I’m especially looking forward to Off-Nominal this-coming Thursday (2025-10-02) because Rob and I are the guests, on to promote our new board game S.P.A.C.E., Scoundrels and Pirates Affiliated with Criminal Enterprises.

But I’ve been a regular listener since the beginning, which means I heard last week’s Rocket Tier List episode…and I have thoughts.¹

Let’s just take this tier-by-tier.

S

Agree on Falcon 9, Saturn V, and Atlas V. Saturn V is the GOAT given what it enabled and how far ahead of its time it was. Falcon 9 and Atlas V earn S-tier for their long history of successful missions (I’m also a bit of a homer because I know so many people who worked on Atlas).

I’m also promoting Soyuz to S-tier: it is/was the work-horse of the Soviet/Russian space program for decades; the Korolev Cross is iconic; and it was America’s access to the International Space Station during The Interregnum, when we’d lost our way and the ability to launch humans into space (more on Shuttle below…way below).

A

I’m promoting Electron to A-tier. Yes it’s small, but its ample backlog suggests it’s big enough. Electric pumps are an ingenious solution that only works at this scale. And who knows how many other launch start-ups Electron’s methodical execution (justifiably) put out of business.

No issues with Mercury-Atlas or Proton, worthy A’s.

Shuttle is not A-tier.

B

After promoting Electron, my only comment on the remaining B-tier rockets (New Glenn, Ariane V, and Vulcan) is that they all have A-tier potential — just hit Electron’s flight rate and in so doing become the foundation for an indefinitely sustainable launch businesses — and S-tier is achievable for any rocket ultimately improves on an A-tier incumbent’s cost, cadence, and/or reliability.

C

I really wanted to put Skylab Saturn V higher because I love Skylab so much. A future where we had a bunch of Skylabs instead of the ISS would have been a brighter one, but as the guys pointed out, Saturn did kind of break Skylab on the way up, and I think that contributed to the program’s premature demise. C for effort.

C is the perfect grade for something with heft on both sides of the ledger. Delta IV-H was big dog for a long time, but so darn expensive. Pegasus was novel and kind of fun, but its main value was in proving that air launch is not a responsive-launch panacea. Also, it shouldn’t take three (sometimes four! five if you count the plane!) stages to reach LEO. If it does, you’re doing something wrong.

D

I’d have put Rocket 3 lower except that it wasn’t developed with the public’s money.

For Firefly Alpha, it’s hard to go above D because its success:failure ratio is just too low. It was teetering on F-tier, but I tipped them into D for playing on hard mode: it’s a miracle it even flew given all the corporate governance shenanigans that team worked through.

F

Sometimes you need an F-tier because the student has earned an F. There are two rockets here, and they have some things in common.

SLS is simple for me. You simply can’t spend that much and have so little to show for it. It’s been 24 years and $26B, with one demonstration launch. It does work, and it’s huge, but this is an opportunity cost argument. This isn’t the rocket’s fault per se, but I’m angry about what could have been, and none of the people responsible will ever be held to account, so I’m taking it out on their brain child instead. It turns out that Congress is not very good at designing rockets — no committee ever is.²

Shuttle. At the bottom, where it belongs. I hear the people who want to rate it higher for all the cool missions it flew, but in the end, for me, this one is simple. Shuttle is the only rocket that’s killed its astronauts, and it happened twice: Challenger on the way up and Columbia on the way down.³ Fourteen souls, and these weren’t freak accidents. Both failures were multi-faceted, but also enabled by a fundamentally flawed launch vehicle architecture: Shuttle had no abort system, and it located the reentry heat shield down stream of a debris-generation device. Yikes.

Some of Shuttle’s missions were A- or S-tier, but you can make anything that doesn’t violate the laws of physics work with enough money and dedication. Shuttle foreclosed private investment in alternatives for two generations, since unless you’re the USAF or a sovereign government it’s hard to compete with NASA. Falcon 9 also demonstrated that Shuttle was barking up the wrong branch of the tech tree. Reuse should start with the booster, and boosters should land propulsively. Not every rocket needs a crew, and having crew on every flight prevented us from taking reasonable risks and pushing the envelope.

Almost any decision I can think of Shuttle decided wrong, so the good things it accomplished were accomplished through brute force and stubbornness — and that’s no way to get a good grade in my class.