SpaceX Starship: Back to the drawing board
Despite a fiery midair explosion, SpaceX is one tiny step closer to making missions to Mars a reality, said Marina Koren in The Atlantic. A South Texas crowd erupted in cheers last week as “the 33-engine rocket booster below the spacecraft ignited its engines and rose from the launchpad, generating twice the thrust of the Saturn V rocket” from the Apollo moon missions. The biggest, tallest, and most powerful rocket in history didn’t last long, however, and just “four minutes after a beautiful liftoff,” the rocket, called Starship, “blew itself up” over the Gulf of Mexico. It’s easy to dismiss this as a failure, but “explosions happen during rocket testing.” Even if the test had gone smoothly, and Starship had reached orbit, it was still programmed to crash-land in the Pacific Ocean. The ultimate goal is a system that “verges on science fiction”: Starship is designed to turn itself around and land upright, ready to relaunch. SpaceX will learn from this experience. It has to.
Consider this a reality check, said Loren Grush in Bloomberg. While it’s rare for any inaugural launch to be flawless, “the inability of Starship to separate from its booster, one of the very first steps to getting the vehicle ready for prime time, highlights the challenges ahead.” We are still many years and many billions away from fulfilling CEO Elon Musk’s grandiose vision for human space travel. On the ground, last week’s test left a massive crater under a launchpad that may be beyond salvaging, said Aria Alamalhodaei in TechCrunch.
It was a striking demonstration of how hard it is to fire the powerful booster engines while keeping the launch site intact and undamaged to allow for the spacecraft’s return.
“Successful failure” is Musk’s moon-shot mantra, said Steve Gorman and Arlene Eiras in Reuters. SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket experienced three launch failures in the early years after the company was founded in 2002. Its successor, Falcon 9, now flies “dozens of commercial missions a year” as the “workhorse rocket for low-Earth orbit.” SpaceX’s aggressive testing approach contrasts with that of NASA, which likes to painstakingly perfect its products before trying them out. “One could sit in meetings for ages and discuss everything that could go wrong with a rocket like this,” said Eric Berger in Ars Technica. But “flying is the ultimate test.” It produces the best data, and that helps engineers to identify what went wrong more quickly. This is SpaceX’s process, and while it may be messier than what we were used to when space was NASA’s domain, “it is also much faster.” And that puts us closer to forever changing humanity’s relationship with the cosmos.