Why SpaceX's Starship Explosion Is No Big Deal
Time By Jeffrey Kluger April 20, 2023
Again, just for the record, the 40-story rocket—whose upper stage is intended to serve as the lunar landing vehicle on NASA’s crewed Artemis 3 mission in the late 2020s—blew up rather than going to space. There is no prettifying that unhappy fact. But there is no arguing with one other fact too: Blowing up or crashing is what rockets do—lots of times, over and over, throughout the history of uncrewed space flight. And this inevitable part of the testing process is essential to success in space.
On Feb. 20, 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth, launching aboard an Atlas rocket that had previously exploded in roughly 50% of its uncrewed test flights. On March 23, 1965, Gus Grissom and John Young strapped themselves into their Gemini 3 spacecraft, becoming the first astronauts to fly atop a Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile that had failed in more than a dozen of the test launches intended to qualify it to carry humans. On Dec. 21, 1968, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders, the Apollo 8 crew, became the first astronauts to fly the Saturn 5 moon rocket, one flight after an uncrewed Saturn 5 suffered engine failures and vibrations violent enough to nearly cause it to shake itself to pieces. But Borman, Lovell, and Anders flew anyway, becoming the first human beings to orbit the moon and returning safe and whole to Earth.
Space travel, as has been said again and again and again, is hard. And SpaceX knows that as well as anyone, following a build fast, fly fast, fail fast, and fly again R&D model that has today made it one of the world’s leading launch providers; its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket has successfully flown 217 times since 2010, including 61 launches in 2022 alone.
Falcon saw three launch failures before it became the star performer it currently is, and Starship has failed multiple times already. From 2020 to 2021, five upper stage Starship rockets were launched on short test flights—to a maximum altitude of 10 km (6.2 mi.)—four of which ended in explosions or crashes before a fifth finally succeeded, and even that one included a small fire at the base of the rocket after landing.
“That’s why we test, you know,” says Lisa Watson-Morgan, NASA’s program manager for the Artemis lunar landing system. “You learn more from a test that doesn’t go well than from one that does go well, and then you regroup and go again.
More:
https://time.com/6273472/spacex-starship-explosion-no-big-deal/
