Any elementary student of history can tell you how bad an idea this is. Apollo 1 almost ended the program. A backlash in public opinion will crater SpaceX in the market and legislature.
There is no space mission in the near decades worth the loss of human life. Economy in terms of money is no priority if you are to undertake human space flight. Move fast and break things is cute for a global search index or regressing public discourse and attention span; it's astronomically stupid and not acceptable for safety of human life.
If this were a billionaire playboy stroking his ego and putting his own money and life on the line who cares. It's not, he's using my tax dollars and is going to hurt others for negligible gain.
They aren't using any tax dollars for Starship. It's entirely funded by their profits (at least as far as I know).
And this Starship MK1 is/was a prototype designed to test some aspects of their design in the real world. It was never going to be anywhere close to taking people onboard. Even this incident had all people far away before they started doing anything like pressurising.
This is active development, every single rocket company or program in existence has had explosions and test failures, and they will continue to have them. The important part is that they are doing this safely and nobody is getting hurt, these are controlled tests.
It may not be the way you think rockets should be designed and built (I'm personally kinda skeptical that they will actually build the full prototypes/rockets outside like this), but it's not more dangerous than any other rocket company.
I meant it as in no government contracts are going toward starship development, but looking it up it seems I'm actually wrong, maybe...
The air force has given them some money for development on their Raptor engine, and they've talked about wanting more government funding for starship itself, but they've also talked about how starship has been privately funded so far.
> There is no space mission in the near decades worth the loss of human life.
This is a weird assertion. Tens of thousands of people die in car accidents each year, but no one proclaims that going to the grocery store isn't worth the risk to human life.
That response doesn't make sense (normal people can risk lives but billionaires can't?). What does make sense is the fact that daily driving produces lots of economic value in the short term which manned space travel doesn't. So it's worth killing some drivers but not worth killing some astronauts. But that's still not obviously the right conclusion. Space travel has the potential for much greater value further in the future - most long term being survival of the species!
It's completely orthogonal. By all means fix the externalities of internal combustion engines.
Intelligent people in NASA realized unmanned vehicles can conduct almost all important space research and business in the near future. There is no reason to jump the gun and do it with the lack of quality the software industry champions and is known for. If the mission of manned space flight is simply to inspire people, then it must be done without compromise. Engineering ethics 101.
There is no space mission in the near decades worth the loss of human life. Economy in terms of money is no priority if you are to undertake human space flight. Move fast and break things is cute for a global search index or regressing public discourse and attention span; it's astronomically stupid and not acceptable for safety of human life.
If this were a billionaire playboy stroking his ego and putting his own money and life on the line who cares. It's not, he's using my tax dollars and is going to hurt others for negligible gain.