Matt Reigle
Videos by OutKick
SpaceX launched the most powerful rocket ever made only to have it blow up shortly after lift-off.
Starship is the name of the company’s massive rocket, and it lifted off from a launch pad in Texas. It was the first time that a fully-integrated version of Starship was complete with a “Super Heavy” booster.
This complete spacecraft is capable of twice the thrust of a Saturn V rocket.
That’s a lot of thrust.
Things were looking good until about 239 seconds after they lit this candle. At that point, the rocket appeared to separate and tumbled through the sky in a ball of fire above the ocean.
Now, I’m no rocket scientist, but this is less than ideal.
Seems like an abject failure, right?
Nope, they’re making lemons into lemonade and tweeted out what sounds like grade-A inspirational poster drivel.
SpaceX Found A Silver Lining
Despite the loss of equipment and lots and lots of money, the company tried to find the silver lining in the situation.
“Success comes from what we learn.” Print that on t-shirts and put it on posters that will hang in high school guidance counselors’ offices.
Even the boss man seemed pretty pleased with how things went.
I understand that this kind of successful launch that morphed into a fireball over the ocean can teach people much smarter than me a lot. However, if I had just sold tons of Tesla stock to buy Twitter, I’d want to see some mileage out of my spacecraft.
That’s not to say that they’d need to run them into the ground, but two launches would be nice.
I guess this comes with the territory for developing a spacecraft the likes of which we’ve never seen. SpaceX says that when fully-developed Starship will be able to carry 100 people on interplanetary missions.
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This was a huge success by any objective standard. The goal was for the rocket to a) not blow up on the launch pad and b) launch. Both goals achieved very clearly. In R&D, you experiment, fail, learn, improve. With a rocket, the experiment and fail stages (no pun intended) just happen to be very, very visible. This was an overwhelming success for the company.
Wonder how many rockets NASA lost and how many test pilots were lost. This is normal process and people can’t understand that.
TWTR went private with the buy out, no stock for sale at present. TSLA has narrowed their earnings by dropping pricing to sell a lot of cars, thus, their share price is down because the move was a long term strategy which our markets don’t handle/reflect well. The heavy lift rocket was a success, the lift off made it so. Any writer that mocks Elon over this week’s events is not-so-bright.