Comment Re: Corporate welfare (Score 2) 62
StarShip on the other hand is not. It is a reboot of the Commie N1 Rocket.
No. The N-1 suffered from these problems:
1. lack of testing on individual engines. The engines were not built to be restartable. They used e.g. pyrotechnics to open valves, meaning that valve could only be opened once. They tested NK-15 engines by building a batch of 6, testing 3, and if those tests were successful, putting the remaining 3 on the rocket.
2. lack of testing on individual stages. This was because the Soviets didn't want to spend years, $ and thousands of tons of concrete to build the huge test stands that would be needed for such tests. They did their stage tests by launching rockets.
They used the same strategy for Proton, which went into successful service after 14 test launches with lots of explosions.
3. lack of money. The USSR space budget was 1/20 of the Apollo budget.
4. lack of support from the leader of the Soviet space effort, Mishin. This meant N-1 development was not pushed, but allowed to languish.
5. lack of quality control. One launch failed due to welding slag entering an engine.
6. many engines on a stage, with no way to test the behavior of that engine cluster on the ground due to #2.
SpaceX has none of these problems. Yes, they've blown up a lot of rockets. 0 of those failures were in any way similar to the problems seen on N-1 launches. In contrary: those tests show SpaceX has designed Starship to operate reliably with 33 engines, demonstrating engine-out capability and resilience to violent engine failures.
Starship development is similar to N-1 development in the early use of launch tests. For Starship, this has not replaced stage testing on the ground. It just gives early access to a flight regime that cannot be tested on the ground: reentry.