How much of a setback would disaster be? Would SpaceX keep going, or would failure leave room for competitors to take over? (If there are competitors? I don't even know tbqh.)
SpaceX has followed a tech startup-like model of iterative development AKA "move fast, break things", in which many rockets go boom and (as saberdancer said) every boom is studied to reduce the odds of the next one go boom. Basically an edit-compile-debug loop writ large. This is why SpaceX's official countdown schedule states "excitement guaranteed" at T-0:00.
>Would SpaceX keep going, or would failure leave room for competitors to take over? (If there are competitors? I don't even know tbqh.)
As saberdancer said, there is no serious competitor. Rocket Lab has achieved ~~reusability~~ recovery of small rockets and has a good launch record, but a) has not yet figured out how to get them to land other than on the ocean and b) can't launch them weekly/daily like SpaceX. Bezos's Blue Origin actually landed rockets before SpaceX, but only suborbitally. ULA (US) and Arianespace (Europe), the two large commercial-payload providers pre-SpaceX, aren't at the point of test launches of any reusable rockets.
The above is all before Starship, which if it works will give SpaceX a) a fully reusable launch vehicle (existing SpaceX rockets' upper stages aren't reusable), and b) the ability to launch gigantic payloads. The combination of the two will further massively cut launch cost. I've read that even if Starship is fully expended, it will still be the same $2700/kg that existing SpaceX rockets cost, with that aforementioned gigantic payload capacity.
It would range from unfortunate to a non-issue. The entire flight is not expected to be successful, the purpose is data gathering. The worst case scenario is that it fails on the pad and damages the launch infrastructure, which would be a huge setback to the project. If it fails anywhere else it's probably fine.
I haven't followed this specific launch in much detail, but part of why SpaceX has been so successful is they expect a certain amount of failure and don't pin the failure of the program on the failure of any one test. This allows them to iterate faster than other programs that might have less test launches and thus rely more on the success of the launches they do perform. I've heard for example that this rocket is already out-of-date and the next planned rockets already have a bunch of improvements.
Not a big setback at all. They would have to analyze reasons for failure and make changes. There are no serious "reusability" competitors, especially at Starship size.
SpaceX is trying to iterate quickly on this rocket so they have several already assembled. Next two launches will also be fully expendable.
Disaster is complete demolition of the launch site, setting their schedule back many months and costing them a rumored hundreds of millions to rebuild. They've run enough tests to support reasonable confidence that won't happen. The directionality towards mass manufacturing the rockets, instrumenting to observability scale data collection to feed engineering course corrections, and resilience to setbacks is promising.
The hundreds of millions figure doesn’t sound implausible either way necessarily, but I wonder if it includes the R&D costs? I.e. building number 2 would be incrementally much less expensive than building number 1.
I wouldn't be surprised R&D numbers were included in the rumored figures, but considering their lessons learned today from the extensive concrete spalling incurred by the launch, there is even more R&D to perform with the next build-out. Especially when we take into account some observers are claiming SpaceX is installing a deluge system [1] for the next build.
I'd like to hear from some rocket nerds why launch pads don't sit on top of a giant, deep water body, as the deluge systems as I vaguely understand them seem primarily to manage the shock and secondarily the heat, and concrete is a difficult material to manage over a long period of frequent use as a shock absorber.
SpaceX has followed a tech startup-like model of iterative development AKA "move fast, break things", in which many rockets go boom and (as saberdancer said) every boom is studied to reduce the odds of the next one go boom. Basically an edit-compile-debug loop writ large. This is why SpaceX's official countdown schedule states "excitement guaranteed" at T-0:00.
>Would SpaceX keep going, or would failure leave room for competitors to take over? (If there are competitors? I don't even know tbqh.)
As saberdancer said, there is no serious competitor. Rocket Lab has achieved ~~reusability~~ recovery of small rockets and has a good launch record, but a) has not yet figured out how to get them to land other than on the ocean and b) can't launch them weekly/daily like SpaceX. Bezos's Blue Origin actually landed rockets before SpaceX, but only suborbitally. ULA (US) and Arianespace (Europe), the two large commercial-payload providers pre-SpaceX, aren't at the point of test launches of any reusable rockets.
The above is all before Starship, which if it works will give SpaceX a) a fully reusable launch vehicle (existing SpaceX rockets' upper stages aren't reusable), and b) the ability to launch gigantic payloads. The combination of the two will further massively cut launch cost. I've read that even if Starship is fully expended, it will still be the same $2700/kg that existing SpaceX rockets cost, with that aforementioned gigantic payload capacity.