SpaceX’s Starship rocket system reached several milestones in its second test flight before the rocket booster and spacecraft exploded over the Gulf of Mexico.

SpaceX’s Starship rocket system reached several milestones in its second test flight before the rocket booster and spacecraft exploded over the Gulf of Mexico.

  • FauxPseudo @lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    11 months ago

    Which is an incremental improvement over the prior attempt. People mock these failures as though they have never built anything and have no concept that any step forward is a win when you are trying to do something that has never been done before. They got the smaller rockets working. It will just take time to get this giant one working.

    • leds@feddit.dkEnglish
      4·
      11 months ago

      Yeah but to get from here to a 99.99% reliability is a very very long way

    • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zipEnglish
      24·
      11 months ago

      What aspect of this “has never been done before”? Its a multi-stage rocket (NASA and the Soviets have been doing that for about seventy-ish years and the Nazi scientists we all recruited were doing it for even longer). The main innovations are material choice (which is debatable) and landing a rocket on a pad, which is mostly a function of having good computers.

      Space flight is hard. That said, there is a very strong argument for being much less iterative. Especially when the quest for a reusable rocket involves constant spraying of wreckage across oceans and land.