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"Don't be snarky."

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That's how the original successful space program, the Soviet one, worked. Test-driven development is traditional in the space launch space.

Rapid iteration and testing is the preferred approach if you have a highly integrated, tightly-coupled organization.

If you use contractors, on the other hand, everything needs to be planned out and stipulated in advance to protect the parties involved.

Every successful program is test-driven.

The soviet space program stalled on N-1 because this approach (*integrated* move-fast-break-things testing) turned out to be unviable once there are too many failure points. And the engineers were well aware of that and proposed to do static fire tests, but that was not in the budget.

It fell apart a bit after Korolev died.

There are a lot of new space startups that operate this way, trying to replicate SpaceX's success. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

SpaceX also came really close to failure. High risk strategies always look better after they have already paid off.

It fails more often than works

Sure but that's true of startups in general.

Have you heard of Astra...