David Senra

It can never fail.

So there's large margins of safety, there's exhaustive testing, there's conservative everything.

The Falcon 9, which is the operational launch vehicle, it's middle ground.

It says ascent can't fail, but some landing attempts are allowed to.

And then Starship, which is development, failure is instrumental.

And Elon has a quote about this.

He says, Starship does not have anyone on board so we can blow things up.

It is really helpful.

And this is a good way to think about this.

This is the same company doing two very different things with two very different groups of people and two very different risk profiles, but they're talking to each other.

And so if you go back to their very first four launches, it says the contrast with traditional aerospace is stark.

In that world, a three failure start may have triggered years of analysis, review boards, and redesigns on paper before the next attempt.

At SpaceX, each flight became the next test, with fixes incorporated immediately.

This pattern continued into Starship.

The early integrated flights each ended in rapid, unscheduled disassemblies, which is just their name for explosions.

But each came after achieving partial objectives, such as clearing the pad, passing the max queue, reaching near orbital velocity.

Then finally, the famous catch of the super heavy booster, which is the equivalent of catching a 20-story building that's falling from the edge of space.

Each subsequent flight incorporated design changes based on telemetry from the previous one.

Where traditional aerospace might take years to go from flight anomaly to design change, SpaceX was doing it in between flights.

Next subheading, have a high production rate.