When SpaceX lost the upper deck of its colossal Starship spacecraft during its seventh flight test, the incident is typical of next-generation rocket experiments that herald a revolution in spaceflight, an eminent American space specialist said.
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.
The accelerated launches of new Starship prototypes, and demonstration flights peppered with pyrotechnics, resemble in many tactics NASA’s meteoric festival with Soviet spacecraft designers to launch the first satellites and then astronauts into orbit, according to Professor Hodges, a widely identified expert in the field. and former member of NASA’s Advisory Council, he told me in an interview.
At the dawn of the first space race, as Americans and Russians raced to convert their ICBMs into rockets, replacing nuclear warheads with space pills atop the missiles, NASA televised its explosive experiments.
In the best-selling book-turned-movie The Right Stuff, editor Tom Wolfe recounted the intense drama unleashed by the rocket explosions that gave the impression on American television screens of the superpowers’ race to the skies: “To almost everyone As NASA’s efforts followed on television, the odds of effectively launching an American into space seemed dire indeed.
The White House and the newly created NASA “had followed the strategy of going public with their attempts to catch up with the Russians, so other people could see rockets at Cape Canaveral. . . either exploding on the launch pad more quickly or undertaking wild trajectories, toward downtown Orlando or into space, in which case they had to be detonated by remote control.
Although many American viewers were concerned about the long term of those early spacecraft, Wolfe said, the talented military pilots recruited from NASA’s first astronaut contingent “didn’t look at television photographs the same way. “
To America’s top test pilots, he added, “What people were seeing on television were, in fact, ordinary test events.”
“Blown engines were common tests on prototype aircraft and were unavoidable when testing an entirely new propulsion formula, such as jet engines or rocket engines. “
Astronaut John Glenn boards a tiny capsule to become the first American to orbit the Earth – part of … [+] Space Race I with the Soviet Russians. (Photo by NASA/Space Frontiers/Getty Images)
When SpaceX livestreamed Starship’s seventh flight, one of its lead engineers, Kate Tice, recounted the capsule’s rupture as it spread in real time, all with the same air of coolness as NASA’s first 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 spacecraft, the toughest rocket ever built, is counting down to a flight test from Array. [ ] Starbase Center facing the Gulf of Mexico (Photo via SpaceX/Handout/Anadolu Getty Images Agency)
“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 deliberately designed and flown to necessarily test the range. . . seeking to perceive the limits and maximums of the flight ability of this vehicle. “
“We knew,” added Kate Tice, “that enthusiasm today is guaranteed. “
Inside SpaceX, with its 14,000 complex aerospace engineers and spacecraft designers, there appears to be a race to surpass only today’s major space powers, but also the space prodigies that shaped NASA’s early triumphs a generation ago. .
William Gerstenmaier, a star NASA aeronautical engineer who led the complex transnational International Space Station meeting before becoming SpaceX’s vice president of flight reliability, exclaimed at a SpaceX press conference last summer, “I think it’s a lot of fun to be in SpaceX. “
“We took what we learned from NASA in a safe way and then took it a little further,” said Gerstenmaier, who helps as a consultant on Starship’s technical development.
“The rate of progression we can maintain in SspeedX is very similar to the rate of progression that was required in the early days of Apollo,” he reflected. “We have a chance to do it again and we’re starting to push the boundaries. “
NASA has tasked SpaceX with feeding its Starship capsule onto a lunar lander to send Artemis astronauts from orbit around the Moon to the South Pole of orbit.
SpaceX’s craft will bring a new generation of American astronauts to the Moon, then to Mars,Array. . [ ] says SpaceX visionary Elon Musk. Here we see the Moon emerging above the Earth, in a photo taken through an astronaut on the American shuttle. (Photo through Space Frontiers/Getty Images)
However, NASA’s deputy inspector general, George Scott, warned in a report last year that with the agreements between NASA and SpaceX on the Moon, “the Agency has called for a competitive 2- to 3-year delivery schedule between task command assignment and the moon landing, which is much shorter than the average it’s time to start.
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 visionary founder revealed the new deadline for Mars liftoff last summer and added that another spacecraft would lift off in 2028, carrying the first astronauts fit to land among orange-red dunes and cocoa-colored skies. of the planet.
Musk’s ultimate goal is to create an immediate base for humanity on Mars, with 10,000 flights of his Starship Arks carrying a million first-generation Martians to the planet as it is terraformed into a new proto-Eden, before, he said, the World War. . III explodes on Earth, with the prospect of thermonuclear war.
Western astronauts could pilot a Starship to join their robotic forerunners, like NASA’s Ingenuity … [+] Helicopter, on the surface of Mars by 2029, says SpaceX founder Elon Musk (Photo illustration by NASA via Getty Images)
To meet the requirements for moon and Mars landings, Professor Hodges says, SpaceX will want to introduce radical transformations to the spacecraft and verify those iterations quickly.
Although SpaceX, the world’s first independent space superpower, has made immediate progress with Starship’s test campaign, occasional setbacks, such as the loss of the auto-piloted spacecraft, “are not unexpected,” says Professor Hodges.
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 put more rockets into orbit in 2024 than the rest of the world combined, is revolutionizing the entire sphere of space flight.
Next-generation technology, the length of Titan, the constant evolution and complete reusability of the Starship are a planet-changing advance that will impact the future, says Professor Hodges, who has remodeled Arizona State University to become in one of the main agencies in the United States area. centers.
With its maximum capacity to carry a hundred astronauts, along with robot brigades and squadrons of Starlink satellites, on each and every supership launched to the Moon or Mars, he says, Starship could surpass all other spacecraft never produced on this planet. Training
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 NewSpace superstar who is being nominated by President Donald Trump to lead NASA, told me in an earlier interview after his orbital odyssey that Starship represented “a multigenerational leap in flight technology. “space”.
The spacecraft, he predicts, will propel waves of astronauts to the Moon and Mars in the 21st century and, at the same time, help fuel the rise of a spacefaring civilization that will span two globes.
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