Although, this Second Space Age is producing the things we had expected to see, and thought we were paying for, during the First Space Age.

I have complained in the past that people just do not understand that Starship is in development, and in development there are experiments to test the limits. The thermal protection system is an area with such tests all over Starship. Tiles are replaced with other materials in order to watch the performance. Failure is not only expected, it can be demanded. Test to failure is normal, as SpaceX did with at least one test tank, to find the limits of their fuselage design.

Most other rocket companies make iterative changes to a standard rocket design, so they can expect success on the first launch. They don’t always get success, but it can be expected. They do not intend to learn much new from their launches, they only expect to learn the quirks and idiosyncrasies of their new rocket. (Even a new, mass produced car has these.)

Starship is in development right now, so the launch-fast and break-things philosophy is in full use. It is what the guys did with Falcon, too, but they didn’t have as many lessons to learn in order to get the landing, and they were able to test landings during operational missions, so it may have looked much more successful than it was. Successes sort of like these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ (2 minutes, “How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster”).
____________
Dick Eagleson,
I agree with you, too, except I didn’t think of flight test 1 as a cluster. Just a larger than expected learning opportunity, a character-building moment, the kind that we tell everyone we are glad we went through — but really we aren’t.

Generally agree.

Something the Eager Space guy – whose stuff I mostly like – gets wrong is his seeming assumption that there is some clean separation between the Falcon development crew and that for Starship. There isn’t and wasn’t. Significant numbers of F9-Dragon people – especially the senior ones – were put on the proto-Starship team as early as 2015. Starship headcount increased steadily after that. Following the first Crew Dragon flight in 2020, most of the remaining F9-Dragon development team was put to work on Starship.

He also cites Musk’s purchase of Twitter (now X) and subsequent involvement in politics as “distractions.” Musk has had significant “distractions” from SpaceX during nearly his entire time with that company. The most significant of these has been Tesla. But there are also Neuralink, The Boring Company, Starlink, X and Xai. Musk has not only long since learned to walk and chew gum at the same time, but also to juggle running chainsaws while doing both.

Comparing F9 setbacks and recoveries to those of Starship does not, in any case, work to Starship’s disadvantage. The most direct comparison would be the 15+ months it took SpaceX to put SLC-40 back into service after the AMOS-6 debacle vs. the six months it took to put Starship Pad 1 back in service following the EFT-1 Charlie Foxtrot. One suspects that restoration/upgrading of the Massey’s ship static fire test facility will take significantly less than six months to accomplish.

Recovery to the point of returns-to-flight following in-flight mishaps also favors Starship. RTF for F9 following CRS-7 was six months. Following AMOS-6, it was about 4 months. None of the Starship failures to-date have taken more than 2 – 3 months for a next test flight to be ginned up. Some of those reflights have also been failures, but the causes have not been repeated. Starship is simply a much bigger, more complicated vehicle than an F9 2nd stage and is expected to return for reuse in the bargain. More teething issues were simply to be expected. SpaceX’s Starship passing game has been poor of late, but it will eventually cross the goal line even it needs to do so via serial three-yard gains made in clouds of dust.

Maybe, but Eager Space was wrong about the difference between Falcon 9 and Starship. Falcon 9 was not done quickly because failure would ensue if they ran out of money, Falcon 9 was designed to be quick to market, to be virtually the same as any other rocket, just cheaper to build and launch. The design was like virtually every other rocket, it was evolutionary from previous rockets. This is OK, but advancements come slowly, this way. The innovations came later, when there was some income to fund the innovations. This was when Falcon 9 tried some revolutionary changes, such as return and reuse of the booster, then return and reuse of the fairings. Blue Origin also succeeded in returning and reusing its New Shepard booster as well as its capsule. Reuse was shown to be the way to go, and now many companies around the world are working toward this revolutionary idea. This revolutionary idea was supposed to make the Space Shuttle an inexpensive and frequent method of getting into orbit, but the execution was wanting.

Starship is a completely new innovation from its booster design to its Starship landing. No rocket has ever been designed like these two stages. Three stages, if you are willing to accept that the launch pad is Stage Zero.

His proposed SpaceX motto: “fast, cheap, and do it right” is reminiscent of Red Adair’s: ‘I can do it fast, I can do it cheap, I can do it right. Choose two.’ Generally, improvements in any technology or industry tend to improve one of these three concepts at a time, but rocketry was in such a poor state that all three could easily be improved. So SpaceX did this with Falcon, picking up the fastness pace over time, because reuse reduces the need to make a rocket for every launch. Rocket Lab did similar work with its Electron rocket, and is doing similar things with Neutron. Neutron does not need extensive development testing, because — like Falcon — it is not significantly different than current rockets.

Starship is completely different. Completely. Falcon did so well at improving all three concepts that entirely new technologies and methods are needed to make significant improvements to any one of the three concepts, yet SpaceX is working on improving all three again. Are you amazed? Eager Space does not seem to be. He talks as though SpaceX is making the usual operational rocket rather than testing new concepts. This is why he thinks it is OK to compare Starship to Apollo, which was only an evolutionary improvement from the two earlier manned projects. However, the lunar lander was new, a system that had never been done before; that is where the comparison could come in. Failures are to be expected and sometimes desired, because you learn so much more where the limits are.

He says the Falcon 9 team would have made a Starship rocket that was more likely to work. Maybe, but that would not reach the desired goal. The Starship team is testing limits in order to make revolutionary improvements once again, but this time from scratch, not by improving an existing evolutionary rocket. The goal is: frequently get huge amounts of mass to orbit for low cost. This requires significant changes to methods, operations, and hardware. This is not hubris. This is development. I get the idea that Eager Space has never been in a development project, and may never have been an engineer. If this is true, then he is not like Tim Dodd, who researches the heck out of every informational video he does — that is why Dodd is so good.

SpaceX will continue to find the limits, because that is how you make revolutionary changes. The “Apollo reset scenario” is what you do if you are in an evolutionary project. Coming up with the fix is not the best way for SpaceX to proceed. Coming up with a fix and then continuing to test is the way to get the massive job done fastest. It looks like it is not working, but they have been planning and executing each test flight to maximize the learning curve. Coming up with the fix takes longer and takes more time to get less data. Block 2 may be failing, but is it a failure, or is it giving a lot of data points about the limits?

The hopper era went well not because Musk was there to oversee things. It went well because they were not doing much that was new. Starhopper was little different than Grasshopper.

Musk is not suffering from Bezos’s curse of money and time. Musk’s wealth is in the assets, not in the bank. Bezos could sell publicly traded shares to play with his rocket toy, but Musk has made very clear that he is in a hurry. But — and this is a very big but — he also wants to do things right, and for such a revolutionary improvement on three fronts, this takes a lot of trial and error. They are now in the error phase.

“Rover tech looks to improve, at least”

Maybe. Don’t confuse the map for the terrain. In this case, don’t assume the model is correct until its predictions are tested against reality.

Rover tech looks to improve, at least:
https://techxplore.com/news/2025-07-robotic-space-rovers-stuck-figured.html

But such are the demands that our present technology and orbital mechanics impose upon us.