During a drill, a SpaceX Starship rocket falls horizontally through the air. The SpaceX Starship rockets are designed to fall horizontally, which makes SpaceX slow down. On March 4, the SN10 Starship exploded on the ground after it landed. This is the third time a SpaceX Starship rocket has exploded in a row. The following article, which was first published on February 17, details the company’s divisive approach to large space vehicles.
In February, a gleaming 15-story rocket exploded over a coastal testing facility near Brownsville, Texas, in a huge fireball. A video of the fiery accident, which SpaceX broadcasted on YouTube, looked like it came straight out of a Michael Bay blockbuster.
The SN9 Starship rocket’s failure may have seemed to many observers to be a major setback for SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and his team of visionary engineers who expect to one day transport people to Mars. The accident, however, was all in a day’s work for SpaceX principal integration engineer John Insprucker. Following the crash, Insprucker said on camera, “We had another fantastic flight up. All we have to do now is focus on the landing a little more.”
“It’s difficult to launch rockets into space. It’s also more difficult to get them back to Earth intact so they can be reused. NASA has known this for decades, but we are now in a new age of space exploration, with private companies such as SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, and others racing to open up space to the public in ways that only science fiction movies could have imagined a quarter-century ago,” added Insprucker.
The SpaceX Starship programme was launched in 2016 with the intention of transporting cargo, up to 100 people to the moon and ultimately to Mars. Musk said in the early stages of production that the Starship spacecraft could theoretically launch people into space by 2020, but he has since retracted that assertion, stating that hundreds of missions are likely still ahead.
According to Todd, the SpaceX “test-to-destruction” method has the benefit of making a space launch system operational quickly, but “it can imply that launch failures occur more frequently especially on early flights when compared to NASA’s more thorough modelling approach.
He believes that these teething issues will finally be resolved, but that the conflict between the FAA and SpaceX will likely continue for some time.
