Let’s not move the goalposts. This company develops differently than historical aerospace. Success was defined as blowing up any point beyond the launch pad. It made it well past max-q which is the point of highest atmospheric stress on the rocket.
Actually the 'fail fast, learn faster' and 'launch often' approach is what the Soviets did. SpaceX is following the same methodology 20 years later but with far better technology and learnings. Though it seems they are again attempting the Soviet N1 rocket attempt of using more than 30 engines in Starship.
It's historically different in US aerospace, but not Soviet aerospace.
So yeah OK by that metric if a rocket lifted to a height of 1m above the launch pad, so technically being beyond it, before spontaneously disassembling, it's technically a success. Not 'moving goalposts'.
I'm not sure what your point is here — a stainless steel skyscraper-sized rocket powered by 33 methalox full-flow staged combustion engines just made it all the way through max-Q and most of the way to orbit before exploding on its first ever attempt! I'd definitely count that as an unqualified success.
That's not my problem. Space X can define their limit for what counts as success as they see fit. I totally acknowledge that getting this huge thing to any height is an achievement. But there's still a mismatch between what the general audience would label 'success' and what they do. So maybe talking about 'milestones' or something to that effect would be better. After all, in itself it is not yet a useful workhorse to put something in orbit at this stage (pun not intended), even though it's a probably necessary and helpful intermediate step given how finicky and complex rockets are. I was actually only poking fun at your 'not moving goalposts' combined with the idea that 'we call it OK if it doesn't explode right on the ground'. That sounds a lot like a moved goalpost if the aim is to get to the moon or even mars and back. It's a bit like that 'draw an owl in three easy steps' meme: draw a circle for the head, draw an oval for the body, now draw the rest of the owl.
I can't tell if you are serious. The equivalent would be: a child is trying to draw an owl. Instead of praising the child for drawing a crude owl on their first attempt, we are disappointed that the child did not meet the final goal of drawing a photorealistic owl at some point in the future. Just because the general public has a wrong idea about something does not mean that it is reasonable to reinforce the wrong idea.
So this thread is 5 days old at this point but for the record I still want to point out that whereas initially I was willing to play along and say, OK if those responsible for the launch define 'success' to mean 'clearing the launchpad' well than that was a 'success' alright. Even if it wasn't a success when you leave off the quotes.
But in the intervening days I read up quite a bit and found quite a spectrum of opinions. Turns out this launch made a loss of at least $300M (not to forget, of tax payer money) based on estimated costs of engines alone. Both the rocket and the launch pad suffered from design errors. The launch pad suffered heavy damage because it was apparently not built to withstand the forces present at launch. There's video footage of a parked car next to a palm tree at least a mile or so from the launch pad which both got peltered by debris and then engulfed in fast moving smoke clouds.
This is happening right in the middle of a nature reserve which none of those responsible have the slightest respect for.
But this is the state of affairs when you have a billionaire conman with a captive audience of fanboys, gullible media and those who are just hoping too hard for advancements in spaceflight.
The problem in that case is that HN users commonly don’t read the article to get the full story.
From TFA:
> SpaceX staff still cheered as Starship went down in flames. Successfully lifting the 400-foot-tall rocket off the launch pad is still a big step forward to its ultimate goal of one day ferrying humans to the moon and Mars, the company said.
> "With a test like this, success comes from what we learn," the company said in a tweet. "Today's test will help us improve Starship's reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multi-planetary."
I suspect HN users read the article more often than most. I sure did. I stand by my assessment that the headline invites unreasonable expectations, and that it matters. A little, not a lot. Shrug.
That's reasonable and I agree kinda. I think I'm assuming a layman seeing this headline and (unfortunately) mostly not caring one way or the other. At least this version gets them an accurate depiction. I see how it reads differently to readers here though.
There are, of course, multiple ways to describe any situation in a literally accurate way. A canonical example is "glass half empty" vs "glass half full".
If a glass is expected to be at one tenth of its capacity, but then, by surprise, it is found to be at one half of its capacity, then it is a bit odd to write the headline "Glass Half Empty". We would instead expect something like "Glass Half Full by Surprise", or at least "Glass at 50% Capacity". I don't think one has to be a fanboy of glasses or liquids to take issue with that framing.
That's another discussion because it didn't have anything to do with the rocket and was an issue with the command module during a simulation, if you are referring to the Apollo 1 accident, which unfortunately killed all three astronauts in the cabin. And it certainly wasn't designated a success. They also completely altered designs as a result of that event.
I'm wondering what the environmental impact of all of these exploding rockets is though. Surely they won't be able to fish every piece of the rocket out of the ocean, along with all of the fuel.
It's extremely, extremely tiny compared to the impact of the thousands of commercial airplane flights that happen every day. Plus, methalox burns very cleanly, second only to the much more dangerous and finicky hydrolox in terms of environmental friendliness.
It is extremely tiny now- but definitely will be something worth thinking about when (here's hoping!) SpaceX and others reach their goals. When we run 100x or 1000x current launch capacity I don't think it's unreasonable to worry about rocket pollution.
Commercial passenger flights departing in the United States produced 179 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2019.
1 Ton of Methan produces 3 tons of CO2.
Starship+Booster fully loaded has 1000 tonnes of methane (and three times oxygen).
So a thousand Starship launches a year would be 3 million metric tons of CO2. Not nothing but (surprisingly?) less than 1.5% of commercial US flight industry.
Theoretically one can produce Methane climate neutral through bio gas. I found different prices for liquid methane (1000 to 2000 dollars?), with that it seems the fuel cost are only around 2 million per launch? That is cheap. A 1000 Starships would only cost 1 billion in Methan fuel (disregarding oxygen and heightened demand and economy of scales).
