“Flying debris and pieces of Starship there’s stuff smoking on the ground in front of the camera!” said the host of a privately run livestream, one of many catering to the company’s fans, its lens pointed at the landing pad in the town of Boca Chica as steel chunks rained down with frightening velocity. “Looks like we’ve had another exciting test,” announced the sheepish narrator on SpaceX’s official livestream. On March 30, the fourth test didn’t even make it back to the pad: near the apogee of its flight, it blew up with a calamitous boom, spreading shrapnel more than five miles afield. The next, on March 3, appeared to land mostly intact but exploded eight minutes later. The second test, in February, crunched too. The rocket climbed some 41,000 feet, halted as it was supposed to, and returned to its landing pad-much too rapidly. The first proper test of the Starship, the (aspirationally) reusable rocket offered by the SpaceX corporation and launched from the southern tip of the Lone Star State, took place on December 9, 2020. Perhaps in the distant future historians in far-flung corners of the solar system will note that the twenty-first-century Texas space program did not get off to a particularly strong start.
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