Nailing it would be without the things above.
The biggest can't-miss milestone was the flawless engine restart. That gives them the go-ahead to hit orbit on the next flight.
And fornlong duration missions also lubricant evaporation, possibility of vacuum welding & atomic oxygen reactions if you spend long in low Earth orbit. :)
Reminds me of early Google DIY rack PCs. [1]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/1lf6yat/googles_fir...
If you can spare the weight and it meets your specs and the use it close enough you'd be a fool not to use it.
They are built to tolerate that, resulting in much better launch volume and weight utilization (sats are stacked on top of each other & held in place by rods that are then released).
The Starship Starlink release demo was quite tame in comparison to that. ;-)
Is it really unexpected that an extremely hot metal pressure tank will rupture when plunged into water?
Since the ship is designed to be caught by a tower and not be plunged into water at all, it doesn't seem like this would be an issue in normal operations.
Now that they're demoed pez-dispensing v3 dummy Starlinks, I'd assume they'll start launching real ones within ~1-3 months. At that point as long as they can deliver payload to orbit and catch the booster the program is operational and they'll start switching their own Falcon 9 launches over.
The HLS timeline is definitely dicey, but whether Starship winds up being the blocker remains to be seen. Otherwise they've now succeeded enough to "lean launch" Starship with equal/better capabilities to any other existing orbital rocket, and Starlink can fund indefinite further tests/iterations on the rest of their roadmap features (which no one else has).
I think it's still a bit early for that given that they've only had one successful flight and are still testing lots of new design changes, but I think you're right that the capabilities they've already demonstrated are probably enough to make Starship commercially viable even if literally none of the other revolutionary improvements they're working on pan out.
Falcon 9 doesn't recover the 2nd stage at all, and it's already by far the least expensive rocket out there in terms of cost/kg.
I'm surprised they didn't take less risks just to avoid a narrative of failure.
It's privately own, might as well learn as much as possible with each dollar spent.
That's the advantage of being privately owned. "Vibes" (hah) don't matter. Public opinion doesn't matter. What matters is executing on your vision / goals. And they're doing that.
The fact that they're bringing in loads of cash from Starlink surely helps. They haven't had the need to raise money in a while, now.
There's a lot more eyes on them now a days, and Musk is much more well known, so it creates a lot more drama - but they've done the exact same process with everything. They even published a montage of failures [1] on the way to their first successful landing 'back in the day.' It was fiery, but mostly peaceful. They didn't even hit a shark!
They specifically said they're testing lighter fins to see how much they would hold. Let's not invent problems when it's an experiment that was clearly stated.
In SRE, we have chaos engineering so I'm wondering if it's the same concept.
They planned a test that would subject various components to stress levels outside of the normal mission profile. The various specific failures that resulted from that may be within expectations but not necessarily planned.
In engineering you want to know that a design will not just succeed at its rated limit, but have some margin percentage of safety above that. To measure that margin often involves destructive tests.
SpaceX's development methods differ a bit from more traditional rocket development by performing some of these potentially destructive tests with full-scale articles in real flight scenarios as part of an iterative process.
It's a different apporach to say the Apollo program, where they did heavy up-front analysis, at the expense of cost-efficiency, speed, and innovation. They had one-shot for a flight, otherwise that's several $bn up in flames.
Even with the last few mishaps, it's an approach that seems to be working. If you look at Starship and Falcon's journey in comparison to SLS and Blue Origin, they have done so much in such a short timespan.
They'll need a higher bar for Artemis but frankly Starship is not the only critical bottleneck there and it's not SpaceX's main financial driver.
I was very surprised that that flap still held up during the stress testing on atmospheric re-entry.
To the contrary, I am fascinated by what SpaceX has accomplished so far. I wouldn't just say they "nailed it" they completely blew past all expectations I had.
"Why didn't just get it right on their first test", really? People can't even get a regex right the first time.
Are you aware of the size of this rocket? That it reached orbit? That it hovered over the ocean instead of just crashing into it? That it came back into a point with such precision that a buoy with a camera was already waiting for it? From orbit (that its 30,000km/h and 150km high)?
Your comment is just ridiculous.
The comment you replied to didn't say that. And this isn't the first test.
I think their comment was reasonable. It was a successful mission that met the stated objectives and demonstrated progress. But it wasn't perfect, and there is definitely more progress to be made for Starship to be a reliable operational launch system.