Quote:
Originally Posted by Megatron96
So, it was supposed to explode?
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It's not that they WANTED it to explode. It's that SpaceX's way of doing things often means things will blow up along the way.
NASA (and some others) spend years and years and years working everything out on paper and only build when it's ready to roll. They perfect every little thing (in theory), which does work (usually) but tends to be very expensive and time-consuming.
SpaceX believes that they can move a lot faster if they put together a minimum viable product, launch it, and see what happens. They build stuff cheaply, put sensors all over the place, and use what they learn each time to figure out what needs to be fixed. It's messy and destructive, but they tend to end up with VERY solid results at a much lower cost and timeline (or at least that's what happened with the Falcon 9).
Would they have loved to reach orbit today? Absolutely. Is it possible that there's a design flaw, and Starship will never be successful? Doubtful based on SpaceX's track record, but it's possible. But was today a failure? Nah. No matter what happened, this launch was ending with the rocket either blown up in the air or scuttled at sea. The only thing that really failed was they didn't get as much data from the second stage as they would have liked.