> They will be finding problems in this thing until the day it's taken out of service.
Is this similar to how they developed the Falcon 9 platform?
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.
They're plan is to mass produce Starship and work towards operating them continuously like a 737 to space. Blowing up the first few generates great data for identifying problems and helps get that production line rolling.
The falcon 1 was much smaller than the falcon 9 (literally 1/9th the engines on the first stage), and they intended the very first falcon 1 launch to work. I'm not sure that those failures really support the claim that falcon 9 had a similar development model to starship where they are intentionally blowing up starships to develop starship (edit:) and they have already blown up more than 3 starship prototypes.
No two falcons were ever built exactly the same until Block 5 or so (and honestly, I'd be surprised if there weren't changes between rockets coming off the line now, but the changes are much smaller and more iterative, I would guess).
It's basically the software development process, just with hardware. Falcon 9 is a mature product at this point, so most of what's happening are maintenance changes.