SpaceX is nine full-scale test launches into developing its enormous, nearly 400-feet-tall Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built.
Over the last two and a half years, we’ve seen over half a dozen spectacular explosions. Two launches earlier this year sent massive streaks of debris hurtling over the Turks and Caicos Islands, prompting airspace closures. Its most recent test in May ended in an uncontrolled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico after helplessly spinning on its axis and suffering fuel leaks.
The stakes are incredibly high for the Elon Musk-led space firm, which has garnered a reputation for its unusually aggressive iterative design philosophy. Its billionaire founder has made Starship the key component of his endeavor to send humans to Mars, and it also happens to be the linchpin of SpaceX’s future plans for its Starlink satellite network — the major driver of revenue, on which he’s staking the company’s future — which will require the launching of thousands of satellites each year.
But Starship’s repeated test launch failures are forcing experts to ask tough questions about the super-heavy launch platform’s actual viability, as New York Magazine reports. Will Starship ever get off the ground, do its job, and make it back down in one piece? What about NASA’s plans to tap the rocket for its upcoming Moon landing? Could the project have been doomed from the start?
“The question is not, ‘Can you build an upper stage that is reusable with high-performance rocket engines?'” Reflect Orbital chief engineer Charlie Garcia told NYMag. “The question is, ‘Can you do it cost-effectively, and can you do it with quick reusability turnaround?'”
If Musk’s characteristically boisterous predictions are anything to go by, Starship could have an extremely quick turnaround time between launches thanks to a “Mechazilla” tower that catches both its booster and upper stage.
But history has already shown how reality could greatly diverge from those dreams. Case in point: NASA’s Space Shuttle.
“I remember reading a book in the 1970s about how the space shuttle would be flying every two weeks and cost low hundreds of dollars per pound to orbit,” Paragon Space Development Corporation cofounder Grant Anderson told NYMag. “It never did that, obviously.”
SpaceX’s latest Starship launch was seen by many as a step backward, even after previous failures. The company determined that a nitrogen tank in the ship’s nosecone had failed, in contrast to the times its predecessors gently lowered themselves into the ocean.
Flight 7 and 8 also both experienced issues around the same time in their respective launches, prompting concerns.
“If you have a failure at the same stage twice for the same reason, and they can’t solve the problem, that’s an indication that there’s a design flaw that’s more than just an ‘Oops!'” Anderson told NYMag.
All eyes will be on SpaceX in the coming weeks. Musk has promised that the next Starship test launch — the tenth overall — will take place sometime in early August. Giving reassurance is the rocket’s booster, which has repeatedly made it back to the launch pad in one piece after being caught by SpaceX’s “chopstick” arms-wielding launch tower.
Yet nobody knows how SpaceX’s Starship will fare from here. Have the last couple of years been leading up to nothing, if critics are to be believed, or could Starship fulfill Musk’s dreams of delivering humans to the Moon, Mars, and potentially beyond?
SpaceX still has a lot to prove — and the time is quickly running out with each dramatic explosion.
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