It might, but it certainly helps having a ton of them around. Given that they used 42 of them today and 2 failed in some fashion, we'll call that a 1:21 failure rate. On a more typical rocket with say 10 engines (eg falcon 9), there's a good chance they wouldn't have seen the same failure till flight 3.
The whole point of Starship is that it's a reusable vehicle with easy turnaround and quick maintenance. And in particular it's supposed to be different than the other reusable vehicle with easy turnaround and quick maintenance, which turned out to be sort of a boondoggle.
Yet, they've now hand-built and destroyed twelve of these things across multiple redesigns, and it still hasn't completed its design mission once. In fact basically every launch has unexpected major failures.
As poor as its safety record ultimately ended up being, the shuttle launched successfully on its very first try. And we only had to hand-build five of them. And lost two, sure, which is still a lot less than twelve.
Yes yes, I understand that iterative design has merits and that the ability to rapidly prototype and try things in the stratosphere allows for less conservative tolerances and better ultimate performance.
But does it really take 13+ tries?! At what point to we start wondering if we have another boondoggle on our hands?
For reference, SLS has been in development for 5 times as long, and cost 15-20 times as much, as Starship, and they still haven’t landed people on the Moon, which has been one of the stated goals since the Constellation program in 2005.
I don’t see how the number of failures matters if the end result still happens faster and cheaper than anything else.
It worked out in the end, but I can’t imagine being so confident in a new system, no matter how much money and brainpower has been spent to make it safe.
The booster not completing the return part of the flight was disappointing. They had a similar incident in one of the previous flights, when they tried to maneuver the booster too aggressively immediately after stage separation which caused problems with the fuel supply. If it was something similar this time, it might be solvable by changing just a few details of the maneuver. So, maybe it is not that huge of a deal.
There were many cool things in the webcast, from them showing the catamarans that are deployed at the landing site, to the views form the cameras on-board of the "satellites". The first few minutes after liftoff were just amazing visually.
- Launch roughly on time, after a scrub yesterday. (Sounds like the scrub was due to ground equipment, most notably the water system.)
- Initial ascent was good, but then one engine on the booster went out.
- Relight of the booster's engines after stage separation for the boost back burn failed. Engines did light again for a landing burn, but seems to have hit the water harder than expected and was very off target.
- Starship lost one engine shortly after stage sep. Turned into an unintentional test of engine out capability. It made it to space.
- Some weird motion and lots of off-gassing after engine cut-off, with uncertainty about if it actually got a good orbital(ish) insertion. Seems to have been benign, with the motion being a weird slow flip to the orientation for payload deployment.
- Test deployment of dummy payloads was successful, including a couple with cameras to look back at Starship.
- An in space engine relight test was skipped, presumably due to the issues during launch.
- Re-entry to over the Indian Ocean seemed to go really well. Nothing obviously burning or falling off. The amazing views of the plasma during re-entry, something never seen live before starship, are now routine.
- Starship did a maneuver to simulate how they'll have to go out over the gulf and back to the landing site.
- Nailed the target, evidenced by views from drones and buoys. Soft landing before falling over and giving us a big (expected) boom.
As far as overall progress from previous test flights goes, they're at least treading water while making many large changes. I think they were hoping to try for a tower catch and actually going orbital for next flight, but I highly doubt that now. The boostback burn failing was the largest failure, with the engine failure on Starship being a close second. Good performance despite engine out seems to be an unintentional success.
Most obvious improvement was having no re-entry heating problems, secondmost was deploying with zero issues and with a faster pace. It appears they decided to pause the "horizontal" movement of the pez dispenser before a final push away, probably to avoid vibration causing those "bonks" on the payload door, like we had once before.
tectonic•55m ago