Starship seems to explode much more taking everything with it - not just parts on a launch stand
The Soviet program had plenty of that.
I know. I thought we (the USA) were supposed to be better than them. We were with the Apollo program
We did accidentally torch the Apollo 1 crew in their capsule.
My fav Apollo-era fuckup is when they tested the launch abort system. The test went bad, but was 100% successful in demonstrating it worked. Heh. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DpdKxv9WINY
Getting to Apollo involved a lot of big booms, too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13qeX98tAS8
Over on the nuclear side there was SL1, which AFAICT is probably the answer to the question "why doesn't the US Army have its own nuclear systems?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOt7xDKxmCM .
My point is once we launched that was never a failure. Yes, there were deaths, which is horrible.
But we learned and improved fast.
Now that we have decades of rocket knowledge, we shouldn't be wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on giant explosions
> So they had to pick something else & ended up with far too many (for that time) not very reliable NK-15 engines.
I mean, I would note that the first stage of this has 33 engines (N1 had 30, Saturn V had 5).
Also compared to Super Heavy & Starship, they had more stages (4 vs 2) and most importantly, were not able to test the stages separately - which was possible for the Saturn V & IIRC all its stages exploded on the test stand at least once.
Both Super Heavy and Starship can be tested separately & Starship exploded during such testing, without taking the rest of the rocket with it, like N1 regularly did - including demolishing the super expensive launch pad during at least one occasion.