SpaceX Starship Test Flight

[Tom Tyson]

I suspect the reason NASA was so cautious was Congressional oversight, which would have shut down NASA after only a tenth of the “failures” SpaceX has had.

Public funds vs private.

[Séamas Mulholland]

I still annoy my bosses by saying that we learn more when we fail a development test.

[Stephanie Belser]

I have to say that I was initially very skeptical about Space X; I thought it was mostly P.T. Barnum-level of hype, mainly to boost The Boss's enormous ego. The FanBoy cult they built didn't help them at all in my eyes. But, over time, their engineers have proven to be very agile and willing to "try it out and see if it works", which is thus far proving again the old adage about "build a little, test a lot, then build more and test a whole lot more."

"The Boss" is an egotistical tool. His willingness to put his employees' health at risk during the pandemic so he can keep the stock analysts happy was proof of that. So far, at least as SpaceX goes, he seems content to let the engineers do their thing and settle for walking around at launches and looking important.