SpaceX’s Starship V3—still a work in progress—mostly successful on first flight

SpaceX has more to prove before flying Starship all the way to low-Earth orbit.

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[NetMage]

Are there plans for a launch abort system? If not, how will it ever get certified for human flight?

The same way the Shuttle was? Or airliners?

 

[NetMage]

If you are at no risk of forgetting his flaws, it is part of your burden in life to bear the stream of reminders for those who are.

No, there is the ignore function to take care of that. Goodbye.

 

[NetMage]

These things should be as reliable as Merlins now.

Merlin’s were developed from before 2006 through 2018 and had multiple failures in their early revisions. Raptor has been under full development since 2012 and has had only three real revisions. It’s not a surprise that a much more powerful and complicated engine is taking a little longer to be production ready.

SpaceX built hundreds of Raptors because Elon’s experience with F9 taught him that optimizing the factory to mass produce something is just as hard as designing it and that he will need that capability for Starship to meet its goals. I’m sure a lot do Raptor V2s were thrown in the trash as the factory processes were developed.

 

[NetMage]

And hardware-rich development or not, they can't afford to try this a dozen times until it works.

Why not?

 

[NetMage]

The thing is just is that some people here expect it to be a fully reusable launcher with 100 tonnes of payload this year. And it won't.

That doesn’t sound like opinion and that’s the problem. You don’t know that it won’t, you just need to be pessimistic and are finding reasons to be so, as if e.g. SpaceX doesn’t have cameras inside Ship showing the state of the internals just before crashing into the ocean.