A Starship Post-mortem: Why the giant rocket failed and why it's Elon Musk's fault

On Thursday, SpaceX launched its first full version of the “Starship” rocket from a pad on the coast near South Padre Island, Texas. Four minutes into the flight, the rocket was deliberately destroying at an altitude of about 35 km, with debris raining down about a dozen kilometers out into the Gulf.

In many ways, the flight was a triumph. It was the largest rocket ever constructed. It had more engines than any other booster in history, edging out Russia’s failed N-1 Moon rocket. It was constructed largely in the open, in full view of fascinated space fans, instead of behind closed door in near “clean room” conditions. Observers watched as the Starship was welded together from rolls of stainless steel, rather than constructed from carbon fiber, aluminum, or other more traditional rocket materials. The engines for the Starship were developed from scratch in conjunction with the rocket, trading more usual fuels for methane and reaching extreme levels of efficiency.

Everything about the Starship was the result of a series of decisions designed to make spaceflight cheaper. The methane fuel. The steel structure. The method of construction. Even the rocket’s enormous size. All of it was a gamble to create a system that is fully reusable, bringing the cost of getting to orbit down to a small fraction of what it is today and making space almost infinitely more accessible.

However, one decision in the process didn’t just result in the destruction of the rocket, it generated a cascade of failures, one that’s likely to set the program back by a least a year, erasing the chance of NASA’s scheduled return to the Moon in the process. That decision, is 100% on Elon Musk.