Image courtesy: AP
After a series of mishaps that have led some onlookers to doubt its feasibility, Elon Musk’s SpaceX is preparing for the next test of its Starship megarocket on Sunday. The most potent launch vehicle in the world is scheduled to make its tenth flight from the company’s Starbase in southern Texas at 6.30 pm local time (5 am IST on Monday), according to an AFP report.Before the upper stage splashes down in the Indian Ocean, it will fly halfway around the world and undergo a series of tests. SpaceX will not attempt to use the enormous “chopstick” arms of the launch tower to snag the rocket stage, unlike previous attempts. Musk wants to colonize Mars, and Nasa is hoping that a modified version of the Starship will be used as the Artemis lunar lander to bring Americans back to the moon.However, the upper stage of all three test flights in 2025 has exploded, once after reaching space and twice in fiery cascades over Caribbean islands. During a “static fire” test in June, another upper stage detonated on the ground.SpaceX has a strong global lead in launches thanks to its Falcon rocket family, and its impressive track record has long been attributed to its “fail fast, learn fast” philosophy.=However, the company’s ability to replicate that achievement with the largest and most potent rocket in history has been called into question by the Starship mishaps. “The latest setbacks were starting to erode SpaceX’s golden reputation”, Dallas Kasaboski, a space analyst for consulting firm Analysys Mason, told AFP.”I think there is a lot of pressure on this mission,” he stated. “We’ve had so many tests and it hasn’t proven itself reliable — the successes have not exceeded the failures.”On his Substack newsletter, Will Lockett, a former engineer who is now a critic, went further, claiming that the absence of rigorous payload tests demonstrated “the concept of Starship is fundamentally flawed.”According to him, “SpaceX is building Starships that are lighter in an attempt to increase payload to usable levels but is therefore making them much weaker than they should be”—which is why recent testing has revealed structural flaws.The scrutiny has increased as a result of headlines like “Is Elon Musk’s Starship doomed?” in New York Magazine.With plans to eventually abandon the company’s current generation of rockets and spacecraft in favor of the new system, Musk has bet the company’s future on Starship.Even if the tenth test is successful, there are still significant technological obstacles to overcome, such as demonstrating that the system can refill super-cooled propellant in orbit, which is a requirement for deep-space missions, and making it completely and quickly reusable at a reasonable cost.Nevertheless, SpaceX is moving forward, expanding the number of launches in spite of environmental organizations’ concerns about the ecological effects, and constructing additional facilities in Florida, such as launch and landing pads at Kennedy Space Center.
