Elon Now Facing the Possibility That SpaceX Will Never Get Starship Working [View all]

SpaceX is nine full-scale test launches into developing its enormous, nearly 400-feet-tall Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built.

Over the last two and a half years, we've seen over half a dozen spectacular explosions. Two launches earlier this year sent massive streaks of debris hurtling over the Turks and Caicos Islands, prompting airspace closures. Its most recent test in May ended in an uncontrolled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico after helplessly spinning on its axis and suffering fuel leaks.

The stakes are incredibly high for the Elon Musk-led space firm, which has garnered a reputation for its unusually aggressive iterative design philosophy. Its billionaire founder has made Starship the key component of his endeavor to send humans to Mars, and it also happens to be the linchpin of SpaceX's future plans for its Starlink satellite network — the major driver of revenue, on which he's staking the company's future — which will require the launching of thousands of satellites each year.

But Starship's repeated test launch failures are forcing experts to ask tough questions about the super-heavy launch platform's actual viability, as New York Magazine reports. Will Starship ever get off the ground, do its job, and make it back down in one piece? What about NASA's plans to tap the rocket for its upcoming Moon landing? Could the project have been doomed from the start?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/elon-now-facing-possibility-spacex-171323045.html