Starship Is One Step Closer To Flight Readiness While Boeing Finally Gets Starliner Up And Running

This week over two days there have been two very different rocket flights. The first was Boeing’s often-bitten Starliner project finally making it aloft with a test crew of two. The second involved the fourth test of the full Starship mega-rocket. Both managed to meet the objectives of their ground teams. Starliner was expected to rendezvous and dock with the International Space Station (ISS) around high noon today. Starship launched this morning from its South Texas spaceport, all 122 metres (400 feet) tall, the largest and most powerful rocket in existence to date.

For NASA, both events had special meaning. Starliner gives the space agency a second domestic carrier to ferry crews to the ISS and in future, its successors. Starship means the Artemis Program may just get back on track with the hope of a lunar landing in 2026. A version of Starship is to be used as a lunar lander for the first crewed Moon landing since the end of the Apollo Program. It has to prove it is space-worthy.

Starliner has repeatedly seen launch postponements delaying its certification for more than four years. Starship, like so many Elon Musk promises, is also late in meeting its milestones. But the ambition for the latter is far more difficult to achieve. That’s what makes today’s flight a triumph for SpaceX

Starship mated to the Super Heavy booster achieved two goals today. First, the Super Heavy performed a controlled launch, separation, boost back and landing burn while softly settling into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The Super Heavy fired 32 of its 33 engines as it ascended. In the landing burn 12 of the 13 engines fired. The two misfires didn’t affect outcomes. Meanwhile, Starship saw all of its engines light and made it to space on a suborbital flight taking it over Africa to the Indian Ocean where it spectacularly re-entered the atmosphere putting on a light show as its heat shield slowly disintegrated on a flap visible to everyone watching on X, Musk’s social media app.

We all witnessed the intense heat of re-entry lighting up the insulating tiles of Starship’s heat shield and held our breaths as it descended. The flap’s skin began to disintegrate. Pieces broke off. One struck and cracked the camera lens through which we were all watching. The pictures were relayed to Earth over Musk’s Starlink network of telecommunications satellites. The Musk show continued with Starship doing its thing with the flip maneuver unique to it, followed by a landing burn and a slow vertical descent into the Indian Ocean off the coast of Australia.

Several repeat performances for both Starliner and Starship will be needed before NASA can be satisfied that the gamble taken after the Shuttle was retired in 2011 has paid off. Starship and the Super Heavy next have to demonstrate they can land and be reused. Those milestones could be achieved in the next four 2024 planned test flights.

Back in 2014, both Boeing and SpaceX were awarded contracts by NASA to build replacements for the Shuttle to launch crewed missions to the ISS. It has been ten years and Boeing may have finally made it to the show while SpaceX has perfected first stage and fairing reuse for its Falcon 9 rockets, and demonstrated reusability and versatility for its Dragon spacecraft for crew and resupply missions to the ISS.

Now SpaceX’s Falcon 9 successor, the Starship is looking like NASA has made another good bet for future lunar missions. My only nagging concern about NASA is its remaining commitment to the over-budget Space Launch System (SLS) when Starship could help the agency achieve all the goals of the Artemis Program at a far lower cost.

Musk has a dream of using Starship to send crewed missions to Mars and establish a permanent human presence on the Red Planet. He believes that humanity needs a safety net by becoming a multiplanetary species just in case an extinction event occurs here on Earth.