SpaceX's 394-foot-tall Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, lifted off Thursday morning from the company's Starbase launch site in south Texas, propelled skyward by the 33 Raptor rockets on its massive Super Heavy first-stage booster. The uncrewed rocket, making its first test flight, rose 24 miles into the air before beginning to tumble, then, about four minutes after liftoff, it exploded. Back at SpaceX headquarters in California, employees cheered. One sprayed a bottle of champagne on colleagues.
"To get this far is amazing," SpaceX's Kate Tice said on the livestream. "Everything after clearing the tower was icing on the cake." SpaceX tweeted, dryly: "As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation."
Starship's test flight was supposed to take it in a partial orbit of the earth before crashing into the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii about 90 minutes after liftoff. The company explained that after the Starship rocket failed to separate from the Super Heavy booster and started to lose altitude, SpaceX or its computers hit the self-destruct button.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
"It doesn't take a degree in aerospace engineering to know that, ideally, rockets aren't supposed to blow up," Daniel Victor and Kenneth Chang write at The New York Times. But while, for most observers, "blowing up a rocket sure looks like failure," SpaceX "counted the flight test as a win," Marina Koren adds at The Atlantic. "They're sort of right. Explosions, although disappointing, happen during rocket testing," especially at SpaceX.
"This is the way SpaceX goes about: They test this stuff, they run it hard, sometimes it blows up," said Bill Nelson, the administrator of NASA, which is counting on a Starship rocket to take astronauts back to the moon as soon as 2025. "We'll get a report on what happened to the second stage, but I'm very encouraged that they've gotten along this far."
Thursday's launch was a classic "SpaceX successful failure," Garrett Reisman, SpaceX's former director of space operations, told Reuters. Even in the design stage, SpaceX engineers "look for opportunities to create chances to fail, even spectacularly sometimes, early on and often so that you can learn as fast as you possibly can."
Testing early and testing often, and sometimes breaking things, "is their ethos," BBC science correspondent Jonathan Amos agreed. And "it's been very successful for them. You know, their Falcon 9 rocket now is the dominant rocket out there, and nobody comes clear to them. It launches every four days, it puts up 80 percent of all satellites."
SpaceX chief Elon Musk will be especially relieved that Thursday's launch "didn't destroy the launchpad," meaning SpaceX can try again with a new model, as Musk tweeted "in a few months," Koren writes at The Atlantic. So "even after the fiery drama today, SpaceX is, wildly but surely, one tiny step closer to making missions to Mars a reality," which has always been Musk's Starship dream.
-
September 6 editorial cartoonsCartoons Saturday’s political cartoons include profiting from authoritarianism, and the National Guard entering the CDC
-
Should Britain withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights?Talking Point With calls now coming from Labour grandees as well as Nigel Farage and the Tories, departure from the ECHR 'is starting to feel inevitable'
-
5 outspoken cartoons about Epstein survivors taking center stageCartoons Artists take on cover-ups, Trump surrounded, and more
-
SpaceX breaks Starship losing streak in 10th testspeed read The Starship rocket's test flight was largely successful, deploying eight dummy satellites during its hour in space
-
Hurricanes are not exclusive to Earth. They can happen in space.Under the radar These storms may cause navigational problems
-
Rabbits with 'horns' sighted across Coloradospeed read These creatures are infected with the 'mostly harmless' Shope papilloma virus
-
Lithium shows promise in Alzheimer's studySpeed Read Potential new treatments could use small amounts of the common metal
-
Scientists discover cause of massive sea star die-offSpeed Read A bacteria related to cholera has been found responsible for the deaths of more than 5 billion sea stars
-
'Thriving' ecosystem found 30,000 feet underseaSpeed Read Researchers discovered communities of creatures living in frigid, pitch-black waters under high pressure
-
Answers to how life on Earth began could be stuck on MarsUnder the Radar Donald Trump plans to scrap Nasa's Mars Sample Return mission – stranding test tubes on the Red Planet and ceding potentially valuable information to China
-
New York plans first nuclear plant in 36 yearsSpeed Read The plant, to be constructed somewhere in upstate New York, will produce enough energy to power a million homes
