In an update on the first flight of the most powerful rocket ever, Elon Musk offered a timeline of what went wrong while staying optimistic about forthcoming launches.
During its brief first flight more than a week ago, the gigantic Starship rocket made by SpaceX generated an unanticipated “rock tornado” at launch, and multiple engines failed as it headed upward before it somersaulted out of control.
Then, said Elon Musk, the company’s founder, in an update delivered during a Twitter audio chat on Saturday night, the end of the flight was tenser than it should have been. An automated self-destruct command did not immediately destroy Starship. Instead, 40 seconds passed before the rocket finally exploded.
Despite all that went wrong, Mr. Musk deemed the launch of Starship a success.
“Obviously not a complete success,” he said, “but still nonetheless successful.”
He said that the goal of the test flight was “to learn a lot, and we learned a lot,” and that more test flights were planned for this year.
The spacecraft, the most powerful ever launched, is central to SpaceX’s goals of getting humans to Mars, as well as to NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the moon by 2025 as part of the Artemis program.
Although the rocket did not make it to space, “the outcome was roughly what I expected, and maybe slightly exceeding my expectations,” Mr. Musk said, noting that it got “clear of the pad with minimal damage to the pad.”
At the same time, he acknowledged that the launch hurled debris across a wide area and generated clouds of dust, which reached a small town miles away from the launchpad at the southern tip of Texas.
During the discussion on Twitter, which lasted almost an hour, Mr. Musk answered abstruse technical questions and provided a detailed timeline of what went wrong during the four-minute flight.
