Altogether, it was a terrific flight and a big step forward for the Starship program. The biggest success was the survival of stage zero, which bodes well for a quick turnaround for the next flight. Hot staging was the second big success, and Starship got to space. The flight termination was disappointing, but the actual functioning of the FTS system seems to be fixed. That was a problem with the first flight and sho…
I don't understand why people are celebrating failed rocket launches. Apollo 4, the first time the full Apollo Saturn V rocket stack was assembled, did not blow up on the first attempt to space. That is something to celebrate. Now wasting millions of government dollars from subsidies, which in the end comes from citizens. We should not be celebrating failure.
Apollo 1 is highly analogous to the current testing of Starship. New spacecraft, highly ambitious, coming together for the first time.
Its conflagration was predictable, and a total waste of the life of the astronauts onboard. Only their deaths forced the whole spacecraft to be redesigned the way it should have been before any astronauts were onboard. Even afterwards, a second electrical fire nearly killed three more astronauts, far from any safety though their shiny new door.
The Space Shuttle ran much the same way. Carrying astronauts on its very first flight, people though it was safe, right up until it spectacularly killed seven astronauts. After that, it was flown much less ambitiously, and then it killed seven more people, and then we still kept flying it because it was all we had, and our bureaucracy was stuck with it.
Starship blowing up today poses no risk to human life, or to any organizational ambition. Rather, its present failures represent progress towards future success. Somebody is trying to do better than has been done in the past. If they learn all the things to not do to their rocket before valuable payloads and people fly on it, all the better.