Elon Musk’s latest crack at space exploration ended in a fireball Thursday but experts at NASA hailed the launch of the world’s largest ever rocket as a success.
The $3billion Starship spacecraft that will eventually carry NASA astronauts to the Moon had been scheduled to separate from its rocket booster three minutes into the flight, but this failed and it blew up over the Gulf of Mexico.
Nevertheless, Musk, who had given the rocket a 50-50 chance, congratulated his team and said they had ‘learned a lot for the next test launch in a few months’.
NASA administrator Bill Nelson was also glowing in his praise, stating that ‘every great achievement throughout history has demanded some level of calculated risk, because with great risk comes reward.’
‘Looking forward to all that SpaceX learns, to the next flight test—and beyond,’ Nelson added.
The $3billion Starship spacecraft that will eventually carry crew and cargo had been scheduled to separate from the first-stage rocket booster three minutes into the flight, but separation failed to occur and the rocket blew up in a ball of fire over the Gulf of Mexico
Elon Musk (front center) inside the control room watching the SpaceX Starship lift off from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas
Space enthusiasts on South Padre Island, Texas, watching the launch of SpaceX’s Starship
NASA has picked the Starship spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the Moon in late 2025 – a mission known as Artemis III – for the first time since the Apollo program ended in 1972.
SpaceX said that ‘with a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multi-planetary.’
‘We cleared the tower which was our only hope,’ said Kate Tice, a SpaceX quality systems engineer.
A throng of SpaceX workers watching a livestream together at the company’s headquarters near Los Angeles cheered wildly as the rocket cleared the launch tower and again when it blew up in the sky.
SpaceX principal integration engineer John Insprucker said the test flight would provide a wealth of important data paving the way for the company to move ahead with additional tests.
Beyond the launch itself, the test mission fell short of reaching several other objectives, such as deploying the Starship vessel into space and reentering Earth’s atmosphere 60 miles off a Hawaiian coast at hypersonic speeds, where it would have faced key aerodynamic forces and blazing heat before plunging into the Pacific.
Still, getting the newly combined Starship and booster rocket off the ground for the first time represented a key milestone in SpaceX’s ambition of sending astronauts back to the Moon and ultimately on to Mars, as a major partner in NASA’s newly inaugurated human spaceflight program.
Musk has previously estimated the total development cost of the Starship project to be between $2 and $10 billion. He later revised this to ‘closer to two or three [billion] than it is to 10.’
SpaceX’s ambition and achievement are all the more impressive because it is a private company, while NASA is government-backed agency which has existed since the 1950s with a wealth of research and resources at its disposal.
Eric Berger, senior space editor at science website Ars Technica, said: ‘For the layperson who sees NASA at work, which can’t afford to fail, this looks like failure. But for those who know a little bit more, and about iterative design, this was a tremendous success. SpaceX has 2-3 more rockets ready to go.
‘SpaceX does things differently. Its process is faster, but also messier. Fortunately they can afford to “fail.” They can build 10 Super Heavy first stages in the time NASA builds a single SLS rocket. If the first five fail, but the next five succeed, which is a better outcome?’
Towering at 394ft and weighing 394 tons the Starship is larger than NASA’s biggest ever space vehicle, Saturn V, which stood at 363ft and weighed 207 tons.
SpaceX engineers spent just eight months building the first Starship prototype, whereas it took seven years for NASA to complete Saturn V.
Starship consists of a 164ft spacecraft designed to carry crew and cargo that sits atop a 230ft first-stage Super Heavy booster rocket.
SpaceX conducted a successful test-firing of the 33 massive Raptor engines on the first-stage booster in February but the Starship spacecraft and the Super Heavy rocket were being flown together Thursday for the first time.
The integrated test flight was intended to assess their performance in combination.
Starship is both bigger and more powerful than SLS and capable of lifting a payload of more than 100 metric tons into orbit. It generates 17 million pounds of thrust, more than twice that of the Saturn V rockets used to send Apollo astronauts to the Moon
Pictured is the flight path Starship was set to take before it exploded Thursday
SpaceX’s Starship broken down into its Raptor engine, Super Heavy booster, and its Starship which is the component which travels through space
The massive 365-foot-tall rocket launched around 9:30am, following a pause on the countdown clock to finish final checks
This launch vehicle has 33 Raptor engines capable of generating 17 million pounds of lift-off thrust
The launch was initially scheduled for Monday but was postponed until Thursday because of a frozen pressure valve on the first-stage booster.
Musk had warned ahead of the test that technical issues were likely and sought to play down expectations for the inaugural flight.
‘It’s the first launch of a very complicated, gigantic rocket. There’s a million ways this rocket could fail,’ he said.
NASA will take astronauts to lunar orbit itself in November 2024 using its own heavy rocket called the Space Launch System (SLS), which has been in development for more than a decade.
Starship is both bigger and more powerful than SLS and capable of lifting a payload of more than 100 metric tons into orbit.
Elon Musk’s mother celebrates on a balcony in Texas as they watched the launch
Kimbal Musk, Elon’s brother, was also there to support the epic SpaceX mission
Thousands of people set up around SpaceX’s Starbase in Texas to watch Starship take off
The uncrewed mission would have seen SpaceX’s Starship complete almost one circuit of the globe, while the booster that blasts it into orbit splashes back down in the Gulf of Mexico about eight minutes after launch. Crowds have been waiting since before the sun came up
It generates 17 million pounds of thrust, more than twice that of the Saturn V rockets used to send Apollo astronauts to the Moon.
The plan for the integrated test flight was for the Super Heavy booster to separate from Starship after launch and splash down in the Gulf of Mexico.
They failed to separate however and the booster rocket and Starship spacecraft began spinning out of control, exploding four minutes into the test flight in what SpaceX euphemistically called a ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly.’
Had separation occurred, Starship, which has six engines of its own, was to continue to an altitude of nearly 150 miles, completing a near-circle of the Earth before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii about 90 minutes after launch.
‘If we get far enough away from the launchpad before something goes wrong then I think I would consider that to be a success,’ Musk said prior to the test. ‘Just don’t blow up the launchpad.’
SpaceX foresees eventually putting a Starship into orbit, and then refueling it with another Starship so it can continue on a journey to Mars or beyond.
The eventual objective is to establish bases on the Moon and Mars and put humans on the ‘path to being a multi-planet civilization,’ according to Musk.
‘That’s our goal. I think we’ve got a chance.’
HOW WILL STARSHIP WORK, IS IT THE MOST POWERFUL ROCKET EVER AND WHERE WILL IT LAUNCH FROM?
HOW STARSHIP WORKS
Starship aims to be SpaceX’s first fully-reusable rocket, which is part of why the flight costs for Musk’s vehicle could end up 200 times cheaper per launch than most other rockets.
So how will it work?
When it is ready to land on Earth, Starship will initially re-enter the atmosphere at a 60-degree angle before ‘belly-flopping’ to the ground in a horizontal position.
This type of return uses our planet’s atmosphere to slow the vehicle’s descent but makes it unstable.
Starship aims to be SpaceX’s first fully-reusable rocket, which is part of the reason why the flight costs for Musk’s vehicle could end up 200 times cheaper per launch than most other rockets
It is for this reason that Starship will use four steel landing flaps, positioned near the front and rear of the vehicle, to control its descent, working similarly to how a skydiver uses their arms and legs to control a free-fall.
As Starship approaches the ground, it flips back into a vertical position and then uses its Raptor engines as retro-rockets to guide it down for a safe landing.
In November 2019, Musk claimed a Starship launch could cost just $2 million (£1.8 million) each time, thanks to efficiency savings from reusing a rocket.
By comparison, NASA’s new Space Launch System (SLS) rocket is estimated to cost an eye-watering $4.1 billion (£3.3 billion) per launch.
IS IT THE BIGGEST ROCKET EVER?
Yes. And not only that, but it is also the most powerful.
Musk’s vehicle packs 16 million pounds (70 Meganewtons) of thrust, almost double that of the other new generation rocket created by NASA and known as the SLS.
You might remember SLS for successfully delivering the Orion spacecraft to orbit last November as part of the Artemis I mission that saw it fly around the moon and back.
Starship is 395ft (120m) tall, with the ship itself measuring 164ft (49m) and the booster 230ft (70m).
No surprise, but SpaceX’s Super Heavy rocket and the accompanying Starship spacecraft are heavy.
When fueled, the whole thing comes in at 11 million pounds.
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