Elon Musk said teams could be prepared to try another Starship launch in as little as one to two months after the most powerful rocket to ever launch from Earth left a crater at the SpaceX launch site last week.
To allay NASA’s concerns about possible Starship damage when it begins flying from Kennedy Space Center, SpaceX is still constructing a backup site for human launches on the Space Coast.
These missions won’t happen until SpaceX has finished testing at its Starbase launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas, where the Starship and its Super Heavy booster successfully launched together for the first time last Thursday.
The booster’s 33 Raptor engines, each of which is capable of producing more than 17 million pounds of thrust, were able to clear the launch tower even though it was unable to reach space. About four minutes after flying only to about 24 miles and tumbling back to Earth, SpaceX sent the self-destruct command resulting in the rocket exploding over the Gulf of Mexico.
“The vehicle experienced multiple engines out during the flight test, lost altitude, and began to tumble,” reads an update on the SpaceX website. “The flight termination system was commanded on both the booster and ship.”
While teams said their top priority was clearing the launch pad, part of the company’s testing strategy that expects hardware to fail through more frequent test launches, Musk had tempered expectations for the Starship mission to achieve its goal of reaching space and flying 2/3 of the way around the Earth on a suborbital flight path.
Repairing the significant damage from the launch site will be required first, even if the failed engines and absence of a scheduled stage separation are two important issues for the next launch attempt.
“All that’s left of the concrete lateral support beam is the rebar! Hopefully, this didn’t gronk the launch mount,” Musk posted on Twitter to images comparing the launch site’s construction to post-launch damage.
Musk said the company had prepared for a “massive water-cooled, steel plate to go under the launch mount,” but that it was not ready in time for the test launch.
He said “we wrongly thought the launch pad concrete would survive the launch based on data from a static fire performed in February that saw 31 of the 33 engines manage a successful test burn.”
“Still early in analysis, but the force of the engines when they throttled up may have shattered the concrete, rather than simply eroding it,” he wrote on Twitter. “The engines were only at half thrust for the static fire test.”
Concrete fragments were seen flying everywhere in video taken near the launch location, including numerous pieces that ended up in the waves less than a quarter mile away. One piece slammed into an unoccupied minivan for website NASASpaceflight.com that was parked close to the pad to shoot video prompting tweets of “RIP NSF Van.”
“The two cameras we placed on the roof of the van got hit and were taken out. Obviously, this was all at our own risk which was well understood,” posted Michael Baylor, part of the live stream team for the website.
Only 27 of the rocket’s 33 engines were visible in images of the rocket lifting off, and more engines failed before the mission’s end. It’s unclear if any were damaged by debris on liftoff.
“With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and we learned a tremendous amount about the vehicle and ground systems today that will help us improve on future flights of Starship,” the company posted on it site.
At 8.8 million pounds of thrust for a rocket that actually made it to space during its launch from Kennedy Space Center last November on the Artemis I moon mission, NASA’s Space Launch System still holds the record. Starship’s power was almost twice as great. The damage SLS did to the Mobile Launcher at Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39-B has led to what continues to be months of repair work as teams get it ready for Artemis II in 2024.
Last year, NASA expressed concerns about the potential harm that Starship could cause to SpaceX’s Launch Pad 39-A due to its immense power for planned future flights from KSC. SpaceX is continuing to build out a Starship launch tower at 39-A for when the spacecraft is ready for operational flights.
The issue, however, is that NASA relies solely on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft to transfer humans from the United States to the International Space Station because Boeing’s Starliner is still not available as a backup.
The Starship launch pad damage risk has prompted SpaceX to focus on improving its adjacent launch site at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 so it could also launch the Dragon spacecraft. Those launches can currently only take place from 39-A.
“SpaceX and the NASA team has done an incredible job laying out the crew and cargo capability from pad 40,” said NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager Steve Stich in February. “SpaceX has started groundbreaking on that pad, and actually the initial work to clear the site and then pour the pilings for the crew tower.”
SpaceX’s Dragon mission management director Sarah Walker said she expects the site to be ready this fall for initial launches with just cargo.
“We’ve think it enables even greater flexibility to our Dragon customers,” she said. “Our primary focus first will allow cargo missions to launch and just allow them to be interchangeable between the two pads, 39 and 40. And then we’ll add the final certification elements for human spaceflight capability soon after, but we’re seeing good progress.”
A version of Starship will serve as the Human Landing System for the Artemis III mission, which aims to return humans, including the first woman to the surface of the moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972, as early as 2025. NASA has a vested interest in the development of Starship, however, as it will rely on it.
Despite the mission ending in a fireball, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson praised the SpaceX team last Thursday in a tweet.
“Every great achievement throughout history has demanded some level of calculated risk, because with great risk comes great reward,” he posted. “Looking forward to all that SpaceX learns, to the next flight test and beyond.”
