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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 nev

• jillesvangurp 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      They literally left astronauts stranded on the space station
      • adaml_623 1y ago
        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 1y ago
        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 1y ago
          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 1y ago
            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 1y ago
        "Stranded" then landing with 3 good parachutes, vs "excitement guaranteed" and literally exploding
        • DoesntMatter22 1y ago
          Boeing stranded them. Space X rescued them. Which company do you think they trust more
          • 1y ago
  • aredox 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
    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!
• deleted 1y ago
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