![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/starship-ift2-staging.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
A long-range tracking camera captured this stunning view of Starship hot staging, with the upper stage engines firing at the same time as booster separation.<\/p>\n
Credit:
\n SpaceX<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n
Remember, the first Starship launch was just under seven months ago. And in the time since then, the company\u2014at Musk\u2019s direction, in a bid to increase the capability of Starship\u2014implemented this radical engineering change. It is not trivial. Starship is still attached to its booster. The Starship engines, upon igniting, are blasting away at the top of this huge Super Heavy rocket that is still thrusting upward. It\u2019s kind of crazy, and it pretty much worked.<\/p>\n
Although we don\u2019t have the details yet, the Starship upper stage successfully completed hot-staging and pulled away from Super Heavy. If you\u2019re not impressed, you should be. This is world-class engineering completed on an insanely compressed time scale.<\/p>\n
Some things went wrong, of course<\/h2>\n
Perhaps most critically for SpaceX, on this flight, the Super Heavy booster appears to have performed a nominal flight. After Starship pulled away, the first stage had done its heavy-lifting job. If this were a normal expendable launch, the rocket would have fallen into the ocean.<\/p>\n
But this was not a normal launch, of course. SpaceX intends for Starship to be fully reusable, and that means trying to recover both the booster and the upper stage. According to SpaceX, the Super Heavy rocket initialized its \u201cboostback\u201d burn, which is intended to slow the rocket down. This entails igniting a subset of the rocket\u2019s 33 engines, similar to what happens with the Falcon 9 rocket at the top of the atmosphere. After that point, however, things went sideways. Perhaps the upper portion of the first stage was too damaged by the hot staging, as the ignition of Starship\u2019s engines understandably singed the rocket below. It\u2019s also possible there was an issue with tank pressures inside Super Heavy, as there was not much propellant left, and it\u2019s challenging to move the remaining fuel and oxidizer to the engines.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
In any case, Super Heavy blew up spectacularly. So was this a failure? Hardly. SpaceX had just launched the largest rocket the world had ever seen, a flying skyscraper largely built with private funding. If it were almost any other rocket in the world, it would have been judged entirely as a success because first stages are disposed of. But because SpaceX took the next step, to experiment with recovery, the loss of the first stage after completing its primary mission was somehow viewed as a failure by some observers. I\u2019m sorry to say it, but that\u2019s just dumb.<\/p>\n
As for the vehicle\u2019s upper stage, SpaceX reported that Starship not only survived the technically demanding hot-staging maneuver, but ignited all six of its engines and began to power its way to space. Eventually, it reached an altitude of about 150 km above the planet.<\/p>\n
However, near the end of its burn, something went wrong. It\u2019s possible that one or more of the Raptor engines failed. Perhaps there was a problem with the shielding around the engines to protect them from heating. In any case, Starship began flying off course, and its flight termination system activated.<\/p>\n
Getting any data from Starship on this test flight is a pretty big win for SpaceX, and surviving staging and most of the vehicle\u2019s propulsive burn will set the company\u2019s engineers up well for future success. They will learn so much from this. It would not surprise me if they take enough confidence away from this flight to put Starlink satellites as a payload on Starship\u2019s third flight.<\/p>\n
But, but, but it\u2019s a failure compared to NASA\u2019s rocket<\/h2>\n
One year ago NASA flew its Space Launch System rocket for the first time. After a decade of development and tens of billions of dollars, the large rocket had a flawless debut aside from some damage to the launch site. This was a great success, but NASA really had no other choice. It started building pieces of the rocket seven<\/em> years before launch, and the whole ethos of the space agency is that \u201cfailure is not an option.\u201d<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n SpaceX built the Starship and Super Heavy rocket that launched on Saturday over the span of a couple of months at a price somewhere between one-tenth and one-hundredth the cost of NASA\u2019s SLS rocket. Because it can build Starships rapidly and at a low cost, SpaceX has half a dozen more rockets in various stages of work, all awaiting their turn to go to space. Due to this iterative design methodology\u2014flying to identify flaws, and rapidly incorporating those changes into new hardware\u2014SpaceX can afford to fail. That is the whole point. By flying its vehicles, SpaceX can rapidly identify what parts of the rocket need to be changed. The alternative is, quite literally, years and years of analysis and meetings and more analysis. Iterative design is faster and cheaper\u2014if you can afford to fail.<\/p>\n In some respects, on just its second flight, Starship now is as successful as NASA\u2019s SLS rocket. Consider that the Artemis I test flight in November 2022 used a core stage, side-mounted boosters, and an upper stage known as the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, or ICPS. This core stage performed well, flying a nominal mission as it boosted the Orion spacecraft into orbit.<\/p>\n Although the core stage was new hardware, the upper stage ICPS was a (very, very lightly) modified version of a Delta rocket upper stage that has been flying for a quarter of a century. Put another way, the core stage of the SLS rocket, and the Super Heavy booster have now both completed one successful launch. If SpaceX had stuck an ICPS and the Orion spacecraft hardware on top of Super Heavy, it could have gone to the Moon on Saturday.<\/p>\n This is the power of iterative design\u2014it\u2019s faster, cheaper, and typically better than the alternative if you can survive the popular canard of being perceived as a failure.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n I\u2019m pretty sure that most non-space people do not really understand what Starship aspires to be. And that\u2019s OK, because there\u2019s really no precedent for this. Yes, NASA went to the Moon with the Apollo program half a century ago, and that was truly awesome. But it did so with funding that approached nearly 5 percent of the US federal budget and a workforce of about 400,000 people. Such resources are completely off the table today.<\/p>\n Moreover, every piece of Apollo hardware that landed astronauts on the Moon was never used again. The components of the big Saturn V rocket fell into the ocean or were jettisoned into deep space. The Apollo spacecraft splashed down into the ocean and ended up in museums.<\/p>\n With Starship, SpaceX is seeking to build a fully reusable<\/em> launch system that is larger and more powerful than the Apollo rocket. SpaceX seeks to land hundreds of metric tons on the Moon, not 15 tons like Apollo. What SpaceX is trying to do is extremely challenging from a physics and funding standpoint, and the work is only beginning.<\/p>\n Saturday\u2019s launch of Starship was only the beginning for SpaceX.<\/p>\n Credit: Beyond simply getting Starship to space, it must become an orbital vehicle, and both the booster and spacecraft must be made to reliably land. Then SpaceX must learn how to rapidly refurbish the vehicles (which seems possible, given that the company has now landed a remarkable 230 Falcon 9 rockets). The company must also demonstrate and master the challenge of transferring and storing propellant in orbit, so that Starship can be refueled for lunar and Mars missions. Starship must also show that it can light its Raptor engines reliably, on the surface of the Moon in the vacuum of space, far from ground systems on Earth.<\/p>\n But the first step is often the hardest step. And for SpaceX, getting Starship flying to gather that data was the critical step. Now that the company has shown the ability to launch Starship safely from South Texas, the regulatory process should ease up, allowing for a higher flight rate, yielding more data and starting to address all of those challenges cited in the previous paragraph. A high flight rate will solve a lot of ills, and with Saturday\u2019s flight SpaceX is on the cusp of doing just that.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n A lot of the media angst this weekend was undoubtedly driven by antipathy for SpaceX founder Elon Musk. The guy\u2019s a fraud, right? His companies are a grift, right? I can only really speak to SpaceX, but Musk is definitely not a fraud. He has his flaws, certainly. Some of his politics and public statements are deeply unsettling to many. But the dude founded SpaceX and remains the vital force impelling the company forward. He has dumb ideas. He has brilliant ideas. But mostly, he gets things done.<\/p>\n In the aerospace industry there are basically two types of people: checkers and doers. The checkers sit in meetings, write reports, and perform analysis. They serve an important role to be sure. Spaceflight is complicated and hard and risky, and prudence demands an extra set of eyes on work. But checkers are also the bane of progress.<\/p>\n Since its heady days during the Apollo program, NASA has steadily become an agency filled with checkers, rather than doers. That\u2019s part of the bureaucratization process, and today it\u2019s not a bad place for the agency to be as it manages a slew of traditional and new space contractors. However, it\u2019s a terrible place for a space company to be. Part of the magic of SpaceX is that it\u2019s filled with doers, with relatively few checkers, even after more than 20 years of existence.<\/p>\n That culture was created by Musk and is maintained by Musk. He is a hard-charging leader who pushes back on bureaucracy. He wants to move fast and break things. And he does break things. Those very public failures and his recent comments and actions have certainly hurt his reputation, and to some extent, that of SpaceX.<\/p>\n But to denigrate the prodigious rocket science on display in Texas this weekend for this reason, alone, is a mistake. The smart take is to look at it as a critical step on the path toward achieving something amazing, with the potential to unlock a future of spaceflight we have only dreamed about heretofore. The smart take is to cheer on the people out there who are actually doing<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas\u2014Starship launches are clarifying events. Pretty quickly after liftoff you find out who understands the rocket business, and who are the casual observers bereft of a clue. Before I had even left the launch viewing area in South Padre Island on Saturday morning headlines started to fill my news feed. The Wall […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45699,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[21,317],"class_list":["post-45697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-space","tag-starship"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45697"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45697\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}SpaceX has an incredible amount of work to do<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/F_VbEJcbQAAv3Ak-scaled.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n SpaceX<\/p>\n<\/figure>\nShould we cheer for an Elon Musk company, though?<\/h2>\n