Comment by kortilla

>See a pattern here? Each failure from a different root cause. So multiple unsolved failure modes, not iteration. It has never reached orbit, never caught a ship, never demonstrated orbital refueling.

Solid comment on the ISP business but this is straight up bullshit. They absolutely better have different root causes. That’s exactly what iteration looks like. Blowing up subsequent ships for the same problem would be incompetence.

Also the ship has very explicitly been held from an orbital trajectory to ensure predictable reentry in the event of no re-engine light. It’s very apparent from external analysis it was capable of the extra few seconds of engine runtime for an elliptical orbit.