Let’s not move the goalposts. This company develops differently than historical aerospace. Success was defined as blowing up any point beyond the launch pad. It made it well past max-q which is the point of highest atmospheric stress on the rocket.
It's historically different in US aerospace, but not Soviet aerospace.
But in the intervening days I read up quite a bit and found quite a spectrum of opinions. Turns out this launch made a loss of at least $300M (not to forget, of tax payer money) based on estimated costs of engines alone. Both the rocket and the launch pad suffered from design errors. The launch pad suffered heavy damage because it was apparently not built to withstand the forces present at launch. There's video footage of a parked car next to a palm tree at least a mile or so from the launch pad which both got peltered by debris and then engulfed in fast moving smoke clouds.
This is happening right in the middle of a nature reserve which none of those responsible have the slightest respect for.
But this is the state of affairs when you have a billionaire conman with a captive audience of fanboys, gullible media and those who are just hoping too hard for advancements in spaceflight.
It’s one thing to feel defensive about a misleading headline. This is just fanboyism.
From TFA:
> SpaceX staff still cheered as Starship went down in flames. Successfully lifting the 400-foot-tall rocket off the launch pad is still a big step forward to its ultimate goal of one day ferrying humans to the moon and Mars, the company said.
> "With a test like this, success comes from what we learn," the company said in a tweet. "Today's test will help us improve Starship's reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multi-planetary."
If a glass is expected to be at one tenth of its capacity, but then, by surprise, it is found to be at one half of its capacity, then it is a bit odd to write the headline "Glass Half Empty". We would instead expect something like "Glass Half Full by Surprise", or at least "Glass at 50% Capacity". I don't think one has to be a fanboy of glasses or liquids to take issue with that framing.
Commercial passenger flights departing in the United States produced 179 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2019.
1 Ton of Methan produces 3 tons of CO2.
Starship+Booster fully loaded has 1000 tonnes of methane (and three times oxygen).
So a thousand Starship launches a year would be 3 million metric tons of CO2. Not nothing but (surprisingly?) less than 1.5% of commercial US flight industry.
Theoretically one can produce Methane climate neutral through bio gas. I found different prices for liquid methane (1000 to 2000 dollars?), with that it seems the fuel cost are only around 2 million per launch? That is cheap. A 1000 Starships would only cost 1 billion in Methan fuel (disregarding oxygen and heightened demand and economy of scales).