They need do proper failure analysis and engineer a solution so this damage won't happen next time, 6-8 weeks seems way too short. Elon is suggesting just slapping down a shitload of steal, but I really doubt that will meet standards.
1. Not giving up project goals or specs when they start to look dubious
2. Sticking with cheap (in time, money, or both) solutions when more-reliable solutions might be called for
3. Letting sunk costs drive bad decisions about the above and other project related decisions
In this case there are unpleasant downstream effects of making safer decisions: Starship might not be the Moon lander Artemis 3 should rely on. All changes made in Boca Chica will have to be retrofitted to Kennedy Space Center.
Lastly, Musk has made pronouncements about Starlink's viability resting on Starship. That could be hyperbole, but Starlink needs 30-100X more subscribers to become a first tier telecom provider, and it can't support that many without the planned constellation of tens of thousands of full-size second-generation satellites.
I love it when people take one small issue and point out how stupid he’s being, yet ignore how by challenging every point of engineering on rockets he’s almost at the point of making a mars transportation system possible.
The launch pad at Cape Canaveral may not be exactly what Starship needs but it would be a good start. Like flame trenches and placing the fuel storage tanks far enough away from the launch pad.
SpaceX hasn't "started to realize" that, they always knew that some F9 launches would be fully expendable and they've been occasionally expending F9 boosters from the start. Not because there's something wrong with the economics of booster reuse generally, but because expending a booster is sometimes (not usually) worth it to get more mass into orbit (roughly double to GTO with Falcon Heavy if they expend the core stage.)
That extra performance was always known to be required for some payloads, but isn't required for most payloads.
Probably not a whole lot technically. By now we could have had several fuel tanks in Mars orbit and a few on the ground, rather than all those orbiters and ground vehicles.
Trade-offs.
I know they're planning it for Starship HLS to the Moon, maybe it will finally be done then (I'm not holding my breath, Starship HLS's role in Artemis still seems farcical to me.) But until then, it's never really been an idea worth developing.
I agree with you.
Why spend hundreds of millions or in the case of Saturn V billions on a governmentally overspecced launchpad when a launch mount and a concrete pad would do just fine?
Take the SLS crawler looking to cost $1 - $1.5B. What a waste of resources.
https://spacenews.com/nasa-audit-reveals-massive-overruns-in...
Trying to meet wildly divergent, even contradictory goals, is a good way to build a doomed project. Now add schedule pressure to remain the sole vendor for a lunar lander and you get bad project management decisions.
"...following the same formula" of rapid iteration is what they are doing. It worked well for learning how to fabricate a giant rocket out of stainless steel. That formula is bumping up against the cost of iteration. They're trying an Agile-ish approach to making the biggest ever rocket when Agile might be insufficient to, for example, make car software at VW Group.