SpaceX Booster Had Five Engines Out and Powerful Launch Damaged the Pad

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The SpaceX Super Heavy booster had five engines out as it flew. 4 engines were mostly on one side and this led to an imbalance which became critical during the flip move for stage separation. They were likely trying various thrust vectoring and other adjustments.

This was a huge success. Looks like went up to about Mach 3.

UPDATE: I have an article describing the likely cause of the damage to the Starship engines and the changes to launch pad that will be needed for the next launch.

UPDATE: SpaceX Board Member has confirmed my, Brian Wang, over two-year-old prediction. Antonio confirmed that SpaceX will take over Air cargo with a massive fleet of Starships.

The power of the launch did wreck the concrete below the rocket.

SpaceX will need to fix and improve the pad, but they will likely be read to fly again by July, 2023.

12 thoughts on “SpaceX Booster Had Five Engines Out and Powerful Launch Damaged the Pad”

  1. Why didn’t the rocket shut down after these engines stopped working. You would think there’s a failsafe mode in this super expensive rocket that would have saved it from having to be destroyed. Big waste of money.

    • As far as rockets go, this was not a super-expensive rocket. It was a prototype that had a high probability of blowing up on the pad. The SLS (Space Launch System) rocket costs about $4 billion a piece and had a $30-40 billion development program. The SpaceX Super Heavy Starship has 40 Raptor engines and each engine is about $250k-500k. Say $20 million in engines and double that for the rest. It is about $40 million. It was a prototype that there launching to learn about what needed to be fixed and information about how it would work. It would cost more and be less effective to wait around and have analysis instead of test. 1000 people working on the program and each makes $200-300k for salary after benefits and other overhead. $250 million per year. A destructive test that speeds up work by 2-3 months is worthwhile.

  4. The debris from the pad is what probably knocked out the engines in the first place. SpaceX redesign the pad better to avoid this in the future plz love seeing starship launch and was cheering it the whole way and look forward to seeing the next launch.

  6. Looks more like 6 booster rockets out.
    2 @ 11-12 o’clock, 1 @ 2 o’clock, 2 @ 4 o’clock, and 1 in the center at 9 o’clock. That’s 6 of them, not 5.

  7. We also saw a pic of Starship in flight from the wingtip. Only a few tiles were knocked off. Guess is with deluge, they wont as vibrations will go down

  8. You can actually see automobile sized chunks of concrete arcing through the air in some of the camera angles, in the 7-10 second period. I’ve seen speculation that some of the smaller ones actually hit the rocket, it’s certainly true that the tank farm got nailed.

    This has implications for landing on the Moon or Mars, though the thrust levels should be lower in those cases.

    It’s certainly impressive seeing the way the concrete was stripped off of the rebar in the launch mount’s foundation.

  10. Seems like a triumph for iterative development. They didn’t need to simulate or overbuild excessively. The actual launch will tell them what needs to be done.

    Starship Stainless Steel (I think also being made in quantity in Texas for CyberTruck) probably makes a pretty decent armor plating for the concrete of the pad or other places that were damaged.

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