slenk parent
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
"Explode until you figure it out" served Falcon 9 well.
I'm inclined to see Constellation/SLS/Orion/etc. as at least as wasteful as the explosions, at least so far. Which one wins out will depend on the end results.
I'd also note Apollo 13 was definitely a failure.