Well, this was a good start.
On Thursday morning after a brief hold to clear two final issues SpaceX’s Starship—at 394 feet tall, the largest rocket ever constructed—went into its final countdown. Then at least 31 of the 33 engines on the Super Heavy booster fired up and amid plumes of flames and smoke Starship lifted off from the launchpad and began its ascent through the atmosphere.
It all seemed good for the first minute or so of flight, a sight that most of us are familiar with from watching old videos of the Mercury and Apollo days. But then there was that other familiar moment from the glory days of the federal space program, i.e. the moment when things suddenly weren’t going according to plan.
In this case, the next crucial stage was for the rocket to start doing its trademark flip which would lead to disconnection from the Super Heavy booster. From there, Starship was supposed to continue on out of the atmosphere to perform a nearly complete loop around the world, landing near Hawaii.
But that was if the booster and the spacecraft managed to separate.
When Starship started flipping there were cheers from the SpaceX folks watching on the livestream. But then, just as Johnson Space Center took control of the fight, it kept flipping, and then tumbling through the air as the two pieces of equipment, worth millions of dollars each, did not separate.
The entire Starship that had lifted off just over two minutes before became a blazing white fireball in the sky over the Gulf of Mexico. The excited SpaceX employees went quiet. There were only a few soft moans.
When the webcast turned to SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk, he was sitting with the SpaceX flight control almost, leaning back in a desk chair, almost carefully blank faced. The old adage Tom Wolfe coined in The Right Stuff had proved true once again, “Our rockets always blow up.”
Though admittedly Wolfe’s saying failed to acknowledge that this held true right up until it didn’t.
Musk had already downplayed expectations leading up to this second launch, and as SpaceX’s livestream started this morning its hosts repeatedly had continued to remind the audience that even getting the ship off the launchpad would be a huge step forward and a major win for the company, and for plans to use Starship to put astronaut boots back on the moon by 2025.
Now SpaceX is working to recover and cleanup the bits and pieces of the stunning creation that towered over Boca Chica Beach less than an hour ago. Next we’ll have to wait to find out what went wrong—and when they’re going to try again.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
