This incremental progress, far smaller improvements than planned, has put them so far behind schedule I'm not confident this design is any good. Still haven't done orbit. This launch was not a smooth launch. SLS by contrast seems to work. Why did nasa contract SpaceX for the lander. The whole plan is bad.

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decimalenough 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Are you serious? They just launched a completely revamped version of Starship from an entirely new pad, and still hit almost all of their planned milestones while demonstrating that the design is reliable enough to handle a missing engine.

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mempko 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Go back and look at the original plans and projections. Constantly redesigning is not something to be proud of. I call it vibe spaceship design.

	▲	modeless 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Two successful test missions over 15 years using a dead end rocket and ship design for $50+ billion is not something to be proud of either. Nobody's caught up with Falcon 9 in reuse and cost yet, and even if Starship takes another 5 years of iteration to perfect it will still be by far the best rocket in the world for many years afterward.

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XorNot 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There's plenty of finicky systems which go on to be good systems with a lot of work. Some things are just hard, a lot of the time you just don't see them being hard so publicly.

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mempko 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Sometimes a design is poor and needs a lot of modification and patches to kind of work.

	▲	XorNot 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's software engineer "I'll simplify it!" logic and the score of it's successes is far too low for how common it is. If a design with a bunch of modifications works, then it's a good design. Thinking you need to clean sheet redesign everything is how you get Second System Syndrome.