Thoughts on Starship

I don’t really care. 

Don’t get me wrong, Starship is a technological marvel and all the engineers and technicians who worked on it should be applauded.  My issue with it is just burnout from waiting.  I know designing rockets is hard, but I’m just tired of hearing about some great rocket that “should fly next year,” only to wait five or six years before it finally flies.

In the rocket community, you’ll often hear about “Paper Rockets.” These are rockets that are designed, but for one reason or another – they often can’t raise the money – are never built and remain designs on paper.  Starship is not a paper rocket, but it’s in a second category of “Built But Not Flown Rockets.” Once it does fly, it will move into a third category that I call “Promise Rockets.” A lot of people will be passing out from excitement when Starship launches, but I’ll be like, “Yes, that’s nice, but can it actually fulfill all the promises made about it?” I won’t become excited until Starship moves into the fourth category of “Functional Rockets.” This will happen once it starts regularly carrying cargo to space.  What exactly that point is, I don’t know.  Probably something like ten, fully successful missions launched within a year.  Once that happens, I’ll be overjoyed with Starship.

For a bit of clarification, I consider the Falcon 9 a Functional Rocket, but the Falcon Heavy is still a Promise Rocket.  (As of this posting, it has flown five times in just over five years.  If it ever flies six times in a year, I’ll consider it Functional.)  Other Functional Rockets are the Atlas V, the Ariane 5, the H-IIA, etc.  They don’t fly six or ten times a year, but they weren’t built to do that.  I guess in that sense, the SLS is also a functional rocket, since they only promised to fly it once every year or so, but it’s not a rocket I care for. 

So I hope they get all the data they need from this test flight, and that they quickly turn this built rocket into a Functional Rocket.  But until they do, I won’t get too excited.