Elon Musk’s plans to go to Mars may not have come crashing down to Earth but they’ve certainly suffered a significant setback.
The ninth test flight of Starship, the SpaceX spacecraft specifically designed to make “humans an interplanetary species”, ended with it spinning out of control over the Indian Ocean.
This was Starship’s third consecutive failure.
The machine that was touted as taking humans as far as Mars as soon as 2028 has yet to make an orbit of Earth.
Musk‘s near-term Mars plans look even more like science fiction.
No surprise then that a much-trailed update from Musk laying out the detail of his Mars programme scheduled to coincide with the test flight was cancelled.
He posted shortly after the test, as he typically does, about how much had been learned from the test flight and how the programme would ramp up from now on.
Musk’s “fail fast” approach to rocket development has been central to SpaceX becoming, by a large margin, the most successful space launch business in history.
Whether it’s electric cars or rockets, Musk has a reputation for over-promising on timings but ultimately delivering era-defining technology.
But is this an early sign that when it comes to Starship, he has finally reached too far?
As well as trying to overcome two spectacular failures of Starship in tests earlier this year, it was the first attempt to fly a reused Super Heavy booster. Recycling rockets is what has allowed SpaceX to dominate the launch business with its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy machines.
It’s also essential for the commercial viability of the Starship system.
The reconditioned booster performed almost perfectly, in that it delivered Starship to space. But it exploded while conducting its “landing burn” – not the outcome engineers trying to demonstrate reusability would have wanted.
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Aside from helping Donald Trump deliver on a promise to put Americans on Mars during his presidency, Musk’s plans for Mars are largely a personal project.
But this latest failure may have a wider impact on Musk’s fortunes.
Investors were left panicking after Musk’s chainsaw-wielding, questionable hand-gesturing detour into US politics.
Has his time away from his electric car, space, robotics and AI companies harmed their performance?
And while Starship is an experimental programme, very separate from the successful Falcon launch business, is it a viable design and, even if it is, how much of a drain will its fraught testing programme be on the wider company?
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SpaceX and Starship are central to NASA’s plans to put Americans back on the moon as soon as 2030. The fact Starship has yet to orbit Earth, let alone land back on it again, means the US space agency must look more seriously to Musk’s competitors like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space business to step up.
Musk also wants to use Starship’s heavy-lifting capability to win major defence contracts like Trump’s “golden dome” missile defence shield.
It would be a bold investor who would bet against Musk’s ability to ultimately bend technology to his will.
But even the world’s richest man can’t change time, or the laws of physics, to suit his ambitions.
