Tech Corner: SpaceX’s Starship reaches space before exploding by Greg Enslen

SpaceX launches Starship to space (photo submitted)

On Saturday, November 18, SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, attempted the second launch of their new Starship rocket, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. After a morning of propellant loading and final checks, the unmanned rocket’s engines ignited and the massive 11 million-pound rocket powered into the sky during a flawless sunrise liftoff from the private Starbase launchpad, located in Boca Chica, Texas, just north of the border with Mexico.

Launch Successful

The spacecraft is made up of two parts: a Super Heavy booster and a smaller Starship rocket sitting atop the booster. Upon launch, the booster’s 33 engines fired and Starship rose from the pad, sending up a massive cloud of smoke and steam as thousands of spectators watched from a safe distance. The rocket cleared the pad with no damage, an improvement over the first Starship launch attempt in April, which saw massive damage done to the launch pad. In the months since, SpaceX had installed a complex water deluge system to mitigate damage from the rocket’s engines.

Roaring into the sky, the spacecraft continued flawlessly for approximately eight minutes as the flight arced out over the Gulf of Mexico. The rocket initiated a new separation maneuver called “hot staging,” where the smaller Starship engines fired as the two vehicles separated, pushing them apart. The Starship portion continued on as the Heavy Booster dropped away and flipped, attempting to relight the engines and fly back toward Starbase, where it would attempt a water landing off the coast. But the booster’s engines failed to reignite and it spun out of control before exploding in a massive cloud of fuel and smoke, chunks of the rocket flying off in all directions before falling into the Gulf.

Starship itself fired its six engines and continued on toward space. After nearly 15 minutes and just 30 seconds before the vehicle was to reach the coasting phase of the mission, an apparent mishap occurred and the second vehicle also exploded, with reports of debris falling into the Caribbean near Puerto Rico. The first mission in April also ended in an explosion when the two halves of the rocket failed to separate and spun out of control before SpaceX controllers triggered a remote destruction.

SpaceX’s Iterative Approach

SpaceX follows a very aggressive development approach—in fact, at Starbase, there are already several other Starships and Heavy Boosters ready for launch. Elon Musk, owner of SpaceX, didn’t appear to be that concerned about the double explosion of the vehicle on Saturday. In fact, the company plans to “fail fast” and learn as quickly as possible from each unsuccessful launch, following the same methodology as they did to develop the Falcon 9 rocket, which suffered many failures early on before becoming the reliable launch program it is today.

“Congrats @SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship!” Musk posted to X, formerly Twitter, at the time. “Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months.”

“The real topping on the cake today, that successful liftoff,” said SpaceX commentator John Insprucker, and commentator Kate Tice added “We got so much data, and that will all help us to improve for our next flight.”

Big Plans for Starship

Starship is SpaceX’s two-stage super heavy lift spacecraft that is currently under development. It is the heaviest, tallest and most powerful space launch vehicle to have flown, and is intended to be fully reusable. If the launch is successful, after a mission, both stages would be recovered and reused, similar to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets, which have launched and landed over 250 times, both on land and on floating ships. SpaceX also has launched its massive Falcon Heavy rockets, which use three of the Falcon 9 rockets at the same time to launch heavier payloads.

The Starship space vehicle is designed to supplant SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, build SpaceX's Starlink satellite constellation, and serve to deploy crewed spaceflight and other heavy payload missions to orbit. SpaceX plans to use Starship vehicles as tankers, refueling other Starships to allow missions to geosynchronous orbit, the Moon, and Mars. A lunar lander variant of Starship is to land astronauts on the Moon as part of NASA's Artemis program. Starship is ultimately meant to enable SpaceX's ambition of colonizing Mars.

That’s it for this week. Got a topic you want me to cover? Tech question? Email me at greg@tippgazette.com and you might see your topic or question in a future paper!