Video of the Largest Rocket Ever Made Exploding After Takeoff is the Most Incredible Thing You'll See All Day
As a general rule, when a multi-billion dollar rocket that thousands of people invested millions of man hours building erupts in a fireball long before it leaves the atmosphere, we're all calling that an L. Put people on board, and we're searching the Thesaurus for as many synonyms for "catastrophe" as we can find. But just the mere fact that SpaceX's Starship, the largest, most powerful spacecraft ever built by humans made it as far as it did is an unparalleled accomplishment.
In the days leading up to the scrubbed launch a few days ago and into this morning, Elon Musk was saying it was a coin flip as to whether this massively complicated piece of engineering would explode before it left the ground and vaporize the launchpad. So he's doing a victory lap:
I mean, just behold this thing with wide-eyed awe at its awesome might:
There's a saying that "science evolves one funeral at a time." Which usually refers to scientists, not their creations. But I think it couldn't be more apt. From the link on that first Tweet:
Source - SpaceX’s Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, took off from a launch pad on the coast of South Texas on Thursday morning.
The uncrewed rocket exploded midair shortly after liftoff — but SpaceX is still celebrating the test.
"With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multi-planetary," SpaceX said in a tweet. …
SpaceX is known to embrace fiery mishaps during the rocket development process. The company maintains that such accidents are the quickest and most efficient way of gathering data, an approach that sets the company apart from its close partner NASA, which prefers slow, methodical testing over dramatic flareups.
As the analyst says in that video, Starship's engines are twice as powerful as the Saturn V that put men on the moon. Which they have to be given the audacious plan for the vehicle once it's perfected:
BBC - Starship, as it's known, will be a fully reusable transport system capable of carrying up to 100 people to the Red Planet. …
The founding ethos of SpaceX was to make life multi-planetary. [Musk] says that settling humans on other worlds, such as Mars, could preserve civilisation if Earth were to experience a cataclysm, such as a large asteroid impact.
"History is going to bifurcate along two directions. One path is we stay on Earth forever, and then there will be some eventual extinction event," Musk said in 2016.
"The alternative is to become a spacefaring civilisation and a multi-planet species, which I hope you would agree is the right way to go."
The SpaceX founder has often spoken about his dream of building cities on Mars.
And this ball of fire and smoke was a major step forward on that journey. Like a ship sinking in the harbor in the early days of transoceanic seafaring during the Age of Discovery. With the notable distinction of being amazing to watch:
Would it have been a bigger success had Starship slipped the surly bonds of Earth and touched the face of God? Of course. Obviously. But at the same time you can't deny it's fun to watch shit blow up. Provided no one was hurt.
And it's all part of the cost of doing business when the world's most eccentric billionaire is trying to make us a bi-planetary species. Eventually Elon will get this right. Maybe even in a few weeks like he mentions. But until then, let the free fireworks display continue. You can say, "Failure is not an option," like Ed Harris did in Apollo 13. But myself and literal rocket scientists are using the line Tom Hanks uses at the end. "A successful failure."