It’s their 7th launch and they’re still fighting issues with keeping the fuel where it should be. Elon has successfully created a machine that can kill any number of astronauts in sub-orbit and land to do it all over again. How is anyone not getting this? I’ll never forgive him for taking back intellect on space travel to the 1950’s .
I’ve moved no goalposts.
You claimed they were floundering, and I responded with an argument that the rockets exploding isn’t evidence of floundering, it’s an engineering choice to find the limits of their design by pushing a real rocket until it reaches those limits (rather than spending a decade analysing the problem to oblivion).
It’s quite instructive to compare spacex to blue origin in that regard, actually. Both companies are about the same age, but blue origin spent that time designing while spacex spent it flying. The result is that blue origin reached orbit for the first time just this week, after about a decade of effort, but their first launch went pretty well (although not perfectly, since the booster crashed rather than landing the way it was supposed to). Spacex, meanwhile, blew up their first few rockets trying to reach space (I’m referring to the early falcons now, not starship), and blew up quite a few more trying to master landing them again, but they spent most of that decade developing experience in actual flight as a result (not to mention having a sustainable income, and totally dominating the launch industry).
I think it’s difficult to make a good argument that spacex blowing up rockets means that what they’re working on isn’t going to work