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It's a different philosophy. Starship (the in-development SpaceX rocket) has taken the "test as fully as you can add often as you can" route, and no people will

It's a different philosophy. Starship (the in-development SpaceX rocket) has taken the "test as fully as you can add often as you can" route, and no people will be getting on it until it's reached a high level of reliability. Starliner was not developed that way at all. It was supposed to be developed with much more up-front work to make sure that it would work correctly out of the gate. All of the mentioned Starliner tests were certification tests, whereas all of the Starship tests so far have been 100% expected to fail in some way, but with a more ambitious goal about how far it gets.

Dalewyn 2y ago
Putting this more bluntly: Starship: "We expect this to fail, but we will learn valuable lessons." -> Fails -> "That was fun! Next!" Starliner: "We expect this to succeed." -> Fails. "Well, shit." Fundamentally different engineering and design philosophies.
- Jtsummers 2y ago
  It's not a difference in philosophies, it's different stages of development and testing. Starship and Starliner are very different things. Starship is the launch vehicle and a novel one (as in, it's not just a rebuild of an existing system, it's got new components and design elements). The failures we've seen so far were all, to some extent, expected though the particular modes of failure may not have been anticipated. They were launched with the intent of discovering the failure modes and responding to them with changes to design and manufacturing. Starliner is now where Dragon Crew was with DM-2. Both tested with uncrewed flights and various test scenarios before their crewed flights. DM-2 and this flight are flights where nothing should go wrong. Failure, or critical failures at least, are unanticipated events. Otherwise you wouldn't be putting people in them yet (both vehicles are capable of operating autonomously, there's no reason to put a person in them if you aren't confident in the vehicle). The same philosophy applies to both Dragon Crew and Starliner at this stage.

Dalewyn 2y ago

Putting this more bluntly: Starship: "We expect this to fail, but we will learn valuable lessons." -> Fails -> "That was fun! Next!" Starliner: "We expect this to succeed." -> Fails. "Well, shit." Fundamentally different engineering and design philosophies.

Jtsummers 2y ago
It's not a difference in philosophies, it's different stages of development and testing. Starship and Starliner are very different things. Starship is the launch vehicle and a novel one (as in, it's not just a rebuild of an existing system, it's got new components and design elements). The failures we've seen so far were all, to some extent, expected though the particular modes of failure may not have been anticipated. They were launched with the intent of discovering the failure modes and responding to them with changes to design and manufacturing. Starliner is now where Dragon Crew was with DM-2. Both tested with uncrewed flights and various test scenarios before their crewed flights. DM-2 and this flight are flights where nothing should go wrong. Failure, or critical failures at least, are unanticipated events. Otherwise you wouldn't be putting people in them yet (both vehicles are capable of operating autonomously, there's no reason to put a person in them if you aren't confident in the vehicle). The same philosophy applies to both Dragon Crew and Starliner at this stage.