You cut SpaceX no slack, what's your beef with them? No matter what they do right, it seems they've done it wrong in your book.
Simply grew over time, going from SpaceX supporter (since I am commercial spaceflight supporter) to pretty disappointed over the years.
One factor is sure, that people talk about SpaceX like about some friendly tinkerers shop, a small start-up that deserves some credit already for nice tries and near misses. But in reality, SpaceX is a huge mature company, quickly inflated by loans and NASA money in a very short time with the beginning of the Falcon 9 project. It constantly claims to be more cost-effective than NASA - but then already the known inflow of money into SpaceX is on the same magnitude as big NASA programs. Its prices are a tiny bit below Arianespace, but they talk about these differences as if this is a order of magnitude and could also simply just be lower, because contrary to Arianespace, it does not need to publish values like the profit contribution of their rockets and could be selling their initial rockets below costs for strategic reasons. Only few people will know.
So, I made the choice to not compare SpaceX to Armadillo Aerospace or Reaction Engines, but to Boeing, Lockmart and NASA. And would I cheer NASA for what SpaceX does? Or Boeing? No, I would scorch them as hard as I scorch SpaceX, because we all know, that these big players in spaceflight can do better and have done better already in the past. SpaceX can't claim to play in a lower league, when it is about the quality of their work and claim to be champions league, when it is about the prices of future rockets. They have financially the same chances as the rest - but contrary to Boeing, they don't need to communicate financial information to the public because Boeing is a publicly traded company with the full regulations and duty to inform the public, and SpaceX is not.
Think about it: OrbitalATK will be smaller than SpaceX. And OrbitalATK must inform the public about their projects and financial situation. SpaceX doesn't need to.
And I am really more impressed by the work of Orbital in the past years, than about the work of SpaceX.
Cameras are just candy anyway. Telemetry tells you way more than video.
Here we will strongly differ. You can't have so much telemetry in reality, that it could replace a video or a proper engineering cam. Having telemetry already means that you expected some kind of failure and this expectation is much more specific than the expectations behind a camera.
Nothing can replace your Mark 1 sensors, so you should utilize them.
at the moment.
