Well, I've provided plenty of links and facts. You've provided your unique opinions, little else, and seem wholly unaware of the development history of these vehicles you claim to know better than rocket engineers about.
Even if I use your example and timeline:
Shuttle: 1968 (project announced) - 1981 (first launch): 13 years
Starship: 2012 (project announced) - 2022 (first launch): 10 years
Starship's several years ahead of Shuttle development.
Hilarious conversation. Thanks for providing laughs for the evening.
The difference here is that STS-1 achieved orbit and flew 37 times around the earth, while Starship flight 1 didn't even explode correctly after failing to keep its designated path. Starship has yet to achieve orbit, in fact, in 2025 - passing the 13 year mark of STS-1.
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).
> 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.
Again, feel free to point to any rocket of the size and reusability of Starship which is further along in development or has developed faster. None exist.
> Nearly 50 year old technology is generally inferior to modern equivalents <
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.
Yeah, well, apparently neither was Shuttle. RIP Challenger and Columbia and crews.
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.
Even if I use your example and timeline:
Shuttle: 1968 (project announced) - 1981 (first launch): 13 years
Starship: 2012 (project announced) - 2022 (first launch): 10 years
Starship's several years ahead of Shuttle development.
Hilarious conversation. Thanks for providing laughs for the evening.