It feels like if a prototype Toyota had a wheel fall off and everyone immediately assumed Toyota was incompetent and incapable of making cars. It just makes no sense.
I think it’s plausible that they can make it work, but I don’t think it’s a certainty that it’ll work out. I don’t really know what the backup plan is, if they can’t get the belly-flop and flip to a high enough level of reliability.
I also think the development timelines promised to NASA seemed… overly aggressive (as if they were Musk timelines, which never hold instead of Shotwell timelines, which usually only slip a bit)
It seems likely that they’ll get there, but “hit it once” is not demonstrated to my satisfaction.
When they can hit it 3 out of 4 tries, I’ll believe they can get to a place where it’s reliable enough for cargo missions (95%). When they land it 50 times in a row without a failure, then I’ll believe they have a good shot at putting people on it eventually.
It took _20_ launches to get a successful Falcon 9 upright landing. By 2021, across 31 launches they had a single landing failure. Across all of 2022 and 2023 YTD, 137 launches, their success rate is 100%.
By comparison, the shuttle program had 2 failures across 135 launches.
SpaceX is achieving higher levels of reliability for way less cost than anyone else.
Failure is part of the process and the process is clearly working.
I wasn’t saying that the failures indicate that the process isn’t working. You’ll notice that wasn’t my initial point at all when I expressed my skepticism.
I only brought it up to respond to the point: “They have already flight tested the belly flop flip and had no problems with it.”
That isn’t true. They have had problems with it. That’s why I mentioned those tests.
Could they continue to iterate on it and work out those problems? Yes! They could. Could they continue to iterate on it, and find the problems to be very hard to overcome? Yes, that kind of thing has also happened in SpaceX history.
I’m not saying they’re doomed to fail. I’m saying there’s something that seems to me relatively high risk, and a core part of their plans. I don’t think that aspect has been fully de-risked, and I don’t understand what the alternative option would be if they can’t make it reliable enough.
If you call that unfounded skepticism, then I’d turn around and say you’re being overly optimistic.
> It took _20_ launches to get a successful Falcon 9 upright landing.
I know. I watched every single one live. As I’ve watched every single Starhopper test live. I remember exactly where I was for their first successful landing of each.
I’m not hoping they fail. I desperately want them to be successful. If you asked me to bet on it, I’d say more likely than not that they get it sorted. But I’m less confident than I was for the F9 landings.
The same is true for all good R&D projects. If there is no real risk of complete failure, you are not being ambitious enough.