First successful flight of Starship

 

SpaceX has successfully launched and landed Starship, without it blowing up.  It wasn't perfect: there was a methane fire after landing (soon extinguished); the rocket appears to have skipped a metre or so when it landed; and one of the Raptor engines appeared not to ignite.   

All the same, it was a magnificent achievement.  Remember, everything about this rocket is new technology: the methane Raptor engine; the use of steel as a construction material; and the "belly-flop" landing manoeuvre.  And they all worked.  In development, SpaceX started with the Starship upper stage first, because this was the hardest  part of the two-stage Super Heavy booster + Starship combo. The success of Starship brings the colonisation of Mars much closer, because SpaceX knows all about making re-usable boosters.  That's what the Falcon 9 rocket is.  

There is much further to go.  To make Starship truly re-usable, the ceramic tiles used as a heat shield must be easily replaceable.  Starship must demonstrate that it can return to Earth at orbital velocity without burning or breaking up.   But all the -out-there concepts that SpaceX pushed have been shown to work, at a cost 1 thousandth of current rockets, even before they are re-used.

Starship will change everything about space and a great deal about Earth.  Technology responds to need.  As Musk says, the colonisation of Mars will drive a forcing function in technologies, like genetic engineering, air and water purification, construction techniques, AI, to name just a few.  The most obvious right now is high speed internet access round the world via SpaceX's Starlink.  Here's an interesting article about that from The Economist.  Starlink is being used to fund Starship, but it's also being advanced by Starship because Starship will cut launch costs so much.

Here's The Guardian's take on the launch:

Success came on the 60th anniversary of the flight of first American in space, Alan Shepard. And it capped a stunning two weeks of achievements for SpaceX: the launch of four more astronauts to the space station for Nasa, the nation’s first night-time crew splashdown since the Apollo moonshots, and a pair of launches for its mini internet satellites.

Less than a month ago, Nasa chose SpaceX’s Starship to deliver astronauts to the lunar surface in the next few years. The $3bn contract was halted last week, however, after the losing companies – Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Dynetics – protested against the selection.

And here's a video of the whole sequence from launch to landing, with however the sections where signal from the rocket was lost omitted: