Comment by varjag
19 days ago
The snarky point of explosions wasn't mine, the poster I replied to brought it up.
The rest of your points is really one item, launch vehicles. It's where the USA clearly has the lead (above everyone else, not just ESA in particular). The question was whether the EU can successfully manage complex projects and it clearly can, suggesting otherwise is delirious.
I'm not following you.
The previous poster was basically supportive of SpaceX, talked about innovation, and didn't mention explosions at all. You wrote "If your metric of innovation is the amount of rockets exploded at debuts you shouldn't bring up SpaceX really." I interpreted this as a snarky reference to the fact the lots of SpaceX rockets have blown up - mostly due to their different approach to development.
The comment implying that SpaceX isn't innovative is what I was replying to - that looking at the work that SpaceX does (and not the whole pantheon of other space-related work it's not involved in) it's demonstrably innovative in a way that ESA just isn't (e.g. with Ariane).
The poster I replied to brought up Ariane 5 crash as the example of ESA dysfunction while being very positive about SpaceX. SpaceX had lost plenty launch vehicles both in testing and with live payloads, just ask Zuckerberg. I pointed out the contradiction there.