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.

this doesn't even scratch the surface. Slow motion cameras and real time sensors for debugging hardware issues, computer simulations, 3d printing.

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??