Hot staging was the second big success, and Starship got to space.
The flight termination was disappointing, but the actual functioning of the FTS system seems to be fixed. That was a problem with the first flight and should make the FAA very happy.
Who are you talking to where many people are saying that? I work in the space industry and no one I've ever spoken to says that.
Even the first launch had some. https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/12claay/the_k.... I recall the during the SpaceX audio commentary of this morning's launch (but perhaps EverydayAstronaut's) it was mentioned that onboard cameras on Starship and Super Heavy would be attempting to communicate via Starlink for the first time.
They have a production line to build these things. They’ll roll out the next one and try again. It’s not like SLS where everything is expected to work perfectly.
But yeah, landings would have been much bigger successes.
Apollo 4, the first time the full Apollo Saturn V rocket stack was assembled, did not blow up on the first attempt to space. That is something to celebrate. Now wasting millions of government dollars from subsidies, which in the end comes from citizens.
We should not be celebrating failure.
Apollo 1 is highly analogous to the current testing of Starship. New spacecraft, highly ambitious, coming together for the first time.
Its conflagration was predictable, and a total waste of the life of the astronauts onboard. Only their deaths forced the whole spacecraft to be redesigned the way it should have been before any astronauts were onboard. Even afterwards, a second electrical fire nearly killed three more astronauts, far from any safety though their shiny new door.
The Space Shuttle ran much the same way. Carrying astronauts on its very first flight, people though it was safe, right up until it spectacularly killed seven astronauts. After that, it was flown much less ambitiously, and then it killed seven more people, and then we still kept flying it because it was all we had, and our bureaucracy was stuck with it.
Starship blowing up today poses no risk to human life, or to any organizational ambition. Rather, its present failures represent progress towards future success. Somebody is trying to do better than has been done in the past. If they learn all the things to not do to their rocket before valuable payloads and people fly on it, all the better.
As predictable the news media - most of which seem to have an antipathy against anything related to Musk, most likely due to ideological differences between their staff and Musk himself - present the launch as "a failure", "a flop", "a disaster", "a fiasco" and more of the like. This goes for nearly all of the ones I sampled ranging from the likes of CNN to places like Sweden's "Dagens Nyheter". As to whether this misrepresentation is due to them not understanding the expectations of test launches like these or in an(other) attempt to tar-and feather another Musk enterprise is unclear but I find it hard to believe that these institutions do not have the facts at hand to honestly report on such tests.
[ apparently click that down-arrow again... ]
NYT: “The journeys of Starship’s two parts ended in separate explosions. But the engineers at Elon Musk’s spaceflight company overcame problems that marred the rocket’s first flight in April.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/science/spacex-starship-l...
Successful test of Starship’s two stages ended in explosions, making progress over the initial test flight in April.
(A fusion bomb generates more power for a minuscule period of time, but that sort of competes in a different class.)
Starship is like a top drag racer where it’s quickly damaging itself in normal operation, but it’s the most powerful local machine that can last for over a minute.
However, there’s a lot of pulsed devices that briefly get to much higher energy levels like artillery or experiments that charge capacitor banks for massive discharges like Z machine which briefly hits 300TW.
Edit: misread your comment, we’re in agreement. But I’ll leave the arithmetic.
Here is more recent and complete version: https://archive.ph/aN2dV
https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-today-is-failing-...
Keep in mind that the goal of this launch wasn't to carry any payload. It was to get data and further iterative development. People here, especially, should understand how iterative development works.
I'm sorry about the booster tho. But overall it's hard to consider this anything other than a great success.
Scott Manley has a good short up on the booster at hot staging.
Even here, the detractors are coming out of the woodwork to complain about success. At least we get to mine salt from their tears, I guess?
It's really a glass half empty headline, isn't it? It's like if someone got bronze at the Olympics and the headline were, "Athlete loses to multiple opponents, fails to get gold or silver medal."
I'm no fan of Musk by any means, but you only have to look at the Falcon program to see how successful Spacex has been. I have no doubt that Starship will work out.
There’s a reason words like “unsustainable” are so often associated with the Apollo program. It was amazing, but it couldn’t be a model for continued progress.
Do you consider that a failure of the Saturn-V program? Or do you understand the value of testing prototype hardware to destruction?
In SpaceX's case, they've done this exact process before with the Falcon to great success. In a few years, Starship launches will likely be a routine thing, as Falcon launches are now.
You have to understand this is a private business doing it on a budget and fast. Yes, NASA is involved...
But that doesn't seem to have been a Saturn V. What was it? I'm pretty sure it was on Youtube, but a quck search failed to turn it up.
So, maybe "not one Saturn V blew up on launch", but one of the Saturns did.
Applies perfectly and seems to be working for SpaceX
