| HN Mirror

Ah yes, because the Apollo program is famous for never having any problems with unscheduled fires or explosions. Completely safe, it was.

Sarcasm aside, NASA has blown up plenty of rockets. It's not a problem to blow up a rocket if it doesn't pose any substantial risk. NASA doesn't much like to blow up rockets anymore because it's contrary to how their operational model works: Congress gives NASA a task, a deadline, and a budget, and NASA is expected to deliver on the task, and can ask for more time or money down the road. Any kind of high-profile public failure is risky to NASA because it looks bad to Congress, who might cancel the project. Asking Congress for more time or money is normal, so the safe strategy with NASA's undertakings (especially high-profile ones like the James Webb Space Telescope and the Space Launch System) is to deliver flawless performance, usually late and over-budget. Congress doesn't need to be paid back, and history mostly remembers program success rather than schedule and budget overruns.

Of SpaceX's current programs, Falcon 9 is operated most similarly to NASA. It's expected to be mature and reliable; it is trusted to fly billion-dollar spy satellites and human crew. Any kind of failure will be heavily scrutinized, so SpaceX is only pushing the envelope of reuse and flight performance with their in-house payload program, Starlink. All of their customer flights get to operate well within the established safe performance envelope of the rocket. With over 200 successful consecutive flights now, SpaceX's Falcon 9 obviously can be depended on.

Starship, on the other hand, is not being depended on by anybody at the moment. No project gets delayed or cancelled when it explodes; no missile complex goes unwatched, no humans get stranded in space, smacked into the ocean, or burned alive. Nobody, least of all SpaceX, needs it to be perfect now. What they need is for it to become good enough to sell, to sell lots once they're selling it, and to not cost too much once they're selling it, all of this ideally sooner rather than later. They have access to lots of money now to make this happen, but investors' money has to be paid back someday.

So the bar for Starship isn't set at "succeed". It's set at "maximize future return on investment".

SpaceX is counting on present failures to save them money in the future by proving exactly what is necessary to succeed, at a time when failure is relatively cheap for them. They've clearly improved from the previous launch. Key milestones were passed. Telemetry was collected, and the flight safety systems executed an authoritative conclusion to the flight. With the investment of only 212 days of time and money since their previous high-profile Starship explosion, SpaceX has gotten demonstrable progress towards future flight success.