“Next time, we will try the pull * up * method.”
Very silly
Over the course of just two months, SpaceX hurled two huge stainless steel prototypes of its spacecraft from miles away – just so that they both crashed into huge fireballs.
More recently, the starship’s SN9 prototype failed to straighten after a bold “belly-down” maneuver on Tuesday, causing it to impact the ground at a steep angle, an event affectionately known as “unscheduled rapid disassembly. ”.
Building a 160-foot rocket to transport up to 100 passengers to Mars is not easy – a fact that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is painfully aware of.
When He asked on Twitter “why only light 2 engines to land” to remove any points of failure, Musk said – jokingly, we assume – that “we were very stupid”.
“Next time,” he added, “We tried the pull * up * method.”
Hard mode
Just two days later tweeting that he will be “out of Twitter for a while”, Musk returned to the social media site last night. His posts were a characteristically confusing cascade of memes, sarcastic comments and references for the dogecoin cryptocurrency.
The tweets were certainly ironic, but they may also have signaled frustration with the repeated setbacks of the Starship project. Musk has long complained about how difficult it is to build a rocket to establish a city on Mars.
“It’s not like they are big idiots who want to throw their rocket away all the time,” said Musk Ars TechnicaEric Berger in an interview in 2019, referring to SpaceX engineers trying to make changes to the company’s Raptor engine.
“One of the most difficult engineering problems known to man is making a reusable orbital rocket,” he said. “It is stupidly difficult to have a fully reusable orbital system.”
Still on that
But it is a game of high risks and great rewards.
“It would be one of the greatest advances in human history,” added the billionaire in 2019.
And regardless, it’s only a matter of time before SpaceX aligns its prototype SN10. This test launch may not end in a devastating explosion.
More about Starship: New photos show semi-finished SpaceX Super Heavy Booster