They’ve lost as many Starships as NASA lost Space Shuttles so far, with no deaths. It’s a test program for now.
Ask the “rest of the industry” about how Boeing’s Starliner is going. That’s what failure looks like.
I understand a lot of it is politics and government spending but it would be nice if NASA could get a case of go fever every once in awhile. So long as humans aren't involved.
I understand if there were more failures there'd be less money for big projects -but I think we should take the chance to see if that money would end up being spent on more smaller quicker projects.
We've crashed production probes into Mars, we've burned astronauts alive, we've had the supposedly "safe" options like Boeing's Starliner have fundamental problems even making it to orbit. Space has always been this way.
Starship's more akin to taking the Bell X-1 up for a spin than flying a 787 around, for the time being. Problems are expected at this point in the program, or we'd be sending people on them already.
On one side we are talking about how the "space industry" is most moving slowly and how spacex is doing great things.
On the other side we are saying that this is good enough for nasa (who is the establishment when it comes to space) and yolo bro.
On one side we are defending nasa because priorities, but on the other side we're cheering on spacex who is ultimately sucking at the big fat government tit.
i'm not sure anyone is aiming at burning people alive and just because it happened does not make it a justification moving forward.
Shuttle was 1.6 billion a launch. This is gonna be 100 million a lunch even if you let the booster blow up every time.
This test is in line with how every new rocket is developed. You really need to Google the 50s and 60s of space flight and see how many rockets were lost in those days.
Yet they still got to the moon.
If you want to take the stance that any test is a success that's fine but remember this depends on what your definition of success is.
The other thing to keep in mind is that past success is not always a good predictor of future success.
Objectively, this test successfully demonstrated the water deluge system, an intact launch pad, all engines on the first and second stage igniting and staying lit, stage separation, hot staging, and a long burn nearly to orbital speeds. That's a pretty good list of ticked boxes.
They very openly stated they didn't necessarily expect it to get all the way to splashdown. You can argue that's PR, but their history has objectively been one of incremental progress (again, see Falcon 9's landing attempts) via repeat testing.
Personally, I'd consider a mission failed if a) it carries a real payload it's supposed to get somewhere and doesn't, b) it breaks due to a previously known issue, or c) it breaks sooner than the last test. I'd also consider it entirely fine to have "reach goals" in a test.
They went longer, faster, further, and more successfully than the first test. I'm happy calling that a win, and I suspect SpaceX will as well.
It does not matter you call it a win if you are not respecting other opinions that this is a fail.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/11/what-nasa-wants-to-see...
> "Tomorrow is a test and we’re going to learn a lot either way," Lisa Watson-Morgan, who manages NASA's Human Landing System program, told Ars in an interview this week. "We’d love to see it go off perfectly, but frankly, if it doesn’t, it’s still going to be a great learning event, and it still will give us progression on the schedule for the different flight tests, and then we’ll know the areas we need to more deeply penetrate.”
Every launch where more is nominal for longer is new territory and an achievement.
It was a resounding success.