[ToValueFunfetti]

James Webb alone cost NASA $10 billion, with $4.5 billion in overruns. It took 30 years to design and construct. Carefully designing things to work the first time is expensive and slow; blowing up a billion dollars is the more effective use of money here.

[mavhc]

Less than a billion, maybe $100 million per test launch

[bmitc]

That doesn't compute at all.

[swores]

Their point is that if you "waste" $1B as many as nine times with exploding rockets and it leads to working, good rockets, then its economically better than spending $10B to get it right the first time with no explosions.

Of course there's also environmental harm from exploded rockets, and the potential to never find success before running out of money, but as long as they succeed in getting it working perfectly before they've spent as much as it would cost to be confident of it working on the first launch, they'll be happy.

[ToValueFunfetti]

By all means, demonstrate that. I love to change my mind, but I still need more than an assertion that I'm wrong to do so.

[bmitc]

They're just completely different projects that are not comparable. The Webb telescope had no choice but to work.

The SpaceX team has a choice, and they choose "fail fast". There's a gradient that SpaceX can sit on for their development, and for a suite of companies owned by Musk, people would like to see less fail fast and often.