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Boeing's Starliner successfully docks with space station after challenging rendezvous
(www.cbsnews.com)
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Please explain.
Years long delays and development hell for the Starliner; finally launches with significant but manageable propellant leaks. Meanwhile Starship is making cutting edge leaps and bounds in only its fourth test flight. Starship looks nearly ready to launch payloads.
Starliner successfully docked to a space station to deliver crew, a feat first achieved in 1971.
Starship flew into space and crashed, a feat first achieved in 1944.
Nobody broke any big milestones, both were just test flights, that are both horribly behind their promised time-frames.
Itβs okay to hate SpaceX as much as you like but what gave you the impression that starship crashed? Both the booster and the ship itself softly touched down on the water at less than walking speed. They would have been fine on land and the only reason why they did it over water is that nobody had ever successfully landed something that big until today. Nobody had even reentered the atmosphere with something that big. The biggest so far was the Space Shuttle orbiter. The starship upper stage is 1.5 times the size and more than twice the mass of that.