SpaceX Starship Fails in Fiery Test Setback

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00:00Welcome back.

00:01You're watching The China Show.

00:02An update here of SpaceX and the colossal Starship here has suffered a leak.

00:06It's tumbled out of control and space exploded during this test flight.

00:11It's a third straight major setback here for Elon Musk's company.

00:16Let's bring in Paul Allen who's been covering the story for us here.

00:19Paul, what exactly happened?

00:21We did also hear from Elon Musk just in the last hour in terms of how he's framed this

00:26setback in the broader scheme of things.

00:29Yeah, let's talk about it in two parts, David, because the rocket is in two parts.

00:34We'll start with the booster.

00:36This was quite interesting, a refurbished booster that had flown before on Flight 7.

00:42The intention was not to catch it with the chopstick arms this time, but to test a number

00:48of different landing profiles and then have it splash down in the Gulf.

00:52That didn't happen.

00:53That exploded on a re-ignition for a final landing burn.

00:57The second part, the top section of the ship, the Starship, also did not go to plan.

01:02There was no deployments of the dummy Starlink satellites.

01:06There was no relighting of the engines in space and then the ship lost attitude control.

01:12We did hear from Elon Musk, as you say, he said, look, there were leaks that caused a loss

01:16of main tank pressure at the re-entry phase and that ship was also lost.

01:21So not a great day for SpaceX.

01:24Test Flight 9, not going to plan.

01:26Paul, I mean, this all comes on the backdrop of him, you know, Musk returning back to his

01:32companies after a stint in the White House.

01:35What's next then?

01:36What can SpaceX do to kind of renew their new focus or what's going to be the next plan?

01:41Well, no, what's next is they just keep on going.

01:45And there's always a temptation to frame these sorts of, well, setbacks as major disasters.

01:52They're not really.

01:53This is just how SpaceX rolls.

01:55It iterates loudly, publicly.

01:58It's not afraid to let things blow up.

02:00And that's kind of what we saw today.

02:02We have to remember that at the Starbase there in Boca Chica, there is a whole production line

02:07just turning out ship after ship, booster after booster, and every time something like

02:12this happens, they take learnings from it, they redevelop, they reiterate, they go back

02:17to the launch pad and they try again.

02:20Elon Musk still got some very aggressive timelines around this.

02:22He hopes to have robots on Mars next year, which is the next launch window for Mars.

02:29During this launch, however, we were speaking with a former astronaut, Colonel William MacArthur.

02:34He's a little bit sceptical of these timelines.

02:36He says getting to Mars is still potentially decades away.

02:40He says SpaceX might even need to design a new propulsion system that doesn't yet exist.

02:46But this objective of getting back to the moon seems to be a little bit more realistic.

02:50And this is certainly not the end for SpaceX.

02:53They'll be back on the launch pad for Flight 10 before we know it.

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