came in a little hot.
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Yep. This was a hugely exciting and largely successful test flight, which is all it was ever supposed to be. They’ve been testing the various Starship prototypes and component prototypes to destruction pretty regularly, and SN9 has more-advanced versions of the Raptors that they can now refine further due to things they learned on this flight. I’m sure they would have preferred the vehicle survived the test, but they’ve demonstrated thus far that they don’t really give a shit if these prototypes survive so long as they get any useful data out of the test–and here they’ve demonstrated that the Raptors generate enough thrust to get the Starship out of the bottom of the gravity well (something three Raptors wouldn’t ever need to do in the planned flight configurations), that the horizontal configuration is stable, that they can rotate to and from that configuration, and that they can relight the Raptors.
I was grinning from ear to ear the whole time, and while it would’ve been even more exciting to see them stick the landing, I honestly think nobody at SpaceX is or should be disappointed with how this test went.
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If that was ever the case, it may be attributable to its history of denying workers meal breaks and overtime pay, and to reported worker safety issues (and safety requires money).
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Agreed.
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If they do have poor worker relations I expect that is more likely to increase costs and reduce productivity. Gwynne Shotwell is an engineer so it wouldn’t surprise me if her appreciation of HR skills is limited. I would imagine the engineering staff are salaried employees with the work culture that goes with it. Probably young, very devoted to the mission, working 80-100 hour weeks, have the fan boy/girl thing for Elon (and/or Shotwell). Probably all socialize together, are underpaid but think they will be rewarded with stock options “some day”, think having “SpaceX” on the resume is worth the trade off. They’re probably wrong on the last two 
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Test flight or not, a catastrophic failure in testing is a catastrophic failure. I’m not sure why people would try to argue that it’s not. People spend their entire careers purposely causing them and studying them, there’s literally no reason to try and defend a failure as something it’s not.
I will continue to enjoy explosive messy failures, and they will continue to make technology better. It doesn’t need dressing.
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That’s not really how research and science works. If that was truly the case we’d be in the dark ages right now. Failure can still yield great data
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I think @emo_pinata point was that it’s still a failure, not that it doesn’t give us data. Failure is critical to the scientific method, because then you have to come at the problem from a new angle if how you were approaching it proves faulty.
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Yes, and they even have a term for it in rocketry: “Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly”. The key is to get data from the test to prevent future RUDs, and that appears to have been a success this time.
ETA: Twice in one week @anon61221983 ninja’d me and says it better than I did above
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The point, I think, is that catastrophic failure of the vehicle is not the same thing as catastrophic failure of the test.
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Blow up un-peopled stuff so you eventually know how to put people inside and not blow up with them. Simple. Straightforward. Not easy, not cheap. Boil many frogs before finding a prince(ss) to kiss open-mouthed.
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At least finish reading the thought before claiming the guy who worked studying catastrophic failures for a decade is some kind of Luddite.
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You can make Methane directly from water, carbon dioxide and solar energy.
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I liked the part when it went kaboom
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mcsnee nailed the point, here - with the ongoing context, you come off as arguing “it all went to shit and you’re fanboy idiots for trying to claim that this was a success”. Even if your point was the much more precise “one of the things that happened during this test was a catastrophic failure”.
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That’s exactly how I feel about it. There’s plenty to criticize about Elon (like his infamous cave rescue submarine), but I can’t deny that SpaceX is doing some incredible work getting manned spaceflight out of the doldrums. He certainly has hired the right people. Nothing says “the future is here” more than seeing two rockets come down side by side and land softly.
I think part of the problem with the US space program is that after Apollo, NASA had neither the will nor the budget to do the sort of iterative testing that they did back in the Mercury/Gemini era, and that SpaceX does now. Once Apollo 11 returned safely, the budget axes started coming out of hiding, and nobody wanted to risk taxpayer dollars on something that might require multiple destructive tests to get right. Then they pinned all their hopes on the Shuttle, but we’ve seen that didn’t pan out.
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Are you sure you didn’t mean to post this to BoeingBoeing?
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All true, but it’s still a greenhouse gas regardless of source. And once burned turns into CO2 anyway.
It’s the best we have & I support it all the the way, it’s just not ideal. I was reflecting, in a rhetorical way, the irony that exists in burning fossil fuels so we can advance as humans.
I meant no discord.
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