[f-securus]

Holy cow. How are people downplaying something so revolutionary. Without those other tests SpaceX wouldn’t have done what it did today and they show progress each step. They are doing what nasa couldn’t (send stuff to space orders of magnitude cheaper) because they aren’t afraid to blow stuff up.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

They haven't gotten to the revolutionary part yet (fuel tankers in orbit, raptor relight, reusable first stage, reentry).

[f-securus]

Re-using rockets isn't revolutionary?

[pclmulqdq]

Nobody has done anything revolutionary and nobody has gotten to space an order of magnitude cheaper. The best estimates of SpaceX's cost advantage per kilo put it at 30-50% better than a Soyuz.

The Starship program so far has soaked up as much money as SLS, and hasn't even left orbit.

[jiggawatts]

They did several revolutionary things with starship:

Full-flow staged combustion metholox engines.

Stainless steel construction.

Biggest rocket to have ever flown.

Highest thrust at launch of any rocket by a factor of two or so.

Live streaming of reentry via a space Internet network.

Etc…

[thinkcontext]

> The Starship program so far has soaked up as much money as SLS, and hasn't even left orbit

There's a bit of nuance to what you are claiming here.

SLS cost $11B to develop, which is estimated to be in the neighborhood of what Starship will cost when development is complete. We don't know how much has been spent so far.

A huge difference is that producing and launching an SLS rocket costs over $2B, while SpaceX is estimating $10M for Starship. Now, I don't trust that $10M number, that's what they aspire for it to cost. To do it they need to be able to reuse the stages dozens of times. It could take a long time to achieve that or they might not make it at all. However, $2B+ per launch is a whole 'nother level of expense.