It's not ridiculous. While of course everything will fail eventually, it was not anticipated that it would fail this time due to a known issue. Until the cause is determined, it can not safely be assumed that the issue was due to age.
For comparison, if a plane crashed after 23 flights everyone would assume it was a factory defect.
A better analogy would be a Jet engine that has an expected lifetime of 5,000 hours, but operated for 100,000 hours caught fire on the tarmac while no passengers were aboard. Therefore all flights from all aircraft with the engine are grounded indefinitely.
Even by the FAA’s standards for passenger aircraft (Not an experimental Rocket) that’s incredibly unlikely.
> better analogy would be a Jet engine that has an expected lifetime of 5,000 hours, but operated for 100,000 hours caught fire on the tarmac while no passengers were aboard. Therefore all flights from all aircraft with the engine are grounded indefinitely
If the airline attempted to take off with it, yes, that merits a grounding.
As I stated in the part of that sentence you omitted, everything fails eventually. It is very reasonable to expect a better estimate than that for a human spaceflight. If something fails, you need to know why it failed, it doesn't matter if it flew once, 23 times, or 2300 times.
> Planes are meant to fly well more than 23 flights so that's a bad comparison.
The point of the comparison is that for aerospace hardware 23 uses is not decrepitly old, and a manufacturing defect can easily take that long to cause an issue.
> No other booster has flown more than 23 flights, this is unchartered territory.
And it will remain uncharted territory if the reaction to a failure is "eh rockets just aren't supposed to work after that point."
Except that a plane has passengers. But this rocket had none. It did not even have cargo. And it crashed in a pre-evacuated zone. There is no need to have the same level of security for these two situations.
He doesn’t need to be a vet to know the difference between a dog and a cat. Retrieving the booster is optional. Boeing, their competitor, can’t even do it.
So because Boeing can't do it, we should just forget about safety investigations and let SpaceX do whatever? That logic doesn't fly. Neither does your nonsense analogy. Either we give a shit about safety or we don't. FAA previously grounded the Falcon 9 and cleared it to fly once they determined it was safe. They will do the same here. I feel like you and others are severely misjudging the formalities and expertise required for these things and so you're just armchairing this shit. It's tiring. You're not as smart as you think you are.
Yeah because Boeing can't do it and the FAA is OK with it, then SpaceX should be held to THAT same standard and not judged differently otherwise it treates SpaceX differently and contributes to complaints of political double standards. If it's safe enough for a Boeing booster to burn up on entry then the line should be drawn there. If SpaceX managed to land a booster to help recover costs that's a financial benefit to them and has no impact whatsoever on safety.
For comparison, if a plane crashed after 23 flights everyone would assume it was a factory defect.