Spacecraft flew for four minutes and then exploded – is that a success?

On the one hand, a huge rocket exploded just four minutes after launch, flooding the Earth with debris. On the other hand, the team behind it praised the event as a success.

Now that the dust has settled (all over Port Isabel, Texas), what’s the real outcome of SpaceX’s orbiting starship rocket’s “rapid unplanned disassembly” (RUD) — other than an instant meme?

First, this explosion was intentional, not accidental. After reaching nearly 128,000 feet when Starship began spinning and losing altitude, it could not be allowed to return to Earth in one piece. The control team activated the “Flight Termination System” – otherwise known as self-destruct – putting on a spectacular show for viewers online and below.

That’s an element the team now knows works, but presumably the test flight had slightly higher goals than proving it could blow itself up.

And yet SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and others had urged the company prior to launch that their definition of success would take flight — or, as Musk put it, not blow up the launch pad.

That may seem like a simple question 81 years after the first German rocket left our atmosphere. But Starship is very different from that early ship or since. spaceship is big. Very large. Not only in terms of height – 120 meters high – but also in terms of weight and potential payload. That means a lot of thrust is needed, which on Satrship comes from 33 Raptor engines — not all of which fired as planned Thursday.

“We’ve never been able to fly anything this big or powerful,” said NASA planetologist Dr. Jennifer Helman. “It has twice the thrust of Saturn 5, which sent astronauts to the moon in the 1960s and early 1970s.

“Just cleaning the launch pad was a success, because this is the largest rocket ever built by humans in our history.

“We’re looking at the final. What Starship can do is the amount of cargo [cargo] it can go to the moon and Mars and be beyond that like nothing we’ve ever seen before. So we have to be able to take a certain risk.”

DR Heldmann said on Radio 4’s Today programme: “It’s going to be the pre-Starship era and the post-Starhip era, that’s how drastic it will be.”

Age-defining progress isn’t easy, as Starship has already demonstrated – a number of previous prototypes also suffered from RUDs, including two that landed with such force that they exploded on impact. If Starship NASA astronauts land on the moon in 2025 as planned, that’s a pretty big wrinkle to iron out.

But just two years before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the lunar surface, three Apollo 1 astronauts, Virgil I Gus Grissom, Edward H. White, and Roger B. Chaffee, died in a cabin fire during a launch rehearsal.

Advances in space travel are ultimately a very big risk, but they can also happen quickly.

“SpaceX builds, they test, they fly, they iterate, they learn and then they go back and do it again,” said Dr. hero man. “This is very different from the traditional way NASA works: we spend a lot of time, a lot of years and a lot of money going through all possible scenarios.

“At NASA, we understand that [their way of working] and we respect it enough that we have contracts where SpaceX flies NASA astronauts to the International Space Station and it has a contract to bring astronauts to the surface when we return to the moon.

Especially after the test flight, NASA rallied with its space partner, describing the four-minute flight as more important than it appears to the untrained eye.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson tweeted, “Congratulations @SpaceX on Starship’s first integrated flight test! Any great achievement in history has required some degree of calculated risk, because with great risk comes great reward. Looking forward to all that SpaceX learns about the next flight test – and beyond.”

Jim Free, deputy administrator of the Reconnaissance Systems Development Agency, wrote: “Encouraged by @SpaceX’s Starship flight test today. Each test is a necessary step toward a human moon landing. I look forward to learning from the data that SpaceX has collected as they continue to develop Starship’s human landing system and prepare for their next flight test.”

That next test flight is probably coming soon, given the experience with the program so far. Shortly after Thursday’s mission, Mr. Musk: “Congratulations @SpaceX team on an exciting Starship test launch! Learned a lot for the next test launch in a few months.”

And that much is certainly true. The missile may have been lost, but the enormous amount of data generated in those bloodthirsty four minutes has not. No, it wasn’t the 90-minute orbit Starship SpaceX was hoping for. The two phases did not separate. The Super Heavy Booster didn’t return to Texas (well, in one piece).

But a failure? The failure wouldn’t be every little detail Starship shared during its time hovering above Earth — and raining again — to make the next launch better.

Because one day the risks will be much greater. Lives will be at stake.