It’s a joke.
But if you want a serious critique, yes it was a development test, no it wasn’t supposed to do what it did and yes some of it was foreseeable but in typical Musk fashion safety and common sense were thrown out for coolness.
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Or in this case heat-ness. So yes it turned out to be a mistake.
Edit: and again:
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So yes, even as a test, it was a failure
I’m not a rocket scientist, but I think the lack of flame diversion system/deluge system for the worlds most powerful rocket seems like a mistake- at least until they can better engineer a better launchpad that does not involve those features. I don’t think this is particularly surprising that the concrete was obliterated. And not surprisingly the debris is likely responsible for the failure of many of the engines. But the purpose of avoiding such complications is because these will not be remotely easy to construct off the surface of the earth. And where would you get thousands of gallons of water for a deluge system on the moon or mars. Which all comes back to my concern that this probably is not the best option- or at least an extremely high risk option for the Artemis program as an ascent vehicle. Landing such a massively tall object on the moon doesn’t seem like a great idea either. And the 2025 landing date is typical Musk BS. I think that’s extremely unlikely. But the launchpad, as well as other factors like the aerodynamics of the front fins were well known issues leading into this launch.
And my question is, if we’re using Artemis to send astronauts but Starship for the landing, why do we even have Artemis? Knowing NASA, I feel like we could end up with a situation where starship (if successful, even not being reusable) is used to ferry a 3rd party lunar lander to the moon’s orbit.
I read a while back that the water table in Boca Chica is very high, so they can only dig so far. To build up the land would require a lot of regulatory hoops and thus they chose to avoid it.
I haven’t looked into any of the reporting but I’m curious of the lack of stage separation was due to the ascent being so far depressed due to the lack of thrust that the upper stage was aborted or if that too was a failure in itself.
SpaceX is probably twisting this into more of a success than they lead on, but it certainly far from an abject failure. An abject failure would have been it blowing up on the launch pad- especially if they blew up all the ground equipment with it which was a real risk. There certainly appears to be damage from the flying debris.
This is perhaps the most complex rocket ever created. Twice as powerful as the Saturn 5 and 10% larger. Brand new engines, brand new rocket, novel in numerous aspects regarding launching and reusing.
If you pay any attention to any of the other launches of new rockets many have failed- just in the past year. This is far from atypical. There’s a reason this launch wasn’t carrying a real payload. It’s also why there are a couple more ships and boosters that are mostly completed.
If Starship is successful in being reliable and reusable, it will completely revolutionize the space industry. I don’t think we’ll be shuttling people between continents ever using rockets. Building an independently sustainable colony on mars I don’t think is reasonably possible and if we need Mars for humanity to survive climate change Earth is going to have to be in a worse condition than mars. It’s hard to imagine a more inhospitable environment than Mars to try and live. We can talk when earth is -100F on average, has no oxygen, and is a radioactive wasteland made of abrasive dust with few available natural resources to sustain life. This is merely environmental pandering on Musks part that if anyone thinks about it for more than 15 seconds.
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