Highlights from SpaceX’s explosive starship rocket launch

At 9:33 a.m. ET, the 33 engines on the Super Heavy booster ignited in a huge cloud of fire, smoke and dust, and the Starship slowly ascended. About a minute later, the rocket passed through a period of maximum aerodynamic pressure, one of the defining moments in the launch of any rocket. Shortly after, it began to tumble before exploding in a fireball high above the Gulf of Mexico.

Despite the mission’s fiery outcome, Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, congratulated the company. “Every great achievement throughout history has required some level of calculated risk, because with great risk comes great reward,” Mr. Nelson wrote on Twitter.

The space agency is relying on SpaceX to build a version of the Starship that will carry two astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon during the Artemis III mission. There was great anticipation from the flight, which had been delayed from Monday when the giant rocket could one day carry huge amounts of cargo and many people into space.

Before the launch, which had no people on board, Elon Musk, the company’s founder, had tempered expectations, saying it may take several attempts before Starship succeeds in this test flight.

But the launch achieved a number of important milestones, with the rocket flying for four minutes and making it well clear of the launch pad. The short flight provided plenty of data for engineers to understand how the vehicle performed.

“It may look that way to some people, but it’s not a failure,” said Daniel Dumbacher, executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a former high-level NASA official. “It’s a learning experience.”

Nevertheless, the flight was not a complete success. The flight plan called for the Starship spacecraft to reach a higher altitude of about 150 miles before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii about 90 minutes later. And it remains to be seen how Thursday’s flight outcome might affect NASA’s schedule, which optimistically calls for the first lunar landing by astronauts aboard Starship to occur in late 2025.

When SpaceX began building Starship, it was motivated by Mr. Musk’s dream of sending people to live on Mars one day, an endeavor that would require transporting vast amounts of supplies to succeed.

But entrepreneurs and futurists think closer to home. A giant, fully reusable vehicle would reduce the cost of sending things into space, prompting some to imagine how Starship could carry huge space telescopes to look at the cosmos, or squadrons of robots to explore other worlds. Others are designing larger satellites that will be cheaper because they don’t need to use expensive components currently needed to fit into the size and weight constraints imposed by today’s rockets.

“Flying rockets and reusing them has tremendous potential to change the game and transportation to orbit,” said Phil Larson, who served as a White House space adviser during the Obama administration and later worked in communications at SpaceX. “And that could enable entirely new classes of missions.”

Despite the setback, SpaceX remains the dominant company in global space travel. The rockets have already traveled to space 25 times in 2023, with the last launch successfully completed on Wednesday.

Thursday’s countdown at the South Texas launch site, near the city of Brownsville, went smoothly through the morning until the last half-minute, when it was paused for a few minutes while SpaceX engineers worked out technical issues. Employees at SpaceX headquarters in California began cheering loudly as the countdown resumed.

As a cloud of exhaust rose around the rocket, it took flight.

“It looked really good coming off the pad and it looked really good for a while,” Mr. Dumbacher said.

In an update, SpaceX said the rocket came as high as about 24 miles above the Gulf of Mexico. Video of the rocket taken flashes as several engines failed on the lower part of the spacecraft, the Super Heavy booster. It proved to be too much for the steering system to compensate, and the vehicle began to tumble into a corkscrew trajectory.

“This does not appear to be a nominal situation,” reported John Insprucker, a SpaceX engineer, during the company’s livestream of the launch.

The upper stage Starship vehicle apparently did not separate from the booster, and four minutes after liftoff, the automated flight termination system destroyed the rocket, ending the flight in a fireball.

The launch lived up to SpaceX’s promise of “thrills guaranteed.” And it avoided the worst-case scenario of exploding on the launch pad, which would have required extensive repairs.

Mr. Musk congratulated the SpaceX team on Twitter. “Learned a lot for the next test launch in a few months,” he said.

Karl Kriegh, 69, and his wife traveled from Colorado for the launch, lingering afterward on the beach at South Padre Island, where viewers took in the flight from a safe distance.

“I’m so glad I lived to see this,” he said. “It was incredibly dramatic, one of the things on the bucket list.”

Carlos Huertas, 42, a stage technician who lives in Los Angeles, was on the beach wearing a T-shirt sold by SpaceX that said “Occupy Mars.”

“I thought it was going to be fine until I found out it exploded,” he said. He added that he felt “a bit disappointed even though we knew it was a big opportunity” and said he hoped to see a relaunch soon.

Heavy-lift rockets like the Starship are inherently more complex and harder to develop than smaller rockets, just as building an aircraft carrier requires much more work than a modest yacht. Additionally, by aiming to make all parts of the spacecraft reusable and capable of relaunching a few hours after landing, SpaceX is attempting an engineering challenge that goes beyond what was accomplished in the previous 60 years of the space age.

It’s not a surprise to experts that SpaceX didn’t fully succeed on its first try.

“They may have a couple of questions to look at in terms of why some of the engines may not have been running,” Mr. Dumbacher said. “They’ll look into it, they’ll figure it out, and they’ll come back next time and they’ll fix those problems, and they’ll move on to the next end, eventually they’ll get this thing flying its way into orbit. I’m absolutely sure.”

However, SpaceX has a history of learning from mistakes. The company’s mantra is essentially: “Fail fast, but learn faster.”

Traditional aerospace companies have tried to anticipate and prevent as many failures as possible in advance. But that approach takes money and time and can lead to vehicles that are overdesigned. Instead, SpaceX is more like a Silicon Valley software company — starting with an imperfect product that can be improved quickly.

When it tried to start landing Falcon 9 boosters, the first ones hit too hard and exploded. With each attempt, SpaceX engineers fine-tuned the systems. After the first successful landing, more soon followed. Today, it is a rare surprise if a booster landing fails.

A couple of years ago, the company took a similar approach to tweaking the landing procedure for Starship. In a series of tests, prototype Starships rose to an altitude of about six miles before shutting down their engines. The belly then flopped through the atmosphere to slow its rate of fall before tilting back to vertical and firing the engines again for landing. The first ones ended explosively before one attempt finally succeeded.

SpaceX, as one of the most valuable privately held companies, has a large financial cushion to absorb setbacks, unlike in the early days when the first three launches of the original rocket, the tiny Falcon 1, failed to reach orbit. Mr. Musk scraped together just enough money and parts for a fourth launch attempt. Had it failed, SpaceX would have gone out of business. The fourth Falcon 1 launch was successful, and SpaceX has succeeded in nearly all of its endeavors since, even when it sometimes fails at first.

Major NASA programs like the Space Launch System, which NASA used on an unmanned mission to the moon in November, typically don’t have the same explode-as-you-learn luxury.

“Government programs are not allowed to work that way because of that, because of the way we have all the stakeholders able to watch and say no,” Mr. Dumbacher said.

Back on the beach, people who showed up for the launch took the day’s outcome in stride.

“Would it have been amazing if it didn’t explode?” said Lauren Posey, 34. “Yes. But it was still amazing.”

James Dobbins contributed reporting from South Padre Island, Texas.