It's the height of a 40-story office building. Its engines produce more energy during launch than the explosive power of 3,100 tons of TNT. It's the future of spaceflight... and another Starship flight test ended prematurely Tuesday with a propulsion system leak and a fireball in the skies.
Flight Test 9 went further than the previous two, with the Ship upper stage reaching orbital velocity before things went pear-shaped just a few minutes after the successful hot-stage separation from the booster vehicle. The last three losses were the first three flights of Ship Version 2.
"Leaks caused loss of main tank pressure during the coast and reentry phase," SpaceX founder Elon Musk posted on X. "Lots of good data to review." Those of us watching live saw the Ship's telemetry go wild until its final destruction during reentry over the Indian Ocean.
The booster used in Flight Test 9 was the first Starship booster recovered (from Flight Test 7) and re-flown. It, too, experienced anomalies after separation and exploded over the Gulf of America instead of making a controlled "water landing" as planned. Whatever the cause of the failure turns out to be, basic reusability is now proven, and that's great news.
Still, it's been a frustrating year for spaceflight fans who just want to see Starship made spaceworthy in time for the 2026 launch window to Mars and Musk's hope for an early unmanned mission to the Red Planet. As I wrote in a previous column, one obvious purpose of that mission is getting one (or more) of Musk's Mars-ready Prufrock tunnel-boring machines (TBM) digging habitation tunnels two years or more before the first humans arrive.
Getting to Mars on that schedule — or even by 2028 — requires more than vision and thrust. It’ll take a spacecraft that can launch, land, refuel, and relaunch again — often. To that end, Musk told Ars Technica on Tuesday that "The most important thing is data on how to improve the tile design" for a heat shield capable of rapid re-use. "So we've got like a dozen or more tile experiments. We're trying different coatings on tiles. We're trying different fabrication techniques, different attachment techniques. We're varying the gap filler for the tiles."
This is much more difficult than fixing Starship V2's leaky propulsion system.
For example, the original promise of NASA's Space Shuttle was that it would be available to fly every two weeks. The reduced turnaround time would reduce the cost of putting people and cargo into space. But as things worked out, the Shuttle’s heat tiles had other ideas.
Refurbishing the Shuttle's tiles in between missions was incredibly labor-intensive and time-consuming. The spaceship's thermal protection system (TPS) featured more than 24,000 tiles, each one uniquely shaped, hand-fitted, and sometimes needing replacement.
Inspection, refitting, and recertification of the TPS could take six weeks to two months — sometimes longer, depending on how much damage was sustained during flight. Instead of flying a couple dozen times a year, each Shuttle managed only about one mission every eight to 14 months.
The Shuttle enabled unique missions — satellite repair, ISS construction — that no other spacecraft could pull off. But that flexibility came at a steep price: the highest per-launch cost in history, and a tragic reliability record. Of the five orbiters built, Challenger and Columbia were lost in flight with all hands.
SpaceX can't afford any of that if it's going to reach Mars. Instead of five ships that might fly once or twice each year, establishing a settlement on Mars requires hundreds of Starships — with the tanker version able to fly once or twice each day.
NASA can't afford that, either, if we're going back to Luna to stay. An Apollo-scale lunar system, like NASA’s Frankenstein SLS launcher — is expendable system and only good for small crews and brief stays. Creating a permanent presence on Luna, now a national security priority, needs Starship.
So while Starship V2 has so far proven to be one leaky S.O.B., each "failed" mission brings Starship one step closer to perfection, and to the day when spaceship turnaround times are measured in hours instead of months.
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