SpaceX's Starship Blast was a 'Successful Failure'

It has been widely reported that Elon Musk's SpaceX company, the manufacturer and operator of the Starship rocket, experienced a spectacular explosion moments after it soared off its launch pad on a first flight test, which is the latest vivid example of a success failure business model that has served the company well in the past.

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The fiery disintegration of Musk's colossal, next-generation Starship system rather than being viewed as a setback, experts say that the dramatic loss of the rocket ship will actually help to speed up the development of the rocket ship.

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After the highly anticipated launch took place, media coverage was dominated by images of the Starship tumbling out of control while mounted on its Super Heavy rocket booster close to 20 miles in the sky before everything blew apart.

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As part of the ill-fated Super Heavy mission, SpaceX admitted that several of the Super Heavy's 33 powerful Raport engines malfunctioned during the ascent of the rocket, and the booster rocket and Starship did not separate as designed before the flight was aborted.

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Musk, SpaceX's founder, CEO, and chief engineer, lauded the test flight for achieving its main objective of getting the vehicle off the ground as well as providing a wealth of data that will assist with the development of Starship. Musk - the founder, CEO, and chief engineer of SpaceX - praised the test flight.

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Practice Makes Perfect

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The test flight provided a number of benefits, according to at least two experts in aerospace engineering and planetary science who spoke to Trade Algo.

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"This is a classic SpaceX failure, one of the company's most successful failures ever," said Garret Reisman, a professor of astronautical engineering at the University of Southern California, a former NASA astronaut, and a senior adviser to the company.

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SpaceX's test flight of its Starship was described by Reisman as "a hallmark of its strategy which sets SpaceX apart from traditional aerospace companies and even NASA, by embracing failure when the consequences of failure are low."

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There were no astronauts aboard the rocket for the crewless flight, and the rocket was flown almost entirely over water from the Gulf Coast Starbase facility in south Texas in order to prevent any injuries or damage to property on the ground from falling debris on the launch site.

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"Even though that rocket may cost a lot of money, what really costs a lot of money is the wages of the people who work on it," Reisman said in an interview after Thursday's launch.

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SpaceX, according to Reisman, saves more money over the long run and takes less time to identify and fix engineering flaws, if they are willing to take more risks during the development process instead of hiring "a large team of people that worked for a long time and a long time just to make sure it was perfect before they even tried it."

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"As far as what I have seen, the timeline for transporting people (aboard Starship) has been accelerated in comparison to what it was a couple of hours ago," Reisman said.

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Tanya Harrison, a researcher at the University of British Columbia's Outer Space Institute, said that clearing the launch tower and ascending through a critical point known as maximum aerodynamic pressure were two of the most important accomplishments of the first flight of a launch system of this size.

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"The test is an integral part of the testing process," she explained in an interview. "The fact that the rocket launched at all was a great achievement for many people. There are a lot of accidents that happen when you are trying to design a new rocket."

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"The risks associated with a single flight test are small in comparison to the ambitious gains that are at stake," according to her.

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"There is no rocket that can carry as much cargo and people as this rocket, which is one of the biggest rockets that mankind has ever attempted to build. It will have orders of magnitude more cargo and people than any existing spacecraft in terms of size and payload," she said.

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The Mars Perseverance rover is being used to collect samples of Martian soil and minerals measuring in kilograms, while NASA is working on a mission to retrieve those samples. Harrison explained that Starship will take many tons of rock back from Mars and the moon, as well as transport dozens of astronauts and lab facilities.

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The fully reusable rocket system is widely expected to be used by commercial satellites, science telescopes and eventually paying astro-tourists and traveling scientists in order to explore the solar system and other parts of the universe, as Musk has billed it to be crucial to SpaceX's interplanetary exploration goals and its near-term launch business.

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The speed at which SpaceX has developed since its founding in 2002 has led to the company performing dozens of commercial missions every year using its workhorse rocket for low-Earth orbit, the Falcon 9, Harrison states, "I do not think it would be surprising to have humans on Mars using Starship in the next decade."