SpaceX’s Starship represents a revolution on spaceflight – a super-spacecraft that could lead in … [+]
While SpaceX lost the upper stage of its colossal Starship spacecraft during its seventh flight test, the mishap is typical of leading-edge experiments in rocketry presaging a spaceflight revolution, says a leading American space scholar.
The accident took place amid SpaceX’s rapid-fire crafting of a series of Starships – each generation more advanced and more powerful than any other rocket in human history, says Professor Kip Hodges, the founding director of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University.
Stepped-up launches of new prototypes of the Starship – and demo flights sprinkled with pyrotechnics – in myriad ways resemble NASA’s lightning-paced competition with Soviet spacecraft designers to loft the first satellites and then astronauts into orbit, Professor Hodges, a widely acclaimed space expert and onetime member of the NASA Advisory Council, told me in an interview.
During the fiery dawn of the first Space Race, as the Americans and Russians competed to transform their intercontinental ballistic missiles into rockets, replacing nuclear warheads with space capsules atop the missiles, NASA televised its sometimes explosive experiments.
In the blockbuster book-turned-film The Right Stuff, writer Tom Wolfe charted the intense drama sparked by the bursting rockets that appeared across American TV screens during the superpower race into the heavens: “To almost anyone who had followed NASA’s efforts on television, the odds against the successful launch of an American into space seemed absolutely dreadful.”
An early Soviet Vostok spacecraft is being prepared to join the race with NASA for lead superpower … [+]
The White House and the newly created NASA “had adopted the strategy of openly publicizing attempts to catch up with the Russians – and so people were being treated to the sight of the rockets at Cape Canaveral … either blowing up on the launch pad in the most ignominious fashion or else heading off on crazy trajectories, toward downtown Orlando instead of into space, in which case they had to be blown up by remote control.”
While many American viewers were struck with fear on the future of these early spacecraft, Wolfe recounted, the ace military pilots recruited into NASA’s first contingent of astronauts “did not look at the TV footage in the same light.”
To America’s top test pilots, he added, “What people were seeing on television were, in fact, ordinary test events.”
“Blown engines were par for the course in testing aircraft prototypes and were inevitable in testing an entirely new propulsion system such as jet or rocket engines.”
Astronaut John Glenn boards a tiny capsule to become the first American to orbit the Earth – part of … [+]
When SpaceX live-streamed Starship’s seventh test flight, one of its top engineers, Kate Tice, narrated the break-up of the capsule as it played out in real time – all with the same air of cool detachment as the earliest NASA astronauts.
“We were just coming up to the end of that ascent burn for the ship … when we started to lose a couple of the engines,” she said during the webcast. “We saw those dropping out and then we did lose telemetry from the ship.”
SpaceX’s Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, counting down to a flight test from the … [+]
“So at this point we are assuming that the ship has been lost.”
“This was a brand new vehicle – essentially this was kind of an upgrade version – so with that there’s a lot of things you’re upgrading … all those systems are now interacting with each other for the first time,” she explained.
“It was intentionally designed and flown in order to basically test the envelope … really trying to understand the boundaries and the maximums for the ability of this vehicle to fly.”
“We always knew,” Kate Tice added, “that excitement is guaranteed today.”
Across SpaceX, with its 14,000 advanced aerospace engineers and spacecraft designers, there seems to be a race to speed past not just the leading spaceflight powers of today, but also the space-tech wunderkinds who shaped NASA’s earliest triumphs of a generation ago.
William Gerstenmaier, a star aeronautics engineer at NASA who directed the complex, transnational assembly of the International Space Station before becoming Vice President of Flight Reliability at SpaceX, gushed during a SpaceX press conference last summer: “I think it’s super fun being at SpaceX.”
“We leverage off of what we learned from NASA in some ways and then we push it a little bit further,” said Gerstenmaier, who helps guide engineering development of the Starship.
“This pace of development that we get to do at SpaceX is very much like the pace of development that was required back in the early Apollo days,” he mused. “We’re getting a chance to do that again where we’re really starting to push frontiers.”
NASA has commissioned SpaceX to transform its Starship capsule into a lunar lander, to ferry Artemis astronauts from orbit around the Moon down to the orb’s South Pole.
SpaceX’s Starship will speed a new generation of American astronauts to the Moon, and then to Mars, … [+]
Yet NASA Deputy Inspector General George Scott warned in a report last year that with the NASA-SpaceX Moon agreements, “The Agency requested an aggressive delivery schedule of 2 to 3 years from task order award to lunar landing, which is far shorter than the average time to launch.”
So SpaceX is racing to meet NASA’s aggressive timeline for a Moon touchdown, along with Elon Musk’s own countdown to lofting a fleet of five robotically piloted Starships to Mars in late 2026, when the next Earth-Mars orbital transfer window opens.
SpaceX’s founder unveiled the new Mars liftoff deadline last summer, and added that another Starship would blast off in 2028, carrying the first astronauts set to land amid the planet’s orange-red dunes and cocoa-colored skies.
Musk’s ultimate goal is to create a second foundation for humanity on Mars – with 10,000 flights of his Starship arks ferrying one million first-generation Martians to the planet as it is terraformed into a new proto-Eden – all before, he says, World War III erupts on Earth, with its potential for thermonuclear warfare.
Western astronauts could pilot a Starship to join their robotic forerunners, like NASA’s Ingenuity … [+]
To meet these timelines for the Moon and Mars landings, Professor Hodges says, SpaceX will have to introduce radical transformations of the Starship and test these iterations quickly.
While the globe’s first independent space superpower has charted fast progress with the Starship test campaign, the occasional setback – like the lost robotically piloted ship – “is not unexpected,” Professor Hodges says.
Starting with the Soviet and American space wizards who vied to reach the Moon, he explains, “Every rocket program has suffered the same fits and starts.”
With Starship, SpaceX, which launched more rockets into orbit in 2024 than the rest of the world combined, is shaking up the entire sphere of spaceflight.
The next-generation technology, Titan size, constant evolution and full reusability of the Starship all represent a planet-changing breakthrough – one that will reverberate into the future, says Professor Hodges, who has transformed Arizona State University into one of the leading American space studies centers.
With its ultimate design capacity to speed 100 astronauts, along with brigades of robots and squadrons of Starlink satellites, on each super-ship launched to the Moon or to Mars, he says, the Starship could speed past every other spacecraft ever produced on this planet.
Jared Isaacman, the billionaire space pilot who has already commanded two incredible SpaceX Dragon flights circumnavigating the Earth, and has commissioned the first Starship when that spacecraft is approved to carry astronauts, agrees that SpaceX’s evolving super-capsule will transfigure humanity’s future in space.
Isaacman, a superstar of the NewSpace sector who is being nominated by President Donald Trump to head NASA, told me in an earlier interview, after his second orbital odyssey, that the Starship represents “a multi-generational leap in spaceflight technology.”
The Starship, he predicts, will speed waves of spacefarers to the Moon and to Mars across the 21st century while helping spark the rise of a space civilization that spans the globe.
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