STARSHIP LAUNCH PARTIAL SUCCESS, SEPARATION NOT ACHIEVED; ROCKET EXPLODES OVER GULF OF MEXICO

By Kenneth Chang

New York Times

SpaceX’s Starship rocket exploded above the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday, minutes after lifting off from a launchpad in South Texas. The spacecraft failed to reach orbit, but it was not a fatal failure.

Before the launch, Elon Musk, the company’s founder, had tamped down expectations, saying it might take several tries before Starship succeeds at this test flight, which was to reach speeds fast enough to enter orbit before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii.

Despite the setback, SpaceX remains the dominant company in global spaceflight. Its Falcon 9 rockets have already traveled to space 24 times in 2023, with the most recent launch concluded successfully Friday night.

The Starship launch on Thursday at least avoided a worst-case outcome of exploding on the launchpad, which would have required extensive repairs. Once engineers determine what went wrong, they can incorporate changes in test flights of other prototype Starships that are mostly finished and almost ready to launch.

Still, the failure raises questions about how soon SpaceX can get a Starship ready to serve as a lunar lander for the astronauts of NASA’s Artemis III mission, which is to set down near the moon’s south pole. That mission would require a series of successful Starship launches over a short period of time to not only launch the lunar spacecraft but also to bring up enough propellant so that it can get to the lunar orbit where the NASA crew will board it to go down to the moon.

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 ahead of time. But that approach takes money and time and can lead to vehicles that are overdesigned. SpaceX instead is more like a Silicon Valley software company — starting with an imperfect product that can be improved quickly.

In the past, SpaceX has learned from its failures. When it tried to start landing Falcon 9 boosters, the first few hit too hard and exploded. With each attempt, SpaceX engineers tweaked the systems. After its first successful landing, more soon followed. Today, it is a rare surprise if a booster landing fails.

A couple of years ago, the company took a similar approach to fine-tuning the landing procedure for Starship. In a series of tests, prototypes of Starship lifted off to an altitude of about six miles before shutting off its engines. It then belly flopped through the atmosphere to slow its rate of fall before tilting back to vertical and firing its engines again for landing. The first few ended explosively before one attempt finally succeeded.

SpaceX, as one of the most valuable privately held companies, possesses a large financial cushion to absorb setbacks, unlike its early days when the first three launches of its original rocket, the small 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 out of business.

It succeeded, and SpaceX has succeeded in almost all of its endeavors since then, even when it sometimes fails at first.