Is it really a failure?

What really happened?

As the countdown reaches zero with the sound of the powerful roar of the thirty-three methane-fueled Raptor engines of Starship's booster rocket, called the Super Heavy, there's a bit of delay in the launch, and three of the engines are inactive.

Usually, many rocket ship launches are supposed to start ignition between T minus seven and five seconds, and then T0 would be takeoff, but this starship orbital test flight launch was more like T minus two when the ignition of engines fired during this test and T plus four when there was the first movement.?

The next thing to look at is their telemetry on the bottom left. They show which engines are active, and if you look at the outer ring of twenty engines, two of them and one another from the inner ring of ten engines have failed to ignite.

As per images of the launch pad released after this launch, a large crater was created because of the above said powerful engine's ignition.

It's much more likely they failed due to the common cause of pulverized concrete debris from the launch pad. But this couldn't be the primary reason for both engines' failure. That being said, we start to see progressive engine failures during the launch.

Altitude is really important to get out of the thick parts of the atmosphere and then into space. As we can from the indicator at the bottom of the screen, the orientation of the entire Starship and how much it's pitched.

The super heavy booster keeps losing Raptor engines, as shown from the indicator on the bottom left. This is why the exhaust looks so poorly guided and may ultimately be the cause of why the rocket loses control and starts to veer off course.

Since the entire stack of the Starship is tumbling and staying up in one piece, it's pretty clear that SpaceX team tried to see if they could regain control of the entire rocket or maybe try to splash it down in the water somewhere, but they were clearly unable to do that since the super heavy booster has now run out of LOX (liquid oxygen - bottom left of the screen where it says locks and the gauge is all the way down). The booster still has methane in it, as you can see from the CH4 gauge, and the entire rocket is now losing altitude at about 35 kilometers in the air.?

It didn't explode; had to destroy it on purpose.

So as it starts falling, the range operator decides to blow the rocket up there by activating the flight termination system on the rocket, which is remotely controlled explosives.

There is destruction circuitry built into every modern rocket, the capability to blow up the rocket ship in case it is not under the control, so it's not a threat to non-astronauts or anybody on the ground.

The first explosion was a little bit smaller because the super heavy booster is low on propellant, and the Starship blows up right after it with a much larger explosion.?

What happens now?

There's a bunch of analysis to find out what failed, why, and how, go through, recheck their designs, and then fix whatever doesn't or didn't work. We learn a huge amount from the first try, sort of like a model airplane. Anyone can build any kind of model airplane as want, but until it's making its first flight, no one knows if it's an airplane or not, so it needs to modify things before they make its next test flight. This is just a natural and necessary part of the development of an aerospace vehicle.

Let's talk about the goals of this mission.

SpaceX's main objectives for this mission are already complete. First, it was to clear the starship from the launch tower, get off the launch pad, and not blow on the launch pad. From there, they have a number of goals they want to complete, with the next one being passing the speed of sound through Max Q.

Max Q is the moment when the rocket ship experiences the most stress during a space flight.

The rocket is so heavy that it weighs hundreds and hundreds of metric tons, and the rocket engines at the bottom of the rocket are pushing upwards against the gravity force that is greater than the rocket's weight. Since it's still within the Earth's atmosphere, that's when the rocket experiences the most stress, and Max Q is one of the hardest parts of a space launch. Since they made it above most of the atmosphere, learning an enormous amount about how this rocket fly is already complete.

Why it's not a failure

At first glance, people see a rocket taking off and blowing up, and they think that doesn't seem like a success. People don't normally see test operations; they just see things like airlines and expect everything to be perfect. But this was the very first orbital attempt of the biggest rocket ever built with so powerful 33 engines, a vehicle that can give us capabilities we've never had before.

The Wright brothers crashed more often and Orville Wright was almost killed during a test flight. The first flight of the F-14 crashed. It may have looked to the untrained eye that this wasn't what they wanted, but this was enormously successful and considered a mission success even though the vehicle is exploded.

Does it have an impact on the visit to the moon?

Jeremy Hansen and a crew of three Americans are going to the moon on Artemis 2, which is an entirely different rocket ship, the ULA Artemis.?

However, SpaceX is revolutionizing the space flight industry. Starship is the rocket ship of the future since it's pushing the edge of all the Technologies being simpler and eventually more proven and therefore it ends up being a lot cheaper so that's why it's headed this way but hardly anything works the very first time you try it and with this launch, they got a lot further than before.?