'Blowing up or crashing is what rockets do—lots of times, over and over, throughout the history of uncrewed space flight,' writes jeffreykluger. 'And this inevitable part of the testing process is essential to success in space'
Starship did not do nearly as badly today. The Soviet N1 erupted just seconds after liftoff, collapsing back to the ground and destroying the launch pad. SpaceX meanwhile never promised that Starship would succeed, but it did set clearing the launch tower and keeping the pad intact as one of the main goals of the mission.
“I think [the explosion] was something that SpaceX anticipated as a realistic possibility,” says John Logsdon, professor emeritus and founder of the George Washington University Space Policy Institute. “They did a very good job of lowering expectations prior to the launch. And I think it’s because they realized that testing a complex system like this, there are multiple things that can go wrong. And something did.
More still could. The company is continuing to build Starships at a furious pace—reminiscent of NASA’s Apollo era, when 13 Saturn 5s were flown from 1967 to 1973, nine of which carried crews to the moon in just a four-year window. “I think they have a factory full of multiple duplicates of these systems,” says Logsdon. “It’s not like they lost something that’s irreplaceable.”
Musk may or may not make good on his tweeted promise to launch a Starship again in a “few months,” but the company has staked its future—and NASA has staked its Artemis moon program—on the promise that the mammoth rocket will indeed fly, and fly well. Rockets explode and rockets soar. Today Starship suffered the less fortunate of those outcomes. If history is a guide, it will ultimately achieve the other.
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