Originally Posted by
RickNRoll
Split those figures up by program, Falcon or Starship, and the perspective changes.
I must have missed where the Starship was declared other than "Experimental".
SpaceX has made no secret that they expect failures of the Starship with their accelerated development techniques. Compare what they've accomplished so far with Starship (including successful recovery of the first stage) with what NASA has done with SLS (with way more money and time). Sure, they were unhappy with the results of the last two Starship launches. But they learned a lot that will be incorporated into future iterations. Right now, NASA doesn't even have plans to be able to fly SLS more than once a year or so.