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Originally Posted by glend
The engines were removed before it was retired. I believe the overall program schedule forced Elon's hand, he needs to get an orbital flight done by the end of the year, because NASA is tying a refueling proof of concept payment to an orbital flight.
Now that the HLA contract is safe, it is more than just Mars in his sites.
It was just practical. It is hard to have large expensive cranes working around the Pad area while thinking about a launch in the near term. Stacking the Integration Tower is a priority, as is finishing the Orbital Fuel Farm infrastructure.
They may fly SN16 but my bet is that it is also a lower priority now, after all they proved the design works and can land, what does he gain by doing It again in the same way?
Reusability is one aspect, but these individual ships are pretty cheap compared to SLAs. Get to orbit, and back, is the new focus, I believe. Success at that puts any competitors way behind.
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Is one successful test flight ( and landing ) of SN15 constitute success and reliability. I would have thought SN16 and SN17 test flights would reinforce the design and engineering of this vehicle and it’s reliability and more importantly the next big development of the booster and orbital vehicle.The Apollo program and the development of the Saturn 5 vehicle took 6 years ( 1962 to 1968 ) with Mercury and Gemini programs running in tandem to get to the unmanned test flights of Apollo 4 , 5 and 6. Huge development and test program which at the time had nearly 400,000 people working on the program and not one Saturn 5 flight to the moon and back failed ( Apollo 13 was a successful failure not due to the Saturn 5)
Is Elon pushing too quick too hard ?
He certainly has the runs on the board, but the real deal will be manned orbital flights of his Starships.Falcon 9 took 16 years of development and testing to achieve human rated safety and reliability
Your thoughts ?