this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It can almost certainly get to orbit in its current state

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!!!

I’m simply sick of people projecting their hatred of Musk on to all the engineers.

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

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.