Why Starship Explosion Was A Success, 4078

On Thursday, the United States returned to its place of space supremacy with the launch of SpaceX’s Starship from its Starbase on the southern tip of Texas.

Although this first flight of Starship in its super-heavy configuration was deliberately blown up by Elon Musk and his Starbase team at an altitude of 40 km – or 25 miles – that’s over 131,000 feet – hundreds of the project’s engineers were shown wildly cheering it as a total success.

Why?

The super-heavy configuration is twice as big as anything humans have attempted to launch before.

It was so heavy --- about 120 metric tons – that it took a full 10 seconds to rise above its billowing brown cloud of smoke and chunks of concrete as its 33 engines nearly incinerated the launch pad, blowing away most of the concrete below except for the massive pillars upon which the Starship sat. Two of the engines could be seen exploding about 2 minutes into the flight and before it was self-destructed, up to 8 of the 33 engines were not functioning.

Elon Musk afterword tweeted ……. A water deluge system was under development, to cool the pad from the tremendous heat output, but we decided to launch anyway just to see what would happen. To Musk, this was no problem. It will quickly be rebuilt – and not just a little bit stronger, but massively so, and, according to Musk, they will be ready to launch again in a month or two.