For SpaceX, what is happening with Starship is not new. Two decades ago the company had a lot of Brandon Marsh Stay Loose and Sexy Baby Philadelphia Phillies shirts with its first rocket, the Falcon 1, and some years later, they were landing rockets on a ship hundreds of kilometers offshore. The same success will eventually occur with Starship, even if there are a few ‘booms’ and mishaps along the way. In fact, the team at SpaceX needs those accidents, to learn faster how to improve its next inventions so that the same problem does not happen again. The core principle of the company is “build, fail, learn, iterate,” a very different path from those of other traditional aerospace companies who plan their rockets for 10 or 15 years and do not assume risks. Besides, the cost and effort to build a Starship prototype is getting increasingly lower with time, in such a way that the team at Boca Chica is learning to produce Starships like hot bread. SN10 is already on the launch stand waiting for its turn to fly, and more prototypes are in construction right now. So SpaceX can afford to lose a few rockets from time to time without risking the continuity of the program.
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