So what was that? Was Starship’s launch a failure or a success?

SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas—It began with a bang, as big things often do.

On Thursday morning, with clearing skies overhead, SpaceX’s Starship rocket slowly began to climb away from its launch pad. Fully laden with about 5,000 metric tons of liquid oxygen and methane propellant, the largest rocket ever built needed about 10 seconds to begin clearing the launch pad.

From a nearby vantage point, the rocket rumbled and the smoke billowed outward—but it seemed like an eternity before Starship poked its head above the smoke and dust. And then it climbed skyward, a brilliant silvery and fiery streak in the sky.

What could not be immediately discerned from the ground is that a handful of the Super Heavy first stage’s 33 Raptor engines failed in the early moments of the flight. After about two minutes, more engines failed. Before the end, when the rocket reached a peak altitude just short of 40 km, as many as eight engines appeared to have gone out.

Understandably, this appears to have led to some control issues at around the moment when the Starship upper stage was supposed to separate from the first stage of the rocket. It’s also possible that a hydraulics problem contributed to an inability to control the direction of the remaining engines’ thrust. Regardless, the launch system began flipping and rolling.

And then, well, stuff blew up.

“But it exploded”

After Thursday’s test, the Internet was on fire. For many people, Elon Musk has done and said some hate-able things of late, and they were ready to hate on him and his rocket company for screwing the pooch. After all, how stupid could engineers be for celebrating a spectacular failure like this?

This is a totally understandable take. For a general audience who sees NASA at work, an agency that can’t afford to fail, this looks like failure. NASA failures often involve the loss of human life or billion-dollar satellites. So yeah, government explosions are bad.

But this was not that. For those who know a bit more about the launch industry and the iterative design methodology, getting the Super Heavy rocket and Starship upper stage off the launch pad was a huge success.

Why? Because one could sit in meetings for ages and discuss everything that could go wrong with a rocket like this, with an unprecedented number of first stage engines and its colossal size. The alternative is simply to get the rocket into a “good enough” configuration and go fly. Flying is the ultimate test, providing the best data. There is no more worrying about theoretical failures. The company’s engineers actually get to identify what is wrong and then go and fix it. But you have to accept some failure.

Super Heavy ascends on a pillar of flame.

Credit: SpaceX

So SpaceX’s process is messier, but it is also much faster. Consider this: NASA spent billions of dollars and the better part of a decade constructing the Space Launch System rocket that had a nearly flawless debut flight—aside from damage to the launch tower—in late 2022. NASA followed a linear design method, complete with extensive and expensive analysis, because a failure of the SLS rocket would have raised serious questions about the agency’s competence.

Fortunately for SpaceX, the company can afford to “fail.” It can do so because it has already built three more Super Heavy rockets that are nearly ready to fly. In fact, SpaceX can build 10 Super Heavy first stages in the time it takes NASA to build a single SLS rocket. If the first five fail but the next five succeed, which is a better outcome? How about in two or three years, when SpaceX is launching and landing a dozen or more Super Heavy rockets while NASA’s method allows it a single launch a year?

So, yes, SpaceX’s rocket exploded on Thursday. The company will learn. And it will fly again, perhaps sometime later this fall or winter. Soon, it probably will be flying frequently.

The bad and the good

That’s not to say this flight test should raise no concerns. SpaceX has already rapidly iterated on the design of the Raptor rocket engine that powers both Super Heavy and the Starship upper stage. Clearly, it must continue to work on making these engines more reliable both at ignition and during the entire flight to space.

This seems likely given that SpaceX now has ample data on the performance of these engines in flight and the plumbing inside the Super Heavy vehicle’s engine section that feeds them liquid oxygen and methane. It helps that SpaceX can rapidly manufacture these engines at a rate of nearly one a day.

Another major concern is the ground infrastructure that fuels and supports the Super Heavy rocket prior to liftoff. Post-launch imagery showed a massive crater underneath the Orbital Launch Mount, and there were also concerns with the propellant “farm” that stores gases and liquids needed for the rocket.

SpaceX will have to make some hard decisions now about whether it needs to build a flame trench underneath the rocket to carry away exhaust and heat or whether an upgraded water deluge system can handle the immense amount of thrust from the vehicle. The company will probably end up constructing the former.

Solving these issues, particularly with the ground systems, is likely to be the biggest hurdle before the next test flight of Starship can take place.

On the plus side, the Federal Aviation Administration confirmed there were no injuries during the test. Moreover, one of the rocket’s biggest customers, NASA, was happy with the test.