If you actually care about a balanced take watch Scott manleys video on the latest starship launch They still succeeded in reusing the largest booster ever and being second to reuse an orbital class booster, second after themselves taking first already
this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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Bottomless pockets lets him treat aerospace like firework bottle rockets. Problem is billions of tax dollars are keeping those pockets full. It also helps that the cult following him makes excuses for those failures whereas NASA’s work had/s a massive stake in national pride and accountability. Musk isn’t accountable for anything.
The same cult that ridiculed NASA's effort, the one that flew round the moon on the first attempt.
So many gullible kiddies in these replies, jesus christ. "Expected to fail" is absolute nonsense PR talk, and everyone is eating it up.
I'm all for shitting on Musk but this is a very poor comparison. The Starship is very much still being developed and failures are expected. The Falcon 9 rocket is what is currently used to launch LEO satellites into orbit. From wikipedia:
As of 24 May 2025, rockets from the Falcon 9 family have been launched 490 times, with 487 full mission successes, three failures, and one partial failure.
I'd say they're doing pretty damn well, especially since they're doing what nobody else has ever done and the first stage comes back and is reused. Also from wikipedia:
A total of 47 boosters have flown multiple missions, with a record of 28 missions by a booster. SpaceX has also reflown fairing halves more than 300 times, with some being reflown at least twenty times.
Still, fuck Elon.
The Starship is very much still being developed and failures are expected.
Every failure is a success! We're learning! Every negative is a positive if we cheer loud enough to keep the investors happy and the nerds defending our insane waste of taxpayers' money!
Failures aren't expected, actually. What's "expected" was that crewed missions to Mars were done regularly by 2025.
Meanwhile, every orbital flight ends up in the ocean.
Failures aren't expected, actually
Every single engineer I've ever met is laughing at you
Yeah, tell that to the people who engineer lifts, bridges, or literally anything that might end up costing lives.
Aw this bridge collapsed? That's expected, we'll improve next time!
As aa mech engineer, I can tell you, that anything that's worth engineering has a safety factor of 2.5-3, has a carefully predicted lifespan and maintenance cycles, and is 100% not expected to fail. A failure is always a failure, unless its specific purpose is to fail.
Sending a rocket to space and seeing half of its rockets not fire is not an "expected failure".
Safety factor on something like a rocket is much smaller. More like 1.2-1.5. Weight is so important in any sort of flight that the safety factor is reduced.
Lower safety factors don't explain the rockets abysmal failure rate though. Its a total POS by any measure.
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Am mechE. This is an unacceptable failure rate. It means they are several years away from manned flights on these rockets. It's a complete failure of a project currently.
We were supposed to have regular ships back and forth Mars at this point and a thriving interplanetary society blah blah blah.
For what reason? what were they supposed to be ferrying? We never got that detailed out, I think we just weren't ketamined enough to understand.
Instead we have motherfucking nazis making a comeback and he's leading them. I want to speak to a manager.
Eh. Using a weird goal to push engineering boundaries isn't necessarily bad. Is going to mars sort of pointless? Yes, but it would help us continue to improve technology that otherwise not be funded.
Definitely shouldn't be giving money to the nazi though. NASA should be given all the money fElon is getting IMO.
There are so many different, and better, reasons to get rockets out into our solar system aside from trying to forcibly terraform a dead rock.
Asteroids worth trillions in precious metals, diamonds, whatever the fuck — it's out there waiting to be tapped.
Musk uses Mars as a 'weird goal' because it evokes feelings of a time when science fiction still represented 'the future that could be'. He's playing his base, nothing else. If he were actually trying to benefit humanity his focus would be the moon, then the belt.
The design for the Saturn V wasn't handed down by the rocket gods. Several of those Saturn V launches were test flights and there were 3 ground tests before them. Starship has been in development for about as long as the Saturn program took to develop and fly 3 different models of rocket.
Still, the whole reusing the same boosters bit is pretty significant.
No FEA is also very significant.
considering the growing footprint spaceX represents to national launch priorities, they should be nationalized imho.
keep them independent enough to maintain development but get musk out of the decision tree entirely.
Fuck musk and everything he does, but this seems like a bad avenue of attack given SpaceX’s history of success. They’ve shown they can do things that like catch rockets to reuse. They will probably get this rocket to work sometime. Which is bad because it is going to be very lucrative and terrible for the environment and it will enrich a fucking nazi.
Past performance is not a guarantee of future performance. Especially considering how much employee turnaround happens at his corporations. I think it's unlikely that someone with the ego of musk would interfere in company business for Tesla, but be smart enough to keep his hands off SpaceX.
Musk isn’t a rocket engineer
We can’t claim SpaceX has nazi scientists, just that they are run by a Nazi
If you work for a nazi, I have bad news for you...
musk is not an engineer, hes a nepo baby that throws money at things.
Let's be a bit more truthful: the Starship had some successes with booster recovery and the first stage. The issues are currently with the upper stage. The Saturn V did not have even that potential to fail. The new projects are close to what can be done with current engineering and aim for commercial success. It is mich more difficult to do that engineering as you can test less. The Saturn V did not try to be as efficient as possible but to get to the moon.
The Saturn V didn't have near as much existing knowledge to build off of, and doing what it did with the technology available at the time was absolutely incredible.
The manufacturing of rockets out of stainless steel also does not have much existing knowledge behind it. Nor does landing a rocket booster or first stage back on earth. Or staging a rocket this large and reusable.
What the engineers at SpaceX are pulling off on a regular basis is crazy. Having a reusable rocket system of this kind and size was unthinkable at many points in history. Just a shame their work gets overshadowed by a guy who takes all the credit while doing almost none of the work.
Y'all got the spirit but reusable rockets are SOOOOO much cheaper for customers to put something in orbit. That's why nasa uses them so much.
How is it reusable if they all fail?
Not pictured (that's called cherry-picking): Falcon 9 has 469 successful launches for a >99% success rate right now.
Falcon 9 was designed by a different engineer who has since left SpaceX, and was originally intended to have a reusable second stage like Starship, but that never happened either.
Just Google it before you speak lmao
In their defence. SpaceX have the mentality of test and fail rather than simulate. It's proven remarkably effective so far. Starship, as a concept it mildly insane. If they can pull it off, it will be amazing. Blowing up a few rockets on the way is expected.
I just wish they didn't have an idiot Nazi at the helm.
Pretty sure that's just PR talk so the stock doesn't take too big of a hit when the rockets do blow up.
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Fuck Musk but those are test flights while developing the rocket. they expect the rocket to fail. seems ultra hard for so many people to unterstand...
they expect the rocket to fail. seems ultra hard for so many people to unterstand…
Move Fast And Break Things, people. It's not rocket science!
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Musk = POS Nazi.
I propose that the engineers keep doing their best to get it to work every slightly better... Just enough to believe that the next one is the one.
Run that company to the ground and build a brand spanking new one in its place later when the nazis are gone.
Here’s a scary thought, what if Elon fully follows Von Brauns career but in reverse?
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