this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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Firstly, I admit it’s wrong to be so rude, and you’re right to call me out on that.
As you said, Starship is far from proven. It can almost certainly get to orbit in its current state but who even knows if reusability (and propellant transfer) will pan out.
I’m simply sick of people projecting their hatred of Musk on to all the engineers. They assume that because they dislike the man that he must be stupid, and that because he must be stupid, everything he owns must also be stupid. It shows a tribalistic, shallow understanding of the engineering process, when we should instead all be cheering for every success in spaceflight.
No it can't, they've tried twice where it failed very shortly after takeoff. The last attempt was only a month ago, pretty much like some people expected pre launch, because that would be very hard to avoid the way it's designed. Also Musk himself acknowledged it was high risk, with a good chance it wouldn't make it. NASA would NEVER have launched with a high probability of failure, the way the Starship program has been going, it would be very unlikely to be allowed to continue. Musk justified the launch with the value of the telemetry in case of failure. Problem is that they lost contact 8 minutes before it visibly exploded in the sky. So they got no valuable telemetry either!!!
That's not what I see, it seems like Musk has become increasingly irate, and he is calling the shots. The engineers are AFAIK almost never blamed.
You clearly know very little about the history of SpaceX, they run a hardware rich development program and this kind of failure is normal for the first few flights. It’s simply a matter of iterating until it works consistently.
Seriously, look up their process - Falcon 1 failed 3/5 times, and Falcon 9 recovery attempts didn’t succeed until the 8th test. Starship’s suborbital landing tests failed 4 times before they succeeded.
Having a couple launch failures is normal at this phase of development, for SpaceX anyway.