Steady progress
Watch carefully for dishonest critics of Starship moving the goalposts.
After IFT-1 they said that 30 engines couldn't be reliable. We have now had 2 back-to-back flights with zero failures on ascent.
After IFT-2 they said that the dynamics of the boostback were fatally… pic.twitter.com/ikDPejazg7
— Peter Hague (@peterrhague) March 14, 2024
Astrophysicist Peter Hague chimed in after the test, saying we should be on the lookout for “dishonest critics of Starship moving the goalposts,” as he wrote on X. Initial doubts about Raptor reliability and boostback dynamics were disproven after the first two flights, Hague wrote, and now he suspects that critics will “opine on heat shields, control issues—and insist that these things can’t be fixed any time soon.” It’s a fair point, as SpaceX has made progress with each of the three Starship launches thus far, and moving past supposedly intractable challenges each time.
