Keith’s note: I was just on Bloomberg TV for live coverage of the SpaceX Starship 7 flight. [Audio] They recovered the first stage perfectly but they lost comms near the end of the Starship burn. This was an upgraded version of Starship. So they’ll just try again to get it right.
Biologist, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Biologist and Payload integrator, Editor of NASAWatch.com and Astrobiology.com, Lapsed climber, Explorer, Synaesthete, Former Challenger Center board member... More by Keith Cowing
As many times as SpaceX has failed (granted, learning with each failure), NASA would never be able to take on this kind of risk profile. It’s amazing to me that Starship still hasn’t made it to orbit or attempted a landing/capture. It feels like it is going to be at least another year before those milestones are achieved, and at least a couple of more failures. Is there any other modern large systems equivalent of this many failures before success?