Blowing up a landing pad, trashing the local environment and sending massive amounts of concrete flying hundreds of yards not killing anyone is in fact techbro idiocy. Not doing something stupid like that has in fact been understood since launches in the 1960's.

While the stage zero stuff was clearly dumb, I don't know if it was "risk to life" dumb given the exclusion zone.

My ignorance permits the possibility that exclusion zone wasn't big enough, for example.

But it did have an exclusion zone, and Musk gave it, what, 50% odds of making it past the launch tower? Or was 50% a different test launch?

I believe it was acknowledged that the lean of the rocket immediately after launch was unintentional possibly due to the damage of the pad, and later (for possibly unrelated reasons) the thrust vectoring failed completely. Given it took more than 30 seconds for the flight termination to take effect there was definitely non-zero risk there for staff or potentially even the observers a half-dozen miles away.

While the FTS needs improvement, my (limitied) understanding is that its ineffectiveness was due to the fuel tank being almost empty at the time, and while in extremely thin air.

(But this is what I get as an untrained watcher of Scott Manley videos, I'm not a rocket scientist nor a pilot so I assume I only half-understand what he says, and what he says is necessarily a summary or the videos would be x10 longer).

The entire goal of Starship is to carry human passengers.

Oceangate also started with unmanned test dives before they declared their submersible to be safe for humans.

It's not directly comparable. Oceangate didn't do that many test dives and never tested their sub to destruction, and SpaceX is working with several government agencies on certifying Starship (both Nasa and FAA). But there are parallels in attitudes that should be drawn and compensated for.

> Oceangate also started with unmanned test dives before they declared their submersible to be safe for humans.

They were reusing a material that is not safe to reuse that way. If they were only testing the design, it's unlikely anyone would be dead.

Material selection is part of the design.

Selection and use.

Either "reusable carbon fiber" is the design, and you need to test what it takes to break that.

Or "single use carbon fiber" is the design, and you need a new hull each trip.

They did neither.

They didn't stress test the reusability before putting people on board, and that's both one of their biggest mistakes and one of their biggest differences from SpaceX.