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SpaceX rocket explosion illustrates Elon Musk’s successful failure formula

The spectacular explosion of SpaceX’s new Starship rocket minutes after it soared off its launch pad on a first flight test is the latest vivid illustration of a “successful failure” business formula that serves Elon Musk‘s company well, experts said on Thursday.

Rather than seeing the fiery disintegration of Musk’s colossal, next-generation Starship system as a setback, experts said the dramatic loss of the rocket ship would help accelerate development of the vehicle.

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Images of the Starship tumbling out of control some 20 miles up in the sky while mounted to its Super Heavy rocket booster before the combined vehicle blew to bits dominated media coverage of the highly anticipated launch.

SpaceX acknowledged that several of the Super Heavy’s 33 powerful Raport engines malfunctioned on the ascent and that the booster rocket and Starship failed to separate as designed before the ill-fated flight was terminated.
But SpaceX executives including Musk – the founder, CEO and chief engineer of the California-based rocket company – hailed the test flight for achieving the major objective of getting the vehicle off the ground while providing a wealth of data that will advance Starship’s development.

At least two experts in aerospace engineering and planetary science who spoke with Reuters agreed that the test flight delivered benefits. This is a classical SpaceX successful failure,” said Garrett Reisman, an astronautical engineering professor at the University of Southern California who is a former NASA astronaut and is also a senior adviser to SpaceX.

Reisman called the Starship test flight a hallmark of a SpaceX strategy that sets Musk’s company apart from traditional aerospace companies and even NASA by “this embracing of failure when the consequences of failure are low

No astronauts were aboard for the crewless flight, and the rocket was flown almost entirely over water from the Gulf Coast Starbase facility in south Texas to avoid possible injuries or property damage on the ground from falling debris.

Source: Reuters

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