![Starship launched on Saturday with all 33 Raptor engines burning nominally.](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/starship-1-800x450.jpg)
SpaceX
SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas—Starship launches are clarifying events. Pretty quickly after liftoff you discover out who understands the rocket business, and who’re the casual observers bereft of a clue.
Before I had even left the launch viewing area in South Padre Island on Saturday morning headlines began to fill my news feed. The Wall Street Journal led with, “SpaceX second Starship test flight ends in one other explosion.” Bloomberg was still more dour, “SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy Booster Launch and Failure.” Perhaps, after consultation with their beat reporters, editors subsequently modified these online headlines. And the stories themselves higher reflected the truth. Nevertheless, much of the media coverage of the launch delivered a harsh verdict: One other failure for Elon Musk and SpaceX.
I mean, yes. The primary stage of the Starship rocket, Super Heavy, did explode. And the upper stage, Starship, had a failure that caused its flight termination system—explosives on board in case a vehicle begins flying astray—to detonate. But that was to be expected on such an experimental, boundary-pushing test flight.
Leading with words like “failure” and “explosion” are sort of like putting the headline “Derek Jeter had a strike out” on a news story concerning the 2001 World Series game during which he later hit a walk-off home run. Like, it’s accurate. Nevertheless it’s a lazy take that completely misses the purpose.
Rapid rebuild of ground systems
Here’s what SpaceX actually achieved with its second Starship launch on Saturday morning, from a narrow peninsula of land on the southern extremity of Texas.
The vehicle’s first launch, in April, caused significant damage to the launch mount and surrounding infrastructure. At SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s direction, the corporate had attempted to find out whether it could get away with launching the huge rocket without a sophisticated sound suppression system to mitigate launch pad damage. Seems, that is a no. The primary Starship launch shredded the launch site by throwing chunks of concrete for miles around.
Musk and SpaceX learned their lesson and completely redesigned and rebuilt the launch pad to include a complicated water-based sound suppression system. By August, just 4 months later, it had not only built the complex system, but tested it. All of those changes resulted in a way more robust launch pad, which survived Saturday’s liftoff largely unscathed.
Afterward I spoke with Phillip Rench, an engineer who worked at SpaceX for five years and for a time directed the corporate’s Starbase facility near Boca Chica Beach in South Texas. He was impressed by the speed of the rebuild and smoothness of the ground-support operations for Saturday’s launch.
“The thing I take into consideration, and which probably goes unnoticed by most, is how extremely hot and humid it’s in Boca through the late summer and fall,” he said. “The team that just rebuilt the orbital launch mount, water deluge, and remaining launch pad just did so in the most well liked, most miserable a part of the yr. I remember having mild heat stress almost each day in August and September while working on the pad. I give kudos to those technicians, welders, and engineers that spent the last seven months out in the sector making this occur.”