It doesn’t take a degree in aerospace engineering to know that, ideally, rockets shouldn’t blow up.
So for non-engineers, the explosion of SpaceX’s Starship rocket on Thursday could seem like a disaster – not the kind of outcome that should have made SpaceX founder Elon Musk and his colleagues His staff celebrated, who cheered for what they saw as a disaster. great success.
Regular space watchers are even more interested when the company describes the results of the mission on Twitter with the cosmic level of euphemism. SpaceX calls it an “unexpected rapid disassembly” — or, in other words, an explosion.
But SpaceX doesn’t necessarily expect the rocket – the most powerful and one of the most complex to ever fly – to actually come out unscathed. Although it failed to achieve its most ambitious goal of gathering enough speed to reach orbit and then re-enter the atmosphere, it has achieved other successes by flying for four minutes and leaving. launchers.
That was enough for employees at SpaceX headquarters to cheer for the performance — one employee sprayed a co-worker with a bottle of champagne — and for Bill Nelson, NASA administrator, congrats to the company.
Daniel Dumbacher, executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, said that SpaceX is used to broadcasting both its successes and failures, just as it did when it first attempted to land the Falcon 9, its current rocket. Many of these attempts ended unsuccessfully.
“They put them out there for everyone to see,” Mr. Dumbacher said. “And that’s great. In fact, I applaud them for that because it shows how hard some of these jobs are.”
Big NASA programs like the Space Launch System that the government agency used to launch to the moon in November often can’t afford to explode like you learn. There is a tendency to experiment and analyze more in practice — which slows development and increases costs — to avoid embarrassing public failures.
“Government programs are not supposed to work that way, because of the way we have all the stakeholders who can monitor and say no to you,” Mr. Dumbacher said.
Even if SpaceX boldly acknowledges the explosive end of the flight, it still accepts it as a useful outcome.
“With an experiment like this, success comes from what we’ve learned, and today’s test will help us improve the reliability of Starship as SpaceX seeks to induce life on multiple planets,” the company said. wrote on Twitter.
