New Delhi: The spectacular explosion of SpaceX’s new Starship rocket just minutes after it lifted off from its launch pad on a maiden flight test is the latest vivid illustration of the “successful failure” business formula that has served Elon Musk’s company well, experts said Thursday. does. Rather than viewing the fiery dismantling of Musk’s massive, next-generation Starship system as a setback, experts said the dramatic loss of the rocket ship would help accelerate development of the vehicle.
Images of the Starship spiraling out of control some 20 miles into the sky as it mounted its Super Heavy rocket boosters before the combined vehicle blasted media coverage of the highly anticipated launch. SpaceX admitted that several of the Super Heavy’s 33 powerful rapport engines malfunctioned on ascent and the booster failed to separate the rocket and Starship as designed before the ill-fated flight ended.
But SpaceX executives, including Musk, the California-based rocket company’s founder, CEO and chief engineer, praised the test flight for achieving the key objective of getting the vehicle off the ground while providing a wealth of data that will drive Starship’s development.
Practice Makes Perfect
At least two experts in aerospace engineering and planetary science who spoke with Reuters agreed that the test flight delivered benefits.
“It’s a classical SpaceX successful failure,” said Garrett Reisman, an astronautical engineering professor at the University of Southern California who is also a former NASA astronaut and a senior advisor to SpaceX.
Reisman called the Starship test flight a hallmark of the SpaceX strategy, which sets Musk’s company apart from traditional aerospace companies and even NASA by “embracing failure when failure has little consequence.”
There were no astronauts aboard for the uncrewed flight, and the rocket was flown almost entirely over water from the Gulf Coast Starbase facility in South Texas to avoid possible injuries or property damage on the ground from falling debris. .
“Even though that rocket cost a lot, it actually cost a lot of money in people’s salaries,” Reisman told Reuters in an interview hours after Thursday’s launch.
Reisman said SpaceX saves more money in the long run, and takes less time to identify and fix engineering flaws, taking more risk in the development process, rather than having “a big team that works for years and years.” trying to make it right in front of you.” Try it too.”
“I would say that the timeline for transporting people (on Starships) has just accelerated compared to a few hours ago,” Reisman said.
Planetary scientist Tanya Harrison, a fellow at the University of British Columbia’s Outer Space Institute, said clearing the launch tower and climbing through a critical point, known as maximum aerodynamic pressure, is difficult for such a large, complex launch system. The major achievement was on the first flight.
“It’s part of the testing process,” she said in an interview. “When you’re trying to design a new rocket there are a lot of accidents. The fact that it launched at all makes a lot of people really happy.”
He said the risks of a single flight test were small compared to the ambitious benefits at stake.
“This is the biggest rocket that humanity has tried to build,” he said, adding that it is designed to carry “orders of magnitude” more cargo and people from and to deep space than any existing spacecraft. .
While NASA works on a mission to retrieve samples of Martian soil and minerals, measured in kilograms, being collected by the Mars Perseverance rover, Starship will carry back several tons of rock, along with dozens of astronauts and Will move the entire laboratory facilities to and from the Moon. And Mars, Harrison said.
Musk envisions Starship to be used for SpaceX’s interplanetary exploration goals as well as commercial satellites, science telescopes as well as a fully reusable rocket system for rides into space with eventual paying astro-tourists— with its near-term launch being said to be critical to the business.
Citing the rapid pace of SpaceX’s growth since its 2002 founding, leading dozens of commercial missions a year with its workhorse rocket to low-Earth orbit, the Falcon 9, Harrison said, “I wonder Won’t happen if we have humans on Mars on Starship in the next decade.”