SpaceX’s Starship ‘Learning Experience’ ends in explosion

SpaceX’s Starship rocket exploded Thursday, minutes after taking off from a launch pad in South Texas. The rocket, the most powerful ever built, failed to reach orbit, but provided important lessons for the private space company as it worked toward a more successful mission.

At 9:33 a.m. Eastern Time, the Super Heavy booster’s engines ignited in a huge cloud of fire, smoke, and dust, and Starship slowly lifted upward. About a minute later, the rocket went through a period of maximum aerodynamic pressure, one of the critical moments for a rocket launch. Soon after, it began to tumble before exploding in a ball of fire high over the Gulf of Mexico.

Despite the mission’s fiery outcome, Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, congratulated the company. “Every great achievement throughout history has required a certain level of calculated risk, because with great risk comes great reward,” Mr. Nelson wrote on Twitter.

The space agency is relying on SpaceX to build a version of Starship that will carry two astronauts from lunar orbit to the moon’s surface during its Artemis III mission. There was great anticipation for the flight, which had been delayed from Monday because the giant rocket could one day carry huge amounts of cargo and many people into space.

For the launch, which had no humans on board and was intended to validate whether the missile system’s design is sound, Elon Musk, the company’s founder, had lowered expectations. He said it could take several tries before Starship succeeds in this test flight.

But the launch hit several key milestones, with the rocket flying for four minutes and well clear of the launch pad. The short flight provided a huge amount of data for engineers to understand how the vehicle was performing.

“It may seem that way to some people, but it’s not a failure,” said Daniel Dumbacher, executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a former high-level NASA official. “It’s a learning experience.”

Still, the flight fell short of complete success. According to the flight plan, the Starship spacecraft was supposed to reach an altitude of about 150 miles before crashing into the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii about 90 minutes later. And it remains to be seen how Thursday’s flight result may affect NASA’s schedule, which optimistically calls for the first moon landing by astronauts aboard Starship in late 2025.

When SpaceX began building Starship, it was prompted by Mr. Musk’s dream of one day sending humans to Mars, an endeavor that would require the transportation of massive amounts of supplies to succeed.

But entrepreneurs and futurists think closer to home. A giant, fully reusable vehicle would cut the cost of shipping things to space, leading some to imagine how Starship could carry giant space telescopes to look at the cosmos, or squads of robots to explore other worlds. Others are designing larger satellites that will be cheaper because they won’t have to use the expensive components currently required to fit the size and weight limitations imposed by today’s rockets.

“Flying rockets and reusing them has tremendous potential to change the game and transportation to space,” said Phil Larson, who served as White House space adviser during the Obama administration and later worked on communications efforts at SpaceX. “And it could enable whole new kinds of missions.”

Despite the setback, SpaceX remains the dominant company in global space travel. Its rockets have already traveled to space 25 times by 2023, with the most recent launch successfully completed on Wednesday.

Thursday’s countdown at the launch site in South Texas, near the town of Brownsville, ran smoothly all morning until the last half minute, when it paused for a few minutes while SpaceX engineers worked through technical issues. Employees at SpaceX’s California headquarters began cheering as the countdown resumed.

When a cloud of exhaust fumes rose around the rocket, it took off.

“It looked really good when it came off the pad, and it looked really good for a while,” said Mr. Dumbacher.

In an update, SpaceX said the rocket was as high as about 24 miles above the Gulf of Mexico. Video of the flashes captured by the rocket as several of the 33 engines failed on the lower portion of the spacecraft, the Super Heavy booster. That proved too much for the guidance system to compensate and the vehicle began to tumble into a corkscrew track.

“This doesn’t appear to be a nominal situation,” John Insprucker, a SpaceX engineer, reported during the company’s live stream of the launch.

The upper stage Starship vehicle apparently failed to detach from the booster, and four minutes after launch, the automated flight termination system destroyed the rocket, ending the flight in a ball of fire.

The launch fulfilled SpaceX’s promise of “excitement guaranteed”. And, in the worst-case scenario, it prevented an explosion on the launch pad, which would have required extensive repairs.

Mr. Musk congratulated the SpaceX team on Twitter. “Learned a lot for the next test launch in a few months,” he said.

Karl Kriegh, 69, and his wife traveled from Colorado for the launch and then lingered on the beach of South Padre Island, watching viewers take off from a safe distance.

“I’m so glad I got to experience this,” he said. “It was incredibly dramatic, one of those bucket list things.”

Carlos Huertas, 42, a stage technician living in Los Angeles, was on the beach in a T-shirt sold by SpaceX that read “Occupy Mars.”

“I thought it was going well until I heard it exploded,” he said. He added that he was “a little disappointed even though we knew it was a big possibility” and said he hoped to see another launch soon.

Heavy-lift missiles like Starship are inherently more complex and difficult to develop than smaller missiles, just as building an aircraft carrier takes a lot more work than a modest yacht. In addition, by striving to make all parts of the spacecraft reusable and capable of launching again a few hours after landing, SpaceX is attempting to meet a technical challenge beyond what has been achieved in the previous 60 years of the Space Age.

It comes as no surprise to experts that SpaceX didn’t quite succeed on the first try.

“Maybe they have a few questions to look at why some of the engines haven’t been running,” said Mr. Dumbacher. “They’ll look into it, they’ll figure it out, and they’ll come back next time and they’ll fix those issues and they’ll move on to the next one and eventually they’ll make this all fly down the road into orbit. I’m confident in that in.”

However, SpaceX has a history of learning from mistakes. The company’s mantra is essentially, “Fail fast, but learn faster.”

Traditional aerospace companies have tried to anticipate and prevent as many failures as possible in advance. But that approach costs money and time and can lead to overdesigned vehicles. Instead, SpaceX is more like a Silicon Valley software company – starting with an imperfect product that can be quickly improved.

When it tried to land Falcon 9 boosters, the first few hit too hard and exploded. On each attempt, SpaceX engineers modified the systems. After the first successful landing, more soon followed. These days, it’s a rare surprise when a booster landing fails.

A few years ago, the company took a similar approach to refining the landing procedure for Starship. In a series of tests, Starship prototypes ascended to an altitude of about six miles before the engines shut down. It then belly-slid through the atmosphere to slow its rate of fall before flipping vertically again and firing its engines again to land. The first few ended explosively before one attempt finally succeeded.

SpaceX, as one of the most valuable privately owned companies, has a large financial buffer to withstand setbacks, unlike the early days when the first three launches of its original rocket, the tiny Falcon 1, failed to reach orbit. Mr. Musk scraped together just enough money and parts for a fourth launch attempt. Had it failed, SpaceX would have gone bankrupt. The fourth Falcon 1 launch succeeded, and SpaceX has succeeded in almost all of its endeavors since then, even if it sometimes fails at first.

Major NASA programs like the Space Launch System, which NASA used on an uncrewed mission to the moon in November, generally don’t get the same luxury of explode-as-you-learn.

“Government programs should therefore not work that way, because of the way all stakeholders can watch and tell you no,” Mr Dumbacher said.

Back on the beach, the people who showed up for the launch took the day’s outcome to heart.

“Would it have been great if it hadn’t exploded?” said Lauren Posey, 34. “Yes. But it was still great.”

James Dobins contributed reporting from South Padre Island, Texas.