My guess is the biggest issue is the destruction of the pad. Building it up so that it doesn’t get destroyed by each launch will be a very expensive challenge.
Nevertheless both the SpaceX and NASA approaches to this are valid engineering approaches.
Whether this particular failed launch is a long term success remains to be seen. If the next 5 Starship launches all explode, maybe the NASA approach of get it right first is the way to go when it comes to space flight.
If SpaceX spends the next 10 years and another 10 billion $ on Starship. It would still be far superior to SLS.
> maybe the NASA approach of get it right first is the way to go when it comes to space flight.
Again, it has to be pointed out that SLS is not close to the same thing, its a lot of legacy tech.
If SpaceX had to build a large booster auto of Falcon 9 tech they could likely design it to work on the first attempt. As they did with Falcon 9.
But Starship is just a different beast. With NASA methods, it would take multiple decades to get to first test and likely never get there.
SLS/Orion is simply the wrong architecture, and the wrong strategy. Independent of Starship or not. I have been arguing this since 2017, long before Starship was relevant.
Of course in retrospect it would have been better to just contract private rocket companies, as intended by the Obama administration, even had SpaceX not existed. The loss of Ares rocket knowledge with its cost plus contracts and countless subcontractors wouldn't have been so bad. At the cost of the SLS program probably multiple private companies could have developed heavy launch rockets. But at the time it was apparently much less obvious how cost inefficient the NASA developed rockets really were. Now NASA funds SpaceX for part of Artemis 3, but that's only a small fraction of the money that is still poured into SLS.
That is just an excuse. They cared about investment in their states, nothing else.
You're leaning on a lot of hypotheticals and assumptions, right?
Do we even know how much a Starship launch costs? The only cost I can find is Musk saying they'd dropped $2-3B, but that was back in 2019. My point is...how can it not be a comparison when costs may (or, may not) be comparable?
I don't think the reason NASA Is risk-adverse is because of cost - it's because a similar explosion would effectively crash the entire NASA space program.
We know how much SLS cost in a lot of detail. Also remember, SLS development, the 20 billion is only to first launch to get to 1B they will likely drop another 10 billion or so and it will likely take until 2030.
We don't know about Starship, but it is far, far less. SpaceX could absolutly not spend 5 billion $ a year on the program.
And the complexity of Starship is in a different dimension.
So Starship for a fact is orders of magnitude cheaper then SLS and orders of magnitude more complex.
In all seriousness I don't follow space stuff much so I give the benefit of the doubt when 99% of posters give rave reviews... but I also know who is in charge of this company and the same thing was happening with Tesla a few years ago with every announcement/demo getting 99% of HN people giddy and just a few shouted down people saying "but..."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17397271
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16587249
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16328676
Pretty even mix of enthusiasm and doomsaying. There's even people saying that Tesla will go bankrupt and Apple will absorb them.