Starship Explosions Show SpaceX Cannot Defy Gravity
The rocket company has had a bad year so far. SpaceX’s Starship rocket is the vehicle at the heart of the Mars mission. It has been launched twice this calendar year and has blown up both times. The debris shower caused a new headache for passengers in Florida and the Caribbean, who weren’t used to “falling debris” being the cause of flight delays. Neither incident injured anyone.
Explosions are not necessarily failures for a company that has thrived on a mind-set of “launch it, break it, fix it, launch again.” With innovations like landing and reusing rocket boosters, SpaceX has slashed the cost of sending stuff to space. Starship, designed to be fully reusable, has the potential to upend the rocket business once again.
But these two Starship explosions were a step backward in SpaceX’s development process, as the flights could not even repeat the successes of earlier test flights, and they perhaps show that the company’s engineers are not as infallible as fans of the company sometimes like to think.
“There’s this persona that has built up around SpaceX, but you’re starting to see that they’re human, too,” said Daniel Dumbacher, a former NASA official who is now a professor of engineering practice at Purdue University and chief innovation and strategy officer for Special Aerospace Services, an engineering and manufacturing company whose customers include NASA, the United States Space Force and some of SpaceX’s competitors.
The delays could also have repercussions for NASA, which hired SpaceX to use a version of Starship to land astronauts on the moon as soon as 2027 during the Artemis III mission.
The two lost Starships, which both failed less than 10 minutes after liftoff, were an upgraded design. They were disappointingly less successful than the older version of Starship which flew last summer. Three previous test flight successfully coasted half-way around the globe, survived reentry through the atmospheric layer over the Indian Ocean and then simulated landings off the west coast Australia. This suggests that SpaceX failed to diagnose and fix the problem. It could point to a significant design flaw in the upgraded Starship.
That also means that SpaceX has so far been unable to test aspects of the updated Starship design, including smaller and repositioned forward flaps used to guide the spacecraft as it falls through the air during re-entry. SpaceX also planned to test a Pez-like dispenser for deploying its Starlink internet satellites.
Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, is central to Mr. Musk’s dreams of building human settlements on Mars. The frequency of Starship launches will also be crucial for SpaceX to achieve its immediate financial goals. The next generation satellites of the Starlink internet service are larger and heavier. The voluminous cargo space of the Starship upper stage would allow the company to replenish its constellation of thousands of orbiting satellites quickly and cheaply.
The test flight failures also mean that SpaceX’s development program has not been able to move on to other objectives.
SpaceX needs to demonstrate that Starship can stay in orbit for an extended period of time, and then drop out of orbit and return to the launch site to be caught by the mechanical arms on the launch tower. The Super Heavy booster stage has done this successfully three times. (The Super Heavy does not orbit). The company also needs to show that it can launch several Starships in quick succession.
Most critically, it needs to show that it can move liquid oxygen and methane propellants from one Starship to another. This procedure is crucial to allow a Starship accumulate enough fuel to travel to Mars or the Moon. Musk claims that propellant transfers are a simple process. Amit Kshatriya said that NASA’s moon-to-Mars program’s deputy associate administrator, Amit, did not know the tank’s performance at an Artemis media event at NASA Kennedy Space Center, Florida, in December. “We don’t.” Then SpaceX could also test its ability to operate two Starships in orbit simultaneously and determine how efficiently it can move propellants between two spacecraft.
Those findings, in turn, would help NASA put together a realistic schedule for Artemis III.
Within a year, “we’re going have a really good understanding of that problem,” Mr. Kshatriya said. I cannot schedule this innovation. “There’s no way.” The Federal Aviation Administration has grounded Starship until SpaceX finishes its investigation into the Flight 8 crash. This could delay the launch of the long-duration Starship to the middle of this year or even longer. Dumbacher believes that SpaceX can overcome the technical challenges presented by Starship. “I don’t know how long it will take them to do that.” “I don’t know when they’ll be able to accomplish that.” Dumbacher suggested that NASA use a simpler, smaller lander in order to increase the odds that NASA will win the 21st century moon race against China. SpaceX must demonstrate its Starship lander before Artemis III. This means that a successful landing of an astronaut on the moon could take up to 40 launches. Dumbacher stated during the hearing that he needed to reduce the number of launches. “I have to keep it simple.”
