2023-04-21 16:42:10
It would be success in failure. This is the mantra of SpaceX, NASA andpart of the media Americans since the explosion of the Starship rocket, four minutes following takeoff Thursday, April 20.
“Congratulations to SpaceX for its first integrated Starship test flight! Every major accomplishment in history has required calculated risk-taking,” reacted Bill Nelson, the head of NASA. “Congratulations to the whole team for an exciting test launch!”, rejoiced Elon Muskthe whimsical CEO of SpaceX and Tesla.
Deliberate destruction of the rocket
No reference in these congratulations and self-congratulations to the explosion. SpaceX’s twitter account even preferred to use the phrase “unplanned rapid disassembly” to describe the accident.
Yet the engineers did press the self-destruct button on this huge 119 meter rocket high when it was 39 km from the earth. “When they realized that the two parts of the spacecraft were not separating as planned, they preferred to blow it up rather than take the risk of losing control of it”, summarizes Ian Whittaker, physicist specializing in space at Nottingham Trent University.
This very first test flight of the most massive rocket ever built did not fulfill its roadmap. Far from it: Starship was supposed to reach an altitude of 150 km and make an almost complete circle of the Earth in orbit for 90 minutes before falling back into the Pacific.
Eventually, Starship should become the first fully reusable rocket. Enough to hint at a future in which the price of a flight to space would be considerably reduced, since it would suffice to pay once for a rocket capable of making several round trips to the Lune or elsewhere.
And that’s the whole point of the Starship rocket explosion. “Elon Musk made this test a planetary media event followed by the whole world, he expected a resounding success”, underlines Christopher Newman, specialist in space law and policy at the University of Northumbria. Finally, the general public saw a giga-rocket that was supposed to be reusable at will disappear following only four minutes of flight.
For ordinary mortals, SpaceX has swallowed up ten years of research and development in four minutes for a project that has already cost more than two billion dollars, according to Elon Musk.
Difficult under these conditions to consider this test flight as a success, and the statements of Elon Musk and the boss of NASA seem to fall under the Coué method.
Four minutes of data collected
But that would be ignoring the lessons of the past. “The fact that the rocket took off correctly should not be minimized. In the 1960s and 1970s, rockets usually exploded on takeoff and might claim the lives of personnel on the ground,” points out Ian Whittaker.
The four minutes spent in the air raised a significant amount of data. “In this regard, we can say that the test flight has fulfilled its purpose,” said Tomas Hrozensky, associate researcher at the European Institute for Space Policy.
The rocket has notably passed an essential milestone: that of the Max Q. It is a point in the trajectory of the spacecraft “during its flight where it is subjected to the maximum pressure that it will encounter during its journey”, explains Ian Whittaker. Starship survived it, proving “that the materials used will be ready to withstand all flight conditions”, says Tomas Hrozensky.
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The tendency to see this test flight as a failure also comes from the comparison with the standards imposed by large public agencies such as NASA. The latter “cannot afford to lose rockets in this way because their programs are financed by public money, which obliges them to be more accountable”, notes Ian Whittaker.
SpaceX has more leeway in this regard. “Private companies are better off financially and are more willing to lose rockets because real-life test flights are the only way to perform experiments not possible in the lab, such as measuring Max Q resistance” , details Ian Whittaker.
Nevertheless, the explosion so quickly following takeoff must have deprived SpaceX of certain essential data. “We do not know, for example, what the behavior of the machine is when it descends at full speed towards the earth, or how it behaves beyond 100 km above the Earth”, lists Tomas Hrozensky .
A small step for the return of Man to the Moon
If SpaceX’s success with Starship is so important for the United States, it is because this rocket is “crucial for NASA’s Artemis III mission”, says the Wall Street Journal. This program must mark the return of american astronauts to the moon by 2025.
NASA signed a more than $1 billion contract with SpaceX in November 2022 for the Starship rocket to help land astronauts on the moon. On paper Elon Musk “has three years for his rocket to be ready to safely transport human beings”, underlines the Wall Street Journal.
Hence the importance for SpaceX and NASA to present this test flight in its best light so as not to give the impression that the Artemis III mission risks being delayed because of Elon Musk’s company.
“For the moment, this test flight does not call the schedule into question,” said Tomas Hrozensky. “Nasa must have even been reassured to see that SpaceX agrees to lose machines that are worth millions of dollars to see what works or not”, notes Christopher Newman.
But the “failures-which-are-in-truth-successes” should not be linked together. Elon Musk has already claimed that a new test flight will have “take place in a few months“The pressure will then be greater on him to do better,” confirms Ian Whittaker. This expert estimates that it takes regarding four or five conclusive tests for Starship to be considered safe enough to participate in the Artemis III mission. And one of those tests will have to include a successful moon landing, which will take longer than flying the giga-rocket 150 km above Earth.
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