I think you’re intentionally cherry picking some tiny quibbles and ignoring the enormous body of evidence that proves their success. For instance, the vast majority of your complaints are about things they haven’t done (despite saying they would). This is normal in an engineering/marketing dynamic.
This is also why I only focus on actual flight hardware when comparing launch vehicles.
its mission profile can be replaced with other existing rockets for around the same cost
Having competition is great and does not invalidate success in the slightest. I’m looking forward to more competition in the industry. I have my eye on Blue Origin this year.
Turns out refurbishing a rocket and reusing it is really time consuming and that process basically cannot be significantly sped up without cutting corners that will lead to losing rockets
You could not have chosen a more appropriate topic. This is something we have hard data on, and it turns out that you can in fact refurbish a Falcon 9 without issues in a very short time. The current record is 9 days. I’m pretty sure they’ve done a couple hundred refurbishments by now.
Shotwell is a joke, as is Starship.
I don’t agree with you about Shotwell, but Starship is certainly a gamble. I have no doubt they’ll get to orbit, but the reuse architecture is harrowing at best. And I agree that Artemis is unlikely to use Starship as a lander.
I suspect using an expendable second stage for Starship (just like Falcon) is the better architecture, but I guess we’ll see if they can pull it off very soon.
I think you’re intentionally cherry picking some tiny quibbles and ignoring the enormous body of evidence that proves their success. For instance, the vast majority of your complaints are about things they haven’t done (despite saying they would). This is normal in an engineering/marketing dynamic.
This is also why I only focus on actual flight hardware when comparing launch vehicles.
Having competition is great and does not invalidate success in the slightest. I’m looking forward to more competition in the industry. I have my eye on Blue Origin this year.
You could not have chosen a more appropriate topic. This is something we have hard data on, and it turns out that you can in fact refurbish a Falcon 9 without issues in a very short time. The current record is 9 days. I’m pretty sure they’ve done a couple hundred refurbishments by now.
I don’t agree with you about Shotwell, but Starship is certainly a gamble. I have no doubt they’ll get to orbit, but the reuse architecture is harrowing at best. And I agree that Artemis is unlikely to use Starship as a lander.
I suspect using an expendable second stage for Starship (just like Falcon) is the better architecture, but I guess we’ll see if they can pull it off very soon.