Where is the gas lighting? They said getting off the launch pad would be a win going into it and people are pointing this out after the fact. There is no hypocrisy or doublethink involved
Musk said something before the launch to the effect "Clearing the tower is a success." Musk said after something to the effect, "Expecting perfect would be crazy."
And here I am thinking about the Saturn launches that von Braun oversaw 55-ish years ago.
(Saw the launch this morning, BTW. Just happened to be road-tripping in Texas this week and thought we'd pop down for a look-see.)
A private company just launched the largest rocket ever built. It was a test. Tests fail, but failed tests aren't failures, theyre learning opportunities.
SpaceX had several of these types of failures when testing and iterating on falcon 9. It now sends people to the ISS.
There is a PR battle going on with this, there always have been but in particular, Elon is associated very publicly with this company and he's no longer a darling due to the Twitter fiasco. SpaceX has to remind people quite strongly that these are tests, failure is a part of the process, and there will be a big push by his enemies to make this out to be some catastrophic failure because some people want to make him look bad.
Its a failure, but it's a testing failure, so its a success. If the entire thing had exploded on the pad I'd agree with you, but it didn't, it made it through several of it's test objectives and was well worth it for the data alone.
I could frame this. Task failed successfully. Maybe folks need more experience in hard science (I'm a former bench chemist), but the only way a test can truly fail, is if someone or something is harmed, or you don't collect good data.
Blowing up rockets is arguably better than successful missions (provided you get telemetry), cause you found an edge of the envelope.
> Its a failure, but it's a testing failure, so its a success.
Cultural misunderstanding then. Only in USA failure is seen as learning opportunity. Most other countries punish you severely for failure, hard enough to discourage you from trying ever again.
This is why SpaceX could only happen in the USA. And why other countries are left behind while Americans are flying to Mars.
@ 9:38 "We will consider any data inform and improve future builds of starship as a success. From a milestone our main goal is to clear the pad. Every milestone beyond that is a bonus."
They may not have defined the test as aggressively as you would have liked them to, but it's their test, they get to choose what they're testing.
The topic has been beaten to death in the comments, but it comes down to sematics around success and goals.
They didn't meet every goal hopeped for, but how much or which constitutes sucess? This will be in the eye of the beholder. SpaceX said they would consider it sucessfull if it leaves the launch pad/site.
I might call it a failure because it didn't land a human on the moon, and it doesn't matter if that was not the expectation or intent of SpaceX today.
It is ultimately subjective. You might be happy with your life, but I might call it a falure. Is one of us right, both?
So you seem to be defining "success" in terms of completing pre-planned flight events, which is fine. However, this is not the only metric by which one can define and assess success. Surely you must agree it depends on the objective.
We might as well be arguing over if the launch was "good" or "bad", -it is subjective.
One objective question you can ask is "Did the test complete the pre-specified criteria which SpaceX said they would consider a success?", which it did.
We could then debate if they have a dumb criteria for Success, and what we think is a better one.
Success is defined by meeting objectives. Primary objective was to not blow up the vehicle on the pad. Great success here.
Secondary objectives indeed aren’t met. I think everybody realizes by now that the big hole where the pad used to be is a bigger problem that it seemed initially. Any solutions are expensive and time consuming.
> everybody realizes by now that the big hole where the pad used to be is a bigger problem that it seemed initially
I'm seeing a lot of speculation and little engineering on this. Is there a good post hoc take on why it's a big problem?
Counterfactuals: it wasn't a production pad. It was designed to be expendable. That's why you don't put a bunch of expensive kit like deluge equipment on and around it; there's a meaningful chance you never clear the tower.
The problem isn’t that it didn’t survive, the problem is the style it went out with: how much of it didn’t survive, how far the rocks were flung (far!), how far dust settled (very far!) and the amount of engineering needed to build a flame diverter which can be called any sort of reusable. Also the amount of fresh water needed for the deluge will be simply epic.
I fully understand that rocket launches are going to fail a few times before succeeding, I don't get the need for gaslight.
This feels like North Korea style propaganda.