Starship won’t be ready for a while
I’m sure many of us went into this launch with a glass-half-full perspective, hoping—and even expecting—to see the first mission unfold as planned. After stage separation, the upper stage was supposed to journey through space for a brief stretch and crash some 155 miles (250 kilometers) off the coast of Hawaii. That obviously did not happen, with the fully stacked rocket exploding far above the Gulf of Mexico. Despite this successful failure, I now consider this glass to be half empty, particularly as I look to the future of this program and NASA’s Artemis 3 mission, which needs the vehicle to land humans on the Moon in just a few years.
