However the program has been in development for quite a while (well over a decade) and seems to have a lot of internal issues. Be that poor management, scope creep, or whatever the process looks flawed.

No longer than other rocket programs. The speed of development is frankly mind blowing considering it's scale. Regulatory hurdles seem to be the biggest delaying factor. Which goes a long way toward explaining Musk's political activities AFAICT.

> and seems to have a lot of internal issues. Be that poor management, scope creep, or whatever the process looks flawed.

It seems like you're making the mistake of equating SpaceX's hardware-rich development philosophy (i.e. just fly it and see what happens) to NASA's check-it-ten-times-before-flight risk-averse methodology. Different approaches. Russia followed the former, much like SpaceX, and Soyuz is second only to Falcon 9 in number of launches. Arguably, more can be learned, more quickly, and for lower cost following the hardware-rich approach. You just have to deal with the optics and armchair rocket engineers declaring every launch a failure until they aren't.

So it is getting tough to say that Starship development is proceeding fast compared to other projects.

The work towards booster landing and reuse was more iterative, but it was a special case. They had to be careful with the changes, because they were testing in production. The first priority was always delivering the payload. But once the booster had done its job, it was available for experiments.

Starship is the biggest rocket ever attempted, with uncommon propellant, most advanced engine cycle and it is designed to be fully reusable. Falcon was safe retreading of known ground comparatively.

Yeah, but it failed with more complex rockets (the soviet N1), where it just kept blowing up.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/apollo-moon-khrus...

> Korolev was not a scientist, not a designer: he was a brilliant manager. Korolev's problem was his mentality. His intent was to somehow use the launcher he had. [The launcher was called N1]. It was designed in 1958 for a different purpose and with a limited payload of about 70 tons.] His philosophy was, let's not work by stages [as is usual in spacecraft design], but let's assemble everything and then try it. And at last it will work. There were several attempts and failures with Lunnik [a series of unmanned Soviet moon probes]. Sending man to the moon is too complicated, too complex for such an approach. I think it was doomed from the very beginning.

It’s been in some level of development for well over a decade. Back in 2018 they changed the idea from using carbon composites to stainless steel and renamed the project Starship but in no way can you call it a fast process.

> hardware-rich development philosophy

If it was actually working it’s a perfectly viable strategy, but it seems to be slowing things down.

How long did the last fully reusable superheavy lift rocket take to develop? There's never been one you say? Right. So you have no metric for measurement. The closest equivalent: SLS is flying hardware who's design originated in the 60s, and Blue Origin began development 24 years ago.

Starship is developing at light speed by comparison to anything approaching it's size.

Still think it's happening slowly? Feel free to build one yourself in less time. I'll wait.

> the MiG-105 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-105 ) from 1965, and the Silbervogel project ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbervogel ) from 1941.

Starship can trace its development back to the 1920’s seeing as the team leveraged that research, if you’re going to use such a meaningless definition including USSR projects as a legacy here Starship loses simply because of the much later launch date.

So you're not even aware of how the shuttle was developed and are just making ill-informed assumptions. Got it.

We can trace them both down to liquid rocket propulsion, but one flew in 1980’s the other is still in R&D.

Then why don't you tell us about it?

And note that the actual shuttle that was launched in 1981, the Columbia, went on to conduct 27 more successful missions (until its tragic end many years later). So it was already successfully reusable from its first test flight (with the known caveats around cost of refurbishment).

Only the orbiter was refurbishable (not fully and rapidly reusable like Starship - booster reuse was demonstrated today), which took 6 months, and cost $2 Billion per launch.

The whole Starship development program is slated to cost about as much as 5 Shuttle launches.

Feel free to counter the points being addressed rather than attack a straw man. Obviously if Starship was strictly worse there’d be no point in trying to develop it.

Suggesting a modern preproduction car is better than a Fiat Argenta from the early 80’s isn’t a recommendation, same deal with Starship.

No fatalities with Dragon yet, thankfully. It seems to me that Dragon and Shuttle are much more directly comparable. Falcon 9 throws away it's second stage, which is still less than Shuttle did. And Dragon requires a similar level of refurbishment to Shuttle. Shuttle could carry 27,000kg to LEO whereas Falcon 9 can carry 22,800kg to LEO.

Starship is slated for 200,000kg to LEO. It's in an entirely different class.

The aspect of Starship I find craziest - it's lack of launch abort system at this stage of development - was a problem Shuttle suffered it's whole life. And Shuttle didn't have the engine redundancy of Starship or Falcon 9.

Yep, you’ve got nothing. Starship even borrows heavily from the shuttle program using a lifting body design etc.

At least have the dignity of walking away.

Except SpaceX is spending ~2 billion dollars per year which on the surface is well below the space shuttle (though not that far), but modern aerospace projects have massive advantages over these early programs so simple inflation calculators don’t really capture the cost changes well.

The shuttle flew well over 100 successful mission including infrastructure that’s still in use ISS, Hubble.

Starship has 0 successful missions.

Relative to the less ambitious Space Shuttle and New Glenn projects, it seems to be progressing at good pace. They already demonstrated landing and reflight of the lower stage, and it does seem likely that they will land the upper stage this year.