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

Starship blasts off from Texas before exploding a few minutes later (Pictures: SpaceX/Reuters)

On the one hand, a massive rocket exploded just four minutes after take-off, showering the Earth below with debris. On the other, the team behind it hailed the event a success.

Now the dust has settled (all over Port Isabel, Texas), what is the real take-away from the ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’ (RUD) of SpaceX’s pioneering Starship rocket – apart from an instant meme? 

First of all, that explosion was intentional, not accidental. Having reached almost 128,000ft when it began to spin and lose altitude, Starship couldn’t be allowed to plummet back to Earth in one piece. The control team activated the ‘flight termination system’ – aka self-destruct – giving spectators online and below a spectacular show.

That’s one element the team now know works, but presumably the test flight had slightly loftier aims than proving it could blow itself up.

And yet, before the launch, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and others from the company had stressed their definition of success was taking off – or, as Mr Musk put it, not blowing up the launchpad.

That might seem a simple ask 81 years after the first rocket to escape our atmosphere blasted off from Germany. But Starship is very different from that early craft, or any since. Starship is big. Very big. Not just in height – 120metres of height – but in its own weight and potential cargo capacity. That translates into the need for awesome thrust, which on Satrship comes from 33 Raptor engines – not all of which fired as planned on Thursday. 

‘We’ve never been able to fly anything this big or powerful,’ said Nasa planetary scientist Dr Jennifer Heldmann. ‘It has twice as much thrust as Saturn 5 which sent astronauts to the Moon in the Sixties and early Seventies.

Space deliberately blew up Starship as it began to lose altitude (Picture: Reuters)

‘Just clearing the launchpad was a success because this is the biggest rocket that has ever been built by humans, ever, in our history.

‘We’re looking at the endgame. What Starship is capable of, the amount of payload [cargo] it can take to the Moon and Mars and beyond is like nothing we’ve ever seen before. So with that, we have to be able to accept a certain amount of risk.’ 

Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme, Dr Heldmann added: ‘It will be the pre-Starship era and post-Starhip era, it will be that transformative.’

Era-defining progress does not come easily, as Starship has already shown – a number of earlier prototypes also suffered RUDs, including two that landed with so much force they exploded on impact. If Starship is going to land Nasa astronauts on the Moon in 2025, as planned, that’s a fairly large wrinkle to iron out. 

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

Progress in space travel is ultimately very high risk, but can also be rapid.

‘SpaceX builds, they test, they fly, they iterate, they learn and then they go back and do it again,’ said Dr Heldmann. ‘That’s very different from how Nasa traditionally works – we spend a lot of time and many years and a lot of money working through every possible scenario. 

‘At Nasa we understand [their way of working] and we respect it enough that we have contracts where SpaceX is flying Nasa astronauts to the International Space Station, and it has the contract to take astronauts down to the surface when we return to the Moon.’

Certainly after the test flight, Nasa rallied around its partner in space, hailing the four-minute flight as more momentous than it appeared to the untrained eye.

Starship before launch (Picture: Xinhua/Shutterstock)

Nasa administrator Bill Nelson tweeted: ‘Congrats to @SpaceX on Starship’s first integrated flight test! Every great achievement throughout history has demanded some level of calculated risk, because with great risk comes great reward. Looking forward to all that SpaceX learns, to the next flight test – and beyond.’

The agency’s associate administrator for exploration systems development Jim Free posted: ‘Encouraged by @SpaceX’s Starship flight test today. Each test is necessary progress toward a human lunar landing. Looking forward to learning from the data SpaceX captured as they continue to develop the Starship human landing system and prepare for their next flight test.’

Starship is the biggest rocket ever built (Picture: Metro.co.uk

That next test flight is likely to come around quickly, given past experience of the programme. Shortly after Thursday’s mission, Mr Musk tweeted: ‘Congrats @SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship! Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months.’

And that much is certainly true. The rocket may have been lost, but the massive amount of data generated in those nail-biting four minutes was not. No, it wasn’t the 90-minute orbit of Starship SpaceX hoped for. The two stages didn’t separate. The Super Heavy booster didn’t return to Texas (well, in one piece).

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But a failure? Failure would be not using every minute detail Starship shared during its time soaring above Earth – and raining back down – to make the next launch better.

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

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The space industry thinks so.