Yuuge Rocket Blew Up; All Systems Goooooo!

The second launch of Elon Musk's SpaceX Starship went very well right up until both parts exploded. Which is fine, as the major testables occurred nicely, albeit "with issues," as people say. The whole assembly took off with every engine firing all the way until the innovative MECO, which in this case stands for "Most Engines Cut-Off," as the enormous booster kept a couple of engines firing even as the Starship on top of it released the clamps and fired its own engines at full power, propelling itself away from the booster and "blowing" the booster back.

"Innovation" in rockets typically starts as a series of loud booms over several years. From there, the booster was supposed to turn around, come back, and land gently on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico and then sink, not to be recovered. Instead, the booster turned around (suspiciously quickly to my eyes), and oriented itself apparently correctly, but clearly had issues, including what looked like a major leak (think of a slow explosion out one side), then blew itself up. Or perhaps it was commanded to blow up.

Recall that on the first launch, which did not even attempt "hot staging," the stages failed to separate, the whole thing cartwheeled, and then crucially failed to blow itself up for an agonizing minute or so. Imagine being the folks in the command center earlier this year as your giant dying rocket spins out of control, heading back to Earth somewhere, and you're all mashing your self-destruct buttons, but the thing perversely remains in one piece. Harrowing. Finally, it did like a good rocket and blew itself to confetti, but everybody from Musk to the FAA was not impressed. Well, problem solved, and on today's launch, the booster blew itself up in a timely manner. Who's a good rocket?

So the second stage, the "Starship" that looks like an idiot's idea for a cheap space opera paperback illustration, cranked away from the scene, adding more altitude and velocity. This went on until it got to something like 145-149 kilometers altitude, if I recall, and then odd signs appeared. Something spread out and then stopped, it looked normal again for a short while, then something major let go, and the thing obviously self-destructed. Who's a good Starship?

This is all still in the research phase -- hoped-for burnback and landing of the cartoonishly large booster were, uh, "not observed." Same for the hoped-for high-energy re-entry, maneuver, and landing of the Starship at a point some hundreds of miles north of Hawaii. I believe just based on the timeline that the whole thing played out once more entirely above the Gulf of Mexico, so it never even got out over the Atlantic proper.

Yet this was a huge success. Once again, private industry has launched the world's largest, most powerful, and arguably most ambitious rocket in the history of man, and in its second time flying, it broke new ground in the things that went right. Live reports said that the trajectory and speed for both components were nominal, meaning "according to plan," right up until they weren't.

The scene was breathtaking in its beauty. Sunrise on the (fetid, bug-infested, swampy wasteland) southern Texas coast, with a gentle onshore breeze. The massive rocket stood at its launch station, filled with far sub-zero liquid oxygen and fuel, chilling the air around it to such a degree that a downdraft circulated about the vehicle, creating a local patch of fog slowly trailing hundreds of yards downwind.

Aerial and ground shots captured this magnificent work of technology and its interaction with a picturesque location in vibrant colors, microscopic detail, and stark contrasts. The plain-old drone footage is already art quality. I hope they make a million bucks selling pictures of this rocket that blew up minutes after the photos were taken. Just stunning.

And brave. This is the onset of a new gilded age for spaceflight. These are the good old days. I called my son in Japan and we watched this live together on Elon Musk's Twitter (alright, just this once "X") video streaming. But that's another story.

What a raucous time to be alive. There are terrible threats and horrors sufficient to the day. If you needed something to pick yourself up from the carnage and human filth, you could do worse than to lift your eyes, if not to Heaven, then to a nice proxy that is a little bit lower, a little more fallible (boom!), and which portends if not a blissful eternity, well, a beautiful and productive future for our kids and their friends.

Thank you, Elon Musk. Who's a good billionaire?