[ben_w]

Perhaps, and good suggestion regardless, but the Soviet leadership was so adverse to negative publicity that it's hard to be sure how happy they were with hardware-rich testing.

Throwing cheap rockets into the air until they don't explode worked fine for Falcon; but given how long it's taking, I'm not sure it's working okay for Starship, and I'm now completely convinced that this is a *terrible* way to make something that's supposed to land on Mars, refuel, and return.

[rsynnott]

The whole thing really does feel like a bit of a repeat of the N1 in the sense that it seems to be a “lash loads of relatively small engines together and see what happens” effort, though the N1 was abandoned quickly. I did wonder about this when I saw they were planning on using like 30 engines, because, well, N1, but I was assured that it was different this time.

[ben_w]

Likewise, though I figured they'd solved the "engines are a bit explode-y" with the Falcon 9 and Heavy.

Turned out not, and also that handling re-entry was much much harder than the Space Shuttle (and Buran) had made it seem.

Is this category of launch vehicle just that hard, or did Musk aggravate just enough of the competent engineers and lose just enough talent to grab defeat from the jaws of victory? Timeline's about right for the latter, but I could easily believe the former.

[rsynnott]

Thing about N1 and starship is they have _loads_ of small engines; lots of complex plumbing and vibrations. Falcon 9 has a more sensible number.

On re-entry, Buran re-entered once. You can’t read much into that. The shuttle did about a hundred times, but exploded doing it once and had a number of near misses. One reason it was killed off was that making re-entry safe was considered to be impossible. I think it’d be fair to say that re-entry for large objects remains an unsolved problem.