Starship will attempt a launch this Friday
fly.faa.gov
fly.faa.gov
Plan to get to the park entrance at least 30 mins early because it takes time to walk through to the southern end, and there will likely be a large crowd.
Stayed at Isla Grand Hotel and there were a bunch of other people hanging out the night before, have fun!
Bring binoculars. You don’t need them to see the rocket on the pad but it flies away pretty fast once it’s going, and they’re useful for watching propellant load and noticing other details. I also bring camping chairs, sunscreen, bug spray, and a bottle of water.
If it's a concern, I'd check again on Thursday & early Friday. At least around me, this summer, their multi-day forecasts were often pretty inaccurate.
https://www.margaritavilleresorts.com/margaritaville-beach-r...
I stayed in Port Isabell a few years ago visiting some of my wife's family in the valley. There's a big freaking bridge there that you can see the pad from. I bet that bridge would be a good place to watch as well.
This video gives you an idea of what it was like watching from there on the first flight:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPazqKRf9NM
The biggest scheduling point is that you probably need to get there super early, like at least 8 hours beforehand. Not sure how that's going to work out with the small children you mention in a later comment.
This isn’t about exploration. It’s about profit. And there’s not an easy way to shine that.
The only way they start making meaningful profit from what they're doing is basically if the exact opposite scenario of what you're implying comes to pass - that space becomes so completely accessible and utilized that they win by scale. And that's the exact opposite of 'mega yachts.' This is explicitly about exploration, colonization, mining, and more. This is about actually opening space to the human race, beyond relying on multi billion dollar toy expeditions, for the first time ever.
Maybe a Corolla would be more relatable nowadays.
Another profitable industry besides mining could be setting up nursing homes on the moon, where wealthy elderly folks could live fuller lives due to the reduced gravity. Yes, the idea of this only being available to the super-rich (at first) is nauseating to me too, but if it provides the source of funding to establish sustainable moon bases, that would be incredible, and other industries could follow afterwards, including e.g. new sports leagues such as low-gravity basketball and soccer.
Eventually, enough people would be living on the moon as helpers for the wealthy folks and athletes that eventually there would be so many working-class people on the moon that secondary and tertiary industries would spring up to provide products and services for the working-class people. Soon enough it would become profitable to farm crops on the moon (for lunar consumption), build products on the moon (for lunar consumption), and more.
We'd eventually get to the point where a lunar nation could have positive GDP and be economically self-sustaining. It would be a trade partner with the terrestrial nations, and be the first new nation to step beyond Earth. Generations of people will get married and be born there, and humanity would be a step closer to settling the cosmos.
You’re depriving yourself of the opportunity to appreciate a once in a lifetime event because some news outlet told you you should dislike the guy who built it.
Given these circumstances, depending solely on NASA for space advancement or asteroid deflection may not be the most effective strategy. Those acquainted with federal programs can confirm these issues. Thus, your comment appears uninformed and overlooks the wider impact on American taxpayers.
It’s hard to believe you’re being objective if you think the SLS, costing over $2 billion per launch, is superior and not profit-driven, compared to Starship's estimated $40 million launch cost.
If he doesn't do it who is going to do that?
Surely NASA has has fifty years to do something like this (excepting the ISS which is).
> "billionaire’s mega yacht"
Billionaire hatred is a real thing. He will not be riding on this thing and likely never will be, so I'm not sure this is a great analogy.
What makes you say that? Musk has made it known he has a dream to "... die on Mars. Hopefully not at the point of impact."
Secondly, if you don't think NASA was about profit, you don't understand NASA. Who do you think built all the Apollo rockets? Private contractors working for profit.
Besides, what is wrong with profit? Profit is what makes things sustainable and allows reinvestment to continually improve.
The tech here is way beyond what governments have been able to do so far. It promises to be quite a show. Might blow up again, but they'll learn and build another one.
For the record, I find Musk to be a menace, but the team he put together at SpaceX is phenomenal.
Falcon 9 launch is $62m. NASA SLS launch is $1b.
That's 6% of the cost.
It's about lowering the barrier to launches by dramatically decreasing the cost.
I'll also note that NASA's funding for Starship was for a lunar lander, not a launch vehicle, and SpaceX was the cheapest of all the competitors despite developing a launch vehicle as well while the competitors were only developing a lander and planned to use an existing launch vehicle.
A billionaire's mega yacht is for his exclusive use. Starship is definitely not that. Starship's purpose has nothing to do with any personal transportation plans for Musk himself.
If you’re on less then not likely
But remember it’s not just your bank balance. Do you really want to live in a society where your neighbour can’t afford treatment for cancer? Or where your nephew gets weekly “active shooter” drills? Where you get two weeks a year holiday if you’re lucky?
All the other things you listed heavily depend on where you live and the company you work at?
Maybe? I would like to live in a society where there's no hard ceiling on what you can achieve if you have the competency and some luck. Do you think it's easier to become a millionaire in the EU or the US? It feels like there's very little social mobility in Europe compared to the US.
Likewise, the same can be said of the United States. Quality of private healthcare is going to depend greatly where you are. Remote areas and smaller towns and cities are not going to have access to top-quality physicians like larger cities will have. But, top-quality physicians will have very long waiting lists. I'm currently on the waiting list for a top-national orthopedic surgeon in the Bay Area and my total appointment wait is 5 months.
For ACA plans, the premiums can factor in age and smoking status. That's it. Job related insurance is generally take it or leave it at a fixed price.
That's what you're worried about? A .000067% chance? You must live a life of crippling fear then, the number of things more deadly to your kids than .000067% is staggering. I assume you never let them enter a vehicle of any kind, for example.
By the way, of that 38 per year number, less than 10% happens inside a classroom [0]. The most likely location is outside in the school parking lot, a violent dispute between students, and not a "mass shooting" scenario. So if you were mostly concerned about "mass shootings", the odds of death are over 10 times less than .000067%.
[0] https://www.campussafetymagazine.com/safety/k-12-school-shoo... [1] https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/education/k-...
Edit: Also just read that on the same day, the first GPS satellites were also launched from the US.
As for SpaceX, just a few months ago the Psyche asteroid mission and a Starlink launch also happened the same day.
“From a field near the village of Serooskerke, five V-2s were launched on 15 and 16 September, with one more successful and one failed launch on the 18th“
That must mean they launched at least 3 on either the 15th or the 16th.
That page also says “Beginning in September 1944, more than 3,000 V-2s were launched” and “The final two rockets exploded on 27 March 1945”, so that’s over 3,000 in at most 208 days, so there must have been days there were at least 14 “launches in a single day by the same entity”. I suspect the actual top number is a lot higher.
If you think that’s borderline “a single entity”, there’s “After the US Army captured the Ludendorff Bridge during the Battle of Remagen on 7 March 1945, the Germans were desperate to destroy it. On 17 March 1945, they fired eleven V-2 missiles at the bridge”
This graph shows the incredible impact of SpaceX on the volume of rocket launches, with an exponential rise in recent years:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-...
With Starship, SpaceX is striving to make rockets fully reusable, which will transform human civilization by making space vastly more accessible.
https://twitter.com/Alexphysics13/status/1724225785139986648...
Official Launch license has still been not granted. But it will likely launch on Friday.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1wcilQ58hI
T-minus 30 seconds from launch:
https://youtu.be/-1wcilQ58hI?t=2674
Highlights of First SpaceX Starship Flight Test Video (~2 Minutes):
This is like watching the first container ship get built. It’s going to change so much so quickly — we couldn’t be more stoked.
edit: https://i.imgur.com/Avn6Cnm.png; that's just the output of curl, there's a bit of html above and below the message but it's a really straightforward page.
SPACE X STARSHIP SUPER HEAVY FLT 2 BOCA CHICA, TX
PRIMARY: 11/17/23 1300Z-1720Z
BACKUP: 11/18/23 1300Z-1720Z
11/19/23 1300Z-1720Z
Previous: am I missing something? This says 11/14/2023, aka tomorrow. Starting 11:30Z (6:30AM Eastern, 3:30AM Pacific)... like, 9 hours from now? And it seems to be landing somewhere in SFO area? There's a bunch of checks for SFO... [ed: there are also Starlink launches listed: 6-28 and 7-7 (whatever that means)].
SPACE X STARSHIP SUPER HEAVY FLT 2 BOCA CHICA, TX
PRIMARY: 11/17/23 1300Z-1720Z
BACKUP: 11/18/23 1300Z-1720Z
11/19/23 1300Z-1720ZLoss of taste for most foods, vision problems, loss of muscle mass and bone density. In light of these and the many unpleasant our outright dangerous effects of space travel on human physiology, science writer and cartoonist Zach Weinersmith wonders: When it comes to the dream of space expansion, what exactly do we hope to gain? Listen as he and EconTalk's Russ Roberts discuss his new book (co-authored with Kelly Weinersmith) A City on Mars, which offers a hard-nosed yet humorous look at the sobering and lesser-discussed challenges involved in building space settlements. Topics include the particular problems posed by the moon and Mars's atmospheres; the potential difficulty of reproducing in zero gravity; and the dangerous tendency to overlook a key factor in whether space settlement is a good idea: the fact that people are people, wherever they may be.
https://www.econtalk.org/zach-weinersmith-on-space-settlemen...
Without the engineering breakthroughs to produce something like the Raptor engine launches at this scale just aren't possible. There's other engines with thrust to match Raptor but not the efficiency nor size. For example, there's just no way you can put 33 RS25s under an airframe.
from the link below
"The SpaceX Raptor 3 was recently test fired and reached 18% more thrust than a Raptor 2. The Raptor 2 had 25% more thrust than the Raptor 1 and it was 20% lighter."
it's just crazy what that propulsion team is doing...simply crazy
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/05/spacex-raptor-3-engine...
Musk often points out that the stage 0 work is harder (and I suspect more innovative) than the rocket (and engine) design. He also often mentions that fabrication is even harder. I.e., all the processes, tools, machines, etc. used to build all those engines and rockets is harder still than stage 0 -- one might even call it stage -1. It's possible that Raptor is not even closed to "30% of Spacex's innovation" :)
Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are already better by a long distance then any other rocket in the world. All other organizations world wide are trying to catch up to that.
You only really need huge rockets like this if you are launching some truly massive amount of stuff. This just wasn't a thing until today. The biggest ever was during the moon race, US Saturn V and Soviets N1. However the Saturn V was expensive and NASA wanted to have a reusable Shuttle instead, so they dropped it. The Soviets did the N1 but when they lost the moon race (and a few failures) they didn't want to pay for it anymore.
So really since the moon race, rockets of this scale just were not necessary. If you can't reuse the rocket, a rocket of this scale is just to expensive to be practical.
It took SpaceX making re-usability real and mega constellations to make it worth considering a rocket like Starship.
Just for reference, this thing is far more powerful then the Saturn V or N1. It has almost double the liftoff thrust. So really humanity has never operated this scale of rocket before.
Also, the risk of failure is so high. Musk was literally laughed out of the room when he proposed re-usable orbital boosters. I'm sure he was laughed at again when he proposed a full-flow staged combustion engine (Raptor). And again when he said they were going to put 33 engines beneath a stainless steel water tower.
Governments can't weather the ire of public opinion the way a private company can.
edit: after all that typing i just realized i'm basically saying "i agree" to your comment hah. The risk of failure is just too high for governments to stomach.
From what I understand about space exploration, this is an opposite-world position. Can you expand on what you mean?
Governments ("gov organizations") have been defining the term "space exploration" since 1944. First object in outer space, first object in orbit, first human in outer space, first space station, first interstellar space flight, first human on the moon, first man-made objects on mars, venus, all by "gov organizations."
I'm super confused why you think the comparatively young private space industry, which has accomplished putting satellites and a car in low earth orbit, is somehow more capable?
At insanely massive expense. Note that this isn't a bad thing, R&D is expensive and humanity has benefitted from this. The problem here is just the government doing it never leads to cost decreases. The lack of cheap orbital access has crippled the expansion of space industry.
Industry tends to be exceptionally capable in producing assembly line style production. Up until this point rockets have been much more custom productions, use once and throw away. There was pretty much zero headway in the government achieving this scale of production. SpaceX in two decades has dramatically decreased the cost to orbit. And with their new rocket will drop costs by order of magnitude or more. This will lead to far more government R&D expenditure in space.
>which has accomplished putting satellites and a car in low earth orbit
And by that you mean "has accomplished in putting more satellites than all other governments/entities added together into space". I don't know, you tell me.
i would say the appetite for risk and prioritization in the private space industry makes them more capable. Don't forget the Apollo program and the space race was in response to a real existential threat. Once the threat lessoned the appetite for risk went down and other priorities took center stage.
The private space industry has taken all that innovation, adding to it, and moving forward where the governments don't because they have other fish to fry. To mangle a quote, "If [private space industry] have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants [government science/engineering]". I think the private space industry is further validation the public investment in space is worth it.
There is a very, very, very big gap between a operational heavy and super heavy rocket that has proven re-usability up to 20 times.
What 'China' ie iSpace did was build a tiny hopper, did a mini-hop and demonstrated landing. Those things are totally different dimensions.
SpaceX has done test like that in 2012, and that was with far more advanced engine technology:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_prototypes
China official reusable rocket are even further away.
And in fact its not that China is closing the gap, its actually that SpaceX is INCREASING the gap. SpaceX is not standing still, going from landing to doing it 100+ times successful and 20+ times with a single rocket.
And in addition SpaceX is already moving on to Raptor engines and Starship, further increasing the gap.
So lets be clear about the fact, China is not closing the gap, they are falling further behind.
SpaceX is rapidly increasing the gap with all (government) space agencies, even the US/NASA and EU/ESA; both SLS and Ariane 6 are decades behind.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-stage...
Also don't let the myopia blind you to the fact that whatever SpaceX innovates, others will commercialize. That's the entire point in the first place. Musk has stated multiple times he'd open source everything if he was allowed to ..
[1]: https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-...
[2]: https://www.faa.gov/space/stakeholder_engagement/spacex_star...
Even there, when it went up, the door to the beach (which we had open to see if we could hear it) was rattling, as well as the windows in the room.
Obviously there is something to be said for being at the park, but I suspect there is something to be said for being a bit further north - particularly if you want to avoid the worst of the crowds leaving afterwards.
Do plan to spend some time on the island afterwards - as the main route back is a longish two lane bridge that will back up significantly for a couple hours as the early birds try to rush out.
Unconfirmed whether starship will attempt and ocean landing or bellyflop… would be odd if they didn’t try the landing maneuver.
This graphic capture my understanding of what people outside SpaceX are expecting for this test. We may learn more in the coming days.
https://twitter.com/InfographicTony/status/17243188773694546...
https://www.space.com/spacex-faa-seek-dismiss-starship-lawsu...
You don't have permission to access "http://www.fly.faa.gov/adv/adv_spt.jsp" on this server.
Reference #18.94fe1202.1699997741.a52fc3c
i.e. if it makes it will this be the first? i.e. a really big deal?
This is the second integrated flight test. Even if this flight fully meets all of its goals, it won't /really/ be a successful launch by standard measures.
Starship (the top part) has successfully completed several suborbital hops, including a "bellyflop". So in that sense, yes.
This upcoming test involves launches with both Starship and the Super Heavy Booster. Succeeding the current mission goals would be the booster soft(ish) landing in the ocean near the launch site, and the Starship obtaining a parabolic arc before surviving reentry to crash into the ocean near Hawaii.
To really have a "success" by standard measures under their belt, SpaceX will need to target having Starship actually orbiting with a test payload (probably Starlinks). After that "success", they're likely to still have secondary mission failures with landing the booster, and deorbiting and landing Starship.
If they crash into the ocean do you know if they are supposed to be recoverable or will they sink?
However, in so far as the raptor engines have flown, the belly flop maneuver has been validated, and the full stack has flown, once they're landing the booster and starship following successful payload deliver we could say that the new era started when raptor first flew.
It's hard to answer the whole success question though. SpaceX has a very bend it and send it approach to R&D, they've had a hard time with starship and the powers that be, mostly because of the scale of the whole operation.
They got some useful data, but, they didn't get to do all the things they wanted/planned to do, so, failure, but, a useful one. If you remember, they smashed a few falcon 9's into the ground before they landed one. That model might not be tenable with something the size of starship, but, only because the powers that be would much rather you not blow up moon capable rockets as a habit.
Are they right, are they wrong, not really an important question for regual saps like us to be concerned with. All the spaceX fans in the world have no chance of moving the needle there any more than the spaceX haters do. I think at least most can agree, however, rockets are cool, and, watching them fly or not in 4k on youtube for free is a good thing.
If this gets to orbit or close enough, that will be considered the first successful real launch.
Wikipedia entry talks about its max capacity{150 t (330,000 lb) of payload in a fully reusable configuration}
I hope it's fully successful
I wouldn't expect it to survive the re-entry regime, as there are a lot of tiles missing, but honestly, if it makes it to atmospheric entry on target, it'll be a wild success.
Even with a high volume and relatively low cost launch vehicle, the actual offworld base will be hugely expensive, and no commercial enterprise can realistically expect to make a return for their investors.
A government needs to step up with the rationale that it will eventually form a tax-producing colony - but a huge investment will need to be put in till it gets there.
All we need is the political will and we can fund a Mars base as a purely government funded research program.
Money is just a medium for the exchange of goods or services. What would the colony export in order to generate the revenue required to produce said taxes?
Also it has space accountancy pirates.
"The law of the passage of quantitative changes into qualitative changes"
According to Wikipedia it has its roots from ancient Greece https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism
"First there was the dream, now there is reality. Here in the untainted cradle of the heavens will be created a new super race, a race of perfect physical specimens. You have been selected as its progenitors. Like gods, your offspring will return to Earth and shape it in their image. You have all served in public capacties in my terrestrial empire. Your seed, like yourselves, will pay deference to the ultimate dynasty which I alone have created. From their first day on Earth they will be able to look up and know that there is law and order in the heavens."
:)
Moonraker :)
I'm guessing Starlink will get less expensive to operate - but will it be to the point it'll displace cell towers?
Earth observations satellites would be cheaper to put up... so maybe we'll get a few more than before. But are there any real game changers?
With Starship, most of this goes away. It becomes possible to launch bigger, heavier (that is, cheaper) stuff to space. Still high-tech stuff, for sure, but engineers will be able to make more tradeoffs, because there won't be a need to optimize everything to be small and light.
Beyond that it would be a significant boon for science.
It really depends on what we mean by "offworld base". There is extensive literature on how this might be done "on a shoestring budget". Start here: https://www.marssociety.org/concepts/mars-direct/
He's also more recently said the revenues from Starlink, aiming to be at least $5+ billion monthly recurring revenue, will fund his Mars colony.
The reality is though he's now tapped into accessing the full abundance of the universe, and he's at least 1-2 decades ahead of everyone else, in part due to the synergy of his various projects: Starlink, Boring Company, Tesla, etc - all are technology that he'll need for Mars - so he can funnel revenues/sales back into those companies]; and Musk understands exponentials of scaled paths, and so him being 1-2 decades ahead, with the synergy of the multiple companies he owns/controls, every year he has the chance to leapfrog ahead another decade of any other competition.
Can we get to a point where every kg doesn't need to be maliciously thought about and optimised, maybe we could just yeet any potentially useful thing in to orbit and sort it out later.
You probably mean meticulously...
Yeah, it’s cool, but there’s bazillion things needed for a space station. Just a metal tube in the orbit isn’t sufficient.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/ekyibk/commen...
It's not a good look to criticize an org for being careless when you haven't even put bare minimum effort into seeing if they were careful.
I thought NASA already had those rockets. What's preventing them from sending astronauts and cargo now?
* Precision landing of large amount of troops, anywhere
* Ability to lift 250 tons -> precision landing of tanks and artillery, anywhere
* Deployment of kinetic impactors from space
That is a lot of launches for a rocket that doesn't work.
I would prefer some contingency plan so that were not stuck here because Elon decided to go fast and break things...
Kessler Syndrome is a real risk at higher orbits like 1000km and above. But not at the lower altitudes. Kessler Syndrome is an exponential effect, so if the losses (due to atmospheric drag) are higher than the gain (debris generation due to collisions), then you do not get the exponentially growing debris problem. It’s not even possible.
Although it should be pointed that even at higher orbits and even if you’re technically in the exponentially growing regime, this growth would occur very slowly, not minutes or hours. Think months or years. And it’d take something like an active war with mass deployment of anti-satellite weaponry to trigger that kind of thing.
In fact, most debris problems nowadays ARE caused by debris from anti satellite tests (as well as collisions with old Russian derelict satellites or explosions of upper stages not properly deorbited).
But we also have demonstration missions for deorbiting derelict satellites to prevent the production of additional debris even at these higher orbits.
But sorry to say, none of these problems are due to Elon Musk.
The same brain that is so pig-headed as to believe whatever $Conspiracy today, is also the brain that was pig-headed enough to think he could fund an EV and a Rocket company at the same time, when he had experience of none, during a recession.
If he was reasonable minded, he would have realised the whole EV and Rocket thing is a stupid risk not worth taking and he would have invested his paypal money into something safe like all his fellow paypal mafia members who started VCs, and today we would never had heard of him except in esoteric terms, and he would have been sipping mai tai or whatever it is that VCs do when they are lazing around in their 3rd yatch.
Like acc to his bio (mentioned somewhere in his 1st bio by ashlee vance) the man literally had an intervention with fellow rich white buddies that he's gonna go bankrupt, that's how stupid the idea was.
to speak in explicit 4chan terms, that autist brain of his what created/funded this, and his stupid tweets are frankly a cheap price to pay for it (at least for me, I'm not american ;p)
A thousand times this. All humans are fallible. If you presume someone isn’t you just don’t know them very well.
Unforgivable offences should not be forgiven. Beyond that - celebrate wins, cherish humanity, embrace humility and tolerance. Don’t have to like anyone, but need to tolerate and respect.
You lost me there. No need to racist, you know? It goes both ways.
I see the risk that someone who has been consistently so stubborn and capable of making reality match his absurd aspirations, might even succeed in making $Conspiracy come true before he changes his mind :)
A lot of the innovation that went into Tesla and SpaceX occurred before he decided to transform himself into a complete tit.
I'll take the good, please.
Musk is outright supporting people who are openly white supremacists, go look through his recent posts on X.
The real answer is to simply accept that real people are not one dimensional characters. They have good points and bad points. You are perfectly free to appreciate the good points while disapproving of the bad ones. Maybe there's a limit for really bad people (Hitler etc.) where you just don't want them involved in society at all, but that clearly doesn't apply to Musk. Nothing he has done is outright evil.
He sucks at solving social problems where it's unclear what people want.
So do we all.
you can admire what he accomplished. he ain't no God.
I hope SpaceX is able to dump him soon so they can get back to just being a cool company doing cool things.
Why? Is it just negative associations and emotions preventing you from enjoying it?
> bonkers conspiracy theory mongering and anti-trans, anti-democracy, and white supremacist views
That's a supremely uncharitable description.
Particularly the "white supremacist" bit. Just because I am friends with a communist and support/defend them and agree with some of their views (that aren't "communism is the best socioeconomic system") does not mean I am a communist.
I'm convinced this numb minded narrow viewed narrative is such a minority that it's proponents have a zeel to spew their misinformation every chance they can get.
> A unique and fundamental advantage of Grok is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the 𝕏 platform.
Source: https://x.ai
So I guess Tesla will collect all kinds of information from the streets, Starlink will collect (earth and space) information using satellites, and X will collect real-time information about what people are currently talking about.
I think OpenAI may not be the biggest player in AI soon.
If you're referring to futurists and visionaries, we do have many I'm sure, but most weren't lucky enough to stumble across a pile of cash they could convert into an infinite pile of cash.
Musk still has a fairly problematic views on sustainability, I'd rather have more powerful people who are convinced that public transports, healthcare and education are essential to our prosperity.
People like Elon can carry the flag of what many of us have been warning about when we point out that our systems often have single points of failures: often one man with, for example, the ability to literally end the world, and no actual safeguards to prevent it. Or, one man with billions of dollars of assets at his disposal, money which could be making people's lives better but is instead being used by that man to do things like buy his favorite website and ruin it. Or, the fact that that website is one of three or four which represent the backbone of our species' communicative ability, and that man can control which of our species' communications are seen.
Whether it's a good or bad person at the helm, this is not how our systems should be designed or function. The more horrible the person, the more obvious this is.
The problem here is the lack of properly open (and FOSS based!) popular communication channels. A committee or safety team can be even worse than one man.
Get off hacker news, and back to reddit pls
Is this similar to how they developed the Falcon 9 platform?
* It did suffer engine failures on flights 4, 83, and 108, but compensated flawlessly with the other 8 as designed. They also blew one up on the test stand (which would have been flight 29). Additionally the satellite on flight 47 was supposedly lost due to an issue with the payload adapter (not built by SpaceX), but pretty much all information about the launch is classified.