Spacex's starship,
the world's largest rocket was set to fly to space for the first time last week.
It didn't get there.
Everything after clearing the tower was icing on the cake.
Most companies wouldn't call a fiery explosion,
icing on the cake.
But for SpaceX crashes like this
are part of a unique learning process that Ceo Elon Musk expects will one
day bring humans to Mars and help fuel nasa's ambition to return to the
moon.
Here's why starship is so important to the future of space travel and what the latest
test means for the rocket's future.
Musk has been talking about building a spaceship to go to Mars for years.
Here he is in 2016.
This is really intended to carry huge numbers of people,
ultimately,
millions of tons of cargo to Mars.
In 2017,
he shared the plans for a vehicle that would be both massive and reusable and would
eventually become starship.
And I can't think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars as a
community.
This is what we've been working toward and hoping for.
This is Mike Massimino,
a former NASA astronaut who worked on the Hubble space telescope,
the ability to go and do these things to go to the moon to go to MARS to explore even
further.
This is the kind of spacecraft that can make that happen.
Starship started to take shape in 2019.
1st came the star hopper,
a smaller craft used to test engines that would be used on starship.
Musk unveiled an early version of the spacecraft in September that year.
This is,
this is I think the most inspiring thing that I've ever seen early prototypes of the
spacecraft faced challenges and in order to be
reusable,
it needed to be able to land which it couldn't do in flight tests in
2020.
But for SpaceX,
space crashes weren't necessarily a bad thing.
They're part of the trial and error method that SpaceX regularly uses to test new
spacecraft.
SpaceX philosophy is more like fail fast but learn faster.
NASA is more like we can't afford to have anything explode while we're learning,
we have to,
we have to be ready to go.
It's taxpayers dollars.
We got to get it right on March 3rd.
2021 starship marked a major accomplishment launching to
about six miles up and making a landing but the rocket exploded just
after the cameras stopped broadcasting.
But just a few months later,
a prototype landed and didn't explode on the live video.
We are down,
the starship has landed.
Starship has taken on an increasingly large role at spacex and
not just literally,
it's central to the company's future.
Business strategy.
Executives have said they want to start launching the spacecraft regularly with starlink
satellites and it signed a pair of contracts with NASA to develop a variant of
starship that would carry astronauts to the moon.
Those deals are worth over $4 billion.
It's certainly what NASA is counting on that's going to get people back to the moon and
land on the moon.
So it's a key piece of what NASA is trying to do.
By 2021.
The rocket's design was coming into focus.
It was made up of two parts,
the bottom,
a 226 ft tall booster called super heavy,
which was designed to push the 164 ft tall spacecraft that may one day carry
dozens of passengers out of earth's atmosphere altogether.
Starship stands at almost 400 ft tall.
In comparison.
Spacex's next largest rocket is just 229 ft
tall.
This is the biggest rocket ever made and there's a reason for that,
the further you want to go,
the more payload you want to take,
the more things you want to take,
the bigger the rocket you need.
By the end of 2022 SpaceX was preparing for a key test
starships first test flight using both parts of the rocket.
Musk said the year before that there was a lot of risk associated with the first
launch.
So I would not say that it is likely to be success successful,
but I think we'll make a lot of progress and he still wasn't optimistic the day before its initial
scheduled launch.
This is not like a,
you know,
some sort of train leaving the station at precisely like,
you know,
nine oh three AM or something like that.
The first attempt set for April 17th was postponed due to a frozen
valve.
Then three days later,
SpaceX was ready for lift off.
The plan was for starship to take off from the launch pad in Texas.
The booster would then separate and fall into the Gulf of Mexico as the spacecraft's engines
fired and took it on a 90 minute flight,
then it would come down and crash in the Pacific Ocean,
but that's not what happened shortly after starship launched at 9 33 AM
Eastern.
A graphic on the live stream indicated that three engines weren't working with more
appearing to go out before the blast.
It reached more than 1300 MPH before it started to spin.
It does appear to be spinning the shuttle that was intended to separate from the booster
here didn't we should have had separation by now.
Obviously,
this does not appear to be a nominal situation.
After climbing 24 miles,
the rocket began to tumble back to earth and around four minutes into its flight
starship exploded.
SpaceX said a flight termination system was triggered on both the spacecraft and the
booster.
When you have a failure,
you learn a lot from that failure.
So I think their plan was to test to the point of failure.
And then let's learn from what we can from that failure.
So it never happens again.
Minutes after the explosion,
the company tweeted that success comes from what we learn.
Starship is grounded for now as the Federal Aviation Administration is overseeing an
investigation into what happened during the flight.
An agency spokesperson said,
but Musk said they'd be testing in a couple of months.
This is a huge step if they can get this right.
If they can figure out how to do this with,
with such a big rocket.
I think it's gonna be not just taking people to the moon,
but it's gonna help us to explore the rest of our solar system and maybe on some day.
So I'm very excited.
I wish I could go.
I don't think I'm going anywhere,
but I,
I'm really excited for the people that will be going.