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Is Starship a dead end?

When Elon Musk announced Starship it was supposed to usher in a new era of interplanetary travel and exploration.

He set some pretty ambitious expectations for what he claimed would be the world's largest and most powerful spaceship. Missions to mars by 2020 and a manned colony on the red planet by 2024.

How's that going Elon?

Sadly, but not unexpectedly, Starship hasn't even made it into orbit, more than six years after it was supposed to be regularly flying to the Martian surface.

What's gone wrong?

Well I've already expressed my concerns over the choice of materials used to build this ambitious craft but more recently there have been a few more red flags that Starship will never fulfill the claims made for it.

First up is its payload capacity.

I have to concede that it has carried a variety of paylods, including a whole banana which went all the way to a splashdown in the Indian Ocean, although that didn't involve reaching orbit.

It's also carried a few faux Starlink satellites and, in the last mission, some *real* ones which were ejected into space but not with orbital ballistics.

One thing you'll note, if you've been watching the livestreams of the launches, is that these sub-orbital flights have required both the booster and the starship to be filled to 100 percent with liquid methane and liquid oxygen. That means they're using a full fuel-load just to make sub-orbital hops even with a very limited payload.

How on earth is this ship, in its current form, going to fulfill the role of ferrying large amounts of extra fuel into orbit so that a Starship to Mars can be fueled up for the journey? It seems the payload capacity is incredibly limited and that would require dozens (or more) fueling flights simply to fuel-up one such Mars mission.

Why is there such a limited payload capacity? Well maybe (as I explained previously), stainless steel is not the best material to build a rocket and its booster from -- being too heavy, having too higher coefficient of thermal expnsion and being too susceptible to fatigue.

Then there's the reusability we were promised.

The whole rationale behind Starship was that it would be a craft that could be landed back at the launch tower, refueled and reused for a rapid turnaround and high launch cadence.

How's that going?

Well experts warn that this simply isn't going to happen while using available heat-shield technologies.

The hard, brittle, easily damaged ceramic heat tiles used on Starship simply are not durable to re-use without a total refurbisment after each flight -- just as was needed in the case of the now retired space shuttles.

Given that SpaceX is betting a huge amount of its future on the Starship, I don't think I will be investing in SpaceX shares (down by more than 50 percent from the post-IPO high already).

Don't get me wrong, Starlink is still a seemingly profitable element of SpaceX's activities but those profits will be drained dry by other follies such as Starship and the proposal to build AI datacentres in orbit. It's also worth remembering that Starlink may be in big trouble if/when a Kessler Syndrome event kicks off. That could pretty much wipe out SpaceX overnight.

As a final observation, those who have seen the pictures of Starship after its latest splashdown will notice that the skin of the craft now bears a striking resemblance to snake skin. Could that be related to the special oil that Mr Musk seems to be so fond of peddling?

Carpe Diem folks!

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