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Comment by swarnie | Hacker News Reader

The Chief Twit said "anything other than blowing up the launch pad is a success."

> “I'm not saying it will get to orbit, but I am guaranteeing excitement. It won't be boring,” Musk promised at a Morgan Stanley conference last month. “I think it's got, I don't know, hopefully about a 50% chance of reaching orbit.”

Sounds like he moved the goalpost.

He's been saying this for literally years. That the pad is stage 0 and if they don't blow up the pad, they're happy.

I think he said the exact same thing about the first Falcon Heavy launch.

I am not disputing that this is progress. It is an admirable effort. I am happy for them.

I interpreted literally the words they used about the plan for today's launch.

It's a difference between "definition of success" and "the plan". They can't just say "we want to get off the pad and whatever happens afterwards, meh", they have to point it somewhere. So they plan out a whole flight to maximize useful data per additional success, but consider some subset of the plan to be an overall success.

I might go to the grocery store with a list of five things, but I only really need two things. Coming home with 3 things would be a success.

I am happy that they had a partial success. I remain unconvinced that it was a success as defined by other things they said.

Who cares? It's a lot of arguing over semantics that doesn't end up meaning anything in the grand scheme of things. SpaceX continues making progress on the development of Starship, and the tiny little mishaps that depend mostly on chance along the way don't end up actually mattering in the grand scheme of things.

I don't think SpaceX cares about your uninformed opinion

I agree with you. The only information I had is the words they used.

The plan was a range.

On one end of the spectrum, Starship detonates on the pad and they have learned very little and have a year of work to do rebuilding the pad.

On the other end of the spectrum, everything works flawlessly and Starship survives re-entry and smacks into the ocean off of Hawaii.

They achieved a result in the middle. Neither total failure nor total success, and well within their stated expectations for this attempt.

They defined success up front as being able to gather information. They did that.

Oh, In that case there’s no such thing failure then. Lucky for them

Exploding on the launch pad would've been a failure.

surely not - they would have gathered information

there is something about this launcher and the launch that looks exeedingly wrong to me cf a saturn v (i realise spacex is trying to launch larger masses)

you should write elon and tell him what he's doing wrong and how saturn v did it right

on twitter?

It’s sort of difficult to call it moving the goal post when that goal post was set well before the test attempt. That’s maintaining the goal post.

Moving the goal post pre-event is a new one for me.

Thanks for the laugh.

If you watch the launch broadcast, the hosts set the expectation that they success meant achieving thrust-to-weight of >1 and clearing the launch facility.

Furthermore, we don't know there was a failure to separate. If I had to guess, once the vehicle was in an unstable attitude outside of the nominal flight path, they triggered the self-destruct and purposefully didn't try to separate.

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