A Brief History
On April 20, 2023, the giant SpaceX Starship rocket booster vehicle proudly made its first flight, although the huge and hugely expensive rocket blew up only four minutes into that maiden flight!
Digging Deeper
The most powerful rocket ever made, the Starship’s price per unit is hard to pin down, although the project cost is a whopping $5 billion. Towering 397 feet tall with a diameter of 30 feet, the giant rocket weighs 11 million pounds!
Designed to replace SpaceX’s previous rockets, the Falcon series, Starship is expected to provide the heavy lifting needed to launch the next Moon missions and the proposed trip to Mars, as well as take large and heavy cargo into space.
Rocket science is not an easy subject, and the second launch of Starship in November of 2023 also resulted in failure. Many other space launch failures have occurred, notably the Challenger disaster of 1986 and a Chinese launch disaster in 1996.
Question for students (and subscribers): Is the space program worth the cost? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Bergan, Brad. Space Race 2.0: SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, NASA, and the Privatization of the Final Frontier. Motorbooks, 2022.
Seedhouse, Erik. SpaceX: Starship to Mars – The First 20 Years. Praxis, 2022.
The featured image in this article, a video by Luis Martinez of Starship launching during its first integrated flight test, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
You can also watch video versions of this article on YouTube.
