It was a significant progress, but I won't call it "nailed it". As there was an damage or explosion on re-entry where the skirt of the starship got damaged. And we could see pretty significant damage on one of the fins.

Nailing it would be without the things above.

The explosion was unexpected and (as far as I know at the moment) unexplained, but they flew the mission at the edge of the envelope, and with a variety of different materials/missing bits on purpose, to better understand where the edge is. Everything that happened (maybe even including the explosion, we'll see in the final analysis) was, as far as we know, within the plan.

The biggest can't-miss milestone was the flawless engine restart. That gives them the go-ahead to hit orbit on the next flight.

SpaceX has two big things going for it: Starship/Raptor factories churning them out cheap, and themselves as a paying customer in Starlink who can dogfood a risky new launch platform.

Now that they're demoed pez-dispensing v3 dummy Starlinks, I'd assume they'll start launching real ones within ~1-3 months. At that point as long as they can deliver payload to orbit and catch the booster the program is operational and they'll start switching their own Falcon 9 launches over.

The HLS timeline is definitely dicey, but whether Starship winds up being the blocker remains to be seen. Otherwise they've now succeeded enough to "lean launch" Starship with equal/better capabilities to any other existing orbital rocket, and Starlink can fund indefinite further tests/iterations on the rest of their roadmap features (which no one else has).

Yes, although it was stated before the flight that they were intentionally flying with some heat tiles removed and with a more aggressive profile to test some outer limits.

I view it differently. The ship not only survived, but also accomplished all of its mission objectives despite those issues. What this shows is that it has remarkable resilience, which is a really important considering the types of forces it will be subject to during future missions.

I think this launch showed they were very robust. Engines went out on booster and ship which they can compensate for. A small explosion and a half melted fin didn't seem to affect the splashdown sequence or target.

Fin damage isn't ideal, but even if they had to replace the fins every flight, the cost would be quite low in comparison to replacing the entire second stage, which is necessary on the Falcon 9.

> And we could see pretty significant damage on one of the fin

They specifically said they're testing lighter fins to see how much they would hold. Let's not invent problems when it's an experiment that was clearly stated.

I would say they nailed it based on achieving all the objectives they stated before the launch.

The fins were intentional… they said on the live stream they were testing different types of tiles and missing tiles to see how the substructure would behave.

For Starlink deploys (or other commercial launches) re-entry isn't too critical. Starship is still an order of magnitude cheaper than other launch vehicles even without Stage 2 re-use.

They'll need a higher bar for Artemis but frankly Starship is not the only critical bottleneck there and it's not SpaceX's main financial driver.

The damage was visible long before the explosion, during ascent (not sure if anyone has explained how it happened). Though your point still stands.

I was very surprised that that flap still held up during the stress testing on atmospheric re-entry.

They compromised the ship to study failures of that nature.

Nah, they nailed it.

This guy ... MEGA lmao.

To the contrary, I am fascinated by what SpaceX has accomplished so far. I wouldn't just say they "nailed it" they completely blew past all expectations I had.

"Why didn't just get it right on their first test", really? People can't even get a regex right the first time.

Are you aware of the size of this rocket? That it reached orbit? That it hovered over the ocean instead of just crashing into it? That it came back into a point with such precision that a buoy with a camera was already waiting for it? From orbit (that its 30,000km/h and 150km high)?

Your comment is just ridiculous.

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