“Anyway, it’s hard to iterate though when people are on every mission. You can’t just be blowing stuff up ’cause you’re gonna kill people. Starship does not have anyone on board so we can blow things up. It’s really helpful.” – Elon Musk
The Starship test did not get as far as second-stage ignition. That does not mean it was a failure. Rather it was the first step in testing — using a test to destruction test philosophy. The main goal of the test was to get it off the launch pad and not to get it into orbit. All components in the test were intended to be discarded. Both the first and second stages were early versions of the hardware, which had been replaced by better designs. Rather than scrap them, Musk opted to use them in a launch test. (In fact, newer versions of the two stages already exist, to be expended in the next rounds of tests.) Hardware (even launch pads) can be replaced. Time and lives lost cannot.
That is the way Musk develops things. Instead of relying on simulations (which ultimately reflect your own assumptions), he does frequent live testing to see what really happens. That is how he developed the Falcon 9. He blew a lot of them up in early testing. And people laughed at him because he kept blowing up rockets. Yet look at the result. The Falcon 9 is the most frequently launched booster in the world and is highly reliable.
One of NASA’s greatest curses is the mantra “Failure is not an option.” That is only really true under certain very limited circumstances – like getting a crew on a crippled spacecraft heading to the Moon safely back to Earth. But if it is always true, then the only way to guarantee you never fail is to never do anything. Or to take small, incremental baby steps that take forever to get anywhere (and typically result in Challenger- and Columbia-style failures anyway). Which has been NASA’s pattern since the 1990s.
Musk’s approach is to blow things up early, when humans are not on board. Build in reliability by discovering all the failure modes during the test phase. Then go into production.
How is the working out? So far this year, SpaceX has had 27 successful orbital launches. The rest of the world combined has 31. Not too shabby.
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