Blowing up on the pad is incredibly worse from a design data collection perspective, a risk to life perspective, and a downstream impact to future launches perspective (nobody can use that site for a couple of months).
Blowing up on the pad is incredibly worse from a design data collection perspective, a risk to life perspective, and a downstream impact to future launches perspective (nobody can use that site for a couple of months).
To be fair the last Starship to blowup on launchpad/ground was less than a year ago. It is a set back but it appears nobody has avoided this issue yet.
https://www.livescience.com/space/space-exploration/spacexs-...
That was on a test stand, NOT a launchpad.
Vastly different destroying each of those.
I will give you that. Better to blow up in a test rather than ready for launch.
not to mention 7 days before it was meant to deliver a payload to space... a proper commercial payload. not just a POC payload.