Sorry, doubters: Starship actually had a remarkably successful flight

SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas—Starship launches are clarifying events. Pretty quickly after liftoff you find out who understands the rocket business, and who are the casual observers bereft of a clue.

Before I had even left the launch viewing area in South Padre Island on Saturday morning headlines started to fill my news feed. The Wall Street Journal led with, “SpaceX second Starship test flight ends in another explosion.” Bloomberg was still more dour, “SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy Booster Launch and Failure.” Perhaps, after consultation with their beat reporters, editors subsequently changed these online headlines. And the stories themselves better reflected the reality. Nevertheless, much of the media coverage of the launch delivered a harsh verdict: Another failure for Elon Musk and SpaceX.

I mean, yes. The first stage of the Starship rocket, Super Heavy, did explode. And the upper stage, Starship, had a failure that caused its flight termination system—explosives on board in case a vehicle begins flying off course—to detonate. But that was to be expected on such an experimental, boundary-pushing test flight.

Leading with words like "failure" and "explosion" are kind of like putting the headline “Derek Jeter had a strikeout” on a news story about the 2001 World Series game in which he later hit a walk-off home run. Like, it’s accurate. But it’s a lazy take that completely misses the point.

Rapid rebuild of ground systems

Here’s what SpaceX actually accomplished with its second Starship launch on Saturday morning, from a narrow peninsula of land at the southern extremity of Texas.

The vehicle’s first launch, in April, caused significant damage to the launch mount and surrounding infrastructure. At SpaceX founder Elon Musk's direction, the company had attempted to determine whether it could get away with launching the massive rocket without an advanced sound suppression system to mitigate launch pad damage. Turns out, that's a no. The first Starship launch shredded the launch site by throwing chunks of concrete for miles around.

Musk and SpaceX learned their lesson and completely redesigned and rebuilt the launch pad to incorporate a sophisticated water-based sound suppression system. By August, just four months later, it had not just built the complex system, but tested it. All of these changes resulted in a far more robust launch pad, which survived Saturday's liftoff largely unscathed.

Afterward I spoke with Phillip Rench, an engineer who worked at SpaceX for five years and for a time directed the company's Starbase facility near Boca Chica Beach in South Texas. He was impressed by the speed of the rebuild and smoothness of the ground-support operations for Saturday's launch.

"The thing I think about, and which probably goes unnoticed by most, is how extremely hot and humid it is in Boca during the late summer and fall," he said. "The team that just rebuilt the orbital launch mount, water deluge, and remaining launch pad just did so in the hottest, most miserable part of the year. I remember having mild heat stress almost every day in August and September while working on the pad. I give kudos to those technicians, welders, and engineers that spent the last seven months out in the field making this happen."

Rapid revamp of the rocket

The SpaceX engineers also rapidly re-engineered the first stage of the Super Heavy booster to address issues with multiple failures of its Raptor rocket engines on the first flight. During Saturday’s launch, all 33 of these Raptor engines burned for their full duration, with nary a failure on the way to space.

Additionally, the company’s engineers gathered data on a brand-new component of the rocket called a "hot staging ring." This interstage sits atop the Super Heavy first stage and below the Starship upper stage. This new piece of hardware was intended to facilitate "hot staging," a difficult maneuver a couple of minutes into the flight at stage separation, in which the Starship upper-stage engines ignite before the Super Heavy first stage has completed its burn. This maneuver was captured with ground-tracking cameras, and it is stunning.

A long-range tracking camera captured this stunning view of Starship hot staging, with the upper stage engines firing at the same time as booster separation.

Credit: SpaceX

Remember, the first Starship launch was just under seven months ago. And in the time since then, the company—at Musk's direction, in a bid to increase the capability of Starship—implemented this radical engineering change. It is not trivial. Starship is still attached to its booster. The Starship engines, upon igniting, are blasting away at the top of this huge Super Heavy rocket that is still thrusting upward. It's kind of crazy, and it pretty much worked.

Although we don't have the details yet, the Starship upper stage successfully completed hot-staging and pulled away from Super Heavy. If you're not impressed, you should be. This is world-class engineering completed on an insanely compressed time scale.

Some things went wrong, of course

Perhaps most critically for SpaceX, on this flight, the Super Heavy booster appears to have performed a nominal flight. After Starship pulled away, the first stage had done its heavy-lifting job. If this were a normal expendable launch, the rocket would have fallen into the ocean.

But this was not a normal launch, of course. SpaceX intends for Starship to be fully reusable, and that means trying to recover both the booster and the upper stage. According to SpaceX, the Super Heavy rocket initialized its "boostback" burn, which is intended to slow the rocket down. This entails igniting a subset of the rocket’s 33 engines, similar to what happens with the Falcon 9 rocket at the top of the atmosphere. After that point, however, things went sideways. Perhaps the upper portion of the first stage was too damaged by the hot staging, as the ignition of Starship’s engines understandably singed the rocket below. It’s also possible there was an issue with tank pressures inside Super Heavy, as there was not much propellant left, and it's challenging to move the remaining fuel and oxidizer to the engines.

In any case, Super Heavy blew up spectacularly. So was this a failure? Hardly. SpaceX had just launched the largest rocket the world had ever seen, a flying skyscraper largely built with private funding. If it were almost any other rocket in the world, it would have been judged entirely as a success because first stages are disposed of. But because SpaceX took the next step, to experiment with recovery, the loss of the first stage after completing its primary mission was somehow viewed as a failure by some observers. I'm sorry to say it, but that's just dumb.

As for the vehicle’s upper stage, SpaceX reported that Starship not only survived the technically demanding hot-staging maneuver, but ignited all six of its engines and began to power its way to space. Eventually, it reached an altitude of about 150 km above the planet.

However, near the end of its burn, something went wrong. It’s possible that one or more of the Raptor engines failed. Perhaps there was a problem with the shielding around the engines to protect them from heating. In any case, Starship began flying off course, and its flight termination system activated.

Getting any data from Starship on this test flight is a pretty big win for SpaceX, and surviving staging and most of the vehicle’s propulsive burn will set the company’s engineers up well for future success. They will learn so much from this. It would not surprise me if they take enough confidence away from this flight to put Starlink satellites as a payload on Starship's third flight.

But, but, but it’s a failure compared to NASA’s rocket

One year ago NASA flew its Space Launch System rocket for the first time. After a decade of development and tens of billions of dollars, the large rocket had a flawless debut aside from some damage to the launch site. This was a great success, but NASA really had no other choice. It started building pieces of the rocket seven years before launch, and the whole ethos of the space agency is that “failure is not an option.”

SpaceX built the Starship and Super Heavy rocket that launched on Saturday over the span of a couple of months at a price somewhere between one-tenth and one-hundredth the cost of NASA's SLS rocket. Because it can build Starships rapidly and at a low cost, SpaceX has half a dozen more rockets in various stages of work, all awaiting their turn to go to space. Due to this iterative design methodology—flying to identify flaws, and rapidly incorporating those changes into new hardware—SpaceX can afford to fail. That is the whole point. By flying its vehicles, SpaceX can rapidly identify what parts of the rocket need to be changed. The alternative is, quite literally, years and years of analysis and meetings and more analysis. Iterative design is faster and cheaper—if you can afford to fail.

In some respects, on just its second flight, Starship now is as successful as NASA’s SLS rocket. Consider that the Artemis I test flight in November 2022 used a core stage, side-mounted boosters, and an upper stage known as the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, or ICPS. This core stage performed well, flying a nominal mission as it boosted the Orion spacecraft into orbit.

Although the core stage was new hardware, the upper stage ICPS was a (very, very lightly) modified version of a Delta rocket upper stage that has been flying for a quarter of a century. Put another way, the core stage of the SLS rocket, and the Super Heavy booster have now both completed one successful launch. If SpaceX had stuck an ICPS and the Orion spacecraft hardware on top of Super Heavy, it could have gone to the Moon on Saturday.

This is the power of iterative design—it's faster, cheaper, and typically better than the alternative if you can survive the popular canard of being perceived as a failure.

SpaceX has an incredible amount of work to do

I'm pretty sure that most non-space people do not really understand what Starship aspires to be. And that's OK, because there's really no precedent for this. Yes, NASA went to the Moon with the Apollo program half a century ago, and that was truly awesome. But it did so with funding that approached nearly 5 percent of the US federal budget and a workforce of about 400,000 people. Such resources are completely off the table today.

Moreover, every piece of Apollo hardware that landed astronauts on the Moon was never used again. The components of the big Saturn V rocket fell into the ocean or were jettisoned into deep space. The Apollo spacecraft splashed down into the ocean and ended up in museums.

With Starship, SpaceX is seeking to build a fully reusable launch system that is larger and more powerful than the Apollo rocket. SpaceX seeks to land hundreds of metric tons on the Moon, not 15 tons like Apollo. What SpaceX is trying to do is extremely challenging from a physics and funding standpoint, and the work is only beginning.

Saturday's launch of Starship was only the beginning for SpaceX.

Credit: SpaceX

Beyond simply getting Starship to space, it must become an orbital vehicle, and both the booster and spacecraft must be made to reliably land. Then SpaceX must learn how to rapidly refurbish the vehicles (which seems possible, given that the company has now landed a remarkable 230 Falcon 9 rockets). The company must also demonstrate and master the challenge of transferring and storing propellant in orbit, so that Starship can be refueled for lunar and Mars missions. Starship must also show that it can light its Raptor engines reliably, on the surface of the Moon in the vacuum of space, far from ground systems on Earth.

But the first step is often the hardest step. And for SpaceX, getting Starship flying to gather that data was the critical step. Now that the company has shown the ability to launch Starship safely from South Texas, the regulatory process should ease up, allowing for a higher flight rate, yielding more data and starting to address all of those challenges cited in the previous paragraph. A high flight rate will solve a lot of ills, and with Saturday's flight SpaceX is on the cusp of doing just that.