And even the Apollo 10 mission which went 99.99% of the way from the Earth to the moon, just 15km from the surface (but couldn't have landed on the moon- LM structure was too heavy) was incredibly important step. The sort of thing that people today would want to skip, it doesn't seem flashy or necessary. Why take all the risk of going into lunar orbit and separating the modules (requiring the very first rendezvous not in in Earth orbit) but not actually land on the Moon? It was about getting all of the ground crew proved and worked out, and proving that the rendezvous would work and they could get home, so that the actual landing mission could focus their efforts on just working out the last 15km, confident that all of the other problems were already dealt with. Trying to do all of that in one mission would have been a gigantic mess- A11 crew felt a lack of training time as it was.

So far, Isaacman's competence has mostly consisted of (rightfully) throwing is predecessors under the bus. The real test will be if there are problems on his watch, but also it seems likely the result of having backbone will not be good for Isaacman and sycophants will end up running the agency again.

Wow, in the past no presidents pushed for NASA to launch under deadlines. Imagine telling them they need to get to the moon before the end of the decade. Unprecedented.

Good thing we have a large number of CRUD SaaS experts to tell us what's wrong with the space program

> They've blown up 11 Starships without any of them making it to orbit.

They purposely were not trying for orbit from my understanding. The last one did orbit the earth at suborbital heights and release satellites. It did seem to do what they wanted it to do, it wasn't a failure.

This is why NASA can never adopt the SpaceX philosophy. People don't understand the concept of test fight.

>> And we 'tried until it didn't blow up immediately' is not a great sign.

But everything that didn't blow up has been tested 11 times already. Things that did fail have had more than one design iteration tested. One approach has gains more real-world test experience.