Elon Musk "Fix this or Starship is DONE"
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SpaceX's recent decision to refly a super heavy booster could be the most important moment in the company's history. But what exactly makes this step so important?

Now, on a quiet Thursday morning in South Texas, a thunderous roar cut through the air as Super Heavy Booster 14 came back to life. In 9.40 a.m. local time, fire erupted from beneath the behemoth rocket as it stood anchored to the ground at SpaceX's Starbase launch site. This was the first time the company had ever fired a flight-proven Super Heavy.

The eight-second static fire test marked a key turning point, not only for the booster itself, but for the entire SpaceX Starship program. Booster 14 had already flown once during a test flight in January, but instead of being retired or sent back to the rocket garden, the rocket was refurbished on site, outfitted with parts from previous missions, Frankenstein back together, and prepared for return to action.

Now SpaceX confirmed that this very same booster will be part of the upcoming Starship launch. They said the first super heavy reuse will be a step towards our goal of zero touch reflux. That's what they posted on X.

SpaceX said 29 of Booster's 33 Raptor engines had already flown before, which is not only a technical miracle, but also a logistical achievement. Developing and operating 33 methane-fueled engines in tandem is already absolutely stunningly complex. And reusing most of them and still managing to make the system perform is an engineering feat that's godly.

Each of these engines contributes to the rocket's staggering 17 million pounds of thrust, twice as much as NASA's Saturn V, which took people to the moon. Now this accomplishment is essentially important. This accomplishment is especially important right now because the other half of the Starship rocket, the upper stage, has been struggling. The last two flights of Starship's upper stage ended in failure, explosions around eight minutes into the missions.

Now, at roughly the same phase of the flight, leaving engineers with more questions than answers.

And while booster development is accelerating, the ship itself remains an unsolved puzzle. Even as parts of the Starship system move forward, the recent string of failures has slowed the overall program. In both the January and March test flights, the upgraded upper stage, which is Block 2 now, lost engine power and began to tumble out of control.

And each time it disintegrated midair before reaching its intended splashdown zone, scattering debris across the ocean near the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos. These repeated failures didn't just end those specific flights. So they blocked SpaceX from testing one of the key innovations of block two. It's reinforced heat shield.

Now, without a successful reentry attempt, engineers can't validate whether the redesigned tiles will survive the intense thermal forces of reentry. Now, this leaves a critical element of the system unproven and adds more uncertainty to future missions. But despite the upper stage setbacks, SpaceX's progress with booster reusability is advancing faster than many have expected.

Compared to Falcon 9, which required extensive refurbishment and logistics between flights early in its development, Super Heavy is being turned around much more efficiently. Falcon 9's first reused booster had to be shipped back and forth across the whole country for months of testing.

Super Heavy, by contrast, was readied for reflight in less than 90 days and never left its home sweet home at Starbase, Texas. That's partially because Falcon 9 was never designed for fast reusability from the start.

Lesson learned from that earlier program have been built directly into the design of the super heavy rocket. This means that instead of transporting the rocket thousands of miles for repairs and inspections, SpaceX can conduct everything, testing, refurbishing, reassembly, just within a few miles of the launch site. Just cart it down there.

Another difference is how these boosters are recovered. Falcon 9 lands vertically on drone ships using landing legs. Super heavy, however, skips the legs entirely. No legs on this thing. And instead, it's caught by massive mechanical arms called chopsticks that are mounted directly on the launch tower.

This allows for a quicker turnaround and eliminates the need for landing gear systems, which can be vulnerable to damage and also add a lot of weight. There's a much higher degree of difficulty with super heavy though. It's bigger, more powerful, and far more complex. At over 400 feet tall, when stacked with the Starship upper stage, this rocket towers above every launch system in the history of humankind.

It's also equipped with more engines than any other rocket ever built. That means there are more systems that need to work perfectly together. And despite those challenges, though, Super Heavy's performance has been stable. SpaceX has launched eight integrated Starship test flights so far. And since the failure on the debut flight, all seven subsequent Super Heavy boosters have successfully lifted off.

Of the last four attempts to recover the booster, three succeeded. This consistently contrasts sharply with the upper stage's recent track record, which has now failed on two consecutive launches. But why does this all matter? First, there's the simple fact that making Starship reusable is the foundation of Elon Musk's long-term goal to send humans to Mars.

And without a reusable system, launching regular missions to deep space becomes cost prohibitive. Every successful reuse test cuts down the potential cost of future launches and moves the technology closer to practical, affordable deep space. Then there's the role of Starship in U.S. space policy. NASA is relying on SpaceX to deliver a crewed lunar landing using Starship under its Artemis program.

But that's not a single rocket launch. It's a massive orchestration involving up to 10 in-orbit refueling launches to top off Starship before it heads to the moon.

And if SpaceX can't reliably reuse the super heavy booster and the upper stage, it won't be able to fly often enough to meet this demand. Another important piece is Starlink. SpaceX plans to use Starship to launch heavier next generation Starlink satellites, improving its global internet service. Now these satellites are too large to fit inside Falcon 9's payload fairing.

So until Starship becomes a reliable launch system, these upgrades remain on hold.

And the FAA recently signed off on SpaceX's internal investigation into the January failure. And the company concluded that vibrations during flight were stronger than anticipated, leading to stress that damaged engine components and caused a fire. That fire disabled key systems and led to the loss of control. And SpaceX implemented 11 specific changes to prevent the same problem from repeat.

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However, the cause of March's failure remains similar. The investigation is still a little bit open. And although early science suggests a very similar failure point and without a known fix to the upper stages issues, it's unclear when SpaceX can move forward with full end to end testing. The company had initially aimed for up to 25 Starship launches in 2025.

Now that goal looks increasingly unlikely now. Starship continues to struggle and may only fly a handful of times in the next 12 months. The delays don't just affect SpaceX. NASA has billions of dollars tied up in contracts that depend on Starship performing. If refueling tests are pushed to 2026, as Musk has suggested, the timeline for landing astronauts on the moon also slips.

And that domino effect could delay future Artemis missions, forcing NASA to rethink how it plans its deep space exploration goals. At present, SpaceX has not released a target date for Starship's ninth flight. The upper stage assigned to that mission remains inside the star base facility right now. Its next milestone will be a static fire test of its engines, followed by inspections and final preparations.

Only then will SpaceX move the ship to the pad and mount it atop booster 14 for a full stack test. The sequence is clear, though, but the outcome isn't. If the next flight fails again...

SpaceX may have to pause launches altogether until it can identify and fix the root cause. If it succeeds, it will allow engineers to finally test the heat shield and perhaps move closer to orbital recovery. Until then, SpaceX continues its high-wire act, pushing the most complex rocket ever built closer to reusability.

while also still wrestling with the challenges of its upper stage failures. Hey, thanks for watching today. I want to take a second and I want to make a deal with you. If you'd like Starship content and you want to continue getting Starship content in your feed, I want you to do something for free. Let's hit the subscribe button, like button and leave an emoji down below. And this is my promise to you about this. Let's make this deal. You and me, I'm

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