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Comment by nikolay | Hacker News Reader

No, I'm commenting on Elon Musk's comment. I would have taken a humble: "Sorry, we blew up this (literally), but we're gonna get better after learning from our mistake." You blow things up, you fail. No excuses, sorry! Don't start a test knowing it most certainly will fail! Start a test when you're a lot more confident!

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> Don't start a test knowing it most certainly will fail! Start a test when you're a lot more confident!

Good thing you aren't the one designing these things.

The purpose of a test is to gather the data you need to improve. Scientists and engineers constantly start tests knowing it will most likely "fail". Actual failure would be a test that didn't produce any data.

No, an explosion and destruction of equipment is a failure. Why do you keep dancing around this truth? It is a failure everywhere else in the world! You should've listened to the commentary of foreign anchors! They don't look at it as a success!

They are currently building like 10 other Starship prototypes.

Even if this model had worked perfectly, it's unlikely they ever would've flown it again. Remember, SpaceX's goal is to mass produce these.

Much better to fail hard now and in many different ways, as the more problems you can find with your expendable prototypes the better (before your manufacturing process starts to ossify).

Things are successfully tested to destruction every day. That is the truth. Some of the most successful tests involve explosions and loss of equipment; it's the only way to be sure where the limits are.

News anchors? They're often pretty clueless about technical things, so their mistakes don't mean much.

I'm very confused by your take here... SpaceX made it clear beforehand that the primary objectives of this test were the ascent and descent, not the landing. The "belly flop" horizontal descent is entirely new, and something they have only modeled so far.

The primary objectives of the test were completed without any issues. If that doesn't meet your definition of success, I don't know what to tell you...

But it didn’t fail, landing wasn’t a test objective.

Landing may not have been one of the primary objectives, but it clearly was an objective, since they didn't just let it crash at will after having completed the flight maneuvers.

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