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Starship: Dead End?
What happened on Test Flight 9?
SpaceX just can’t catch a break, can it? After nine test flights, they still haven’t figured out how to prevent Starship from blowing up or disintegrating. The narrative has always been that they would learn from each failure and take giant leaps forward with each failed mission, but after this many failures, you have to ask if that is really happening. On the surface, this mission might seem to be an incremental improvement over the last few — it made it to space and orbital speeds, after all. But, dig a little deeper, and it’s evident that SpaceX has hit an impasse.
I want to give credit where credit is due: Flights 7 and 8 failed in a similar manner. They were both successfully able to land their first stage, the “Super Heavy Booster”, but this isn’t as impressive as landing the upper stage because the Super Heavy Booster remains in the atmosphere and has significantly less kinetic energy. During the flights, both of their upper stages exploded before they could reach orbital speeds. Flight 7 experienced a catastrophic explosion due to a massive fuel leak. Flight 8 had a rocket engine explode and take out almost all others, thanks to a “flash” event, likely caused by either a fuel leak or overheating. So, did Flight 9 solve these issues? Has SpaceX progressed?
