This is not typically the reaction to failure. Then again, nothing is typical about what SpaceX is doing.
It was not, as they say in the space-launch business, nominal. Four minutes into Thursday’s launch of the giant SpaceX Starship, the unmanned rocket blew up at an altitude of 18 miles. The 390-foot-tall launch vehicle, the largest and most powerful anyone has ever attempted to launch into space, has long been a lynchpin of Elon Musk’s ambitions to someday colonize Mars, and its failure interrupted what had been a remarkable string of successes for SpaceX. Yet as the fireball ballooned across the sky, the mood on the ground was anything but somber, as the crowd that had gathered to watch erupted in whoops and cheers. “Congrats @SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship!” Musk tweeted in the aftermath. “Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months.”
Congrats @SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship!
Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months. pic.twitter.com/gswdFut1dK— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 20, 2023
The vehicle consists of two stages: The first, called the Super Heavy, is powered by a cluster of 33 Raptor engines and returns to Earth after each launch, and the Starship is a second stage powered by six Raptor engines and designed to soar into orbit and beyond. The whole stack together weighs some 11 million pounds — about twice as much as the Saturn V rocket that carried Apollo astronauts to the moon.
The launch had originally been scheduled for Monday but was scrubbed due to a stuck valve.
