It's the 4-minute mile except it's taking everyone else too long to copy it. Really shows how far ahead Musk is.
replySpacex first landed an orbital booster just over 10 years ago and have now landed 600 times.
replyThe entire rest of the world combined has done it twice.
For a long time people would scoff when it was said they had a 10 year lead, and that others would catch up quickly. Proof meets pudding.
FTA: "SpaceX suffered upper stage failures on three test flights of the massive Starship rocket last year. "
replySpaceX has also had numerous failures with the larger generation of second stages and currently doesn't have a lead there. Nobody does.
Nobody else has anything remotely like Starship. If they pull it off, and it's looking like they will, they will extend their dominance for another decade if not more.
replyYes, Starship development has been slow and occasionally explodey, but they've successfully demonstrated all the fundamentals and it's "just" iteration from here. (They haven't gone into full orbit, but that's by choice, not lack of capability.)
It's a hard problem, and both SpaceX and Blue Origin will probably have failures in the future too, I am encouraged that they both see failure as a way to do better and looking forward to both of them eventually succeeding. It's a good time to be a space nerd.
replyThere's a saying in the racing business. If you're not walking back to the pit now and then carrying the steering wheel, you're not trying hard enough. If you're walking back to the pit too often, you're incompetent.
replyThere's another aspect. If you're launching men in rockets, you cannot tolerate failures, so the development cost is way, way higher. The cost effective method is to launch unmanned ones, tolerating a lot of failures, and when the bugs are worked out then launch men.
replyIf you always fail, you aren’t trying.
replyIf you never fail, you aren’t trying.
If you always fail, you aren’t learning
replyIsn't that better?
True, but then you have to differentiate trying and failing vs not doing anything and failing by default.
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