THE massive Starship super-heavy lift launch vehicle by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company took off last week on November 18, 2023 on its second test flight.  The launcher is the largest and most powerful ever built, weights 5,000 tonnes and can carry payloads of 100-150 tonnes. The launcher is a 2-stage vehicle comprising the booster and the spaceship atop, both stages being powered by SpaceX’s own Raptor engine, 33 of which power the booster. Starship itself is highly innovative and is intended to be fully reusable so as to sharply reduce launch costs, a cornerstone of Elon Musk’s vision for both earth-orbital and inter-planetary missions.

Starship is intended by SpaceX to supersede its Falcon Heavy launcher and has been selected by NASA to return humans to the moon after more than fifty years under the Artemis mission scheduled for 2024 or 2025, and for missions to the new space stations being built orbiting the earth and the moon.  SpaceX then plans to use Starship towards Elon Musk’s vision, or rather obsession, for interplanetary travel especially to “colonise” Mars and making humans a “multi-planetary species.” Nobody can accuse Musk of not dreaming big, and actually trying to make it happen!

On this test flight, the spacecraft was not intended to complete a full orbit of Earth, but to go eastwards almost all the way around the planet from SpaceX’s Starbase at Boca Chica in Texas, USA, and splash down in the Pacific Ocean off Hawaii, while the booster would splash down in the Gulf of Mexico and be recovered. However, after the second-stage spaceship had successfully separated from the booster, the latter fell down out of control and exploded in mid-air. Nevertheless, the spacecraft continued on its planned path and reached its planned sub-orbital altitude of 148 km when, instead of coasting around the earth, seemed to veer off trajectory, lost communications with mission control, leading the automated flight termination system to trigger a self-destruct explosion over the Gulf of Mexico, described by SpaceX as a “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” as creative a characterisation of an explosion as any! 

The first test flight of Starship in April this year too witnessed the huge booster explode mid-flight when the second stage failed to separate. 

EXPLOSIVE INNOVATION
Despite the explosive end to last week’s test flight, it was described by SpaceX spokesperson as “an incredible successful day.” NASA, which has pinned its hopes for the Artemis mission and much more on Starship, congratulated SpaceX for “the progress on today’s test flight, (saying) Spaceflight is a bold adventure demanding a can-do spirit and daring innovation.”

Indeed, SpaceX has moved forward considerably since the first full-fledged test flight in April earlier this year. Besides the explosion of the booster, that test had shattered the flat concrete launch pad and left a deep crater under the launch platform by its sheer power, sending large pieces of concrete, other debris and dust raining down on the nearby town. Some environmental groups and native Americans too have filed suit against the FAA for environmental damage caused by operations at Starbase. Despite NASA’s extreme tolerance shown towards SpaceX, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) which must approve all space flights after due diligence, was compelled to issue a long list of 63 corrective measures which SpaceX must, and had, complied with before the next test flight was permitted.

Three major innovations in particular may be noted, two between the first two test flights.

A new “deluge system” was introduced under the launch platform on which the booster and second stage are stacked. The basic idea is simple: a huge quantity of water, some reports say as much as 360,000 gallons, under pressure was thrown upwards for about 25 seconds through a massive steel disc with holes, like an inverted shower-head. The spray was targeted at an angle of about 45 per cent so as to not damage the rocket engines above. This huge water spray absorbed the enormous heat generated during the launch burn and protected the launch pad and surroundings. Journalists and others who visited the site after the test flight have testified that the launch pad is intact and that there was no debris in the surrounding area.  

Another innovation was the “hot staging” strategy to overcome the problem of the second stage not separating from the booster in the first test flight. In this test, the engines (also Raptors) on the second stage started firing even while many of the 33 engines on the booster were still firing too, ensuring that the second stage separated from the booster using brute force. Not that this was being done for the first time, though. The hot staging technique was used in an earlier period of spaceflight, such as in NASA’s Titan 2 rockets in the Gemini series in the 1960s and in the Soviet Soyuz rockets.

GAME-CHANGER
The game-changing innovation in Starship, yet to be fully realised, is its full re-usability. SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon9 rocket now regularly flies missions with re-used rockets, although only the first stage is re-used after several weeks of refurbishing, while the second stage is jettisoned. Starship aims to be fully re-usable, with the booster stage descending vertically to the launch pad after an atmospheric “flip” maneuver, being captured by two mechanical arms nicknamed “chopsticks” attached to the launch tower, and ready to be stacked with re-used spaceships or other payloads for the next launch. Falcon9 is now being launched once a week over the past few years. SpaceX plans monthly launches in the build-up to certification for Artemis and, once fully ready, has ambitions of multiple launches per day!

This brief story encapsulates the technology development methods adopted by Elon Musk and SpaceX which he leads in his inimitable hands-on style. Rapid innovation and improvements, frequent tests, pushing technologies to their limits, explosions, crashes, learning lessons, more innovation. The development of reusable rockets and the Falcon 9 series have all followed this trajectory, rather than NASA’s slow, careful, step-by-step, design-to-perfection and testing strategy. It has astonished many, but has brought success to SpaxeX and Elon Musk, compared to its more staid rivals in both public and private sector

For example, NASA had awarded contracts in 2014 to both the venerable Boeing Aerospace company and to SpaceX for development of spacecraft for taking astronauts to the International Space Station, at 4.2 billion dollars to Boeing and 2.6 billion dollars to SpaceX.  Boeing’s Starliner has not been launched even once yet, while SpaceX has flown as many as eight missions to the ISS on its Crew Dragon spacecraft.

BUT WORKERS PAY THE PRICE
However, there is a dark side to this story of brilliant if rash and headstrong innovation. It has come, and is accompanied by, systemic and willful neglect for workers’ safety by SpaceX and a major slackening of regulation and oversight by the state and its major agencies, NASA, FAA and OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration).

The report of a deep first-hand investigative study published earlier this month by Reuters has blown the lid off the scandalous conditions prevailing in SpaceX facilities where workers are subject to high stress and lack of protection or safety procedures in a dangerous work environment. Horrendous injuries to workers due to absence of safety gear, lack of precautions, and lackadaisical attitude of supervisory and managerial personnel have been documented, all with little or no compensation to the injured workers. Heavy parts left unsecured falling on workers, workers falling off moving vehicles while being asked to hold on to large components, machinery being started without warning and without safety protocols causing serious injury to other workers, and there are other sickening stories.

Shockingly, regulatory agencies such as the FAA, OSHA or the main contractor i.e., NASA, which has so far paid 11 billion dollars have exercised little oversight and have taken almost no action to hold SpaceX to account. This has revealed the ugly side to the handing over of the space industry to the private sector since NASA exited the launch business, with regulatory agencies themselves accepting toning down their oversight functions at high cost to workers.

After numerous workers’ complaints to regulators, SpaceX in response claimed the company had no responsibility for workers’ safety which, they believed the workers should take care of themselves, and which designated “responsible officers” were tasked with ensuring!

Many former and current staffers Reuters interviewed stated that this work culture was largely due to Elon Musk’s own disdain for “bureaucratic structures,” an attitude that fits with Musk’s libertarian and anti-regulation views. Interviewees also said that Musk’s own strong belief that the earth is soon to destroy itself, and his messianic zeal to build space systems to escape the earth and settle human colonies on Mars, has an almost cult-like following within SpaceX. Musk’s association with and tacit support to right-wing conspiracy theories and, recently, support for anti-Semitic rants on X (formerly Twitter) all fit a nasty pattern.

This other side of Elon Musk, and his SpaceX, cannot be ignored.