Starship Exploded, but SpaceX Had Reason to Pop Champagne Anyway

NYT SCIENCE: Starship Exploded, but SpaceX Had Reason to Pop Champagne Anyway
By Daniel Victor and Kenneth Chang
Section: Science
Source: New York Times
Published Date: April 20, 2023 at 03:00AM

The four-minute flight ended in what the company called a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” — meaning it blew up. But there was much to learn from the flight, the latest step in SpaceX’s explode-as-you-learn approach.

It doesn’t take a degree in aerospace engineering to know that, ideally, rockets aren’t supposed to blow up.
So to those who aren’t engineers, the explosion of SpaceX’s Starship rocket on Thursday might have looked like a disaster — not the kind of result that should have prompted celebration from the SpaceX founder Elon Musk and his employees, who cheered what they considered a major success.
Casual space watchers were further amused by the company describing the result of the mission on Twitter with cosmic levels of euphemism. SpaceX called it “a rapid unscheduled disassembly” — or, put another way, an explosion.
But SpaceX wasn’t necessarily expecting the rocket — the most powerful and one of the most complex to ever fly — to actually emerge unscathed. Though it fell short of its most ambitious goal of gathering enough speed to reach orbit and then re-enter the atmosphere, it did claim other successes by flying for four minutes and getting well clear of the launchpad.

Read More at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/science/rapid-unscheduled-disassembly-starship-rocket.html