Comment by NitpickLawyer
3 days ago
> SpaceX have never had that much success from a first launch.
That is incorrect. Both F9 and FH have successfully launched on the first try, with full primary mission success.
F1 (20 years ago) had 3 failed flights and succeeded on the 4th flight.
Starship hasn't had an operational flight yet.
I see your point but disagree in the conclusion. F1 and F9 are a clear lineage, same engines, scaled up somewhat. It's fairly clear that their experience with F1's failures directly contributed to F9's early successes.
FH is again part of that same lineage. So much of that was a known quantity already. I know that it took way longer to build because it turned out to be way harder than expected, but it was still so much closer than SpaceX's other vehicles.
Also, where F9 built on F1's failures, it also built on its own failures to land, and took a very iterative approach to re-use.
Starship hasn't had an operational flight, no, but neither has New Glenn, and yet NG jumped straight to a flight somewhat equivalent to Starship's flight test 4?
My gut feeling is that SpaceX are far ahead of Blue Origin, but it's hard to compare because of the radically different approaches.
If Falcon 1 is to be thrown into the ring for consideration due to engine similarity, then we'd have to figure out where Vulcan fits. It already flew the same kind of engines that powered New Glenn.
Just a thought.
Very fair point. In some ways that would make NG a more iterative approach, but Vulcan is another example of, at least mostly, a waterfall approach.