As opposed to Blue Origin’s solution, which was to be assembled from three different spacecraft in orbit? Or the Dynetics solution, which was over its own mass budget?

It’s wild that there’s no configuration of SRBs that doesn’t have offset thrust. Wonder how much of the energy was lost because the boosters and main engines had to be angled, so the overall center of thrust and center of gravity were still in line, and the damned thing could fly straight?

NASA is funded with tax money and failures mean they get called in front of Congress like a child who sharpied the brand new tv. They don’t have the luxury of failure, so they over-analyze and over-engineer everything, to the point that everything they build is reasonably expected to work on the first try.

SpaceX doesn’t have that restriction and so they’re free to blow up as much stuff as they need to. How many Falcons failed along the way to building the safest, highest flight cadence launch vehicle in history?

The Starship is in development. The Shuttle is retired. Assuming that SpaceX doesn’t decide to can Starship before operational flights begin, make this comparison again when it’s retired.

They get to claim it because we let them. Every time an article comes out with “____ is a Nazi dogwhistle,” there’s a set of people who don’t want to be associated with Nazis (or insert relevant disliked group of choice) who will immediately drop whatever the thing is. This creates a cycle where something does eventually become a dogwhistle, because everyone who didn’t use it as such has stopped using it altogether.

TL;DR: Fuck 'em. Don’t let those assholes control how you express yourself.