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Derek Newsome
@derek.space

It’s honestly not even that amazing of an achievement. It took Starship 14 flights to accomplish the bare minimum expected of a launch vehicle, and even then it’s not exactly been a smooth flight.

Phil PlAIt@philplait.bsky.social

SpaceX just launched the 14th Starship test flight, and it's now successfully in orbit for the first time. This is an amazing achievement, and I absolutely detest how Musk has ruined this sort of thing both for me and for humanity.

11 reposts58 likes

yub
@astro-yub.bsky.social

Come on now... They didn't do "the bare minimum" because they were focussed on testing TPS and landing to eventually make Starship fully reusable. That's far more technologically advanced than the majority of the spaceflight industry, and Im sure you're well aware of that.

Derek Newsome
@derek.space

Testing TPS means you can’t go into orbit… right… So you mean the constant “It’ll go to orbit in the next 2 flights” since 2023 was because of TPS testing and not a lack of confidence in the vehicle to not get stuck and have an uncontrolled entry? How many excuses do these guys get to have?

yub
@astro-yub.bsky.social

There was no point in going orbital + it was safer to stay sub-orbital. Especially after Flight 7 + 8 and the first Block 3 flights. Or both? Doesn't sound mutually exclusive and fairly logical to not go into orbit if they were not confident, yeah. Do you want them to rush everything instead?

filou
@backup1731.bsky.social

they stayed on the same suborbital trajectory for 13 flights because they ran into severe setbacks partly due to them rushing things like quality control for example.

Yona
@voyagertopluto.bsky.social

You know all these flights were iterative right? Some of those were just hops. They want to be careful because there are so many changes between each test article.