Comment by LorenPechtel
1 day ago
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.