Starship launched on Thursday morning from the SpaceX facility at the Southern tip of Texas. The rocket arrived to about 40km and struggled to work into the recovery phase, and then went BOOM. To those who saw the video, it looks like a massive failure. To SpaceX, and NASA, all of the mission parameters were met, as clearing the launchpad was the goal. Anything else was just additional material to study and fix. This was a rocket putting out twice the thrust of the previous king, the Saturn V rocket that put man on the moon. This was, and still is, a work in progress, as evidenced by the cheers from the SpaceX crowd, even when the rocket exploded. This isn’t failure, but simply a test that was acknowledged as a “push hard and see how much we can accomplish in a short period of time”. Even as we look to the future, we can expect more jarring tragedies, that I don’t think should ever stop us, but keep us moving forward in our exploration of all that we can.
SpaceX’s development process is messier, but it’s also much faster.
Found at arstechnica.com
