My Starship scepticism

I see that, after the success of Elon Musk's rocket and capsule delivering a couple of astronauts to the ISS, Musk told his company that he wants to put "top priority" on the Starship development.

While congratulations are due to Musk and his engineers for the cool aspects of his Falcon rockets (especially the self landing boosters), I tend to have low trust in engineers who smoke pot during interviews, pick stupid names for their baby, and accuse blokes of being pedophiles just because they didn't want his useless assistance.  And besides - that Starship looks so 50's science fiction retro, I've always had my suspicions that artwork has played too much role in its design.

For these reasons, I haven't been paying much attention to the whole Starship idea.  I have noticed its test engines blowing up, of course.  But I just had a look at the whole concept, via the Wiki page (which I assume Musk fan boys keep as accurate as possible.)

So here's my entirely amateur prediction - the Starship is going to have a very difficult time getting credibility.  Why?:

*  the Falcon rockets he's currently having success with are all using the very conventional kerosene and liquid oxygen fuel.  Starship is based on using a new, never used in spaceflight before, liquid methane and oxygen fuel mix.   So, that's why the engines keep blowing up.  (It also explains why methane features so much in Netflix's Lost In Space, I guess.)   Here's a Wired article explaining the advantages of a methane engine, and the difficulties in making ones which are meant to be re-useable at an unheard of rate compared to (say) shuttle engines.   Also the nutty manufacturing rate Musk thinks he can reach:

“Since they’re using so many of them on the Super Heavy vehicle, they’re going to have to be ramping up manufacturing to an absolutely insane pace,” says Dodd. “Elon’s talked about making one in 12 hours, which would be unheard of in the industry. Even if they make one a week that’s pretty impressive.”

*  the re-entry shield:  the Wiki page says they are still probably going to be ceramic tiles.  Sounds familiar?  The same type of technology that NASA had so much trouble with?   The spaceship part is then due to land vertically like a Falcon.  The space shuttle landing as a glider seemed risky enough:  humans trusting the retrorocket landing system to work perfectly every time is going to take a lot of trust in technology that is new, and is going to be a disaster waiting at every landing (compared to the relative simplicity of capsules descending by parachute).

* for the flights to Mars (and even the Moon), there is apparently no planning for radiation shielding.  Musk thinks people will just take the risk and that's it.
 
 I therefore reckon that there are going to be some spectacular failures in developing this pet project.

And his ideas as to how quickly Mars could be colonised are just nuts.   He wants to get there but it will be more like a suicide mission if he gets his way.