https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/03/the-launch-of-japans...

The Soviet N1 rocket never even got past first stage separation, in 4 launches. They got closer every time, but after the 4th stage blew up during main engine cut-off, they canceled the program, and never flew a cosmonaut beyond low-earth orbit.

The third Redstone launch was also a lot like what you describe, but I can't find video.

There was another of the Vanguard ones where it rose a couple of inches and then shut down and fell... and survived and was launched awhile later.

The failure of the pad was entirely, 100% predictable. It's (literally) not rocket science. How concrete responds under pressure is a super well understood thing.

Most rockets (almost all) use just a few engines. The Saturn V had five engines, and the Space Shuttle had a total of five engines (including the Solid Rocket Boosters). The Atlas V uses one engine, New Glenn seven engines, etc.

Historically, there has only been one rocket that attempted the 'many engine' approach before now: the N1 by the Soviets, which they never managed to get working successfully.

SpaceX is thus attempting something unprecedented. They are not only trying to create a rocket with 33 engines, but they are also building the most powerful rocket ever made. Furthermore, it is the only rocket ever designed with fully reusable first and second stages. In this single machine, SpaceX is innovating in multiple ways that neither the US, the Soviets, nor any other country has managed to achieve.

Additionally, the Raptor engine used by SpaceX is the only full-flow staged combustion rocket engine that has ever flown. This design makes it more efficient and high-performing and has been considered the 'holy grail' of rocket engine design. Until now, no one has managed to build a successful rocket engine using full-flow staged combustion due to its complexity. The Raptor is also, pound for pound, the most powerful and efficient rocket engine ever made.

SpaceX is innovating throughout their space 'stack.' The entirety of the Starship project is immensely innovative in almost every way possible. Many others have tried and failed to achieve even a single aspect of what this project encompasses. The fact that SpaceX managed to have 33 Raptors firing perfectly today is already absolutely phenomenal.

So yes, I expect things to fail because much of what they are doing is literally the first attempt of its kind. It's entirely predictable that some aspects might fail. What you're asking is akin to questioning the pioneers of quantum computing: 'Hey, are you telling me the first quantum chip you built failed? That’s crazy! How can you build something so expensive and expect it to fail?'

When you put together a bunch of equipment with a small error rate, the time between errors climbs very fast. Build a RAID array with 33 disks and you’d better have a vendor picked out for replacements because you’ll be doing replacements fairly often, instead of every four to ten years with a single disk.

And they don’t understand dependent statistics either. Every failing rocket engine can potentially damage its neighbors. Every failing hard drive requires a stressful operation on the remaining disks (resilvering) that may push the next drive to failure.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAUVCn_jw5I

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgqZMK22LEk

Rocket science is hard hence "It's not rocket science", except it is.

Having money and smart people doesn't ensure success. Bezos started his company before Musk did Space X and they still haven't gotten to space.

Anything built outside of currently-known parameters might fail, so you design as much of the rocket as possible to operate within the limits of current knowledge.

Some of those limits turn out to be feasible to push in a laboratory. So you build and conduct experiments on those parameters, record the results, and design your rocket accordingly.

But for some parameters, the lab experiments required to test them are incredibly costly. Especially for parameters that vary strongly with scale (like turbulence), a system with the size and energy of the world's largest rocket can only be predicted by an experiment with the size and energy of the world's largest rocket.

Say it costs a billion dollars to build and launch your new rocket, but it will operate with ten unknown parameters, each of which will cost 200 million dollars to individually test on the ground. You could spend two billion dollars on experiments, then one billion dollars on a rocket you're confident will work. This is more-or-less the model that NASA used for developing the Space Launch System: do as much science as necessary, ask Congress for as much extra time and money as the contractors say they need, so they can be extremely confident that their new biggest rocket will work perfectly the first time. NASA doesn't like launching rockets that they don't know will work, because Congress doesn't like when rockets they paid for blow up, and NASA depends on Congress for all of their funding.

However, for the same money, you could build your rocket best-guess within the known unknowns and fly it. It's likely to blow up, because you guessed on ten unknowns. However, if the results of the flight allows you determine some of the parameters with greater confidence than one billion dollars in ground experiments, then it was worth the while, and you re-design your rocket according to the newly-understood parameters. You can do this three times for the cost of building the experiments and flying once. That's a decent chance at learning the parameters, and as a bonus, you get to practice building and flying the rocket, productively employing all of your staff and facilities.

That's more-or-less the model that SpaceX is developing Starship on, and previously Falcon 9. Blowing up prototype rockets only costs SpaceX time and money, and as long as it costs less time and money than running ground experiments (and keeping their production and launch crews on retainer, and maintaining their facilities between rockets), they're saving money by launching rockets they expect to blow up.

Sarcasm aside, NASA has blown up plenty of rockets. It's not a problem to blow up a rocket if it doesn't pose any substantial risk. NASA doesn't much like to blow up rockets anymore because it's contrary to how their operational model works: Congress gives NASA a task, a deadline, and a budget, and NASA is expected to deliver on the task, and can ask for more time or money down the road. Any kind of high-profile public failure is risky to NASA because it looks bad to Congress, who might cancel the project. Asking Congress for more time or money is normal, so the safe strategy with NASA's undertakings (especially high-profile ones like the James Webb Space Telescope and the Space Launch System) is to deliver flawless performance, usually late and over-budget. Congress doesn't need to be paid back, and history mostly remembers program success rather than schedule and budget overruns.

Of SpaceX's current programs, Falcon 9 is operated most similarly to NASA. It's expected to be mature and reliable; it is trusted to fly billion-dollar spy satellites and human crew. Any kind of failure will be heavily scrutinized, so SpaceX is only pushing the envelope of reuse and flight performance with their in-house payload program, Starlink. All of their customer flights get to operate well within the established safe performance envelope of the rocket. With over 200 successful consecutive flights now, SpaceX's Falcon 9 obviously can be depended on.

Starship, on the other hand, is not being depended on by anybody at the moment. No project gets delayed or cancelled when it explodes; no missile complex goes unwatched, no humans get stranded in space, smacked into the ocean, or burned alive. Nobody, least of all SpaceX, needs it to be perfect now. What they need is for it to become good enough to sell, to sell lots once they're selling it, and to not cost too much once they're selling it, all of this ideally sooner rather than later. They have access to lots of money now to make this happen, but investors' money has to be paid back someday.

So the bar for Starship isn't set at "succeed". It's set at "maximize future return on investment".

SpaceX is counting on present failures to save them money in the future by proving exactly what is necessary to succeed, at a time when failure is relatively cheap for them. They've clearly improved from the previous launch. Key milestones were passed. Telemetry was collected, and the flight safety systems executed an authoritative conclusion to the flight. With the investment of only 212 days of time and money since their previous high-profile Starship explosion, SpaceX has gotten demonstrable progress towards future flight success.

If winning and losing were a spectrum, all those things you listed are very clearly much closer to winning than they are to losing.

There is a very interesting book about it, called Combustion Instabilities in Liquid Rocket Engines: Testing and Development Practices in Russia.