@tlalexander (*) And yes, that thing exploding means that is was a failure, they made a bet to get away with less engineering, so they can arrive faster at the stage where they no longer need to pour absurd amounts of money into engineering and instead get absurd amounts of money for just owning the rocket that others pay to use. And the lost that bet and now need to pour lots more money into engineering first.
@aekis_projects
Regarding the means of production: owning a factory is not a passive job. Listen to Richard Wolff - the point is that the people who do the labor also make decisions about how to manage the organization. If we can't understand what engineering tests are success or failures, we can't properly manage our own enterprises.
People can enjoy whatever they want. But as an aspiring engineering communicator I will call out errors in engineering understanding.
The last rev of my farm robot PCBs caught on fire. Was that a failure? I don't think so. I am trying to do welding, programming, PCB design. I go well beyond certainty of design. I am bound to have some things break. That's not failure, that's finding out what doesn't work.
@aekis_projects
I want to drive this one point home a little more.
SpaceX has always taken the approach of design fast and test the whole system. This leads to some explosions but you save a lot of money on R&D and fabrication by doing it this way. Look at Falcon 9. No one ever made a reusable rocket and now they have a bunch of rockets that have been reused 15 times. They absolutely blew up some rockets in the process but clearly the Falcon 9 design program was a resounding success.
They are not losing the bet. The long run costs are still less than the NASA approach of overdesign and test in the lab to high hell. That produces very expensive per unit rocket costs. The SpaceX approach is faster and cheaper even if some things go boom.