Fair enough. I’ve just been jaded from reading people bash on SpaceX anytime anything in space “fails”. But yeah, those events are similar in the sense that on the surface it looks like a failure, but they met their main mission goal and learned a lot from it. It sounds like the engine issue might’ve happened for them before, so hopefully they got a lot of good data from this and are able to fix the issue.

It’s important to keep in mind that going to space is very hard. Landing on another celestial body is order of magnitudes harder.

I don’t know why people insist on trying to diss SpaceX anytime there’s space news… Anyway, last time they missed the Autonomous Drone Ship was years ago when they were first trying to land. So I’m not exactly sure what you are referring to.

Plus, with space missions there are usually many different mission objectives, and with this mission the main mission was to “demonstrate its highly precise navigation and landing system” which they determined to be a success. The extra credit mission would be if it landed properly and they were able to do more science with it.

If you understand gravity wells, think of L1/L2/L3 as the shape of a saddle. If you’re right in the middle of the saddle it’s a pretty stable orbit, but if you get too close to any of the edges you fall right out of it. L4 and L5 are like the peaks of a mountain.

Also worth pointing out that only L4 and L5 are stable, L1/L2/L3 are only metastable where they require a bit of maintenance to stay there.

Another fun fact about Legrange Points: There’s a group of asteroids called the Trojan Asteroids. There’s technically two groups of these since they’re stuck in L4 and L5 in the Sun/Jupiter system.

This. There’s 5 Legrange Points for every 2 body system. They’re specific points around the 2 bodys where the gravity “cancels out”. In this case the 2 body system is the Earth and the Sun. JWST is sitting a million miles from Earth at L2.

Maybe older models were a lot less efficient with always on display, but I just checked for my Pixel 8 Pro and the ambient display was <1% battery usage.

SpaceX created the first successful Full Flow Stage Combustion Cycle Engine, so they’re also innovative in the propulsion department.

SpaceX has only had 2 mission failures out of 274 total missions. Since 2017 SpaceX has had a 100% success rate which is a vast majority of its total missions. The recent explosions have been test rockets and expected to blow up, it’s how they learn and innovate so quickly. NASA takes billions of dollars and 10+ years to successfully launch a rocket on the first attempt. It’s just 2 different approaches to design and innovation.

Not to mention that the gas companies were reporting record profits after increasing the price.