[gravescale]

Falcon 9s have 2 failures and one partial from 354 launches, so they're proving to be an extremely reliable vehicle on the scale of rockets. The current model is 289 of them and has a perfect record so far.

That's substantially more successful than Soyuz which crashed a lot more and killed someone by parachute failure and crew by depressurisation (and another crew escaped the exploding rocket by launch abort system and another abort subjected the crew to a 21G descent) in the early days and is still considered one of the safer rockets ever (Soyuz-U, the rocket, had 22 failures out of 786 launches, and Soyuz, the spacecraft on top, made 153 missions).

There's still a long future in front of us for SpaceX to screw it up by skimping on things or run into some very bad luck or unforseen issues, but at least as it stands now, pointing at test launches going bang, when they're weren't ever expected to not go bang, and calling the production rocket unreliable is not well supported.

[p_l]

For all that I personally like to dunk on Musk, SpaceX follows majorly classic incremental engineering pipeline, and there are people who check things thrice. Some of it because as "new" product in aerospace they can't just skirt things like Boeing did with airliners. Some of it being customer due diligence.

And even Musk personally acknowledged that he nearly tanked SpaceX early on - because they didn't have experienced engineering lead to take the project - and he ended up hiring one when they scraped enough on government money to get there.