Starship Blows Up

The first launch of the SpaceX Starship, the vehicle supposed to one day carry people to Mars, blew up today. The booster failed to separate from the second stage, the whole thing started spinning and then, boom.

Earlier a telescopic view showed that not all of the booster's 33 engines were firing, which seems like a bad sign even if it didn't cause the failure. I have wondered about all those engines ever since SpaceX announced they were going with this design. The reason the Soviets never got to the Moon was that they never got their 30-engine N-1 super-heavy rocket to work, and NASA engineers at the time pointed to the difficulty of making so many engines work together. But I guess computers and controls and such are a lot better now than they were in the 1960s, so maybe SpaceX can do it.

The strange thing about the video of the disaster that SpaceX immediately uploaded to Youtube is the excited atmosphere. The video starts with clips of other SpaceX failures, and when Starship blew up the assembled crowd cheered.

Elon Musk is of the "move fast and break things" school of engineering, and he made SpaceX in that image. His whole approach is that space can be reached much more cheaply if we cut back on the bureaucracy and take more risks. And on the whole it seems to be working; SpaceX launched around the same time as other private space companies but has progressed much faster; its Falcon 9 rocket has made 217 launches, of which 152 were reflights, making it by far the leader in commercial satellite service. Its Dragon capsule is now the main way people and gear reach the International Space Station. Starship, when and if it actually reaches space, will be the most powerful launch vehicle ever made.

Falcon 9 launch vehicle landing on the droneship

So in a sense the whole mission is based on accepting the chance of failure. I don't think the cheerful, excited tone of SpaceX's failure video is all fake. I think that is genuinely the culture they are trying to cultivate, and I have no trouble believing that many of their employees buy into it.

Whether that sort of spirit can really get us to Mars, I have my doubts. I don't have the passion for crewed space flight that animates Musk and people like him, so I am not all that charged up for the mission. If I were in charge of the space budget I would blow up the ISS tomorrow and put an end to all this nonsense about going back to the Moon. We've been there and already know there's no reason to go back. Instead I would send highly capable robots to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, where there are still discoveries to be made.

But other people feel differently, and if they want to cheer the launch of Starship and then its self-destruction, I wish them all the best.