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Originally Posted by photon
I mean it is in development so stuff is expected to fail, the ultimate judge is if they can deliver something that works for a cost that makes sense regardless of how messy it looks.. they're trading fast messy testing for expensive slow engineering.
If they end up failing overall is that a result of that overall choice or a result of the company being unable to meet the challenges for whatever reasons (brain drain from ppl leaving from Musk being crazy, the engineering just too hard for the cost, etc) remains to be seen.
I think they've shown that the lower stage booster part of Starship is doing reasonably well.
The thing with Starship itself is it's a reusable 2nd stage.. something that is much harder to do than a reusable 1st stage.
SpaceX could eventually abandon the idea of a reusable 2nd stage but still use the booster they've created to get big things into orbit.. not as cheap as a reusable 2nd stage; no idea how much more expensive a Mars mission gets without a reusable 2nd stage.
But there probably is a "success" path that just involves putting a more traditional 2nd stage on the big booster. Or do that in the short term while continuing the reusable 2nd stage development.
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Fast messy testing is fine to get a product over the line if you've done enough decent engineering. The corollary is that you can't test in quality if the design is fundamentally flawed. Hopefully that's not the case, and the success of Falcon 9 suggests it isn't, but I don't really know the history of either program well.