SpaceX Lands Rocket without It Blowing Up. Yaaaay.

This week SpaceX finally landed a rocket that did not blow up, on their fourth try.  NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to develop a Starship to land astronauts on the moon.  Why they are calling a rocket designed to go a moon, a ‘starship’ is beyond me, but I’m no rocket scientist.

In fact, I half believe this is not a successful rocket landing but rather a tape of a take-off played in reverse.  But if Reuters believes I suppose I do too.

The “Starship” spacecraft, known as Serial Number 15 (SN15), lifted off from SpaceX’s launch site near the U.S.-Mexico border in South Texas, flew to an altitude of about 6 miles, then it cut its engines before beginning to fall in a maneuver called a ‘belly flop’.   The rocket then has fire up its engines again, right itself, and slow down enough to land back on earth safely.

Here’s what it looks like when goes wrong.  The SN11 flight back in Dec 2020, which exploded, is kind of hilarious to watch:

No humans are onboard for these prototype flights of course, and SpaceX seems to be perfectly fine with them exploding from time to time, they’ll get it right, eventually.  Or hopefully in time to send billionaires on commercial space flights.

Elon Musk has been out promoting the commerical SpaceX program with Japanese Billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, looking for other people (billionaires) to go with Maezawa on the first commercial Starship flight around the moon and back.  There was a whole application process here, and promotional video too:

Maezawa & Musk, look at these two bad boys!

Oh wait, there’s a softer side!  This one is my personal favorite.

Applications are now closed.

Maezawa made his billions from selling his 50% share of Japan’s biggest online fashion brand ‘ZOZO’.  ZOZO literally makes suits that look like this:

ZOZO marketing image.

They are ‘3d body measuring suits‘ that take all your measurements so that you can get custom fiting clothes from ZOZO.  The ZOZO measuring suits apparently were a huge failure though, as they didn’t measure your proportions well, and far fewer people ordered clothes than expected.  But Maezawa sold his stock before that whole project exploded.

So Here’s to SpaceX! And their star-moon-space-rocket-ship…craft that did not explode this time!  And good luck to the billionaires who want to take a pleasure cruise around the moon.   Hopefully the billions dollars and collective brain power we spend on space travel will one day save us all…