Comment by vannevar
3 days ago
They do not expect to lose a given vehicle. They are tolerant of losing some vehicles over time, because they understand that every flight may be affected by unknown unknowns. There is certainly no evidence that they expect to lose crewed vehicles, or that they are tolerant of crew loss.
I think the high loss rate for Starship can largely be traced back to the choice of using steel for the vehicle, which drastically reduces margins across the system. You could certainly say that they had a higher expectation of failure because they made that choice. In that sense, I understand your point. But to the best of their ability, they try to fly every vehicle successfully.
They haven't lost a crewed vehicle.
The only Starship loss that bothers me is the first one. I have no problem with "let's see if this works", I have a problem with dismissing the opinions of all the experts and launching without a flame trench. You don't need to be a rocket engineer to see that when you give all that energy no place to go a lot of it is going to get reflected back at the rocket.
What should be counted against them are the two operational Falcon 9s that were lost. The second one especially bothers me: we didn't really need that part anyway is not an answer to why the part failed!
> They haven't lost a crewed vehicle.
Yes, that's my point. SpaceX understands they need to do many unmanned flights before trusting a launch system with a crew. NASA is trusting Artemis with only a single unmanned flight. That is very high risk tolerance, to the point of recklessness in my opinion, compared to SpaceX.