Max Q - SpaceX's setbacks and stunning views

Monday, April 12, 2021 • By Darrell Etherington

Since I took a vacation last week, this week there’s a double dose of news to recap. The most significant in that span being SpaceX’s big blow-up in its Starship testing program.

A big spacecraft explosion, coincident with some big space tourism news

SpaceX ended March with a bang — literally, as its SN11 Starship prototype exploded just before touching down during its landing sequence. That capped an otherwise pretty successful-looking test, wherein the Starship development vehicle flew to about 30,000 feet before flipping and coming back down. The explosion happened in mid-air just above the landing pad, and sent debris flying quite far from the test site itself.

The cause, according to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, was that one of its engines had problems during the ascent phase and subsequently didn’t reach the right pressure for safe operation during the landing burn. Starship likely could’ve landed without that engine, using only one engine for the landing sequence, but it doesn’t change the fact that this is a big setback for the program.

SpaceX is all about rapid iteration, though, so it could be back and test-flying SN15 relatively soon. It skipped a few numbers because of major changes to the system that mean SN12 through SN14 were headed to the scrap heap instead of the sky.

Oddly, on the same day that all this was happening, SpaceX was making news for its forthcoming tourist flight, which will use a Falcon 9 and an Crew Dragon — both of which have a track record of operational success, unlike the Starship under development. One big bit of news out of that was that SpaceX is designing a space tourist-specific version of its Dragon capsule outfitted with a glass dome that is exposed to space when the vehicle is safely out of Earth’s atmosphere.

That should be quite the view when the all-civilian mission flies in September (if all goes to plan).

Last up for SpaceX in the past few weeks was another Starlink mission, which is basically just the company flexing on how often it can do these at this point. This was the fifth in as many weeks, and put SpaceX at 300 of its own satellites launched in just over a month.

A big spacecraft explosion, coincident with some big space tourism news image

Image Credits: SpaceX

Amazon wants to boost your space startups

AWS announced a new partnership with VC firm Seraphim Capital to create an accelerator for space startups. The four-week program provides a $10,000 AWS credit for some select companies, and the opportunity for investment from Seraphim and others. AWS has dedicated aerospace and satellite solutions, so it’s no surprise to see them take an interest in helping grow the sector at the earlier stages.

It’s a reasonable expectation that most companies getting started working in the space sector at this point are planning to sue some kind of cloud infrastructure, so I suspect they’ll get a lot of interest.

Amazon wants to boost your space startups image

Image Credits: Jason Alden / Bloomberg / Getty Images

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