Spacex Booster Catch: $3 BILLION BUSTED!!

Everyone is gushing over this now. I know what you're thinking — there is no way, no way that you can possibly dunk on this. It's engineering amazing! Well, yeah, it looks impressive. I wonder how much the U.S. taxpayer paid for this, and the answer is they paid $3 billion so far.

The thing is, Musk wasn't meant to be delivering a single booster catch for $3 billion. He was meant to be delivering the Human Landing System for $3 billion — a vehicle to take people from lunar orbit to the surface and return them back safely to lunar orbit. When they were getting their $3 billion off the U.S. taxpayer, this is what they submitted for their plan. SpaceX themselves thought that catching the booster was such a trivially easy task that it wasn't even worthy of its own point on the Gant chart.

As we'll see later in this video, recovering the booster is the energetically easy bit. SpaceX has thus far achieved none of the significant goals towards delivering the Human Landing System, and they were going to be landing on the moon earlier this year, that is early 2024, and they've basically spent all of the fixed-price contract money that the U.S. taxpayer gave them. Rather than actually just one booster catch in 2024, they should have actually been landing this thing on the moon in 2024. How are they going to do that when they've already spent all the cash that the government has given them?

Actually, I tell a lie. In 2022, the government decided that they were going to give SpaceX another billion dollars for an upgraded Starship and to fly a second lunar mission. So they maybe have another billion to play with but have to actually deliver another mission to the Moon. Optimistically, they've completed maybe somewhere between zero and 2% of the contract for all of the original contract value. But rather than landing on the moon, the furthest it's gone is the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

Those are the facts. What, analyzing a problem with facts? You must have Musk Derangement Syndrome, right? In reality, it's not so much that I'm blinded by hate as Musk fans can't see with reason. I mean, the funny thing is if you actually take a look at the comments on any of my streams on these things, you'll find it absolutely dominated by people who don't really make any defense of Musk wasting some $3 billion. Do you think the disappointment on his face was priceless? Not quite priceless. What was the number again? Oh, that's right, $3 billion of taxpayer money. Well, according to Musk fans, money well spent.

For reference, for this sort of cash you could have sent a nuclear-powered rover bristling with scientific instruments to Mars, which landed like this on another planet. "Give the radar a better look at the ground, applicate indicate, shoot deploy. The navigation has confirmed that the parachute has deployed and we heat shield set. Perseverance has now slowed to subsonic speeds. NV filter converge velocity solution 3.3 m/s. The initialization of terrain-relative navigation and subsequently the priming of the landing engines. We have confirmation that the Lander Vision system has produced a valid solution and part of terrain-relative navigation. Current velocity is about 75 m/s at an altitude of about a kilometer off the surface of Mars. We have started our constant velocity accordion, which means we are conducting the sky crane, about to contact the sky crane maneuver. Sky crane maneuver has started about 20 meters off the surface."

Signals from Mars confirm: "Touchdown confirmed. Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars, ready to begin seeking signs of past life." Hell, you could send some six of these solar-powered rovers, which landed like this in 2004. First of all, of course, you've just got to get to Mars, which is a challenge of its own. Then, of course, you come up to the orbital interface where you get some breaking through the heat shield. Then you've got to deploy your parachutes to slow down a little more in the thin atmosphere, jettison your heat shield, at which point the rover repels down on a string. This actually happened. Bear in mind, this actually worked. Then you deploy some airbags because they weren't so sure about the whole landing thing. Employ some retros to slow you mostly down. Drop the rover in its airbags, which then bounces around on the surface of Mars, which takes some time, seeing as Mars has less gravity, before eventually coming to rest. Deflate the airbags, right the rover because it might not have landed in the right configuration, and then you've got to start unpacking the various parts of the rover.

Since it's all origami up, like extending the solar panels, extending the stalk with the camera, and unraveling the wheels before eventually rolling off onto the surface of Mars. That was done twice successfully in 2004 for half a billion dollars a pop, one-sixth of the price of this single booster catch. You could have done all of this six times over for the same amount of taxpayer money as SpaceX spent to not deliver the Human Landing System. At which point this really does shift from "wow, that's so impressive" to "I'm actually kind of pissed that they wasted so much taxpayer money on what is essentially, at this point, an expensive firework." Musk did the metaphorical equivalent of taking a government contract, building a rover bristling with scientific instruments to fly to Mars and do the science there for some $3 billion, and delivered a robot vacuum cleaner that doesn't vacuum very well and gets stuck on cables.

I think, in general, that the amount of waste that happens with the federal government is really staggering. It's a staggering amount of waste of taxpayer money. For any given expenditure, we have to say, "What does this do for the citizens of America? How is this good for the people of America?" It's their money. For some weird reason, a lot of people in the state, or whatever, the politicians, they seem to forget that the money being spent is your money. If it's not being spent in a way that is beneficial to the American people, it's a misuse of the funds.

The most optimistic appraisal of this is it will take at least another billion dollars and half a decade plus to get this to an operational system. But it was a fixed-price contract, right? There is no extra money coming. All in all, yep, Musk has gone all in on this. When Elon Musk came to the White House asking for help on his many subsidized projects, the amount of waste that happens with the federal government is really staggering. It's a staggering amount of waste of taxpayer money, whether it's electric cars that don't drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocket ships to nowhere.

How is this good for the people of America? That's their money. For some weird reason, a lot of people in the state, or whatever, the politicians, they seem to forget that the money being spent is your money. Without those subsidies, he'd be worthless and telling me that he's a big Trump fan and Republican. I could have said "drop to your knees and beg," and he would have done it! Well, first of all, I want to say what an honor it is to be here. Maybe if you had someone in charge in the government who thought you were the right guy to be put in charge of the department of government efficiency because of your ability to deliver a few percent of what you promised for all of the cash.

Elon Musk has given me his complete and total endorsement. That's nice. I will create a government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reform. Generally, probably every department digs grave better than themselves. How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be? Elon, because he's not very busy, has agreed to head that task force. I mean, just think about it: with Musk at the head of the department of government efficiency, if you do choose to be the head of the department of government efficiency, he could do for America what he did for the value of Twitter.

Conceivably, if he's not appointed head of the department of government efficiency, people might start to ask, "About that $3 billion of taxpayer money we gave you to develop the Human Landing System, what have you spent it on and when are we getting our Human Landing System?" How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be? Laughing at having burned $3 billion of taxpayer money is definitely a qualification for the head of the department of government efficiency. Anyway, I promised to tell you why actually recovering the booster was the easy bit. You know, the sort of easy where it doesn't even get its own point on the SpaceX Gant chart.

The whole pinpoint precision thing—well, if you've never cracked open your phone and don't know what GPS is, that might impress you. Or the fact that we've been delivering munitions with pinpoint accuracy since the last millennium. Used alongside the long-range Tomahawks, this is on the front-end of the weapon itself. Nowadays, this is just consumer-grade electronics. There's the Nano, which is like freaking tiny. There's the Mini Pro, and the difference is the Pro has a much larger antenna and it has a built-in comp for storage. You can see that even the very, very tiny one—I don't know if you can see—there's a little battery there. Such that you can get a commercial drone for significantly less than $3 billion, in fact, about $1,000 that will do this.

Tap on the terrain-follow icon. You will then be able to choose how high you want to fly, from 9 ft or 3 m to 33 ft or 10 m. As you fly up gentle slopes, the Mavic will adjust the altitude automatically. Of course, they all land with pinpoint precision on autopilot, you know, because GPS. But of course, landing a rocket upright is completely new and wasn't done, say, for instance, 30 years ago by the Delta Clipper. The DC-X performs its most remarkable maneuver. You know, that would be 1993; it lands in its original takeoff position on its [music] tail. Now, if you're impressed by things that are just bigger then, fine. But basically, the whole landing rockets with pinpoint accuracy on their tail is something that was done some 30 years ago.

Watch closely, you can actually pinpoint the second when his heart rips in half. What SpaceX has been very successful at is taking basically off-the-shelf technology, stuff that was developed by NASA 50 years ago, and streamlining it. Now it lands rockets on drone ships. No one ever believed that was possible. Sure, everyone thought it was impossible, you know, apart from the people who weren't asleep for the last 30 years. The simple version of this video is to remember the fully, rapidly reusable Falcon 9 that Musk was building over a decade ago? No, that's because it was never built.

The pivotal breakthrough that some company has to come up with to make life multiplanetary is a fully and rapidly reusable orbit-class rocket. And of course, El goes on to say that the Falcon 9 was going to be fully and rapidly reusable. We have a design that on paper, doing the calculations, doing the simulations, it does work. I will show you a simulation of what we plan to do. Now, that simulation is mostly accurate. Except, rather being fully and rapidly reusable, it wasn't rapidly reusable, and it wasn't fully reusable either, in that the second stage, no, they never recover that. Because reusing the second stage is much harder than reusing the booster.

As for the rapid reuse of the booster, we really need to get to rapid and completely reusable rockets, just as is the case with aircraft. I mean, aircraft are rapidly completely reusable. Land a 747 and take off an hour and a half later, and you should be able to do that with rockets too. Allward reusability—we don't believe it really counts unless you can turn it around as rapidly or almost as rapidly as you turn around an aircraft. You basically land the system, land the stage, you do some brief but important critical checks and inspections, refuel, and you go.

Our challenge right now is to refly a rocket within 24 hours. That's when we'll really feel like we've got the reusability piece right. Awesome! And of course, vaporware man was out there promising that they would have a relaunch within 24 hours, not with the Starship, but with a much simpler Falcon 9 booster. No later than, shock and horror, next year, which was 2020 when he said it. It will of course surprise precisely no one at this point that that goal wasn't met. Indeed, it's never been met. The fastest reuse of one of their Falcon 9 boosters is about a month, only somewhat faster than the fastest reflight of the shuttle, and that was after about a decade of trying.

Musk got no closer to rapid reuse than the shuttle, which was meant to rapidly take people from Earth to orbit, you know, a shuttle. And well over a decade worth of trying, the Falcon 9, which was developed with billions of dollars of taxpayer cash and designed from the very start to be fully and rapidly reusable, was neither fully nor rapidly reusable. And a decade or so on, Musk is now making the exact same promise, asking for billions of dollars of taxpayer cash. If he couldn't do it with the simpler system, what makes you have any serious expectations for Starship?

Except with the Falcon 9, it didn't really matter whether you got rapid reuse or not because there isn't a market for rapid reuse. With Starship, however, if you want to go to the Moon, you do need the rapid reflight for refueling the thing in space. Because you need some 20 refueling missions just to get to the Moon, really. I was like, you know, I'm an engineer; I know how to do this stuff. So I started to account for nominal schedule slip and boil off, and this is how many rockets it's going to take to fuel up that thing to get it to the Moon. Technically, for Starship, America needs rapid reuse to be a contender in deep-space missions.

I've done the math. That is, if Starship doesn't end up being rapidly reusable, America is not going to the Moon. Or if they can't figure out how to do tons of cryogenic fuel transfer in orbit, America is not going back to the Moon. Or if, like it currently is, Starship is just too heavy and can't carry the cargo — you know, carrying zero tons of cargo on a suborbital trajectory with Musk saying that they're basically going to have to redesign the entire rocket to actually make it functional, you know, for taking things to orbit. Currently, flight three would be around 40 or 50 tons to orbit. Yeah, sure it would be, but it's not; it's an empty rocket.

Musk goes on to say that they're totally going to turn this around by making Starship 2 and 3. So the current design, Starship 2, will be over 100 tons, and then Starship 3 will be over 200 tons. Given Musk's been pushing Starship as the 100-ton to world orbit launcher for the best part of a decade now, and all of a sudden when it becomes clear that this thing really struggles, then suddenly a new version will come along that will solve all of the problems. This thing just stinks of the full self-driving- empty promises.

For years, it was always going to be, oh, there'll be a new version along next year that will really work. I mean, seriously, where in the original plan that they submitted to NASA to get the three or so billion dollars of government money do you see Starship 1, which will, no really, totally honestly get 50 tons to low earth orbit? And then where does it say they're going to scrap that and make Starship 2, yeah, precisely nowhere.

So all they have to do now is make Starship 2, make it rapidly reusable, and maybe it can carry enough cargo to orbit to actually make this thing viable, having already spent all the money they were meant to develop it with in the first place. If they can't do the rapid reuse, and they can't do the tons of cryogenic refueling in Earth orbit, and if they can't multiply-file the Raptor engines in deep space after months of nonuse, America's not going back to the Moon.

All of this should have been done by six months ago, early 2024, according to SpaceX. But even with the Falcon 9, reusing the booster has questionable economics. SpaceX, like all of Musk's companies, is funded by burning astronomical amounts, not just of taxpayer dollars but of investor cash—like over $10 billion. They've launched some 300 rockets, so that's a $30 million subsidy from investor cash for every rocket they've launched. Where they've charged some $50 million for a rocket launch, but the complete details, well, the company is private, so no one can know for certain.

I'll give you this example because it always stops Musk fans dead in their tracks because the source is Elon Musk. Let me give you the backstory before you hear Musk retell it in his own words. Russia used to charge some $20 million for a commercial seat to the International Space Station on a Soviet-era designed by slide rule disposable rocket. Then, of course, the space shuttle retired, and America was basically forced into the monopoly of the Russian launch business, at which point they quadrupled their prices to $80 million a shot.

"The mercy of Putin was very small. I mean, but he charged—the seat prices started off for $20 million a piece; now they're 80 million. 80 million for a seat. I might bet they go down after we fly—yeah, competition is a beautiful thing." It turns out, even inflation-adjusted, SpaceX's cheapest reusable rocket was still significantly more expensive than the Soviet-era disposable rocket. Now, with a renewal of the commercial crew and Russia being a political no-go, SpaceX is now price-gouging the U.S. taxpayer almost exactly as hard as the Russians used to.

When the best defense of SpaceX is they don't price-gouge the U.S. taxpayer as hard as the Russians used to, or saying that "Well, at least they're better than Boeing," this isn't the win you think it is. So the whole thing about recovering the booster for economics or whatever makes no difference whatsoever because the things SpaceX has done that have increased their market viability the most is price-gouging the U.S. taxpayer. But as with Falcon 9 and Starship, it turns out that getting the booster back is the relatively easy bit, which is presumably why it doesn't occur on SpaceX's Gant chart.

So why is getting the booster back the easy bit? To go to orbit, you need to do two things: go high enough to get above the atmosphere, about 100 km or so; this is almost just skimming the Earth's surface. Then you need to go fast enough to hit orbital velocity, 8 km/second. These are separable forms of change in energy. Let's take a kilo from sea level and take it up to space.

Potential energy is mass times gravity times height, so the height is 100,000 meters times gravity, which is 10 meters/second squared. Both of these altitudes—100,000 times 10—it's a million joules for a kilo. Cool. Let's take that same kilo and give it orbital type velocities—that's half mv^2. Half m is 0.5, and velocity is 8 km/s—that's 8,000 m/s squared, it's 64 million. Then you need to times that by half m—that's 32 million joules. So, going fast takes about 30 times as much energy as going high.

In reverse, for the booster to simply fall from space means there's much less energy for it to get rid of, whereas the second stage has much more energy to get rid of, and how did the second stage end up? Oh, with burning metal, and...oh, this is real. It's melting through here. You see, on the bright side, it did better than last time. Even if the core tank survived like they did last time, it's the end of the feed that's presumably when it blows up. Yes, okay, well, there you go.

Fine, let's do the full calculations here. The booster falls from, say, 100 km, gravity is 10, and the mass is 270 tons, which is 270,000 kilos, so that's 270 billion joules. Rocket engines are typically fairly efficient, some 70% that sort of thing, but to make it easier, let's just call them 100% efficient. Now we know how much energy we get from burning fuel, so now all we need to do is work out how much fuel we've got to burn to stop the spacecraft. A kilo of fuel is about 50 megajoules, so a ton is about 50 gigajoules; you only need to burn about 5 tons of fuel to stop the booster.

For reference, when it takes off, it weighs 4,000 tons, which is why takeoff is actually a far more impressive feat than landing. The guidance thing, like I said earlier, this is basically trivial with modern electronics. You know, we've been dropping falling objects with pinpoint precision for several decades now. And the whole landing upright using rocket engines, kind of how we landed on the moon some 50 years ago, was done on Earth some decades ago. The only real difference here is it's a giant empty tube.

But what if you want to include that whole efficiency thing? Fine, rather than 5 tons of fuel, it's 10 tons of fuel, and maybe the same amount of liquid oxygen. So, whatever, 20 tons and you're done. Either way, those are small energy numbers because the upper stage weighs some hundreds of tons. Well, that was what it was meant to weigh originally; then they put a heavier heat shield on it, so that presumably weighs even more now, which still didn't work, but whatever. Fine. It's 8 km/s, that's 3,000 billion joules. This is 10 times the energy of the booster falling.

Okay, let's do the same energy calculations: 3,000 billion joules, and fuel is what, 50 billion joules per ton? You need some 50-60 tons of fuel to decelerate it, twice that if you want to include the oxidizer. Okay, so that would be the entire cargo of the ship. Fine, let's not use fuel; let's dump the heat into the atmosphere. Okay, what range of energies are we talking about? The heat capacity, that's the energy it takes to heat up the metal by about 1°C, is about 500 joules per kilo. So to heat up the entire Starship, some 100 tons, requires 0.5 billion joules per Celsius.

Dumping all of the heat from re-entry into the actual metal structure itself would raise it up to 60,000 Kelvin, because far it really doesn't matter when you're up to about 10 times the temperature of the surface of the Sun. Of course, you never actually get to that temperature because, as things get hot, they tend to radiate heat, which goes up exponentially as you get hotter, so you're going to radiate loads of this energy as light, and you're going to lose some of it to the surrounding atmosphere. In the end, that melted the upper stage, and it exploded. Which is why, sure this looks cool, but energetically, it's the easy bit.

I'm going to be fair to SpaceX. My original concern, I mean even going back to 2016, I was never terribly impressed by the whole landing munitions with pinpoint accuracy—oh sorry, landing a booster with pinpoint accuracy. But realistically, the second stage has basically offered no improvement, even with its new super double load heat shield. It's not just that it has to survive re-entry. It's got to do it such that it can be launched again, like immediately. The original plan, when SpaceX got $3 billion of taxpayer money, was for orbital flight tests in 2022.

Where are we? Five flights in, and they've yet to hit the first benchmark, and they think this is the time to take a victory lap when the progress bar hits 3%. As for SpaceX making all its amazing development through iterative development—that iterative approach is a big part of how SpaceX does development and it's been the basis for all of our major innovations. Look, some fifty years ago, the fifth flight of the Saturn V not only took humans to the moon. Simply stated, the purpose of the Apollo 10 flight was a final test of the men and machines required to do the lunar landing mission.

It took them on a mock landing to the moon and returned them safely to Earth. They did that with 1960s tech and had no GPS or supercomputers. From first flight to the fifth flight was about eighteen months, and in less than a month, Apollo 11 launched—the sixth flight of the Saturn V, which did take people to the surface of the moon. Five decades on, with the aid of supercomputers and all the knowledge of rocketry acquired over those fifty years, Starship made its fifth launch in about the same period of time and made it to the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

I doubt that their sixth flight will even make orbit, while the sixth flight of the Saturn V landed humans on the moon. Even if everything goes perfectly from here—and there's basically no realistic expectation of that—look, in 2019 Musk said that Starship should reach orbit within six months and could fly a crew next year. You said tonight that you might be flying people in a year in this thing. Elon Musk claimed that he thought that Starship would be sending people to orbit within a year then. I think we could be sending people to orbit before the end of next year, you know, within a year approximately.

They didn't send people to orbit in Starship in 2020 or 2021 or 2022, 2023, and they're not going to do it in 2024 half a decade later. In fact, forget flying people to orbit; it's not even made orbit five years on from when Musk said it would take six months. Not only that, they currently can take zero master orbit and can't survive re-entry in any meaningfully useful way. But if it all goes perfectly, it'll be about 20 more flights just to test the Human Landing System on the moon and another 20 or so flights before people go there.

Just so we're clear how delusional Musk is on all of this—in early 2024 he thought all that would happen within three years. I'd be surprised if it's longer than about three years to be landing Starships on the moon because the progression of Starship is very rapid. Not only did the last five years call him "nope," but also the 1960s called and said no it's not. Later in the same year, that's 2024, he said that he's going to be sending five Starships to Mars within the next two years.

I can't help but feel that I heard this promise before, like almost a decade ago. That's not a typo. Musk wasn't just going to land on Mars in 2022. But he was going to confirm water resources and identify hazards and place power mining life support infrastructure for future flights. We will start construction of the first ship around the second quarter of next year, so in about six to nine months we should start building the first ship. That's our goal—to try to make the 2022 window. So then in 2024, we want to try to fly four ships, two of which would be crewed and two cargo and two two crewed.

Rather than landing five Starships on Mars, they did manage to launch five. It's just that three of them blew up and two of them melted and ended as scrap metal in the Indian Ocean, just a smidged short of Mars. You've got to be one of the biggest government contractors. We do essential work for the government, yes. It's not like, you know, we do use essential work, right? Um, that we compete for and win contracts on because our product is much better and costs less. Sure, you do.

You might be interested to know how SpaceX actually got the contract to build the Human Landing System. It was awarded to SpaceX by Kathy Lueders. I'll leave you with this from The Common Sense Skeptic: in looking at the 24-page announcement, it needs to be noted that the entire document is written by Kathy Lueders in the first person. "My role," "I selected," "My final determination," it was decided by, and signed off by Lueders alone. Having been instrumental in awarding SpaceX $3 billion, she rapidly quit the job and went to work at SpaceX.

What I see all over the place is people who care about looking good while doing evil.