Tbf, starship isn’t finished yet, if it were pretending to be a product ready for public use and was blowing up customer’s payloads, that’d be a fair point, but if you’re developing something by just flying it knowing it will probably fail, and then fixing whatever causes the failures so that it gets farther next time, until it eventually goes all the way, then being criticized for the test flights failing isn’t really fair unless you aren’t making any progress with them, which starship seems to have been making.
The last 2 launches have gotten to (near) orbit just fine, although I think the payload door failed on one of them iirc. If they were carrying payloads they probably would have been able to deliver them (I don’t think they have made payload fairings for things other than starlink yet though)
Tbf, starship isn’t finished yet, if it were pretending to be a product ready for public use and was blowing up customer’s payloads, that’d be a fair point, but if you’re developing something by just flying it knowing it will probably fail, and then fixing whatever causes the failures so that it gets farther next time, until it eventually goes all the way, then being criticized for the test flights failing isn’t really fair unless you aren’t making any progress with them, which starship seems to have been making.
The last 2 launches have gotten to (near) orbit just fine, although I think the payload door failed on one of them iirc. If they were carrying payloads they probably would have been able to deliver them (I don’t think they have made payload fairings for things other than starlink yet though)