Rapidly Scheduled Assembly Throughput

So you may be wondering what happened this morning with SpaceX’s maiden launch of the super-heavy Starship vehicle, intended to be SpaceX’s door to interplanetary travel. Summoning up all the knowledge of my thirty years in astrophysics and fourteen years in spacecraft operations, I can explain it thusly:

Sh*t ‘sploded.

OK, so I’ll be back next week with .. wait what? OK, OK.

Here’s the video:

The biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, Space X's Starship, launches in Texas before a "rapid unscheduled disassembly" during ascenthttps://t.co/hRvf4jIThd pic.twitter.com/XJ8YCayRF2

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) April 20, 2023

For about three minutes, it was one hell of a launch. The vehicle thundered off the pad as the mightiest rocket ever built and was well on its way to orbit. However, trouble was already brewing. Three of its raptor engines failed shortly after launch and several more failed on the way up. After it passed Max Q — the point of maximum aerodynamic pressure — it began to tumble out of control instead of separating the second stage. The rocket was destructed before it could get in any further trouble. There are also indications that significant damage was done to the launch pad.

SpaceX referred to the event as a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” which has got to be in the Hall of Fame for euphemisms.¹ And while there’s been plenty of mockery of the event — not unexpected, given the man who heads SpaceX — I would call this launch a “successful failure”. Much like the Astra launch last year, the rocket did not achieve orbit — and indeed Musk only gave 50-50 odds that it would. But like the Astra rocket, it met a slew of goals. The rocket launched. It cleared the tower. It went through Max-Q. And then something went wrong. What exactly it was — guidance failure, structural failure, stuck motor, or some cascade of problems — will be delved into. But the launch achieved what SpaceX wanted to achieve even if it fell short of what they hoped it would.

There’s a reason that “rocket science” is a phrase we associate with incredibly difficult things. Rocketry really is that hard. And while you can do all the ground-testing and simulations and calculations in the world, eventually you have to put the beast on a pad and light the damned candle. And when you do … sometimes you get a spectacular note to go back to the drawing board.

Erik Berger has a great post contrasting NASA’s slow and careful approach to rocketry against SpaceX’s faster but riskier approach. This has been the case since SpaceX was founded. Their first orbital rocket — Falcon 1 — failed three times before its successful launch. But they’ve now made launch and stage retrieval routine and much cheaper than the conventional approach.

Rather than douse my enthusiasm, this has persuaded me that SpaceX is on the right track and will eventually get this thing to work as advertised and at a fraction of the cost of NASA’s less powerful Space Launch System. Hopefully, Musk can spare some time from his bird hobby to keep this thing moving forward. Because we can never have enough rockets.

God, I love space travel.

1. SpaceX didn’t invent that phrase. But given their large social media footprint and CEO, it is likely going be wedded to them from this point forward.