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shmoe parent
SpaceX supporters can only call this "moving fast, breaking stuff" for so long as the entire program regresses in on itself in terms of milestones. This was never easy, but the Falcon program sure made it look so.
jillesvangurp
Falcon also was hard. They had a few failures and nearly went bankrupt in the process of successfully launching for the first time.

> the entire program regresses in on itself in terms of milestones.

The alternative would be looking at the competing programs from Boeing, Blue Origin, etc. It's not like they are hitting their milestones particularly well with their more traditional waterfall approach. The point of rapid iteration is that it is an inherently open ended process that has no milestones other than to launch the next iteration within weeks/months of the previous one. Which they have been doing fairly consistently.

If SpaceX gets starship in a launcheable and recoverable state, they'll still have many years of competing against competitors that have to rely on single launch vehicles exclusively. They would be very early to market. And there's a decent chance they might start nailing things with a few more launches.

shmoe OP
They didn't regress like starship has though... they literally just went from orbit to controlled landing in ocean and catching the booster on a fork to the ships blowing up in orbit or not making it there and the boosters aborting the catch for a controlled landing offshore or blowing up as well.

Now they have regressed to blowing up on the pad during static testing.

Seems very different to me than the Falcon story, 100%. Granted, they had luck too.

DoesntMatter22
They literally left astronauts stranded on the space station
adaml_623
You might want to expand your comment to make it clear that the astronauts were 'stranded' by the Boeing Starliner and not by SpaceX Falcon/Dragon
t43562
I wonder if astronauts will be excited to be the first to ride on the Starship given the statistics. Obviously they aren't going to be too keen on the Starliner but that didn't blow up.
DoesntMatter22
Considering NASA has a 50 percent loss rate on their space shuttles and SpaceX hasn't lost anyone yet I don't think it's a problem.

I'm surprised that people are losing their minds over a few explosions as if the US government didn't blow up hundreds of rockets in order to get a working product.

t43562
That's a wonderful way to bend stats to make a point i.e. to compare probability of failure of one flight to probability of eventual loss of one craft that might last many flights.

The risk angle is that this isn't about national security or a government enterprise. This is commercial - you can't spend your money if you're dead.

numpad0
"Stranded" then landing with 3 good parachutes, vs "excitement guaranteed" and literally exploding
DoesntMatter22
Boeing stranded them. Space X rescued them. Which company do you think they trust more
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shmoe OP
Falcon/Dragon = Successful program, never had the problems Starship has had

Starship = regressing every flight.

This isn't hard to parse man.

DoesntMatter22
It's not a regression every flight. The last flight was pretty successful. You are acting as is this isn't an unprecedented launch vehicle. Even if they lost 20 in a row, as long as they get there that's all that matters. Space X has shown how well things work once they get something working.
shmoe OP
They have yet to re-light an engine in space, which has been a mission milestone several times now. Either the ship explodes in hot staging, orbit, or re-entry (and now, static testing) and hasn't made it to the controlled spot in the ocean in quite some time.
aredox
Boeing is waterfall but with top managers skipping steps all the time to make the bosses and shareholders happy short-term.

Is Blue Origin following waterfall? Why would the founder of Amazon follow the polar opposite strategy of the rest of his businesses?

cma
If Bezos made a bridge building company, I'd expect it to use something similar to waterfall. That's not to say it is right for rockets, but it is a different domain than software.
m4rtink
Traditional non-SpaceX US launch companies does not seem very conpetent at the moment.

But there seems to be a lot of progress in reusable launcher development outside the US, mainly in China and apparently also among Japanese car manufacturers!

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