SpaceX’s Starship—a spacecraft that might one day transport people to Mars—has completed its first integrated launch, but made it only a few minutes into its highly-anticipated debut long-distance flight.
Just four minutes after liftoff from the company’s launch site in Boca Chica in southern Texas, when the Starship stage was supposed to separate from the Super Heavy rocket, both the stage and rocket experienced a “rapid unscheduled disassembly”—a euphemism that Elon Musk and his SpaceX colleagues sometimes use for a rocket explosion.
This test flight aimed to go almost orbital. The ship was supposed to fly to an altitude of 146 miles and make most of a lap around the Earth. The Super Heavy rocket was planned to splash down off the Texas coast soon after launch, and the Starship vehicle would have splashed down at the end of its trip 90 minutes later, off the coast of Kauai, Hawaii.
But SpaceX hails the flight as a success, and an opportunity to improve Starship for future tests. “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 tweeted soon after the explosion.
Photograph: PATRICK T. FALLON/Getty Images
And the crowd at SpaceX’s Starbase in Texas, which cheered enthusiastically throughout the countdown, didn’t seem to mind the deviation from plan, continuing to cheer and clap even as the malfunction became evident and the Starship stack began to spin instead of separate, and then burst into plumes of white smoke. “Everything after clearing the tower was icing on the cake,” said SpaceX commentator Kate Tice. “As we promised, an exciting end to the Starship inaugural integrated test flight.”
A lot has been riding on this 390-foot rocket. SpaceX officials, especially CEO and cofounder Elon Musk, have made frequent bold claims of wanting to use Starship to make humanity multi-planetary. NASA’s also keeping a close eye on this test flight, which has been delayed multiple times since 2021, as it could determine whether SpaceX can deliver on its contracts to provide Starship moon-landers to the space agency by 2025 for the third and fourth Artemis missions. The US Federal Aviation Administration’s watching, too, to ensure public safety in the launch site region, following a lengthy review of the potential hazards of SpaceX’s Starship program.
SpaceX revealed few details of the launch before this week, and the company did not respond to WIRED’s media requests. But there were some clues it was imminent: The FAA included the launch in their operations plan advisory, with backup dates through April 22. And officials in Cameron County, Texas, announced last week that Boca Chica Beach and the local road, State Highway 4, would be closed on April 17, with the following two days as possible backups.
However, until the afternoon of April 14, when the FAA granted SpaceX its critical launch license, it wasn’t even clear that the massive spacecraft would get the green light. Since the fall of 2021, the FAA, which sets the rules for launch and reentry, has been conducting a thorough environmental review of SpaceX’s launch and test operations in Texas. Last June, the agency required the company to address some 75 issues to minimize air and water pollution, harms to local communities, and threats to plants and animals in the neighboring wildlife refuge and on the shore.
This is likely the agency’s longest review process, but unlike the Florida “space coast” launch sites at Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral, Boca Chica is new. SpaceX also modified its plans several times, requiring regulators to make new assessments. “They’ve been designing and tinkering with the vehicle along the way, tinkering with the trajectory, so that it addresses public safety concerns. This is a test program, and it’s not unusual that an applicant would make changes that would impact the schedule,” said Kelvin Coleman of the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation at a media briefing on April 12.
Photograph: PATRICK T. FALLON/Getty Images
SpaceX hasn’t fully addressed all 75 bullet points, and the process is ongoing, Coleman said. The FAA’s license is valid for five years, and subsequent Starship launches will require the agency to approve a license modification.
Some local residents wanted more transparency into the agency’s review process. “The FAA should be talking to the public. It’s almost like they’re responsive to SpaceX and not us,” says Jim Chapman, a board member of the local nonprofit group Save RGV, referring to the Rio Grande Valley. His group is concerned that the review may not have paid enough attention to the effects of heat from launches and explosions, and problems caused by shock waves, sonic booms, and excessive road closures that limit public access to the beach. In particular, Chapman highlights the noise of launches and tests, which he argues could exceed the decibel levels estimated by SpaceX and the FAA.
First-time orbital flights can be challenging and often fail, like Relativity Space’s 3D-printed rocket, which launched in March and flew until the second stage engines faltered, meaning the spacecraft could not reach orbit. Others succeed, like NASA’s closely-watched first flight of the massive Space Launch System and Orion last fall—although valve-related glitches prompted several scrubs before NASA achieved liftoff. Some 11 percent of FAA-licensed launches fail, Coleman said, and the agency wants to ensure that a mishap, such as an explosion or falling debris, doesn’t harm the public or the environment.
At the moment, Starship is an unproven program, and the FAA has said they would investigate should a mishap occur. Since the exploding rocket and Starship could have flung shrapnel or fuel onto the ground, the agency will likely assess whether local communities or wildlife habitats may have been affected.
Musk himself suggested this Starship flight only had a 50 percent chance of success. At a Twitter Spaces event for his subscribers on April 16, Musk expressed concern about possible damage to the launchpad if Starship blew up during or soon after launch. The company has had difficulties during tests of Starship prototypes, including a pressure test in 2019 when an upper tank burst and an explosion during a rocket engine test in 2020. Multiple lower-altitude flight tests have ended in explosions.
SpaceX engineers scrubbed their first attempt for the orbital test flight on April 17 due to a frozen valve in the booster rocket’s pressurization system, similar to the problems NASA faced last year.
SpaceX’s liquid methane and oxygen-fueled Super Heavy, powered by 33 Raptor engines, could be considered a potential rival to NASA’s SLS rocket. They are the world’s two most powerful rockets, both with millions of pounds of thrust; both heavy-lift launch vehicles are capable of bringing astronauts and large payloads to the moon and Mars. The SLS Block 2 configuration, which NASA will use for future moon missions, will be nearly as tall as the combined height of Starship and Super Heavy. But SpaceX’s spacecraft can carry a much larger payload, and it will likely become far cheaper because of its reusability.
NASA’s counting on SpaceX—a frequent commercial partner and the recipient of billions of dollars in agency investments—to get Starship working properly. The second Artemis mission in late 2024 will fly NASA and Canadian astronauts around the moon with the Orion spacecraft. Next will come historic moon landings. NASA awarded SpaceX contracts for the Artemis 3 and 4 missions in 2025 and 2028, beating rival Blue Origin. For those, SpaceX has agreed to deliver a modified version of Starship that will bring astronauts from an Orion capsule in lunar orbit to the moon’s surface and back again.
In the long-term future, Starship might be used for lunar mining missions and for refueling flights en route from Earth to Mars, says Phil Metzger, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida who studies space economics. NASA wants to extract resources from water ice on the moon, and the oxygen from that could be used for fuel. Metzger argues that Starships could play a role in that lunar mining economy as it develops. “I think that Starship is going to be revolutionary. I think it will dramatically lower the costs and increase the activities in space. That will be good for science, good for economics, and good for the environment,” he says.
Musk’s dreams of martian colonization depend on Starship, too. He has spoken about wanting to build a civilization of a million people on Mars, carried there by thousands of Starships. If it’s possible, that vision will face numerous risks, ethical questions, and logistical challenges. And, crucially, it also depends on successful Starship tests.
