Starship Flight 7 unscheduled disassembly over the Turks and Caicos Islands

[EXETER]

No, this machine is a working model to learn how to make a machine to travel into space. They launch it into the sky to see what works and what doesn't. Every doesn't work is as significant or more than every works to learning how to make the ones for actual use.

You have to blow up new designs of rockets before you learn how not to blow them up consistently.

Actually, there are two approaches to learning to not blow them up consistently.  

The first approach is the Wernher Von Braun approach. You build a little and test a little.  You make your best guess at a design, try something, and see if it works.  About half the time it does because you are a rocket scientist. When it doesn't, you figure out why, change something, and then go and test again.  You will relatively quickly converge on the designs that work. But you have to be willing to accept failures along the way. This is what Von Braun did at Peenemunde in 1943.

The second approach is the NASA approach that came into play AFTER Wernher Von Braun and the Saturn rocket.  In the NASA approach you "study" the design for decades at a time with an army of engineers. You design it, re-design it, and re-design it again for many years.  A Presidential administration is only 4 years at a time, so you can plan on getting jerked back and forth multiple times by changes in administrations during the program. You spend most of your time in meetings showing viewgraphs to each other. You assume you can't afford a single failure (even though the NASA approach actually does result in failures) so you don't fly it until you can convince all the program managers along the way that it will probably work. Then you light it off and discover some problems.  So then you go back and re-design it to fix all those problems, which takes another 5 years or so, with a bigger budget and more viewgraphs.  Because it takes longer and costs more to design a rocket this way, you can't afford to fly it more than once or twice a year. The NASA approach is actually the same as the Wernher Von Braun approach, except that it takes 5 times as long and costs at least 5 times as much, and usually results in a poorer product.

Elon is taking the Von Braun approach. If you've ever visited the SpaceX facility in Hawthorne, CA, you will see that it's just like Peenemunde, except with better food.