SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, is busily transforming humanity’s access to space. The Falcon 9 rocket’s first stage booster is an achievement of engineering with its fly-back and landing capability that allows its reuse with only limited reservicing between flights.

However, the second stage of the Flacon 9, the bit that accelerates the payload, cargo or manner spacecraft as of 2020, is not recovered and still represents a significant investment in money and resources that is simply thrown away with every flight. The ‘ammunition model’ of spaceflight, a mindset carried over from the development of rockets as weapon systems is unsustainable for affordable, frequent access to orbital space and beyond. The Space Shuttle developed by NASA in the 1970s and utilizing that decade’s peak technology failed to deliver on its overly ambitious dream of weekly flights to orbit and in the end proved to be too expensive in money and lives to continue operation.

In order to advance humanity’s flights into space SpaceX is developing two new rocket systems, a super heavy booster, and a fully reusable vehicle that booster will put into space named Starship (Though it must be noted it is a spaceship and has non capabilities related to stellar travel.)

Starship is massive and its operational plan requires novel flight dynamics, using one entire side as a heatshield as it returns from orbit, and then translating from basically a ‘belly flop’ attitude to nose up engines down to land in the same manner as presented by countless 50s SF movies.

This week a full-scale test version of Starship, Serial Number 8 or SN8, was flown to 12.5 kilometers and then executed the ‘belly flop’ flight plan. Elon Musk, SpaceX’s CEO, gave an estimated of a 1 in 3 chance of success for the test. After all this had never been done before.

After flying and performing the complicated attitude changes nearly flawlessly SN8 just before touching down suffered a failure of some type in the engine systems, note the bright green in the rocket exhaust in the video, landed hard and exploded.

Some have called this a failure as though this was a terribly thing.

Failure is the lesson before success.

Failure is necessary.

Failure is not the end it is the beginning of wisdom, knowledge, and victory.