On the list of favorable outcomes, what happened with the SpaceX Starship launch today was way down on the list. It exploded after a successful launch, or as SpaceX hosts describing the event on a livestream more eloquently articulated it, Starship experienced a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.” I have to remember that line. It’s a good one.
Elon Musk was on hand in the command room in southern Texas for the historic occasion. While it’s not ideal to have a costly space vehicle explode, Musk tweeted that it’s all part of eventually sending humans to Mars.
“Congrats SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship! Learned a lot for the next test launch in a few months.”
The plan was for the first-stage booster called the Super Heavy (the rocket doing the heavy lifting) would have dropped into the Gulf of Mexico. The vessel on top would have taken a cruise over the Atlantic before settling into the Pacific near Hawaii. That whole flight would have only taken 90 minutes.
Here’s why today’s mission was historic — the Starship generates 16.7 million pounds of thrust, which would be needed to send humans, and their cargo all the way to the moon and eventually Mars. The entire project will cost around $2 billion, but if Musk’s dream of getting to the red planet comes true, it will need Starship to succeed.
Visually, it looked like a disaster, but space experts know that just getting to this point was an accomplishment. Here’s part of a statement SpaceX released on Twitter.
“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multi-planetary.”
While not a total success, Musk at least spent a day out of San Francisco and away from Twitter headquarters.
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