@llamacoffee The obstacle: Engineering a reusable heat shield.
#SavedYouAClick

The heat shield was one of the most vexing problems with NASA’s space shuttle program. Thousands of tiles peeled off of the space shuttle Columbia when NASA first flew the orbiter on top of its modified 747 carrier aircraft in 1979. Tile damage was a regular occurrence throughout the shuttle program’s 30-year service life, necessitating tile repairs and replacement inside the shuttle’s hangar between missions.

Musk has recently claimed SpaceX will send its first uncrewed Starships to Mars next year, too.

I thought his most recent claim (maybe a month ago on Twitter?) was much more circumspect? Something like “if everything happens to go very well we can do that”.

And even on an occasion before that (a presentation he did in Starbase earlier this year), he might have remembered to include caveat words like “aspirational” at least some of the time?

I think if they really had to launch towards Mars in Dec 2026, they could, because they’ve shown they can get to orbit with a second stage that they can ‘mass produce’. So they could choose to focus on orbital refilling rather than reusability, for the next 16 months. And there’s an argument that they should do this, because Mars transfer opportunities are somewhat rare, and Mars EDL is a potential ‘criticial path’ item for their long term goals.

But I guess even for SpaceX, there comes a point at which you just have to accept that certain things have a natural sequence that determines the timeline.

They’ve got an ‘overhang’ of outstanding design changes, which are coming in Block 3, and this will just take a certain amount of time to implement. And once they’ve started testing Block 3, perhaps they’ll even decide there’s another set of ‘obvious’ design changes they’ll want to make; perhaps they’ll decide they need to move to a ‘Block 4’ before aggressively pushing on all the other goals. And the next big goal would probably be vehicle recovery, because that makes everything else more efficient in multiple ways. And maybe only then do they start testing orbital refilling. And maybe only once there’s sufficient progress on that can they start confidently working to finalize the design for the 1st Mars ship.

And maybe in amongst all this, there’s also a decision to prioritize the transition of Starlink launches away from Falcon 9, because even SpaceX doesn’t have infinite money, and it’s too much of a waste not to combine Starship testing with Starship doing useful work (launching an in-house payload).

So basically, I’m now at 15% on them being able to launch towards Mars during the next transfer opportunity. (And that’s not taking into account political considerations, NASA saying no due to planetary protection, things like that.)

It seems SpaceX is not only facing the same obstacles, but also repeating the same mistakes, and I fear partially for the same stupid reasons (secret military applications).

Is it MIB?