re: Serious Question: Would anyone here fly on a SpaceX rocket?

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Has Starship truly ever had a 100% successful flight?) I've said as much on this board before. The more rockets that DON'T have successful missions, the more I'm puzzled by it. How hard would it be NOT to rush these to flight, working on the engineering and do ground based flight sims?

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SpaceX doesn’t consider these “failures” at all. They learn from them and go fix things instead of spending a decade plus trying to get things right the first time. It’s an objectively faster and cheaper way to design a rocket. SpaceX has already proven this and it’s the reason they are decades ahead of all the competition.

The best engineers on the planet work for SpaceX. I say we let them do their thing

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The question, for those smart enough to figure it out, is really about their engineering approach.

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Why wouldn’t it be? They did the same thing with Falcon 9 a couple decades ago and that turned out to be the most successful and prolific rocket in history. It currently sends about 80% of all payload to space WORLDWIDE. Think about that, that includes Europe, China India and other commercial competitors.

So, this design process has worked for them before and there’s no reason to think it won’t work again.

It takes NASA five years in between test flights because they don’t want anything to fail where SpaceX builds one sees what goes wrong and fixes it on the next one and fires another one off two months later.

I really do enjoy all of the armchair rocket scientists on this board. It’s a gift of comedy.

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It's a dumb question.

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Is it? I mean, manned or not, they are building a track record and I'm not sure it's good.

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A dumb statement. These are tests of reusable launch system to get to Mars not just getting to the ISS which the Dragon and falcon seem to be handling well with the crew version and the cargo version.

For starship the block 1 had 4 successes to 2 failures. The failures were the first two flight tests which is where we are on block 2.

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Personally, I think Musk is brilliant. But it also puzzles me that he has so much money that SpaceX's mode of operation is to simply build things to fail.

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It's faster than thousands of meetings arguing theory.

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Has a lower launch success rate than the delta 2

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Just from Google AI so the numbers may not be correct, but they say you're wrong:

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The Delta II rocket family had a mission success rate of nearly 98.7%, with 155 total launches and only a few failures, most notably the GPS IIR-1 launch in 1997 which marked its last unsuccessful mission before a streak of 100 consecutive successful launches; making it considered a very reliable workhorse rocket.

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The active version of the rocket, the Falcon 9 Block 5, has flown 390 times successfully and failed once (Starlink Group 9–3), resulting in the 99.74% success rate. In 2022, the Falcon 9 set a new record with 60 successful launches by the same launch vehicle type in a calendar year.

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The one that actually carries people is pretty damn solid

So you only show prototype Starship test rockets doing their test things, and not human rated Falcons and Dragons successfully launching and landing?