Congratulations to the @SpaceX team on an exciting Starship flight! We have learned a lot for the next test flight in a few months," Elon Musk tweeted after the world's largest rocket exploded four minutes after liftoff on its first launch. Has the mission really been a success and is there reason to congratulate the SpaceX team? Or has it been a failure that Elon Musk is trying to make up?
To resolve the doubt, it should be remembered that in this first launch the Starship did not carry astronauts or anything of value on board, apart from the components of the rocket itself and the fuel. The objective of the mission was to record data on the behavior of the device so that it can launch satellites and astronauts safely in the future.
If the rocket had exploded on the launch tower at liftoff, it would have been unable to record any data during the ascent through the atmosphere and would have caused significant damage to the SpaceX launch site in Boca Chica, South Texas. It would have fallen so far short of expectations that it would have been an unmitigated failure.
If I had completed the mission to the end, circumnavigating the globe in an hour and a half and splashing down in the Pacific north of Hawaii, it would have met all expectations and been a resounding success.
What Starship has achieved today falls somewhere between these two extremes. During the four minutes that she has flown, she has passed the critical moment of maximum stress during the ascent through the atmosphere that engineers call max-q, about 55 seconds after liftoff. Two minutes later it has reached a second critical point where the rocket's lower stage runs out of fuel and its engines shut down. But it has not managed to get this lower stage (called Super Heavy) to separate from the upper one (called Starship) and to turn on the engines of this second stage.
Therefore, SpaceX will have obtained a huge amount of data on the behavior of the Super Heavy module that will allow it to improve the rocket for future launches. But it will have to wait for a next test flight to have data from the Starship module.
Asking if the launch was a success or a failure is like asking if a glass is half full or half empty. The answer depends on the observer, not on the water in the glass. In any case, SpaceX has obtained enough data to draw lessons from the mission and continue development of the Starship.
Beyond the bad image that an explosion leaves in a launch, the loss of a rocket in a first mission is not considered a failure in the space sector. It is considered a learning opportunity. The European Ariane 5 exploded on its first launch in 1996 and later became the world leader in the satellite launch market. He was the leader until Elon Musk arrived with SpaceX and ousted him.
