THINGS THAT WERE SEEN & HEARD WHEN STARSHIP LAUNCHED
If you've only seen a rocket on television, it is the sheer, intense physical presence of a rocket that first impresses itself on your mind. No digital image, no matter how high definition, can possibly compare.
And Starship (including Super Heavy, the first stage of the two stage structure collectively known as "Starship") is not just any rocket, but rather the largest flying machine ever built by humanity.
It is a craft of superlatives:
394 feet tall, plus an additional 100 feet for the launch mount, topping out just shy of a vertiginous 500 feet;
a diameter greater than a Boeing 747;
a fully fueled mass of 5000 tons; and
a maximum thrust of 16.7 million pounds, over 2x the Saturn V.
Uniquely, it is designed to be completely (and rapidly) reusable.
A silvered arrow of stainless steel, it looks out of time, an avatar of science fiction dreams of days past, and a promissory note drawn on the promise of technological utopias that never quite seem to arrive.
Approached from the beach, the ground support equipment and launch mount reveal themselves over the dunes and low lying scrub.
The infrastructure is massive, reflective of the enormous technological capacity and wealth of US civilization. Just a few years ago, this was undeveloped land. If you're looking for national decline, and doomerism, you won't find it here. Starbase, and Starship, is the stuff of Apollo.
Floodlights pin Starship to its gantry. There is an air of expectancy. It looks eager to be released. The salt and crash of the Gulf is all around, the cosmic gulf black above. It seems close enough to touch - and in truth, only the thinnest envelope of gaseous oxygen and nitrogen separates us from that infinite vacuum - that, and approximately 30 MJ/kg.
Hence the entire apparatus of splayed intestinal piping and tanks and umbilicals before us, all in service of a vastly complex mechanical orchestra contained within Starship's steel fuselage. This orchestra must perform in exquisite harmony, orders of magnitude more precise than any human symphony, if it is to succeed. It seems impossible. Yet similar feats of engineering occur many hundreds of thousands of time per day within commercial turbojet engines, for example, and never occasion the slightest consideration on our part.
Starship will be no different. Maybe not the first time, or the second, but certainly by the one hundredth, and the one thousandth.
LAUNCH
The physicality of a rocket is best displayed on its day of launch, when its systems are powered on, and the beast comes eagerly to life.
Electrical and radio nets are energized, cryogenic fluids surge through insulated pipes. The rocket groans and creaks and frosts over. Pumps whine. The clock counts down, stops, is reset, and resumes.
From your vantage point miles away, none of this is audible. You hear the cheering and babble of the crowd, but the forces stressing the rocket as it takes on millions of pounds of fuel are silent to you. The great drama of launch preparation takes place largely out of sight, except for the billowing of venting oxygen.
Another sun blossoms as the engines ignite in yellow flame. Dust blooms, and Starship slowly emerges from its midst, climbing higher on a torch of brilliant purple-blue.
At first, all you hear is people. Starship rises in silence. Then, all of a sudden, the sound, a WALL of sound, an aural ripping you FEEL as much as hear. It's in your chest and your ears and the ground beneath your feet and it continues after Starship is just a light in the sky.
No sound system can compare. More than anything, it is the sound that differentiates a launch in person from its simulacrum on television.
FINAL THOUGHTS
As the world knows, Starship's inaugural flight was terminated early. It also blew a deep crater beneath the launch mount, straight though hardened concrete. Before the next flight, extensive rework will need to be done on the pad and associated infrastructure.
But travel down Highway 4 from the launch mount to Starbase proper. This is where Starship and Super Heavy are manufactured, and this is where the real strength of Starship manifests.
Starship isn’t any one vehicle, but rather a production system. It is the machine that builds the machine.
Any one Starship may fail (and the inaugural flight was a success, to be clear), but the system overall only improves. Behind Starship 24 are 10 more Starships in various stages of production, and 7 more Super Heavies.
It is this production machine that is SpaceX’s real product, and it is only just getting started.