of clowns in their sales team and I have clashed with sales people promising stupid things to clients. So its not just a Boeing thing, its rampant across industry and government. I know that from personnel experience. Engineers share stories of who's had to clean up projects from stupid managers. The Boeing Max-8 is just one of the easiest examples to mention because people know about it.
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TheBorz You just summed up one of the worst behaviors of the digitally connected human race. The ability to consume bad information as if its true while discarding true information as if its bad.
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