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Starship Flight 7

(www.spacex.com)
649 points chinathrow | 1 comments | 16 Jan 25 21:25 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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EncomLab ◴[17 Jan 25 11:33 UTC] No.42736458[source]▶
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.

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1. pfannkuchen ◴[17 Jan 25 15:59 UTC] No.42739145[source]▶
It’s pretty weird to get any engineering thing right on the first test, no? The entire development strategy would have to be based around that goal. I think the standard engineering strategy would be to test early and often.

I hadn’t thought about it before, but, especially during the Cold War, the US government had a big incentive to appear infallible that SpaceX doesn’t have. Are we sure there weren’t more tests in secret? USG also has access to huge tracts of land that is off limits, and rocket tests are easily ‘national security issue’ enough to justify being conducted in secret. Just a thought.