Not being retired, I can't drop everything I'm doing and run down to Boca Chica at the southern tip of Texas and wait till Elon Musk's SpaceX organization decides to launch a Super Heavy booster with a Starship on top of it. But I'd like to, as it's a shorter trip than the drive to Florida to watch launches at the Cape.
But it turns out that if I was looking for a spectacular aeronautical display, Florida would have been the better place to watch last Thursday's launch from, which took place after sundown that evening. The Super Heavy booster did its job, successfully separating from the Starship second stage, and even returned safely to the launch pad as designed. But an "energetic event," as the controllers termed it, happened inside the Starship shortly thereafter, shutting down several of its engines, destabilizing it into a spin, and causing it to explode. Numerous posts to social media from Florida and the Caribbean show a constellation of flaming objects streaking across the night sky. According to Reuters, a car in the Turks and Caicos Islands was slightly damaged by a piece of the rocket that fell out of the sky. But not to worry—SpaceX says there were no toxic materials in the debris. Nevertheless, the Federal Aviation Administration stopped flight takeoffs from several Florida airports briefly because of "space launch debris," and launched its own investigation into the failure.
According to a Wikipedia article on the Starship, there have been eight flight tests so far of the integrated Super Heavy booster and Starship orbital vehicle, beginning in 2022. Three (the fourth, fifth, and sixth) were entirely successful in the sense that both rockets took off and landed intact under control. The first three and the last two, including last week's test, ended with at least the Starship blowing up, although the booster seems to be working more reliably.
Characteristically, Musk termed the latest test a "minor setback." Maybe it's minor to one of the world's richest men, but to people in Florida and the Caribbean, a small but non-zero chance of having a piece of rocket come down on your head is perhaps something more than minor.
Comparisons between SpaceX's exploits and the NASA manned spaceflights of the 1960s are inevitable, at least to someone like me who lived through them both. The Falcon 9 spacecraft, which was the first significant rocket to be introduced by SpaceX, was first launched in 2010, and it was not until ten years later that the company risked putting people on it. By then it had proved to be one of the most reliable orbital workhorses ever designed, so the risks were reasonably well known.
Although the U. S. space program started off with an embarrassing failure—the December 1957 attempt to orbit a satellite after the Soviet Union beat us into space—it quickly recovered and to my knowledge, there were no major rocket explosions, certainly none with people aboard, until the famous Apollo 13 lunar-orbit service-module failure, which almost left the astronauts stranded.
So we can regard the last two Starship failures as growing pains, perhaps, and look forward to many more before the track record improves to the extent that anyone smart enough to train as an astronaut will be willing to step aboard for a ride. The question now is whether we should put up with falling space debris indefinitely while SpaceX works the bugs out of its rockets.
So far, no one seems to have raised any show-stopping objections. SpaceX and Musk are formally at the mercy of the FAA, which has to approve each launch and has the power to shut down the entire operation if they decide that the hazards to the public are too great. Fortunately for Musk, Floridians are used to having rockets around, and there are enough former space-business employees and military personnel in Florida that having a few fireworks fly over now and then doesn't seem to bother them in any major way. If SpaceX had chosen an orbital path over New York or California, on the other hand, we would probably have heard a lot louder protests and a call to cease and desist.
As long as Musk doesn't run out of money, SpaceX will keep trying with the Starship, and once the bugs are worked out the rocket's built-in advantages will come into play. The goal is to get the cost of each launch down to $10 million or less, which is a factor of ten less than it currently costs. But there are a lot of fundamentals in place already.
Take fuel, for instance. Instead of using exotic and hazardous fuels such as hydrazine, the engines burn liquid oxygen and liquefied methane, which is the same stuff that people with natural-gas hookups burn in their stoves. Both the fuel and the oxidizer are relatively cheap and common industrial products.
The rockets themselves are reusable, and ideally will return to the launchpad like all the old sci-fi stories said they should. What isn't commonly appreciated these days is the spectacular recent advances in automated control systems that both make autonomous drones possible, and amazing feats like rockets landing themselves on launch pads without human intervention. Such tricks simply weren't safely possible in the 1960s or 1970s, but we have the technology to do it now and SpaceX is using it.
I hope that the SpaceX engineers figure out exactly what's making the Starship blow up, and remedy things so that we can have a row of ten or more flawless takeoffs, orbital trips, and landings. I suspect something on the order of that kind of track record will be required before any humans are allowed on board. By then, maybe I'll be retired and have the time to go down to Brownsville and hang out for a few days, waiting to see the next successful launch of a Starship. And if I want to see any fireworks, I'll just buy them myself.
Sources: I referred to the Reuters report on the latest Starship launch and failure at https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/spacex-launches-eighth-starship-test-eyeing-ships-mock-satellite-deployment-2025-03-06/, and the Wikipedia article "SpaceX Starship."
No comments:
Post a Comment