As an institution, the United States Pentagon has come to be known for many things over the years — its transparency, its generosity, its cunning. Consistency is not one of them. In the wake of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's disastrous Starship explosion — the company's third in a row — some are pining for the good old days of tax-payer funded space research under NASA. "Weren't we NOT blowing up rockets, like, 50 years ago," asked Sarah Jeong, features editor at The Verge on Bluesky. "Also weren't we l
I don’t think that’s true. Early NASA launches had a failure rate of ~50% [1] and the space program was not cancelled, whereas Starship has a failure rate of 44% of stated launch goals (granted many boosters and ships were lost when they went the primary mission focus).
https://appel.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/NASA_APPEL_ASK_32i_success_failure_nasa_culture.pdf ↩︎
For the HLS that Starship is allegedly supporting, it’s a pretty big miss since the timeline from the bidding process. I remember as of 2020 they were supposed to be doing an uncrewed lunar landing in Q1 2024. So far they’ve missed all the milestones and haven’t actually completed one yet (HLS test launch Q2 2022, Q4 2022 Propellant transfer test, Q2 2023 Long duration flight test, Q3 2023 Critical design review, Q2 2024 Design certification review, Q1 2025 HLS Launch)
They haven’t even tested it with cargo, right? I’d love to see them try with the 100T of cargo they’re hoping for (because then they only need like 15 Starships launches to fuel one in orbit to go to the moon…) Can’t recover the 2nd stage, just plummets back and explodes when it doesn’t explode on the way up.