Starship: Dead End?

What happened on Test Flight 9?

Photo by Forest Katsch on Unsplash

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?

Well, yes, kind of. But no, not really. Not at all.

This was the first time SpaceX reused a Super Heavy Booster. They only had to replace four of its 33 rocket engines, so it was impressive that none of them failed during takeoff. Unfortunately, that is where the good news ends. For reasons we will discuss in a minute, SpaceX wanted to try a new landing flight path with Starship — one that utilised atmospheric drag to slow down its descent more than its retrorockets. This meant landing with the “Chopsticks” (the launch tower arms) wasn’t an option, so they aimed for a controlled splash landing in the ocean. But that didn’t happen. The Super Heavy Booster broke apart just as it started its landing burn. This marks a significantly worse result than last time.

What about the upper stage? Unlike the previous two flights, this one successfully reached space, achieved orbital speeds, and even managed to shut off its engines. However, yet again, the fuel tanks sprang a massive leak, causing the upper stage to tumble out of control and break up in the atmosphere shortly after. So, even though it carried its 16-tonne dummy payload to orbital speeds (which is roughly only 10% of Starship’s promised payload), it couldn’t have delivered it to orbit. What’s more, SpaceX likely didn’t receive any useful flight data from the upper stage due to the loss of contact. So, this is a marginally better result than last time.

Is this progress? If we are being pedantic, sure. Reusing a Super Heavy Booster and reaching orbital speeds without exploding are both steps forward. But in all actuality, this was a lateral move. The result was still the same, or arguably worse: no dummy payload to orbit and two failed landings.

Okay, but I can already hear the Musk fans pearl-clutching and screaming, “We learn from failure!” Fair enough. Let’s look at the lessons we can glean from these results.

Firstly, why did SpaceX try a new landing path for Super Heavy, even though they have successfully landed it multiple times? Well, weight. Starship weighs far too much, meaning its possible payload is vanishingly small, and its engines are being overstressed (hence the constant engine failures). SpaceX must make Starship lighter for it to even have a chance of being functional. The heaviest component of a rocket, particularly a self-landing one, is fuel. In fact, there is a double weight-saving opportunity there, but we don’t have time to go into that today. Super Heavy Booster’s previous landing relied almost entirely on retrorockets, making it predictable but incredibly fuel-hungry. This new path attempted to replace the bulk of that fuel requirement with atmospheric drag by allowing the rocket to fall to Earth in a belly flop position, which is far less predictable but much more fuel-efficient. This reduced the fuel requirement and caused the rocket to be significantly lighter.

That was, until the rocket broke up, meaning that it could not handle the stress of this belly flop manoeuvre. Furthermore, it broke apart after its retrorockets reignited, which also suggests that they may have failed, implying that these engines might be pushed too hard to be reliably reused. So the lesson we can take away from this teachable moment is that Super Heavy Booster and its engines need to be heavily reinforced to survive such a landing (especially if it is to be reused, as planned), but doing so would add enough weight to render the entire exercise moot. So, really, the lesson here is that you meet a dead end when you try to make the first stage lighter.

Okay, but what about the upper stage?

Well, thanks to SpaceX not having any flight data, getting any serious information from this launch is basically impossible. They can hypothesise that the fixes to the fuel leaks and engine flashes from the previous flights might have worked, but without flight data, that will be hard to verify. However, the fact that it was yet another fuel leak that caused the rocket to fail heavily suggests they have a cascading stress issue. They strengthened the fuel lines and the structure that supported the rocket engines after flights 7 and 8, but now a component further down the line has failed, suggesting that the stress is being transferred to other, weaker components. In other words, the upper stage is significantly too weak, and the entire thing might need serious reinforcement, which again would massively increase weight, rendering its already pathetic payload even smaller or non-existent. And while we’re on the topic of payload, let’s not forget that flight 9 tumbled out of control and failed to deliver its payload to orbit — which was just 10% of the promised payload.

Again, the lesson here is that SpaceX somehow needs to make Starship significantly more robust and lighter by well over a hundred tonnes if it is to conduct even one successful mission, let alone achieve constant reuse — which, let’s be clear, is basically impossible. All flight 9 has proven is just how much of a dead end Starship is.

SpaceX still has a long way to go before Starship becomes a viable launch vehicle. It still has to successfully land the upper stage, reuse an upper stage, reach orbit, deliver a payload to orbit, reach a useable payload capacity, conduct a cryogenic fuel transfer between two starships in space (which has never been done before), perform a successful long-duration flight test, conduct a successful uncrewed lunar landing and conduct a crewed lunar landing. All of which, for context, was meant to be achieved by January 2025! Nearly all of Starship’s paid contracts are for human spaceflight to the Moon, which requires repeated orbital refuelling and human spaceflight certification. Orbit refuelling is incredibly difficult, and in order to become human spaceflight certified, SpaceX needs to prove that they can successfully land the upper stage almost 100% of the time. It has taken them nine failed attempts and almost $10 billion for Starship to not reach orbit with a fraction of its promised payload and to never land an upper stage or successfully reuse a first stage. How many test flights, dollars and years will it take to actually get this hunk of junk working?

I know I always say this, but it is an important comparison. After nine launches, Saturn V only had one partial, non-destructive failure and had taken three crews to the lunar surface. Sure, it was a less complex rocket than Starship, but NASA achieved this using technology from the 1960s that was much less reliable and accurate. However, here’s the thing: Musk is currently claiming that Starship will somehow reach a payload of 45 tonnes (which is three times what Flight 9 failed to deliver to orbit and less than half of what was promised). That means a lunar starship would need refuelling 33 times in orbit before it can go to the Moon. Even if we assume Starship can be fully reused, that would put the price of a Starship lunar launch at $2.38 billion. Yet, the Saturn V launched 50 tonnes to the Moon for only $1.8 billion in today’s dollars, and that includes development costs spread over its 13 launches (read more here).

Starship is such a moronic project that NASA already whooped its arse 58 years ago! All these test flights are doing is proving that this was the wrong direction to follow. Musk had to scrap his plans to make Falcon 9 fully reusable over a decade ago because it would reduce its payload capacity to nothing. That should have been enough information to demonstrate that Starship was a no-go. But no, Musk had to push ahead anyway and ignore all engineering conventions and common sense. We will look back at this period in history and realise that letting a billionaire’s ego drive innovation — rather than as part of a collective effort, as seen with Apollo and the Saturn V — was a grave mistake.

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Sources: Space.com, CNN, NBC, Will Lockett, Will Lockett