Comment by decimalenough
2 days ago
Are you serious? They just launched a completely revamped version of Starship from an entirely new pad, and still hit almost all of their planned milestones while demonstrating that the design is reliable enough to handle a missing engine.
Go back and look at the original plans and projections. Constantly redesigning is not something to be proud of. I call it vibe spaceship design.
Two successful test missions over 15 years using a dead end rocket and ship design for $50+ billion is not something to be proud of either.
Starship's design is so far beyond where the rest of the world is that even if it takes another 3 years of iteration to perfect it will still be by far the best rocket in the world for many years afterward, to the point where it would hardly make sense to choose to launch on any other existing or currently in development rocket for any reason other than political ones.
You can't perfect a flawed design. The whole thing might be too big and complex to launch reliably in the way that NASA and spacex need.