Starship Flight 7

First Shuttle orbited astronauts and successfully recovered all intended components. Every Saturn 5 was successful, the 3rd flight sent a crew to lunar orbit, and the 6th put a crew on the moon.

To date a Starship has yet to be recovered after flight - and those launched are effectively boilerplate as they have carried no cargo (other than a banana) and have none of the systems in place to support a crew.

Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure - but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land.

Apollo WAS an impressive achievement

Starship IS an impressive achievement while they speed up development process with real-world hard data

New Glenn IS an impressive achievement while taking their time to develop a vehicle that reached the orbit on first time

Per wiki on Apollo

> Landing humans on the Moon by the end of 1969 required the most sudden burst of technological creativity, and the largest commitment of resources ($25 billion; $182 billion in 2023 US dollars)[22] ever made by any nation in peacetime. At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities.[23]

Different budget, different number of people working on this stuff and different mindset. Actually the Apollo program was also iterative and it paid off.

The Apollo program was inventing all of this technology, and using only extremely rudimentary computers, still doing many calculations with slide rulers.

SpaceX has all of the Apollo program's work to build on, and computers that could do all the computing work that the Apollo program ever made, in total, in probably a few minutes.

SpaceX is inventing quite a lot, there's more areas where they started greenfield than where they got help.

They are inventing a little, but the basics of rocket flight are now well understood. You can get a university (probably post grad) course on it. And nothing that they are doing is all that revolutionary, definitely not compared to what Apollo did (going from airplanes and ballistic missiles to orbital space flight and then Moon missions).

Consider that even reusable self-landings boosters were being worked on in the 90s, before funding was cut off. And for expandable rockets, virtually all rockets designed and launched in the last few decades have successfully accomplished their first ever flight, launching some kind of payload to orbit.

- "And for expandable rockets, virtually all rockets designed and launched in the last few decades have successfully accomplished their first ever flight,"

That doesn't resonate as true to me.

The first Ariane 5 flight blew up [0]. That Europe's current heavy-lift workhorse with 112 successful launches (including JWST), but the first one blew up.

The first PSLV blew up [1]. That's India's current workhorse with 58 successes, but flight #1 was not successful. Their GSLV did not reach its correct orbit on its first flight either [2], though it didn't blow up.

The first Delta IV Heavy did not blow up, but it failed to reach its correct orbit [3]. That was US' largest launch vehicle for most of the 21st century.

The first Long March 5 failed to reach its correct orbit, and the second one blew up [4]. That's China's current heavy-lift launch vehicle, since 2016.

South Korea's first orbital rocket RUD'd both its first flights, in 2009 and 2010 [5].

Japan's newest orbital rocket was launched in 2023, and that blew up [6].

Rocket Labs' Electron has a current >90% success rate, but the first one blew up [7].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5#Launch_history

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PSLV_launches#Statisti...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_GSLV_launches#Statisti...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_IV_Heavy#Launch_history

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_5

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naro-1#Launch_history

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H3_(rocket)#Launch_history

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Lab_Electron#Launch_sta...