Starship Flight 7

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.

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.

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.

Apollo program directors would advocate to start a nuclear war with ussr if they could get hands on that kind of tech.

But also NASA landed two SUVs on mars first try, using skycrane, Full remote. they developed and built mars helicopter/drone (rip). First try. But spaceX gets the glory because... break things??

SpaceX gets credit and rightly so because they have achieved things which no national space agency nor private company has ever done before, and done it faster and at a lower budget than anyone has done before.

Every other national space agency and private company had both infinitely more money, time, and engineers than SpaceX did (when founded) yet they were making zero progress on reusable rockets, cheap super heavy lift capacity to orbit, and America had no way of taking their own astronauts to the space station!

Musk (hate him or love him) founded a company from nothing which has exceeded the capabilities of nasa and the us government, the European space agency, and the russian space agency, as well as ULA, Boeing, Lockheed etc.

They have the first rocket ever made which can take payloads to orbit and then be reused. They have the most cost effective rocket ever made for taking loads to orbit. They have reused rockets up to 20 times! They have build the most powerful rocket ever built which is fully reusable. They have built the most efficient and powerful rocket engines ever built before. And they have done it all incredibly quickly starting from nothing.

Oh and they also built a massive internet constellation providing fast and cheap satellite internet to the whole world, saving countless lives and also helping stimulate economies across the world as well as enabling more remote work etc.

So much of what they have done was considered impossible or not economical or not practical or so difficult other countries or companies didn’t even TRY.

So yes. Given their success it’s worth trying to understand their development methodology, which is iterate fast and fail lots and learn lots. Given how much they’ve kicked the shit out of the SLS program in capability and budget and also how they’ve crushed Blue Origin (which started earlier with more budget) who both operate in a more old fashioned way, I would certainly say it’s important to acknowledge they may be doing something right!

The space shuttle did this over 40 years ago. You can argue SpaceX have the first economical one 40 years later, but the second stage isn't reusable. Once they get starship working they might have it.

Their finances aren't public but there is some stuff to go on where we can say Falcon is probably economical despite not recovering the second stage.

This TED talk from Gwynne Shotwell says they will have reuse of starship so dialed in that in 3 years (from now) they will be competitive with commercial airliners and be operating for consumers in production:

https://www.ted.com/talks/gwynne_shotwell_spacex_s_plan_to_f...

To be safe enough for that I would have expected thousands of flawless flights by now. They said in 2020 it was still on track for 2028 but the Dear Moon project was canceled since that last update.

Are you not considering the fact that the huge external tank and the two SRBs were destroyed every time? Not to mention the insane costs of refurbishing each space shuttle, not the mention the insanely bad safety of the shuttle and the 14 astronauts who died in it!

Space shuttle, while cool, was really, really bad design, bad safety, and totally uneconomical. It was definitely cooler than Soyuz, but Soyuz was cheaper and more safe.

There's a reason the US abandoned space shuttle and had to beg the Russians to use Soyuz to send their astronauts to the space station.