Just saw the splash down. I think this was 100% successful test.
But yes, “rapid reusability” is a ways off. I expect they’ll be spending weeks inspecting and repairing ship and booster before reflight for a few years, but they’ll drive it down over time.
TBD how “rapid” the reusability ends up being in the end.
It seems like if they can get boosters to rapid reuse (a much easier goal), and churn out ships at sufficient scale, they can afford to take time inspecting/refurbing each ship as part of a pipelined approach.
Starship is a fuel-hungry beast - it can get to LEO by itself, but it needs a lot of tanker launches to go beyond. And if your goal is a Mars colony, you don't want to be limited to one launch per launch window.
Once the tanker version is needed, a ship ship could go up 5+ times a day. The logistics of backfilling a pad with a new ship is much more involved
We could just construct 200 Space Shuttles and spend months refurbishing them after every flight, and still send one up every week.
The goal is to drive down launch costs, time is money, and a system that requires time consuming refurbishments is more expensive.
As you say, they reïnforce each other by speeding up the learning curve and deployment of learning to the real world, serving as both a bolstering of the product and experimental validation.
Elon always talks about a city on Mars but seeing for the first time the gargantuan size of Starfactory it dawned on me that SpaceX are true believers. It is still a big IF, because the dimension of the mission is absolutely bonkers, but IF the goal is to send every two years hundreds of Starships to Mars (everyone needing around 3-4 tanker missions) you need large scale production of ships.
Anyone who thinks they can’t do stuff is not seeing the whole picture.
I think that work can be done quite well based on all the footage and other collected metrics.
Definitely true
> Just like the real news, people divide themselves into bubbles of whatever reinforces their beliefs
Hopefully HN can be better than that and be a place for informed criticism or informed praise from whatever provenance
However, I was talking about HN the site. I don't think news websites should (generally) discriminate against sources but the individual readers can (collectively, as with the case of HN and voting) make a judgement call and take provenance into account, including the example you give where an unlikely source makes concessions or gives validity to an argument that they would be usually opposed to.
But the main reason I raised provenance is that the internet has given small individual voices the chance to bring informed insight to the public that previously would have been without a platform. So in this particular case I don't necessarily discount some rando on Youtube making criticisms of SpaceX; they might hold at least some validity. (In this case they obviously didn't.)
It looked like it happened during separation somehow.
Still they are making good progress if a bit slower than that.
-Elon