Second Starship launch attempt partially successful

The second attempt to launch Starship was partially successful. The stainless steel rocket with a liquid methane/oxygen mixture made it to the detachment stage, but that’s where things went wrong.

Almost succeeded

After an initial failed launch, Elon Musk and his engineers try again. Hopefully it worked this time. Starship is SpaceX’s first truly large spacecraft and, for that matter, the largest rocket ever built by man. So equally exciting. The first minutes seem to go well. This is the phase in which most accidents occur, so the chance that this test flight will actually succeed is greatly increasing.

Starship: rocket for cheap mass production

The technical concept of the Starship breaks just about all the usual rules in rocket construction, in order to enable economical space travel on a large scale. The rocket fuels methane and oxygen are cheap compared to the expensive liquid hydrogen and hydrazine favored by other rocket builders, such as Arianespace. The material Starship is made from, steel, is also very cheap, just over a dime a kilo, compared to the expensive aluminum and titanium used by other rocket makers. In other words, cheap rockets, so if this concept works, the costs per launch can be reduced considerably.

Starship quite successful

Unfortunately, the launch of Starship failed after two minutes. The decoupling failed, causing the rocket to explode. Nevertheless, the SpaceX team sees the test as reasonably successful. The rocket has left the launch tower and has successfully completed the initial stages of launch. Tests are designed to fail regularly, and part of SpaceX’s strategy is to take a lot of risk during test flights in order to make progress faster.

Fail early, fail often, fail forward

One of the trickiest and most risky parts is disconnecting the rocket stages. To give an impression: this must be done in a very chaotic process (a rocket launch can best be compared to a controlled explosion) and extreme temperatures. So this was not unexpected. The SpaceX team will now further improve the Starship, so that the stage separation will go well during the next test launch and the rocket will still reach low earth orbit.

As they say in Silicon Valley: fail early, fail often, fail forward. Despite the move to Texas and the culture that exists between chief executive Musk and the progressive-liberal establishment in the Western American coastal state, this mentality still seems to be firmly in place at SpaceX. And rightly so, only in this way, by taking considerable risks if necessary, will we as humanity move forward. And SpaceX is definitely on the right track with StarShip.