sziehr: This was a great success. All 33 engines burned full duration. The upper stage burned all engines full duration. The pad is still standing. The fts worked. The things you needed to get right to have another test with out major delay happened. So this was great for the space x team.
NothingGlad1024: It's an improvement, but the Saturn V rocket had a zero failure rate and was developed in the 60s and went from design to first successful flight in 6 years. Starship has been in development for 18 years and failed its first two launches.
dabocx: Did Saturn v land itself? Was Saturn V reusable?
cgg419: No, but it sure took off without exploding.
Starship also has seventy years of solid rocket science and liquid propulsion tests behind it that Saturn V didn't have, and still this somehow doesn't work.
And the Redstone rockets for the US after WW2, sure. But Starship also exists in a world where cruise missiles, ICBMs, the Titan nuclear launch system and a whole bunch of other declassified or by now ancient rocket tech already exists.
"We're doing something new!" Okay, cool. So was the Apollo program, and I've got orders of magnitude more computing and simulation power in my pocket than they had.
This isn't to say that things can't go wrong, or that a 100% success rate is a reasonable expectation. But the man in charge is a fucking dunce whose shitty company culture is now holding back crewed missions to the moon. So... fuck 'em? I'd be more charitable if it were NASA having problems, but I wouldn't trust Musk or SpaceX to ship a Happy Meal to orbit, let alone crew.
TWENTY SEVEN TIMES the industry average for incidents, and thats a conservative estimate because spacex has not reported numbers in spite of their obligation to do so for seven years straight
