In a recent inaugural test flight, SpaceX’s Starship rocket failed to separate from its booster and exploded just four minutes after liftoff. While the uncrewed spacecraft was expected to take a 90-minute trip around the Earth before splashing down near Hawaii, it began to tumble and then combust entirely after reaching MaxQ 18 miles in the air.
The Starship mishap occurred due to some of the 33 engines [pictured] in the booster not firing, as seen in the launch livestream.
But despite the setback, SpaceX aims to use the starship to still facilitate multi-planetary life. “Starship just experienced what we call a rapid, unscheduled disassembly,” said John Insprucker, SpaceX’s principal integration engineer. He added: “As we expected, excitement is guaranteed. Starship gave us a spectacular end to what was a relatively successful test flight so far.”
As also stated by SpaceX, even as the Starship rocket met with a fiery demise, SpaceX staff remained optimistic and cheered the progress made in successfully launching the 400-foot-tall rocket off the launch pad.
“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn,” the company said in a tweet. “Today’s test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multi-planetary.” SpaceX claimed it anticipates the debris to have landed in the Gulf of Mexico and will collaborate with local authorities for recovery operations. The CEO himself, Elon Musk, revealed the team intends to retest the rocket in a few months and try again.
Meanwhile, NASA administrator Bill Nelson has expressed his anticipation for the next launch and the potential advancements it could bring.
“Every great achievement throughout history has demanded some level of calculated risk,” he wrote in a tweet. “Because with great risk comes great reward.” NASA has a financial investment in SpaceX’s success: they’re paying SpaceX to develop a reusable moon shuttle, which will likely take several years to achieve fruition and one of the factors that could make the Starship rocket reusable for multiple launches is the innovative Raptor engine design.
But despite its potential, SpaceX had faced some challenges with its technology in previous demonstration tests.
The company had to cancel a test launch scheduled for Monday because of a frozen valve in the booster, and on Thursday, the countdown clock was paused with only 40 seconds left due to issues with pressurization in the booster. According to Paulo Lozano, the director of MIT’s space propulsion laboratory, the choice to incorporate 33 booster engines into the Starship rocket represents a trade-off.
Lozano added, “having that large number of rocket engines firing simultaneously — it’s actually quite hard. I think that’s going to be one of the biggest challenges.”
Another obstacle is the selection of methane as the fuel source. While methane is a cost-effective and easier-to-handle alternative to hydrogen, it presents its own set of challenges. For instance, to utilize methane as fuel, the rocket’s oxidizer, oxygen, must be chilled to extremely low temperatures to operate, which caused the cancellation of the Monday test.
“It was a great find by the countdown team, and that’s why we have a countdown,” said SpaceX quality systems engineer Kate Tice on Monday. “We’ve learned a lot over the last 48 hours, and we’re ready to give it another go.”
SpaceX appears to be fully aware of the risks involved in conducting a groundbreaking test launch of this magnitude. “They design based on failure,” says Brendan Byrne, a reporter for NPR member station WMFE. “They push their hardware to the limit, to the point of blowing things up. And they learn what they can.” SpaceX has a significant financial stake in the success of the Starship rocket and its fully-reusable orbital system.
Currently, the company relies on the Falcon-9 rocket to launch its Starlink Internet satellites into orbit. But with the Starship, it could potentially launch several hundred satellites at once. Having this ambition, SpaceX CEO Musk has, however, cautioned that the super heavy booster used in the recent launch is an older design, and the company’s next-generation booster is expected to have a better chance of success.
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