Regarding today's Starship failure.
Seeing a lot of idiots now claiming to be rocket scientists, commenting on the Starship SN9 explosion today.
I can't deny I'm disappointed at the outcome, but I think it's worth putting this up here again. These are all the failures in the Falcon 9 rocket development program, mostly explosive, and on a smaller and less difficult vehicle. If you want to rapidly develop rocket technology that has never been done before, things are going to go wrong, and you have to push through that. SpaceX persevered with Falcon 9, and they now fly nearly every week, and land reliably on drone ships in the ocean. Some boosters have now flown eight times over, landed, been refurbished, and sent up again. Six astronauts have flown to the international space station aboard them.
I think, for most of these knuckle daggers, they just don't like Elon Musk and they want to shit on SpaceX test failures as a result. They have no idea what this work means for humanity, and they don't care about the combined work and passion of tens of thousands of engineers and scientists working to make this development happen.
It takes courage to conduct such large scale, publically visible testing of your work, at such a rapid pace, knowing the ignorant masses will rip your efforts apart after every time something goes wrong. You'll be laughed at, and ridiculed, and it will diminish the pride in your work because people only remember the failures. Is anyone not well versed in the Starship program talking about how amazing it is to see a 16-storey high rocket falling like a skydiver, in controlled aerodynamic descent, onto a landing pad? No, all the headlines are about the explosions.
Why are there no headlines lambasting Blue Origin and Jeff Bezos for their failures? Well, because they haven't tested anything yet, that's why. The significantly smaller, less capable "New Glenn" rocket being developed by that company has not been built or tested yet. It exists now merely as CGI renders and wishes. It's easy to avoid criticism when you've not submitted anything for judgement at all.
So, while they pick up the pieces, SpaceX engineers are going to be figuring out what went wrong, and SN10 (currently still waiting diligently on the launch pad) will be modified accordingly, and then it's time for another try, and another, and another after that, until they get the design right. They did it with Falcon 9, and they will do it with Starship. And, to the uninformed and the haters, what the hell have you done worth a damn lately?
It takes courage and commitment to continuebon testing after a failure that is that public. Say what you want about Musk, he is willing to keep throwing money at vehicles that are exploding in an attempt to figure out what is wrong.
