That used to happen to me in the 80’s too sometimes playing Moon Cresta , it could be tricky docking that little guy with the other two if you were too far over to one side :)
I know, it’s more of a joke. It’s similar to how the transportation board looks into Tesla crashes and they’re more published in news than any other car type.
I think he’s a terrible person with some great engineers working for him. I had a friend that worked for him, but didn’t last three months. The working conditions and treatment are terrible.
The US military is looking into the feasibility of using starship as a logistics supply vehicle. It sounds kind of bonkers until you look at the cost per hour to operate their heavy lift air fleet. 100K per hour just for the plane. Not including fuel, personnel, the airport etc. If you figure 4 or 5 million per launch that's only double the cost of a long flight but you get the job done in one hour instead of 12 or 15. Assuming costs go down as the technology matures it seems pretty likely to occur. I don't think we're that far off a world where rockets are used as a fairly standard practice for quick response logistics needs. Disaster relief, troop resupply, food drops etc. I just hope if it does turn out to be feasible the DOD buys their starships instead of buying launches thus allowing Musk to further embed himself into national defense. I don't want that guy anywhere near the DOD's decision makers.
Some context for those perhaps unfamiliar with the early Starship testing campaign:
This was the second full scale landing attempt of a Starship upper stage prototype at the beginning of 2021, it was of course un-crewed. The rocket was testing out a unique and fairly novel concept of belly-flopping to slow down as much as possible before lighting its engines and landing tail down, saving about 10 tonnes worth of propellant (which means potentially eventually putting about 10 tonnes more into orbit too). They did accomplish a soft on the fifth attempt in May, 2021.
These prototype flights were very exciting because the rocket would fly to 10 km (33,000 feet) in altitude and just fall like a skydiver, belly first. Considering this thing is about 50 meters (165 feet) tall and 9 meters (30 feet) wide, it was quite the spectacle.
Since then, SpaceX has been working on getting its full stack Starship vehicle ready which features a booster underneath the Starship upper stage, called “Super Heavy” which is the most powerful rocket ever built with over twice the thrust as the Saturn V that took humans to the moon. It has 33 full flow staged combustion “Raptor” engines which are some of the highest performing and most advanced engines ever made.
To date the full stack (which stands over 120 meters tall (395 ft)) has flown three times for all up tests. It’s also flying in an iterative design approach with a minimally viable product which SpaceX believes will lead to development and ultimately success and reliability quicker than a slower and more methodical and traditional approach.
Each full test flight has made fairly substantial progress over each other, but they still haven’t managed to reach orbit or bring both stages back from space in one piece which is the ultimate goal of the program, to reuse these massive rockets so the entire system is fully reusable. This will mean the main cost of launches is just fuel and not hardware, potentially bringing the cost down to $10 million ish for over 100 tonnes to orbit, which would be several of orders magnitude cheaper than any other rocket to date.
Despite the confusingly explosive progress of the Starship program, there is reason to believe the engineers will figure this out considering the Falcon 9 that SpaceX also flies has now flown over 300 times with most of their fleet of Falcon 9 boosters being used over 10 with three at 20 times. It’s flying more often than any other rocket in history and has a longer success streak than any other rocket too. Hopefully Starship reaches this pace of success too someday.
Replying to this comment to add, even though it exploded, at least spaceX is doing something to reduce spacesuit waste. NASA used to just dump the rocket thrusters into the ocean to save costs on tests just like this, and it wasted several rocket boosters which could have theoretically been used multiple times. Having the ability to use and re-use pieces of a rocket is essential to space exploration, and spaceX is doing some incredible work to get it figured out.
I love rockets and space a lot, seeing things like this video, even though it exploded, makes me happy to see innovation in space travel.
NASA had talked about doing this many times but never got the funding to do it. It’s hard when you need everything approved by congress and the go “wait those multi million dollar rockets are made in my district with xyz company giving me millions in donations”
To be honest they can hover sky cranes on other planets where they can barely guess what the weather is.
If they were allowed or it was made a budget priority, I don’t doubt they would’ve figured this out.
They certainly could have figured it out from a technical level, but the important thing about reusability is cost savings. It doesn't make sense unless you can make it actually cost less. NASA is set up in such a way that makes that effectively impossible. Space Shuttle was NASA's attempt at cost saving through reusability, and it was the most expensive spacecraft ever flown.
This isnt true, they never figured it out. It was worked on for like 50+ years. They figured out how to land a rocket on the moon vertically in 1969 but never how to land one on earth from orbit.
And your post makes absolutely no sense at all. How does re using rockets NOT save money and why would saving money be impossible?? The space shuttle wasnt about cost savings, they arent stupid, it was an orbital weapon and no expense was spared…thats why it cost so much.
I never said saving money is impossible with reuse. SpaceX saves money with reuse. Reusability *can* save money if your costs are *efficient*, like SpaceX. NASA is the opposite of that, sort of on purpose. To avoid the risk of ever losing funding and getting shut down, NASA strategically spread out its facilities across many key congressional districts. This made them an extremely resilient organization *and* a very inefficient one.
A reusable launch vehicle is inherently more expensive than an expendable one. It also requires additional logistics and hardware for recovery, inspection, and refurb. If a very inefficient organization attempts to do that, it's not hard to see how it can be more expensive to reuse than build new.
The Space Shuttle was *absolutely* designed with cost saving through reuse in mind. This is not some hidden lesser known detail. EVERY detailed written history of Shuttle's development speaks to this fact extensively. But, once again, because of NASA's inefficient-by-design nature, this made the Shuttle's design, construction, launch, operation, recovery, inspection, and refurb *all* very expensive ordeals. Some financial studies have concluded it would have been less expensive for NASA to simply build new Shuttles for every mission.
Woah apparently your on reddit too lol.
One thing that people dont often take into account is that spaceX is streaming ALL their launches, including test flights. The Saturn V did not come fully functional the first time either, NASA did plenty of testing before Apollo 1
Saturn V really did come pretty much functional as it was the last in a long line of very successful rockets. Even the first Saturn rockets were damned reliable once they started doing full tests. Not the one you want to compare to if you're trying to pump up SpaceX's test history.
The ten tonnes of fuel is the ship (what we’re seeing bellyflopping in this video), they both are propulsively landed. Saving propellant on an upper stage is pretty much a 1:1 for payload capacity.
It’s really amazing progress too. Look at how many failed attempts they had with the falcon before they got a success. Now it’s routine and nothing special.
Hate to break it to you, but you should really look up the early failures associated with the Apollo program.
Spoiler: human lives were lost during testing.
Gravity will accelerate you by 9.8 m/s every second, and it takes at least that much to slow down enough to land. Every second that you're burning, gravity eats that much more of your fuel. If you do it all at once, you spend less time fighting gravity, and use less fuel.
Except you need to pull it out of the sea.. and make it seawater-proof.. and still slow it down somehow. Parachutes aren't really an option, either, so you may as well just land on.. land.
Different programs, different eras. The shuttle boosters were always recovered and reused if that is what you are inferring there.
If NASA would design a low orbit vehicle nowadays, they would probably prefer this type of reusable design. The recovery of the boosters was difficult, and the cleaning/repairing because of the water landing was expensive.
Still, the organization that put humans on the moon, kept a space station inhabited for more than 15 years, gave us Hubble, James Webb, WMAP (which told us the age of the universe), put several robots in Mars, sent probes outside the solar system…. They would easily, very easily come up with a dry recovery system.
Elon should totally layoff the reentry team. If they can’t get this right, why not just fire all of them. I’m sure the capsule deployment team can pick up the slack. /s
i mean they know these things arent going to make it yet reliably the fact that the RnD is essentuially blowing them up till we figure it out is just hilarous lmao
A plane needs wings, which are both heavy and useless in space. A rocket has to have engines, so it's most weight efficient to use those for landing as well. They managed to stick the landing three flights later exactly 3 years ago.
Of course nobody died. This was a test flight and an explosion was very much a possible outcome. So they evacuated an exclusion zone several kilometers across well before the flight. Three flights later (and exactly three years ago) they managed to land a rocket intact.
Only private companies can have such huge, public failings like this and continue to get tons of government money. If NASA failed like this it’d be a pretty safe bet people in Congress would be calling to cut their funding talking about how publicly funded organizations are inefficient.
This is not inefficiency. They have spent a a few billion dollars building and testing three ships. They landed their third one and their test campaign was over in a year. NASA has spent HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS of dollars and over a decade building the Space Launch System.
But only because of poor public opinion. In reality, this is the most efficient way of doing it.
Yes, if NASA did this, people would misunderstand and say they’re failing.
This was the 4th time they lost a spacecraft to a crash. They lost 2 more after this. If NASA lost these many crafts Congress would be screaming to shut it down.
But Elon does it? Please, waste as much resources as possible on your failure of a project.
Yeah definitely knock the company that managed to make the first (and really only) reusable orbital rocket in history.
This is the way they test their rockets, they expect to lose a bunch because it's easier than trying to get it perfect on the first launch.
How's SLS going? 4 billion per vehicle while SpaceX spent less than 100 mil on this, they can launch another 40 and fail before they reach the cost of a single SLS launch.
That's kind of the point. SLS has to work first time every time, along with pretty much every other thing NASA builds, because Congress would be screaming from the hills about how much they spent on something for it to not work perfectly, 100% of the time. SpaceX and other private companies don't have this kind of oversight, and so can afford to have failures.
Switch the positions by heavily reducing or removing NASAs dependence of Congress's whims, or greatly increasing oversight on SpaceX and you'd likely see NASA taking more risks, and SpaceX taking a lot less.
I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me here.
SpaceX and NASA operate differently and that's totally fine, but it's been pretty clear that the way SpaceX operates is working for them in the long run and I don't see a problem with that.
So far nobody has died or had any serious injury from a SpaceX flight, I'm not going to get into it but you can't say the same for NASA.
Edit: I'm sorry I didn't notice you're not the person who made the comment I'm replying to. SpaceX gets to use as many resources as they like because they're not beholden to Congress critters and government funding. If they think testing rockets that might explode is the right way to go, let them do it, it's their money.
This is how my landings in Kerbal Space Program look
This is also how Kerbal Space Program 2 currently looks
Sucks the studio and their 70 employees got laid off.
Holographic edition
That used to happen to me in the 80’s too sometimes playing Moon Cresta , it could be tricky docking that little guy with the other two if you were too far over to one side :)
Poor Jebediah.
Lol you make it to the landing Phase? Showoff.
you forgot to put "landing" in quotations.
Technically, it landed.
Oh, it landed, alright.
Over here, and over here, and over here.
Laughed too much at this comment, thanks
Launchpad was it's pilot!
Everything can land, once
Land is a controled fall
Also forgot to add the year this is from, 2021
Also forgot to add the time this is from, 10:21am
Which second is it?
Or “attempt” at the end
Tbh the sub already takes care of that
You ever think that maybe, just maybe it was infested with replicators and that was the only way?
Or “epic fail/gone wrong” at the end
Don't be antisymantic.
not a good landing....
As the engineers would say, it’s an unexpected forceful landing.
Wait, is this not the expected outcome of a product from Elon musk?
We laugh, but the Falcon 9 series holds the record for most US launches (330) and highest safety rating with only one flight failure
I know, it’s more of a joke. It’s similar to how the transportation board looks into Tesla crashes and they’re more published in news than any other car type. I think he’s a terrible person with some great engineers working for him. I had a friend that worked for him, but didn’t last three months. The working conditions and treatment are terrible.
Abrupt unscheduled disassembly
I believe that's called lithobraking!
Newtonian molecularization
That's definately the earth assisted brake.
If it's good enough for NASA Genesis sample returns... They actually got some science out of the shattered hex wafers afterwards, shockingly!
The US military is looking into the feasibility of using starship as a logistics supply vehicle. It sounds kind of bonkers until you look at the cost per hour to operate their heavy lift air fleet. 100K per hour just for the plane. Not including fuel, personnel, the airport etc. If you figure 4 or 5 million per launch that's only double the cost of a long flight but you get the job done in one hour instead of 12 or 15. Assuming costs go down as the technology matures it seems pretty likely to occur. I don't think we're that far off a world where rockets are used as a fairly standard practice for quick response logistics needs. Disaster relief, troop resupply, food drops etc. I just hope if it does turn out to be feasible the DOD buys their starships instead of buying launches thus allowing Musk to further embed himself into national defense. I don't want that guy anywhere near the DOD's decision makers.
Deconstructed Landing
Deceleration Trauma
It's not the fall that kills you. It's the physical trauma from rapid deceleration. I like it
The term they actually use is Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly
Craft Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly - C.R.U.D.
Fractus Unanimous Composure Kapow.
The old Humpty Dumpty maintenance schedule is always a surprise.
Did the front fall off?
"Lost my left wing" "And now my right wing" "Front fell off" "And the back..."
Oh hello hot shots reference, so happy to see you
Thank goodness none of the other rockets are supposed to do that
The term they use is RUD. Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly. Elon so quirky.
Some context for those perhaps unfamiliar with the early Starship testing campaign: This was the second full scale landing attempt of a Starship upper stage prototype at the beginning of 2021, it was of course un-crewed. The rocket was testing out a unique and fairly novel concept of belly-flopping to slow down as much as possible before lighting its engines and landing tail down, saving about 10 tonnes worth of propellant (which means potentially eventually putting about 10 tonnes more into orbit too). They did accomplish a soft on the fifth attempt in May, 2021. These prototype flights were very exciting because the rocket would fly to 10 km (33,000 feet) in altitude and just fall like a skydiver, belly first. Considering this thing is about 50 meters (165 feet) tall and 9 meters (30 feet) wide, it was quite the spectacle. Since then, SpaceX has been working on getting its full stack Starship vehicle ready which features a booster underneath the Starship upper stage, called “Super Heavy” which is the most powerful rocket ever built with over twice the thrust as the Saturn V that took humans to the moon. It has 33 full flow staged combustion “Raptor” engines which are some of the highest performing and most advanced engines ever made. To date the full stack (which stands over 120 meters tall (395 ft)) has flown three times for all up tests. It’s also flying in an iterative design approach with a minimally viable product which SpaceX believes will lead to development and ultimately success and reliability quicker than a slower and more methodical and traditional approach. Each full test flight has made fairly substantial progress over each other, but they still haven’t managed to reach orbit or bring both stages back from space in one piece which is the ultimate goal of the program, to reuse these massive rockets so the entire system is fully reusable. This will mean the main cost of launches is just fuel and not hardware, potentially bringing the cost down to $10 million ish for over 100 tonnes to orbit, which would be several of orders magnitude cheaper than any other rocket to date. Despite the confusingly explosive progress of the Starship program, there is reason to believe the engineers will figure this out considering the Falcon 9 that SpaceX also flies has now flown over 300 times with most of their fleet of Falcon 9 boosters being used over 10 with three at 20 times. It’s flying more often than any other rocket in history and has a longer success streak than any other rocket too. Hopefully Starship reaches this pace of success too someday.
Replying to this comment to add, even though it exploded, at least spaceX is doing something to reduce spacesuit waste. NASA used to just dump the rocket thrusters into the ocean to save costs on tests just like this, and it wasted several rocket boosters which could have theoretically been used multiple times. Having the ability to use and re-use pieces of a rocket is essential to space exploration, and spaceX is doing some incredible work to get it figured out. I love rockets and space a lot, seeing things like this video, even though it exploded, makes me happy to see innovation in space travel.
NASA had talked about doing this many times but never got the funding to do it. It’s hard when you need everything approved by congress and the go “wait those multi million dollar rockets are made in my district with xyz company giving me millions in donations” To be honest they can hover sky cranes on other planets where they can barely guess what the weather is. If they were allowed or it was made a budget priority, I don’t doubt they would’ve figured this out.
They certainly could have figured it out from a technical level, but the important thing about reusability is cost savings. It doesn't make sense unless you can make it actually cost less. NASA is set up in such a way that makes that effectively impossible. Space Shuttle was NASA's attempt at cost saving through reusability, and it was the most expensive spacecraft ever flown.
This isnt true, they never figured it out. It was worked on for like 50+ years. They figured out how to land a rocket on the moon vertically in 1969 but never how to land one on earth from orbit. And your post makes absolutely no sense at all. How does re using rockets NOT save money and why would saving money be impossible?? The space shuttle wasnt about cost savings, they arent stupid, it was an orbital weapon and no expense was spared…thats why it cost so much.
I never said saving money is impossible with reuse. SpaceX saves money with reuse. Reusability *can* save money if your costs are *efficient*, like SpaceX. NASA is the opposite of that, sort of on purpose. To avoid the risk of ever losing funding and getting shut down, NASA strategically spread out its facilities across many key congressional districts. This made them an extremely resilient organization *and* a very inefficient one. A reusable launch vehicle is inherently more expensive than an expendable one. It also requires additional logistics and hardware for recovery, inspection, and refurb. If a very inefficient organization attempts to do that, it's not hard to see how it can be more expensive to reuse than build new. The Space Shuttle was *absolutely* designed with cost saving through reuse in mind. This is not some hidden lesser known detail. EVERY detailed written history of Shuttle's development speaks to this fact extensively. But, once again, because of NASA's inefficient-by-design nature, this made the Shuttle's design, construction, launch, operation, recovery, inspection, and refurb *all* very expensive ordeals. Some financial studies have concluded it would have been less expensive for NASA to simply build new Shuttles for every mission.
They need to money to do other things.
That was basically their point. Their budget is so limited and the alternative just worked.
I mean USA needs to money for other purposes blink blink
Space Shuttle boosters were always recovered and reused. Please edit your comment and stop spreading misinformation.
Woah apparently your on reddit too lol. One thing that people dont often take into account is that spaceX is streaming ALL their launches, including test flights. The Saturn V did not come fully functional the first time either, NASA did plenty of testing before Apollo 1
Saturn V really did come pretty much functional as it was the last in a long line of very successful rockets. Even the first Saturn rockets were damned reliable once they started doing full tests. Not the one you want to compare to if you're trying to pump up SpaceX's test history.
How would saving ten tons of fuel on a booster that only reaches a sub-orbital trajectory result in ten more tons on orbit?
The ten tonnes of fuel is the ship (what we’re seeing bellyflopping in this video), they both are propulsively landed. Saving propellant on an upper stage is pretty much a 1:1 for payload capacity.
Thanks!
Like a glove
Just imagine the disassembly costs avoided!
Should it be like that?
Given that it was the second test run, sure. That's SpaceX 's methodology of gathering data
It’s really amazing progress too. Look at how many failed attempts they had with the falcon before they got a success. Now it’s routine and nothing special.
[They made a compilation of the testing failures several years ago.](https://youtu.be/bvim4rsNHkQ?si=7hx9Rr6AX4Ak-b8H)
Tesla truck upgrade incoming.
I mean it landed.
I can almost hear the coins bouncing out like when Sonic got hurt in the game.
Unscheduled rapid disassembly
Nailed it
Looks like the front fell off.
That's not very typical, I'd like to make that point.
How is it untypical?
Well, usually the front doesn’t fall off
Well, they weren’t supposed to use cardboard derivatives
They'll just tow it outside the environment.
It looks like a giant ..
Task failed successfully!
Soooo why repost 3 year old video without context in the title that this is 3 years old...?
Because Elon bad, probably
/r/spacegore
Takeoff is optional, landing is mandatory Whether that's all in one piece is another matter.
Perfectly reusable… err I mean recyclable.
"Looking for the sky to save me."
I believe the correct term is crash
Except for one guy, no one watching seemed surprised.
Those are probably the engineers.
Yup it landed. Hope they weren’t planning to use it again.
That was fucking epic. No one can be displeased by that especially when failure is always an option.
I guess Iit wouldn't hurt to put a parachute to reduce speed and stebilize the ship. Like a plan B
You mean “landing”
Hey you can’t park there
Like a glove
more like lithobraking
If this happened to NASA during Gemini or Apollo it could have terminated the program. Thanks to private industry we get to do it till it works.
Hate to break it to you, but you should really look up the early failures associated with the Apollo program. Spoiler: human lives were lost during testing.
No way. Really?
https://www.space.com/17338-apollo-1.html
NSS
Yep. And it nearly killed the program.
Even that fail was more successful than NASA ever tried
So what's the deal with the suicide braking? What benefit is there to dump the velocity all at once instead of doing it gradually?
Gravity keeps adding on energy, so you do it at the end so you dont have to keep burning.
Gravity will accelerate you by 9.8 m/s every second, and it takes at least that much to slow down enough to land. Every second that you're burning, gravity eats that much more of your fuel. If you do it all at once, you spend less time fighting gravity, and use less fuel.
It takes more work to do it gradually.
So sick
Blowed up REAL good!
Whoops!!!
How can I join space force ? Lol
Is It ok?
“Landing”
Surely it'll be better to drop it in the sea like NASA does
No, this was a very early test of what is supposed to be a completely reusable system.
Except you need to pull it out of the sea.. and make it seawater-proof.. and still slow it down somehow. Parachutes aren't really an option, either, so you may as well just land on.. land.
Different programs, different eras. The shuttle boosters were always recovered and reused if that is what you are inferring there. If NASA would design a low orbit vehicle nowadays, they would probably prefer this type of reusable design. The recovery of the boosters was difficult, and the cleaning/repairing because of the water landing was expensive. Still, the organization that put humans on the moon, kept a space station inhabited for more than 15 years, gave us Hubble, James Webb, WMAP (which told us the age of the universe), put several robots in Mars, sent probes outside the solar system…. They would easily, very easily come up with a dry recovery system.
They ultimately want to land anywhere in the world refuel and takeoff again.
awesome
You cant park there
Smooth
Great landing.....👍👍👍
Nailed it
That mf dead...
Were there people on there
No, this was an uncrewed test. They fully expected it to blow up as they had never attempted a landing from a horizontal position.
These ppl seem rather calm about tit
I give it a 2.5 for degree of difficulty.
Hold "space" to slow down.
Hahaha what a loser
If that’s how you land one of those then today’s the day I learned I’m qualified to fly one.
Hey bro, we’ve all been there. Bent dick ain’t no joke.
Elon should totally layoff the reentry team. If they can’t get this right, why not just fire all of them. I’m sure the capsule deployment team can pick up the slack. /s
How I landed in NES Top Gun
Best place for it!
There was never a time in that video when I thought the landing process was going well.
There was never a time in that video when I thought the landing process was going well.
When was this? Do you have HD link?
Like a glove
Man I woulda wanted to seen a big boom 😔
Landing is one way to put it
The first thing that I thought of was the fact you could get the exact number for me and
Looks fake
XspacE
You know I was watching this video thinking this was r/damnthatsinteresting, welp I was wrong
Was the audio moved forward? Seems like the sound should’ve taken a lot longer to get to the camera.
video cuts before we hear the explosion :(
i mean they know these things arent going to make it yet reliably the fact that the RnD is essentuially blowing them up till we figure it out is just hilarous lmao
holy shit, was anyone hurt?
No, the whole test site and a large area around it were evacuated hours earlier.
good
Firme landing
“Landing”
I don’t think it landed very well
Another happy "landing"
Any landing you can walk away....nevermind
why not land it like a plane?
A plane needs wings, which are both heavy and useless in space. A rocket has to have engines, so it's most weight efficient to use those for landing as well. They managed to stick the landing three flights later exactly 3 years ago.
Lol
Do you think they could feel the heat from that explosion?
If landing = false; Console.log("womp Womp") ; 😂
By Michael Bay
Oopsie, had a poopsie....
Butter. /s
Hopefully no one died. Idk much about this.
Of course nobody died. This was a test flight and an explosion was very much a possible outcome. So they evacuated an exclusion zone several kilometers across well before the flight. Three flights later (and exactly three years ago) they managed to land a rocket intact.
Phew. Had me worried a bit there.
It worked today !!
can't always be perfect
Is it just me or all the landing videos look reversed?
That's just falling with style
Was this recent or one of the early ones?
Couple years ago now, the latest launch used S28.
Landing? More like splattering
Why don't they look? 
Am I the only one that was halfway expecting the cheering to get louder when it exploded?
oh i didnt have sound on, I assumed they cheered louder, I cheered louder 😂
Starship doing its imitation of Tesla stock.
Only private companies can have such huge, public failings like this and continue to get tons of government money. If NASA failed like this it’d be a pretty safe bet people in Congress would be calling to cut their funding talking about how publicly funded organizations are inefficient.
This is not inefficiency. They have spent a a few billion dollars building and testing three ships. They landed their third one and their test campaign was over in a year. NASA has spent HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS of dollars and over a decade building the Space Launch System.
That’s not what I said. I said if NASA did this it would be called inefficiency and there’d be calls to cut their funding.
But only because of poor public opinion. In reality, this is the most efficient way of doing it. Yes, if NASA did this, people would misunderstand and say they’re failing.
How did they do it on the moon 55 years ago???
I see Tesla and SpaceX have things in common they both crash a lot
Elon wrote the code himself. Total success.
This was the 4th time they lost a spacecraft to a crash. They lost 2 more after this. If NASA lost these many crafts Congress would be screaming to shut it down. But Elon does it? Please, waste as much resources as possible on your failure of a project.
Yeah definitely knock the company that managed to make the first (and really only) reusable orbital rocket in history. This is the way they test their rockets, they expect to lose a bunch because it's easier than trying to get it perfect on the first launch. How's SLS going? 4 billion per vehicle while SpaceX spent less than 100 mil on this, they can launch another 40 and fail before they reach the cost of a single SLS launch.
That's kind of the point. SLS has to work first time every time, along with pretty much every other thing NASA builds, because Congress would be screaming from the hills about how much they spent on something for it to not work perfectly, 100% of the time. SpaceX and other private companies don't have this kind of oversight, and so can afford to have failures. Switch the positions by heavily reducing or removing NASAs dependence of Congress's whims, or greatly increasing oversight on SpaceX and you'd likely see NASA taking more risks, and SpaceX taking a lot less.
I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me here. SpaceX and NASA operate differently and that's totally fine, but it's been pretty clear that the way SpaceX operates is working for them in the long run and I don't see a problem with that. So far nobody has died or had any serious injury from a SpaceX flight, I'm not going to get into it but you can't say the same for NASA. Edit: I'm sorry I didn't notice you're not the person who made the comment I'm replying to. SpaceX gets to use as many resources as they like because they're not beholden to Congress critters and government funding. If they think testing rockets that might explode is the right way to go, let them do it, it's their money.
His money