On Tuesday, SpaceX showed yet again how far ahead of the competition it really is—and how far it still has to go to deliver on Elon Musk's optimistic promises.
The event in question was the not-entirely-successful ninth test flight of Starship, the biggest, most powerful rocket SpaceX (or anyone else, for that matter) has ever built. Starship's meant to be more than just the world's greatest firecracker, though—it's designed to be a fully reusable space-launch system and to have an astonishingly ambitious flight cadence. In past remarks, Musk has said that Starships could eventually launch a few times per day—that is, more than a thousand times per year. And each launch would be capable of delivering unprecedentedly massive amounts of material to Earth orbit—and beyond—for what would be on a per-kilogram basis a bargain-basement price.
Such starry-eyed prognostications are almost irresistibly seductive for anyone hoping to do big things in space, especially given SpaceX's demonstrated track record of achieving game-changing aerospace innovation. Exhibit A: NASA, which has enlisted SpaceX to develop a Starship-based "Human Landing System" (HLS) for the space agency's Artemis III crewed lunar mission which is slated to launch as soon as mid-2027.
The trouble is, SpaceX's much-lauded innovations tend to arrive much later than Musk predicts. That sort of scheduling uncertainty is especially problematic for a program as sprawling and complex as NASA's Artemis, since notionally every other piece of the "crewed lunar landing" puzzle could be ready, yet forced into a very costly holding pattern for lack of a viable Starship HLS. And the chief concern increasingly isn't whether HLS will be ready on time, but whether it will ever be ready at all.
Tuesday's test flight was notable for being the third in a row that has ended with a Starship test vehicle's explosive—and, it must be said, entirely unplanned if not unexpected—demise. Rocket science, after all, has a well-deserved reputation for being hard. But this spate of failures still raises a worrisome question: Instead of being too big to fail, might the dream of a behemoth rocket that revolutionizes spaceflight instead be too big to succeed?
Thoughts? Questions? Let me know via e-mail (lbillings@sciam.com), Twitter or Bluesky.
Thanks for reading, and I'll see you next time!
—Lee Billings
![A team of astronomers combined data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the SKA [Square Kilometer Array] Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope on Wajarri Country in Australia to study the antics of the discovered object, known as ASKAP J1832−0911 (ASKAP J1832 for short), located 15,000 light-years from Earth.](https://static.scientificamerican.com/dam/m/2adda471cf436f3/original/ASKAP-J1832.jpg?width=1200)
