this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
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The Starship is in development. The Shuttle is retired. Assuming that SpaceX doesn't decide to can Starship before operational flights begin, make this comparison again when it's retired.
Yeah if it ever gets to that point we can revisit the comparison.
Not a single space shuttle exploded during development.
Two did during the 135 operations.
So spaceship is already behind on development. Let's see how operations works out.
NASA is funded with tax money and failures mean they get called in front of Congress like a child who sharpied the brand new tv. They don't have the luxury of failure, so they over-analyze and over-engineer everything, to the point that everything they build is reasonably expected to work on the first try.
SpaceX doesn't have that restriction and so they're free to blow up as much stuff as they need to. How many Falcons failed along the way to building the safest, highest flight cadence launch vehicle in history?
Having the kabooms before going into production is better than having them afterwards. Obviously the jury is very much out on Starship. Personally I'm not at all optimistic about it. But comparing the current development problems with the shuttle disasters isn't really fair.