SpaceX supporters can only call this "moving fast, breaking stuff" for so long as the entire program regresses in on itself in terms of milestones. This was never easy, but the Falcon program sure made it look so.
> the entire program regresses in on itself in terms of milestones.
The alternative would be looking at the competing programs from Boeing, Blue Origin, etc. It's not like they are hitting their milestones particularly well with their more traditional waterfall approach. The point of rapid iteration is that it is an inherently open ended process that has no milestones other than to launch the next iteration within weeks/months of the previous one. Which they have been doing fairly consistently.
If SpaceX gets starship in a launcheable and recoverable state, they'll still have many years of competing against competitors that have to rely on single launch vehicles exclusively. They would be very early to market. And there's a decent chance they might start nailing things with a few more launches.
Now they have regressed to blowing up on the pad during static testing.
Seems very different to me than the Falcon story, 100%. Granted, they had luck too.
I'm surprised that people are losing their minds over a few explosions as if the US government didn't blow up hundreds of rockets in order to get a working product.
The risk angle is that this isn't about national security or a government enterprise. This is commercial - you can't spend your money if you're dead.
How can you be confident that, given the circumstance, their lower-cost competitor, the one pushing iterative startup style move fast approach, has the same extensive safety checks AND had zero hardware bugs in 10 or so years?
Which one do you think the astronauts want to ride on?
I don't want to listen to the maddening tic tic tic tic tic sound[1] on Dragon doing best it can to deorbit by mashing H key, or experience human excrement contamination problem[2] caused by toilet system becoming autonomously unassembled. Soyuz with intact main engines don't seem to have those kinds of problems[3], only spinal injury risks in ballistic modes.
Dragon V2 is a Tesla rocket, after all. In hindsight, why would have it not been one, and how could have it ever been a good thing? Sure, Starliner practically died and rebooted during docking with the ISS, which is surely extremely dangerous, but when it comes to Dragon V2, they had proper kaboom during ground testing.
Tell me, which human spacecraft in past 20 years had a full on explosion, and why should I want to be on it?
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADFlgu-3GgU
2: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/01/tech/spacex-crew-dragon-t...
Starship = regressing every flight.
This isn't hard to parse man.
Is Blue Origin following waterfall? Why would the founder of Amazon follow the polar opposite strategy of the rest of his businesses?
But there seems to be a lot of progress in reusable launcher development outside the US, mainly in China and apparently also among Japanese car manufacturers!