San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
SPACEX LAUNCH ENDS IN EXPLOSION
But experts note progress in 2nd test of giant moon rocket
Spacex, Elon Musk's spaceflight company, successfully launched its mammoth Starship rocket from the coast of South Texas on Saturday, but lost both the booster and the spacecraft in a pair of explosions minutes into the test flight.
Saturday's flight of Starship, a powerful vehicle designed to carry NASA astronauts to the moon, was not a complete failure. Although Spacex did not achieve the test launch's ultimate objective — a partial trip around the world ending in a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean — it did show that the company had fixed key issues that arose during its first test operation in April. All 33 engines in the vehicle's lower booster stage fired, and the rocket made it through stage separation — when the booster falls away and the six engines of the upper stage light up to carry the vehicle to space.
“Just beautiful,” John Insprucker, a Spacex engineer and live launch commentator, said on the Spacex webcast.
By contrast, the first Starship launch badly damaged the launch site; several engines on the booster failed, fires knocked out the steering of the rocket and the f light termination system took too long to explode.
According to Spacex's “fail fast, learn faster” approach toward rocket design, successfully avoiding a repeat of past failures counts as major progress.
However, the second flight revealed new challenges that Musk's engineers must overcome.
Soon after stage separation, the booster exploded — a “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” in the jargon of rocket engineers. The upper-stage Starship spacecraft continued heading toward orbit
Spacex’s mega rocket Starship launches for a test flight from Boca Chica, Texas, on Saturday. The Starship booster and spacecraft were lost in explosions minutes later.
for several more minutes, reaching an altitude of more than 90 miles, but then Spacex lost contact with it after the flight termination system detonated.
In a statement, the Federal Aviation Administration said no injuries or property damage had been reported. It will conduct a mishap investigation, which is standard anytime something goes wrong with a commercial rocket.
Engineers will now have to decipher what went wrong on both the booster and the upper-stage spacecraft, make fixes and then try again.
Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever to fly. Spacex aims to make both parts of the vehicle fully and rapidly reusable. That gives it the potential to launch bigger and heavier payloads to space and to significantly drive down the cost of lofting satellites, space telescopes, people and the things they
need to live into space.
Many outside observers are optimistic that Spacex will get Starship to work fully.
“They have fixed issues identified in their first flight and got further than ever before with this type of vehicle,” said Phil Larson, who served as a White House space adviser during President Barack Obama's administration and later worked on communication efforts at Spacex. “The magic of engineering is that it is all about learning, iterating the design and reflying again soon.”
Daniel L. Dumbacher, executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, agreed. “This is a large launch system,” he said. “It's going to take some work to get it to where it needs to go. I have no doubt that the Spacex team will be able to figure out how to get the launch vehicle working.”
Top NASA officials offered congratulations to Spacex.
“Each test represents a step closer to putting the first woman on the Moon with the #Artemis III Starship human landing system,” Jim Free, NASA'S associate administrator for exploration systems development, wrote on X. “Looking forward to seeing what can be learned from this test that moves us closer to the next milestone.”
How quickly Spacex solves the Starship issues could determine how soon NASA astronauts return to the moon.
The space agency has hired Spacex to adapt Starship as a lunar lander to take two astronauts to the moon's south polar regions. Even before the latest Starship test flight, the first landing, scheduled for late 2025, had already been considered likely to slip to 2026.