General News

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR:Response to ‘Musk’s Starship’ column (Dec. 18) 

January 9, 2026   ·   0 Comments

Dear Editor,

I strongly objected to the negativity expressed by Mr. Gwynne Dyer in his recent article, “Musk’s Starship: If it sounds too good to be true…” The title alone raises an eyebrow – obviously the intent.

As a retired engineer who grew up in the ‘60s, the race to the moon captivated me. The technical challenges of space flight still fascinate me.

Putting Elon Musk’s politics aside, it’s hard to feel anything but enormous respect for what he has accomplished since his company SpaceX began in the early 2000s. Working with a small team, he built his first rocket from scratch and first principles. Named Falcon 1, it reached orbit on its fourth try. From this success, SpaceX developed the Falcon 9 and later, with the addition of deployable landing legs and an innovative steering system, successfully landed the booster on a remotely positioned barge in the middle of the ocean. Albeit only after more than a few fiery failures – which Musk referred to as RUDs or Rapid Unscheduled Disassemblies!

However, the successful landing milestone, which many respected rocket engineers and NASA personnel insisted could not be done, has now been accomplished by SpaceX over 500 times, with some boosters in the fleet logging more than 30 trips to space and back. And until the launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket earlier this year (kudos to Jeff Bezos and his team!), no other rocket launch company has accomplished this feat, although China is developing a Falcon 9 copycat, so they may be next. 

Musk’s goal in the near term is full and rapid reusability. This is the basis of his claim of being able to reduce the cost of tonnage to orbit by at least two orders of magnitude. All other launchers ‘expend’ every last piece of hardware during the process of placing a satellite in orbit. The booster, the second stage, any side-mounted boosters, the fairings – everything is dumped into the ocean, never to be seen again. 

Each launch costs the customer over $100 million. Musk wants to reduce that to only the cost of the fuel, say, about $1 million. To do that, he is developing Starship. And it’s not easy. But his approach is unique. Build, test, fly, and repeat, each time improving on the previous version, always pushing the envelope. This process, by its nature, invariably leads to explosions, or RUDs, but each time he gets closer. 

Mr. Dyer’s article uses phrases like ‘someone got the calculations wrong’ and ‘ignorantly overstated’ and ‘grossly underestimated’, implying that SpaceX engineers are less than competent. I suggest that an alternative opinion can be gained by watching a YouTube rerun of the Integrated Flight Test 5, or ITF 5. In this, the returning Super Heavy Booster guided itself to spot exactly from where it launched minutes before and was gracefully caught between two giant arms, called “chopsticks.” And just in case anyone thought this was a fluke, SpaceX did it again on a subsequent flight.

I don’t recall the origin of this expression, but it certainly applies here: 

‘Would the guy who keeps saying it can’t be done get out of the way of the guy who’s doing it..!’

Klaus Fritzsche

Alliston

Readers Comments (0)