The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Despite explosion, Musk hails flight of Starship prototype
A prototype of the massive spacecraft Elon Musk’s Spacex is building to take people to the moon and Mars exploded upon landing Wednesday after a seemingly successful launch and flight. Nevertheless, the company called it “an awesome test” and Musk said the company “got all the data we needed.”
The Starship rocket has been Musk’s passion for years. It has gone through multiple design changes as Spacex has worked to develop a craft that could eventually fly people to deep space.
Before the test flight, Spacex cautioned that there will likely be setbacks during the ongoing development of the vehicle. And before Wednesday’s flight, it said that “with a test such as this, success is not measured by completion of specific objectives but rather how much we can learn, which will inform the probability of success in the future as Spacex rapidly advances development of Starship.”
Starship, made of stainless steel, with aerodynamic flaps to help control its trajectory, was supposed to fly to an altitude of nearly 8 miles, then fall back through the atmosphere in a belly- flop position before reorienting itself, reigniting its engine and touching down softly.
It appeared to complete all of those milestones, except for the landing, which sent a fireball and a plume of smoke over the Gulf Coast.
After the flight, Musk tweeted that it was a “successful ascent” and that the vehicle performed well. There was low pressure during the landing, “causing touchdown velocity to be high & RUD,” he wrote, using an acronym for “Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly.”
In a blog post before the flight, Spacex said it was hoping to test a number of systems, including the vehicle’s three Raptors engines, which burn methane and liquid oxygen, as well as how it behaves in the upper atmosphere.
Instead of attempting to fly straight to orbit, Spacex has been taking an incremental approach with Starship, flying to progressively higher altitudes and then landing the vehicle on a landing site near the launchpad.
The spacecraft that flew Wednesday was the eighth prototype Spacex has built, and it says it has two more ready for the next steps in the test campaign. Musk has said he’d like the vehicle to make it to orbit by next year.